We introduce the concept of therapeutic servicescapes, defined as consumption settings where emplaced, market-mediated performances compensate for sociocultural dilemmas. Our focus is on the localization of emotions that are emplaced in specific sociospatial features and collectively reproduced through ritualized consumer performances. This ethnographic study of religious pilgrimage consumption reveals that the therapeutic servicescape comprises three features: evocative spaces, ideological homogeneity, and restorative emotion scripts. These servicescape features catalyze the consumer rituals of therapeutic relations, therapeutic release, and therapeutic renewal. Our theorization of therapeutic servicescapes offers three contributions. First, we reveal how emotions are socially and geographically orchestrated and transformed in marketplace settings. Second, we demonstrate how therapeutic ritual performances reproduce emplaced, market-mediated emotion and compensate for embodied emotional restrictions. Third, we demonstrate how the negotiation of emotional ordering guides the therapeutic dialogue between religion and the marketplace.
Purpose Through adoption of the psycho-emotional model of disability, this study aims to offer consumer research insight into how the marketplace internally oppresses and psycho-emotionally disables consumers living with impairment. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws insight from the interview data of a wider two-year interpretive research study investigating access barriers to marketplaces for consumers living with impairment. Findings The overarching contribution offers to consumer research insight into how the marketplace internally oppresses and psycho-emotionally disables consumers living with impairment. Further contributions offered by this paper: unearth the emotion of fear to be central to manifestations of psycho-emotional disability; reveal a broader understanding of the marketplace practices, and core perpetrators, that psycho-emotionally disable consumers living with impairment; and uncover psycho-emotional disability to extend beyond the context of impairment. Research limitations/implications This study adopts a UK-only perspective. However, findings uncovered that the model of psycho-emotional disability has wider theoretical value to marketing and consumer research beyond the context of impairment. Practical implications The insight offered into the precise marketplace practices that disable consumers living with impairment leads this paper to call for a revising of disability training within marketplace and service contexts. Originality/value Extending current consumer research and consumer vulnerability research on disability, the empirical adoption of the psycho-emotional model of disability is a fruitful framework for extrapolating insight into marketplace practices that internally oppress and psycho-emotionally disable consumers living with impairment.
This paper explores transformations of self through pilgrimage consumption. A three year ethnographic study of Lourdes, one of the largest Catholic pilgrimage destinations, reveals the concept of "mini-miracles" to refer to those miracles that occur in and are important to an individual's life, but are unlikely ever to be officially deemed as miracles in the eyes of the church. Mini-miracles transform selves and in turn draw pilgrims annually and recurrently to consume the Lourdes pilgrimage experience. The findings reveal the existence of three forms of subjectively experienced mini-miracles: physical, social and peaceful, each of which act as intangible word-of-mouth consumption drivers to the Lourdes pilgrimage. Lourdes, as a business institution, should capitalize on the word-of-mouth mini-miracles shared amongst consumers as a means of building and maintaining stronger networks and relationships within Catholic/ Christian communities at both the national and local level.
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