Prior experiential marketing research suggests that extraordinary consumption experiences take place within antistructural frames, i.e. outside the realms of everyday life. This paper challenges that notion, through an ethnographic study of consumers attending the Primavera Sound music festival in Barcelona, Spain. We demonstrate that festival attendees perceive their experiences to be extraordinary, despite these occurring within 'everyday' structural frames. Consumers' extraordinary experiences unfold through their negotiation of a series of structural and antistructural marketplace tensions, including commercialism/authenticity, ordinary/escapist, and immersion/communing. We outline the theoretical implications of our research for the changing nature of extraordinary consumption experiences, in light of postpostmodern consumer culture. We conclude with managerial implications and provide suggested avenues for future research.

Purpose The aim of this paper is to explore how the paradox of individualism/tribalism is brought into play and negotiated by consumers in the wake of the post-postmodern era. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on netnographic and interview data from the Greek football manager (FM) online gaming community. FM is a simulation strategy game in which players act as “real-life” managers from the screen of their computer. Findings A central paradox and a set of four supporting paradoxes are identified. These paradoxes give rise to a transitional mode of experience, which lies on the borders of reality and fantasy, and is realised both at the individual and the tribal levels. Originality/value This study makes a threefold contribution. First, it advances the understanding of the paradoxical aspects of consumption experiences in light of post-postmodern consumer culture. Second, it shows how these paradoxes are negotiated by consumers between individual and tribal levels. Third, it extends the understanding of the nature of consumption experiences through the development of the concept of the transitional consumption experience.

This paper invokes Redhead’s concept of claustropolitanism to critically explore the affective reality for consumers in today’s digital age. In the context of surveillance capitalism, we argue that consumer subjectivity revolves around the experience of fidelity rather than agency. Instead of experiencing genuine autonomy in their digital lives, consumers are confronted with a sense of confinement that reflects their tacit conformity to the behavioural predictions of surveillant market actors. By exploring how that confinement is lived and felt, we theorise the collective affects that constitute a claustropolitan structure of feeling: incompletion, saturation and alienation. These affective contours trace an oppressive atmosphere that infuses consumers’ lives as they attempt to seek fulfilment through digital market-located behaviours that are largely anticipated and coordinated by surveillant actors. Rather than motivate resistance, these affects ironically work to perpetuate consumers’ commitment to the digital world and their ongoing participation in the surveillant marketplace. Our theorisation continues the critical project of re-assessing the consumer subject by showing how subjectivity is produced at the point of intersection between ideological imperatives and affective consequences.

Purpose -The aim of this paper is to explore how spatial taste formation and the interrelationships between place and taste can inform the development of contemporary place marketing and/or place management strategies.Design/methodology/approach -The paper draws on previous research conducted within the context of live music consumption and, in particular, within live musical spaces such as festivals and concert halls.Findings -Our study illustrates how spatial taste formation can inform the development of topographies of taste which focus on the creation of field-specific experiences. It also offers insights for understanding the phenomenological uniqueness of various places and the role of place users and other stakeholders in the creation of place marketing and branding value.Originality/value -We elaborate upon the potential usefulness of spatial taste formation for place management and marketing research practice and draw out implications for future research. We advance a holistic and phenomenological understanding of place which illustrates how users' perceptions of place are shaped by their experiences in various places and by the interplay of these experiences with their individual tastes and vice versa.

The aim of this paper is to explore how a concert hall can orchestrate and shape individuals' classical music tastes. The paper is based on an eight-month ethnography at the Bridgewater Hall concert venue in Manchester. Our emergent findings illustrate how classical music tastes are influenced via the spatial meanings of the concert hall. These meanings include various physical, historical and socio-cultural aspects that are revealed in the context of the Bridgewater Hall. Our study contributes to various streams of consumer culture theory (CCT) research and opens up avenues for future research on the interrelationships of space and place with taste. Summary statement of contributionOur study focuses on spatial taste orchestration, and provides valuable insights for CCT research into taste and space and place. More specifically, we provide a phenomenological approach to the study of place that moves away from conventional approaches and captures the totality of the meanings captured in the concert hall. Our study also positions the concert hall as an emplaced taste regime that shapes attendees' classical music tastes and their consumption practices within the classical music field. Finally, we illustrate how particular places acquire significance within individuals' everyday lives in the context of classical music consumption. KeywordsClassical music, consumer culture theory, experiential consumption, place, taste, concert halls Word count: 8,031 (excluding references) Introduction'Identity is worked and power is wielded within the spaces of musical experience, and few who enter its rarified atmosphere exit unchanged'. (DeChaine, 2002, p. 91) This study explores the shaping qualities of the places of musical experience, along with their ability to orchestrate musical tastes. In particular, we explore the shaping of individuals' tastes in a concert hall setting within the field of classical music consumption.The logic of this paper broadly concerns an exploration of the interrelationships between space and place with taste. Both space and place and taste have been studied extensively across the humanities and social sciences. However, there is little empirical research that brings together these two theoretical constructs, and investigates how particular places tend to orchestrate and shape taste. Phenomenologically-oriented philosophical thought sees place as the primary basis of our experience with the world (cf. Creswell, 2004). Such philosophers have long argued for a revitalisation of the place construct in contemporary scientific thought.Consumer culture theory (CCT) research (cf. Arnould and Thompson, 2005) has illustrated the importance of space and place in a diversity of ways (e.g. Arnould, 2005; Debenedetti, Oppewal, & Arsel, 2014;Maclaran & Brown, 2005). We argue that connecting taste with place can provide novel insights for those fields of marketing theory and practice that deal with the socio-cultural aspects of consumption.We position our paper within the field of CCT research and bo...

Drawing on qualitative interviews with indie music fans in Manchester, UK, we explore how experiences in the indie music field inform spatial and place-specific understandings of musical taste. Inspired by Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, the concept of place-dependent capital incorporates the interplay of the experiential dimensions of taste, and the overall structures in which they are embedded. We develop our findings into three themes, which allow us to highlight the diversity of ways in which our participants create place-dependent capital: exploring the taste of place; dwelling in place; and creating a sense of place. We propose the usefulness of place-dependent capital as an alternative theoretical tool, which acknowledges both structural and experiential dimensions of musical taste, allowing us to demonstrate the situatedness of indie music fans’ tastes.

Purpose This study aims to explore how membership (initially as a consumer) in a given field shapes individuals’ entrepreneurial journey. Design/methodology/approach The research context is cultural and creative industries and, in particular, the independent (indie) music field in which unstructured interviews were conducted with nascent and established cultural entrepreneurs. Findings The authors introduce and justify their theoretical framework of consumption field driven entrepreneurship (CFDE) that captures the tripartite process via which the informants make the transition from indie music consumers to entrepreneurs by developing field-specific illusio, enacting entrepreneurial habitus and acquiring legitimacy via symbolic capital accumulation within the indie music field. The authors further illustrate how these entrepreneurs adopt paradoxical logics, aesthetics and ethos of the indie music field by moving in-between its authentic and commercial discourses to orchestrate their entrepreneurial journey. Research limitations/implications This study holds several theoretical implications for entrepreneurship-oriented research. First is highlighted the importance of non-financial resources (i.e. cultural and social capital) in individuals’ entrepreneurial journey. Second, this study illustrates the importance of consumption activities in the process of gaining entrepreneurial legitimation within a specific field. Finally, this study contributes to consumption-driven entrepreneurship research by offering a detailed description of individuals’ consumption-driven entrepreneurial journey. Practical implications This study provides some initial practical implications for entrepreneurs within the cultural and creative industries. The authors illustrate how membership in a field (initially as a consumer) might turn into a source of skills, competences and community for entrepreneurs by mobilising and converting different forms of non-material and material field-specific capital. To acquire entrepreneurial legitimation, nascent entrepreneurs should gain symbolic capital through approval, recognition and credit from members of the indie music field. Also, entrepreneurs can acquire symbolic capital and gain entrepreneurial legitimation by either “fitting in” or “standing out” from the existing logics of the field. Originality/value This study contributes to the growing body of literature that examines entrepreneurship fuelled by consumption practices and passions with our theoretical framework of CFDE which outlines the transition from indie music consumers to indie music entrepreneurs.

Purpose Service research has previously documented service providers’ role in addressing the barriers of technology mediation, mostly at the service delivery level. The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding about the role of service providers who hold strategic and operational roles, as well as investigate the impact of coordinated, organization-wide initiatives in dealing with the demands and associated emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated services. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative study draws from a series of in-depth interviews with health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles in health-care organizations along with participant observation to develop an understanding of the broader organizational context of telehealth services. Findings This paper outlines the strategic sense-giving process and highlights how health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles enact the sense-giver role. This study illustrates that strategic sense-giving involves the recognition of sense-making gaps; identification of sense-giving opportunities; and provision of templates of action. Originality/value This study illustrates that sense-giving can be performed by a number of organizational members in a more formalized way which extends informal sense-giving efforts at the peer-to-peer level. The importance of strategic sense-giving in providing templates of action for service providers and consumers is highlighted. This study also shows how strategic sense-giving safeguards against confusion and errors by communicating appropriate ways of using technology. Finally, the role of strategic sense-giving in helping service providers and consumers cope with the emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated service interactions are demonstarted.