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Creating a Hyper-Place: How Refugee Helpers Create a Place for Their Values

Consumer Culture Theory

ISBN: 978-1-78635-496-9, eISBN: 978-1-78635-495-2

Publication date: 28 November 2016

Abstract

Purpose

Research has shown that activist consumers create places that are imbued with idiosyncratic meanings, conventions, rules, and activities. However, research on why and how such places are created is scant.

Methodology/approach

This ethnography in the context of voluntary refugee helpers shows why and how a meaningful place is produced.

Findings

By drawing on spatial theory from human geography, I map out how activist consumers create a hyper-place: embedded in the dynamics of demarcating and linking, voluntary helpers set a place apart from the surrounding space and other places. This place allows for practices that combine materiality, activities, and meanings in new ways in comparison to practices in traditional places. This place allows for the enactment and the conveyance of values that are not accommodated in traditional marketplaces.

Originality/value

I contribute to literature on activist consumers and the role of place within consumer research.

Keywords

Citation

Gollnhofer, J.F. (2016), "Creating a Hyper-Place: How Refugee Helpers Create a Place for Their Values", Consumer Culture Theory (Research in Consumer Behavior, Vol. 18), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 109-126. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0885-211120160000018010

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017 Emerald Group Publishing Limited