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This paper aims to explore how a socio-digital platform can facilitate consumer responsibilisation in food consumption to encourage sustained responsible consumption and uncovers its possible impacts on different stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem.

Two-year-long case study of a socio-digital platform that aims to integrate consumers with the farming process; creating value for them and the farmers in India.

The process of consumer responsibilisation happens through three mechanisms; construction of a moral-material identity, vicarious self-artisanship and shared responsibilisation. Through these key mechanisms, the socio-digital platform could foster consumer responsibilisation and engender positive societal impacts by promoting both responsible production and consumption.

This study shows how the construction of moral–material identity could move beyond an either-or choice between moralistic and material identity and allow space for the coexistence of both. This paper highlights how a socio-digital platform can be leveraged to facilitate responsible consumer engagement in an aestheticised farming process.

This paper aims to guide policymakers to design digitally-enabled human-centred innovation in facilitating consumer engagement with farming and cultivating responsible consumers in achieving sustainable development goals.

This study shows how consumer responsibilisation can actually address market failures by enhancing the value created in the system, reducing wastage and cutting costs wherever possible, which drive better incomes for the farmers.

Previous studies have discussed heterogeneous motivations for responsible food consumption. However, this research explores the processes through which an individual reconnects to food production and the mechanisms that support this process in the long run.

The purpose of this study is to characterize how services present responsibilized consumers with well-being capabilities. This is done by drawing on structuration theory and literatures on responsibilization, social well-being and psychological well-being.

This paper is based on conceptual development and a qualitative interpretive study of value propositions in texts and images on websites of 11 different self-tracking wearables and applications.

This paper introduces the changing–coping–countering characterization to explicate different types of well-being capabilities that are represented in services. These capabilities represent different stances towards structures. This paper proposes and discusses how these capabilities can have different impacts on well-being on individual and collective levels.

This study is limited to the perspective of services in a self-tracking context. Further empirical research is needed to investigate well-being capabilities from consumer perspectives.

The proposed characterization can help practitioners in becoming more reflexive concerning their value propositions that relate to consumer well-being. This implies becoming aware of well-being discourses that shape and affect service development.

This paper provides a novel characterization for understanding the role of services in the context of responsibilization. It contributes to structural perspectives on the role of services in contributing to well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to study how individuals assess responsibility during an uncontrollable event requiring collective action, using crises affecting service workers as contexts. Specifically, the authors examine what parties consumers hold responsible for ensuring service worker welfare following an uncontrollable event and determine what factors make customers more open to accepting responsibility for ensuring worker welfare themselves.

The authors surveyed a nationally representative sample of US consumers regarding their attitudes toward protecting service workers during COVID-19 and used regression analysis to identify factors that predict attributions of responsibility to customers. The authors also conducted an experiment (using a new crisis context) to determine whether certain key factors impact customer perceptions of their own responsibility for helping employees during an uncontrollable event.

The survey results show US consumers hold firms most responsible for worker welfare, followed by customers and, finally, government. When examining factors that drive attributions of responsibility for customers, perceptions of how sincere firms are in their efforts to help employees predict higher responsibility attributions, and experimental results confirm that higher perceived firm sincerity increases consumers’ own sense of responsibility toward workers.

This research identifies factors that affect consumer support for efforts to help service employees and collective action problems more generally.

This research highlights an under-studied crisis context – uncontrollable events that require collective action – and shows how consumers make assessments about their own responsibility (in addition to the responsibility of the service firm) in these contexts.

The study examines the responsibilisation of an ethnocentric consumer in commercial, meta-organisational discourses. In addition to nationalistic and patriotic discourses, the focus is on wider conceptualisations of consumer responsibility.

The paper uses critical discourse analysis as a methodological approach to conduct an empirical case study on the texts of two producer-driven labelling campaigns.

The campaign texts create possibilities for ethnocentric consumption with positioning, argumentative and classificatory discourses. Patriotic responsibilisation is emphasised, together with rationales to take action on environmental concerns.

The study highlights the responsibility of marketers over their corporate responsibility communication, suggesting that ethnocentric promotions may have the power to alter how consumers take action on various responsibility concerns.

The study surfaces the tensions that responsible consumption can entail for consumers. Indeed, nationalistic and patriotic discourses may alter our understanding of responsibility issues that may seem completely separate from the concepts of nationalism and patriotism.

The paper shows how different organisational texts are deployed to bring about the idea of ethnocentric consumption and how this relates to responsibility discourses, nationalism and patriotism.

Research to date has reported ambiguous results on the influence of tax concessions on retirement savings decisions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of tax concessions on private retirement investment decisions by analyzing actual retirement decision processes and the rationales behind these decisions in‐depth.

Qualitative semi‐structured interviews on actual retirement savings decisions were conducted with private investors (17) and their respective bank advisors (5). Decision‐making rationales are analysed by means of semantic and causal coding of verbal data as well as by highlighting the complexities of decision processes represented in individual investment narratives.

Results indicate that taxes do not matter much, neither during the decision to join a private retirement plan, nor when choosing a specific investment product. Financial planning for retirement consists of saving disposable income instead of the required savings premium and choosing a secure type of investment which yields more than a savings account. Savers do not base their decisions on calculating and comparing rates of return or tax benefits. Instead, comparatively unqualified relatives as well as bank advisors and the desire for trust and security are of major relevance.

The generalization of results is limited in so far as they refer to a relatively small interview sample. The study shall thus prompt further research that takes the decision‐making context and the interrelation between several context factors systematically into account.

The study is of value in that it highlights the difficulties private investors' experience when making actual – rather than hypothetical – retirement savings decisions and the rationales behind seemingly “imperfect” decisions. It shows that retirement savings decisions are heavily linked with the social decision‐making context. These results are closely linked to the recent debate on “responsibilization”, critical perspectives on the tendency of states to hold individuals increasingly accountable for aspects of market governance and social security.

The purpose of this paper is to take the case of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a starting point for the analysis of the blend between the notions of halal and luxury in the Arab region because the UAE presents an interesting multicultural yet Islamic blend, which has yet not been investigated. Scholarly calls for the assessment of the relationship between consumption and wellbeing have raised interest in conspicuous consumption research. The global phenomenon of luxury consumption has drawn researcher interest at recent times. Despite consumer affluence in the oil-rich Arabian Gulf, research into this phenomenon at this emerging region to-date is still lacking. As the Arabian Gulf is also particularly Islamic, a significant body of literature has addressed halal purchasing yet had failed to examine the intersections between luxury and halal consumption.

The research takes a qualitative methodological approach utilizing unstructured observation and content analysis of 138 visuals collected from prominent shopping malls in Dubai and Abu-Dhabi during the occasion of the minor Islamic Eid following Ramadan.

The results show that the UAE consumer culture combines authenticity with modernity portraying highly savvy cosmopolitan consumers sharing the global values of urbanization within the halal parameters.

The limitations relate to the utilization of the qualitative methodological approach; hence, the research findings need to be generalized with caution to relevant contexts. This research should be regarded as a critical starting point in analyzing the syllogisms between the notions of halal and affluence.

The findings are relevant to consumer culture research which looks at the implications of modern consumption within the boundaries of halal. The research presents a critical approach and questioning of the overlaps between halal consumption, responsible consumption and luxury consumption in a unique multicultural and affluent setting which is the UAE.

The present paper invites academics and practitioners to introspect into the dimensions of responsible consumption, luxury consumption and halal consumption. It asks the critical metaphorical question of whether halal and luxury consumption are two faces of the same coin.

The research concludes with raising critical questions around the boundaries of luxury consumption from an Islamic perspective, thereby combining elements of religion and cultural approaches to Islamic marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to re-evaluate the sustainable attitude-behavior gap by reconsidering the cognitive-rational aspects of consumer purchase behavior. We aim to show how companies can benefit from focusing on hedonic aspects of consumption in their marketing of sustainable products. We claim that consumer culture research needs to examine the link between hedonic, aesthetic, and cognitive-rational aspects of sustainable consumption.

We use the electric vehicle marketing strategy in the United States as an example of an approach to bridge the attitude-behavior gap. More specifically, we focus on the car manufacturer Tesla as an example of marketing a sustainable product.

We find that Tesla’s marketing strategy focuses on aesthetics and hedonics-ludic performance. Similarly to other luxury cars, Tesla markets itself with a full compliment of consumer benefits. Compared to economical electric vehicles, sustainability is not the primary focus of Tesla’s marketing communication strategy.

Sustainable consumption theory benefits from examining the interlinking of hedonic, aesthetic and cognitive-rational aspects product purchasing and use. Future research in the development of sustainable consumption theory in additional complex product categories is needed.

Greater regard for consumer experience in sustainable consumption offers the potential for additional strategies to bridge the attitude-behavior gap and marketing of sustainable goods.

We move beyond the attitude-behavior gap by not only focusing on expressed attitudes of sustainability, but also focusing on the hedonic aspects at play in sustainable consumption.

This study aims to reveal the implications that trust, as a key driver of consumer behaviour, might have on consumer acceptance of front-of-pack labels (FOPLs) and policy effectiveness. By conducting three studies on 1956 European consumers with different levels of exposure to FOPLs, this study offers additional theoretical and experimental support through a deep investigation of the central role of trust in consumers’ decision-making towards healthier and more informed food choices.

Study 1 used structural equation modelling to assess whether trust is a relevant mediator of the relationship between attitude and behavioural intention (BI), thus upgrading the front-of-pack acceptance model (FOPAM); Study 2 tested the model by comparing two labels at the extremes of the current European scheme (NutrInform Battery [NiB], Nutri-Score [NS]); Study 3 assessed the effect in cases where the connection between trust and algorithms is made transparent and evaluated trust dimensions, focusing on the perception of an algorithm presence behind FOPLs information.

Study 1 strengthens the FOPAM model with the mediating role of trust in FOPLs, demonstrating a positive effect of attitude on trust and, in turn, on BI, and resulting in a higher model fit with all the significant relationships; Study 2 revealed that the relative performance of the different labels on the FOPAM can be explained by the trust dimension; Study 3, investigating the dynamics of trust in the FOPAM, revealed that the NS is less effective than the NiB on attitude, BI and trust.

The sample was limited to Italian, French and English respondents, and two labels at the extreme of the spectrum were examined. Furthermore, the research has relevance to the issue of trust. Other moderators used in previous studies on technology acceptance model, such as actual use versus perceptual use, user experience level or type of users and type of use might be investigated.

The investigation of trust, with the upgrade of FOPAM, enhances understanding of consumers’ decision-making processes when aided by food labels and makes a new contribution to the European Union “Inception Impact Assessment” in preparation for the finalization of the “From-Farm-to-Fork Strategy”, providing new insights into the role of trust by assessing the relative performance of FOPLs in consumers’ acceptance of food-related information. Furthermore, this study revealed that consumers’ perception of FOPLs worsens when they realize that they are the result of an algorithmic calculation. Finally, the new FOPAM represents a reliable theoretical model for future research on FOPL.

This study increases the knowledge about the performance of different FOPLs on several dimensions of food decision-making, positions the upgraded FOPAM as a valid alternative to existing theoretical models to assess the relative performance of labels, also extending the literature in the context of algorithm-based FOPL, and could be used as a valid support to policymakers and industry experts in their decision towards a unified label at European level.

Research on sustainable consumption (SC) has shown how, faced with barriers that prevent them from embracing a sustainable lifestyle, consumers experience classic symptoms of distress. Although distress emerges as a constitutive dimension of sustainable lifestyles, research has not yet provided a comprehensive account of how consumers cope with it. This paper aims to provide such an account.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 people who defined themselves as sustainable consumers. A hermeneutic approach was adopted for the analysis.

The analysis shows that consumers enact two different coping strategies: adjustment or episodic coping and structural coping or deradicalization. Both sets encompass reappraisals and meaning-making strategies to maintain motivation while simultaneously appeasing tensions. They also comprise the strategic enactment of emotions to energize the self and/or to appease distress. Coping influences how SC is appraised and lived, as these practices are dynamically changed to navigate structural constraints.

SC campaigns have traditionally focused on cognitive empowerment. However, the evidence suggests that emotional empowerment could be a more effective way to promote the practice.

This paper provides the first in-depth examination of the strategies adopted to cope with distress. The analysis shows that consumers reconfigure how SC is appraised and implemented, while emphasizing the crucial role of emotion work in the coping repertoire. Although SC is stressful due to structural and social constraints, consumers are able to remain committed to it to varying degrees.

Driven by the visible proliferation of marketing scholarship dedicated to the topics of food marketing and consumer well-being, this study aims to examine the prevailing meanings and assumptions around food and health in marketing research.

Following the guiding principles of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and the methodological orientation of critical discourse analysis, the authors analyze a systematically produced corpus of 190 academic articles from 56 publication outlets.

The study identifies three discourses of health and food dominant in marketing and consumer research. Each of the three discourses blends the ideology of healthism with market(ing) ideologies and provides a unique perspective on the meanings of health and health risks, the principles of appropriate consumer conduct and the role of marketing in regard to consumer and societal well-being.

The study contributes to research into ideologies in and of marketing by introducing useful concepts that help explain the role of healthism in marketing discourse.

The finding of three dominant discourses could help reduce at least some of the existing complexity in regard to conflicting knowledge existing in the domain of health and food, and thus could inspire a more reflective body of work by researchers, policymakers and marketers towards improved food-related well-being.

This analysis of assumptions and consequences of the meanings mobilized by the dominant marketing discourses contributes to a better understanding of the current state of knowledge about health in the market reality.