The contemporary German food market is marked by a large number of food items on retail shelves—the choice and abundance of products stand in sharp contrast to the market of the 1950s. We conduct a qualitative, interpretive analysis of the archives of a food magazine from West Germany between 1949 and 2014 to understand the changes the German food market has undergone. Drawing on category research, we discover three inter-related category dynamics that contribute to the change in the market: category member proliferation, category member valorization, and category member entanglement. We then discuss the implications of category dynamics and theorize how they drive category change.
Past research shows that successful consumer learning takes place in environments that support cooperative communities of practice, that enable access to refined didactic resources, and that provide a safe, sympathetic backstage for a controllable and able learning body to durably transition from one repertoire to another. This study complements existing research by investigating a group of lactose-intolerant consumers who must learn to transition to a new consumption repertoire because of socially embarrassing symptoms. Consumers must engage in high-risk, unguided, experiential learning pathways in a less than sympathetic frontstage, without the support of a cooperative community or a well-developed vocabulary, and while grappling with an impaired and unruly body in a dynamic marketplace. The findings demonstrate that consumers adapt to this hostile learning environment by surfing between different consumption repertoires in a fluid, impermanent manner.
Performing frontline interactive service work can be an alienating experience for many of those who join the ranks. On one side are customers who have internalized the mantra of consumer sovereignty, and on the other side are managers intent on producing the perfect, fully customer-oriented, branded service worker. Frontline employees feel the full brunt of these two impositions in sectors such as luxury hospitality, especially in emerging economies. Customers possess much higher reserves of economic and cultural power than frontline workers, which can exacerbate their sovereign-like (mis)behaviour. Managers control almost every aspect of the worker and train workers to reproduce a particular embodied style of service. These conditions reduce workers’ ability to de-alienate and humanize themselves and increase work stress, which can then accelerate negative consequences, such as burnout or worse.
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