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The purpose of this study is to investigate narcissism in relation to consumer identity projects. Narcissism is rarely the focus of consumer culture studies, though it resonates with theories of individualistic, consumption-driven identities, and is argued to be a pervasive social trend within a hegemonic consumer culture that places the individual center stage. We explore these themes in the context of emerging adult identity projects given arguments about increasing narcissism in younger generations.

Identifying eight participants using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory – four with high and four with low scores – we conduct in-depth interviews to explore their identity projects, narcissistic traits, and brand relationships.

Through idiographic analysis, we find that those with lower narcissistic tendencies seem to have a communal orientation to both people and brands, whilst those with greater narcissistic tendencies tend to be individualistic and agentic. We relate the narcissistic consumer to Fromm’s “marketing character,” proposing four themes that emerge from the analysis: liquidity; an other-directed sense of self; conformity; and the commodification of self.

This paper discusses the societal implications of individualistic consumer identity projects, highlighting narcissism, a concept relatively neglected within consumer culture theory. Narcissism carries with it a host of societal implications, not least of which is a focus on the self and a lack of concern with the wellbeing of others.

Purpose: This chapter seeks to understand ethnic identification among second-generation consumers by drawing upon the lived experiences of British Indian migrants in England.

Methodology/Approach: The authors analyze interviews with middle-class, Hindu, second-generation British Indian women through Bourdieu’s key concepts of capital, field, habitus, and distinction.

Findings: Through resources such as Bollywood cinema, and Indian schools for language, music, and dance, second-generation consumers acquire, use and (re) produce situationally prized subcultural capital for distinction from other ethnic consumers and members of the white majority group. Ethnicity is central to second-generation consumers’ identity projects, and their everyday social interactions. Ethnicity is considered in uplifting and empowering terms, and first-generation consumers play a key role in reinforcing this belief.

Research Limitations/Implications: Due to our small sample size, limited by class, religion, and gender, the findings of this chapter might not be generalizable to the wider population. Instead, they can be used to develop new theoretical ways of understanding ethnicity in multicultural settings with long-established migrant populations.

Social Implications: Ethnicity can play a central and positive role in the everyday lives of second-generation consumers. By investigating this further, we can improve our understanding of contemporary, multicultural societies.

Originality/Value of Paper: Prior work in consumer research has focused on understanding first-generation migrant consumers through the lens of acculturation, and foregrounding experiences of stigma and tension. Instead, the authors foreground the positive and uplifting lived experiences of second-generation consumers in relation to their ethnicity. This chapter extends the literature on second-generation ethnic consumer identity work.

Purpose – To explore how young men negotiate the matriarchal domain of fashion consumption and self-presentation, observing techniques adopted by these men to navigate this feminized space and construct their identity project.

Methodology/approach – Engaging Foucauldian theory, a constructionist approach is followed to analyze qualitative interview data with the understanding that a consumer's narrated experience is embedded in a social web of possible interpretation. Rather than seeking to discover a respondents “essential self” within interview data, this research takes a narrative analysis approach, considering individuals storytelling within the context of circulating discourses and power relations.

Findings – As young, fashion-forward men navigate new configurations of power relationships and adopt new modes of performing masculinity, they come to legitimate themselves by forging new categories of existence. They engage various techniques to include the arts and the art of irony in an effort to constitute their masculine subjectivity within discourses of fashionable self-presentation practices.

Social implications – By exploring the social context wherein consumer choices are made, we see consumer identity projects are in fact constricted and influenced by a myriad of sociocultural forces.

Originality/value of paper – Within consumer culture theory, there is much focus on the agency of consumers and their identity projects. However, there is a dearth of work that considers the social and cultural context wherein these identity constructions take place. This study makes a contribution toward addressing this gap.

This paper brings a fresh contribution to the role of space and places in Consumer Culture Theory. Investigating the context of tattooing, it conceptualizes the various articulations that link the body as a topia and a utopia, and the street shops (as “other” places or heterotopia) where consumers’ identity projects are undertaken.

Our approach is based on an ethnographic work, that is, the observation of the shop and interviews conducted with its two managers, three male tattooists, and a young female apprentice.

We show how the changes that affect heterotopic places in the world of tattooing impact the way body identity projects are taken care of. We highlight the material and symbolic exchanges that “take place” and “make place” between the shop as a heterotopia and people’s utopias of the body.

The research involves a single fieldwork and deliberately focuses on the female apprentice as the main informant of this study.

This paper draws attentions to the emergence of women in the world of tattooing and their transformative role of highly gendered meanings and practices.

In articulating the links between bodies, their utopias and heterotopic places where these are carried out, we contribute not only to the understanding of the meaning that consumers attribute to the transformation of their body, but also to the role played by spaces – sites as well as gendered bodies – in our understanding of these phenomena.

Purpose: This study seeks to determine the marketplace practices in which consumers engage with regard to masculine and feminine codes employed in product design. Since extant consumer research argues that consumers prefer marketing stimuli that match their sex or gender identity, this study also asks how consumers’ practices inform this understanding of the possession-self link.

Design/methodology/approach: This study used semi-structured interviews with an auto-driving component to answer the research questions. Data from 20 interviews were analyzed using feminist critical discourse analysis and a poststructuralist feminist-informed theoretical framework.

Findings: Four consumer practices identified in the data show that interpretations and evaluations of product gender are sometimes, but not always, a reflection of the gendered self.

Research limitations/implications: This research shares a snapshot of a cohort of individuals that interact with the marketplace, but there are some perspectives missing. Future research must engage with individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as non-binary or gender nonconforming individuals, in order to enhance or even challenge these findings.

Practical implications (if applicable): Evidence from the marketplace demonstrates intense criticism of products that have been coded as masculine or feminine based on gender stereotypes or men and women’s perceived aesthetic tastes. Marketers are encouraged to use gender codes to differentiate products catered to men and women based on their ergonomic or biological needs.

Originality/value: This study complicates theory on the possession-self link to show cases in which that link is broken. Engaging critically with the topic of product gender from a poststructuralist feminist perspective also illustrates how marketing practices may help or harm consumers.

This chapter explores the symbolic connections between coming of age liminality and identity-oriented consumption practices in postmodern American culture, specifically among adolescent girls.

Forty-two female participants (ages 20–23) participants were asked to answer the general question of “Who am I?” through creating identity collages and writing accompanying narrative summaries for each of three discrete life stages: early adolescence (past-self), late adolescence (present-self), and adulthood (future-self). Data were analyzed using a hermeneutical approach.

Coming of age in postmodern American consumer culture involves negotiating paradoxical identity tensions through consumption-oriented benchmarks, termed “market-mediated milestones.” Market-mediated milestones represent achievable criteria by which adolescents solidify their uncertain liminal self-concepts.

In contrast to the traditional Van Gennepian conceptualization of rites of passage, market-mediated milestones do not necessarily mark a major transition from one social status to another, nor do they follow clearly defined stages. Market-mediated milestones help adolescents navigate liminality through an organic, nonlinear, and incremental coming of age process.

Rather than traditional cultural institutions (e.g., church, family), the marketplace is becoming the central cultural institution around which adolescent coming of age identity is constructed. As such, organizations have the power to create market-mediated milestones for young people. In doing so, organizations should be mindful of adolescent well-being.

This research marks a turning point in understanding traditional rites of passage in light of postmodern degradation of cultural institutions. The institutions upon which traditional rites of passage are based have changed; therefore, our conceptions of what rites of passage are today should change as well.

Compared to monoracials, multiracials appear (a) to be more concerned about acceptance within their select social groups and within society at large and (b) to have higher differentiation and uniqueness needs. Artworks help consumers successfully fulfill these needs, and multiracials are heavily dependent on artworks in their (racial) identity negotiations. In addition to these needs, familial background, school, and technical qualities of artworks serve as antecedents to artwork consumption. Multiracial identity influences artwork consumption both directly and indirectly. The indirect influence is mediated by social acceptability, group identification, and uniqueness needs. Artwork consumption serves multiracials in two ways: pleasure/escape and communication/identity negotiation.

This paper reflects on the development of Consumer Culture Theory, both as a field of research and as an institutional classification, since the publication of Arnould and Thompson (2005).

This paper takes a conceptual/historical orientation that is based upon the authors’ experiences over the course of the 10-year CCT initiative (including numerous conversations with fellow CCT colleagues).

The authors first discuss key benchmarks in the development of the CCT community as an organization. Next, the authors highlight key intellectual trends in CCT research that have arisen since the publication of their 2005 review and discuss their implications for the future trajectories of CCT research.

The paper by Arnould and Thompson (2005) has proven to be influential in terms of systematizing and placing a widely accepted disciplinary brand upon an extensive body of culturally oriented consumer research. The CCT designation has also provided an important impetus for institution building. The 10-year anniversary of this article (and not incidentally the CCT conference from which the papers in this volume hail) provides a unique opportunity for the authors to comment upon the broader ramifications of their original proposals.

At both ACR 2004 and EACR 2005, Richard Elliott and Fuat Firat queried the need for CCT, and the thrust of their concerns seemed to be concerns with imposing CCT as a totalizing narrative. The major instigator of this totalizing concern is probably the singularizing semantics of CCT we adopted, which can be read – despite our original emphasis on the internal diversity of its constituent research traditions – as a call for a unified body of theory that is grounded in a vernacular of normal science and its epistemic goal of making incremental contributions to a system of verified propositions (Kuhn, 1962). It is worth noting that, for better or worse, this normal science orientation and its quest for a unified theory is taken as a normative goal (not a threat) by consumer researchers who work outside the CCT tradition. CCT, however, has emerged in the liberatory glow of the sociology of scientific knowledge (LaTour, 1988), reflexive critiques of power relations that are encoded in scientific narratives hailing from feminist, poststructural, and postcolonial critiques (see Bristor & Fischer, 1993; Haraway, 1994; Rosaldo, 1993; Thompson, Stern, & Arnould, 1998), and marketing's positivist–relativist debates (Anderson, 1986; Hudson & Ozanne, 1988). All have significantly problematized conventional notions of objectivity and the modernist project of totalizing theorizations.

Purpose – This interpretive study aims to demonstrate how dialectics might hamper researchers' imagination, inspiration, and insight that can otherwise enhance the understanding of a variety of phenomena in consumer-market dynamics and subsequently propose Foucauldian genealogy as an alternative to theorize such dynamics in the current consumer culture.

Methodology/approach – An ethonographic field study is conducted in the context of X Games, followed by an empirical juxtaposition of semiotic square, as a dialectical analysis, and a genealogical analysis of the same textual data.

Findings – Consumer-market dynamics operate based on interactions and mutual facilitations among four theoretically and empirically distinct groups of consumers in the context of X Games: pragmatic, stigmatized, distinction-oriented, and self-normalizing consumers. The historic conflict between consumers and the market steeped in Hegelian dialectics is contested in the dynamics due to the switch of modes(arts) of being(consumption) made by individual consumers who respectively participate in the system through presentation and representation.

Implications – A multitude of reality/truth-making is present in the consumer-market dynamics; thus, the dialectical view of the systematic progression of the market is found to be less implicative than the genealogical view of the system as polyvalent power relations.