Mobile apps redistributing surplus food are receiving increased attention for their sustainability benefits. Nevertheless, there is limited research on the opportunities created for businesses to penetrate the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) market. Drawing on Service-Dominant (S-D) logic, affordance and means-end theories, this study investigates how food waste mobile apps can support sustainable value co-creation at the BoP. Using a laddering approach, data were collected through semi-structured interviews in Sri Lanka. Despite similarities in respondents' perceptions of app functions, there are noticeable gaps in the perceived affordances and end goals, which may challenge the value co-creation process.Additionally, opportunism, stigma and goal misalignment may result in value co-destruction, i.e. the diminishment of value through stakeholder interactions. Our findings demonstrate that to develop technologies which enable value co-creation, an in-depth understanding of factors driving perceptions of value is essential. Summary statement of contribution:Currently, there is very limited research exploring food waste mobile apps as BoP marketing tools, and their potential to support sustainable value co-creation to benefit businesses, BoP consumers and society.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to combine Service-Dominant logic, affordance theory and means-end theory to explore mechanisms underlying digital value cocreation and co-destruction.Our findings provide meaningful insights about the interpretation of technological functions into value.

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Consumerism, closely linked with growth‐oriented development, has been identified as detrimental to environmental sustainability. Yet literature on throwaway consumption, a key form of unsustainable consumption, has rarely examined the influence of consumerist social values on individual behavior. This paper examines how the contemporary “liquid” consumerist social trends that elevate transience over durability manifest in individual throwaway consumption. Utilizing a sample of consumers from a developing country, Sri Lanka, the study explored the throwaway consumption of the mobile telephone. It identifies that consumers replace their phones with new ones at quick intervals because they consider novelty as a source of pleasure and technological change as progress, both of which can be considered as manifestations of “liquid” consumerism. Further, the market stimulates both ideas, providing greater impetus for throwaway consumption.

Consumers in societies that are still strongly influenced by traditional cultural values experience tension when traditional cultural values conflict with consumerist values. This paper aims at providing a theoretical explanation for these tensions using the theory of Self-discrepancy. The study, conducted in Sri Lanka, used an interpretive qualitative approach, where data were collected through interviews with a middle-class consumer segment from a relatively strong traditional cultural background, but who are also significantly exposed to the consumer culture. The findings demonstrate that cultural tension can be explained as resulting from different forms of Selfdiscrepancy and that there are differences between the nature and intensity of tension experienced by consumers with different sociodemographic characteristics. In particular, the tension appears to be greater among consumers who had moved to urban areas from rural Sri Lanka, whose affiliation with cultural values is strong, and among parents with dependent children because the children are very strongly influenced by the consumer culture. The theory of Self-expansion in conjunction with the theory of Self-discrepancy is used in the attempt to explain the dynamics between parent and child.

Although identity construction has been discussed extensively in relation to consumption, such studies have also been criticised for reducing consumption objects into mere signifiers or symbols of various identities, ignoring the complex meaning construction processes of objects in use. This paper addresses this criticism, through a study of mobile telephone consumption practices in Sri Lanka, by examining how different usage patterns of the mobile telephone could play a role in consumer identity construction processes. The study focuses on three consumer groups: senior business managers, young consumers representing a high socio-economic stratum, and young consumers representing a lower socio-economic stratum. The findings indicate that consumers use differences in consumption patterns as a means of distinguishing their identities from those of others; further, varying the consumption patterns is used by consumers to manage multiple identities of the same individual.