is professor of marketing, Bilkent University, Ankara, 06800, Turkey. The authors would like to thank Halil İnalcık and Mehmet Kalpaklı for sharing their invaluable knowledge and sources and Jonathan Schroeder for his useful comments on earlier versions of this article. The authors are grateful for the supportive and helpful remarks and insights provided by the editor, associate editor, and the reviewers, particularly the trainee reviewer.
AbstractWe examine the socio-historical formation of the consumer subject during the development of consumer culture in the context of leisure consumption. Specifically, we investigate how an active consumer was forming while a coffeehouse culture was taking shape during early modern Ottoman society. Utilizing multiple historical data sources and analysis techniques, we focus on the discursive negotiations and the practices of the consumers, marketers, the state, and the religious institution as relevant stakeholders. Our findings demonstrate that multiparty resistance, enacted by consumers and marketers, first challenged the authority of the state and religion and then changed them. Simultaneously and at interplay with various institutional transformations, a public sphere, a coffeehouse culture, and a consumer subject constructing his self-ethics were developed, normalized, and legalized. We discuss the implications of the centrality of transgressive hedonism in this process as well as the existence of an active consumer in an early modern context.
A very common but futile practice in scientific research investigating non-western consumer cultures and markets is the imposition of concepts that are derived from a single historical trajectory of western modernization. This paper aims to show that there are alternative historical trajectories in the early modern period which have formed today's multiple modern consumer cultures. The particularities of the Ottoman context, which shaped the development of an alternative early modern consumer culture, are examined as an example. Islamic ethics, fluid social structure, wakf institutions, the negotiability of market institutions, and a public sphere formed by aesthetic, emotional, and playful communicative action are among the particularities discussed in this study.
This commentary addresses recent debates in marketing research on the elusiveness of the notion of value, with the aim of starting a dialogue on the possibility of developing a comprehensive and culturally informed understanding of value and value creation processes. First, we provide an overview of the predominant uses of value in marketing and consumer research literature and discuss them in relation to three abstract conceptions of value. We show the interconnectedness of these value types in market and consumption contexts. Next, we suggest possible avenues that have their foundations in the notion of field, practice theory, and markets as networks approaches, in order to conceptualize complexity in value and value creation processes.
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