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In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.

This chapter builds upon the analysis of the last chapter, as fans have to deal with the issues that arise from their team’s financial superiority. Here, we question what happens when that financial superiority is accompanied by significant moral and ethical issues. Recent involvement of state actors in the ownership of English football has been evidencable and occasionally appears clear. Various reflexes and cognitive distancing occur from fandoms when football club ownership engages in practices that, according to the normative models that fans ascribe to their clubs, are mutually exclusive with the values of the fanbase and the club’s history. A common form of fan reflex often takes the form of distancing the players on the pitch from the club’s institutional structures, effectively teasing out the matchday experience from the structures that benefit from the raw emotion it generates. Another reflex is questioning why the fan should surrender their club when a morally, ethically problematic ownership model has acquired it. Here we have perhaps the greatest challenge to the normative model and, rather than negotiating that tension, as often as not the response is to try and ignore it.