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This study aims to answer two research questions, namely, what kinds of mundane resistance practices emerge in the local food system and which spatial, material and social elements catalyse the resistance practices.

The study adopts a post-humanist practice approach and focusses on exploring the agentic capacity of socio-material elements to generate resistance practices. The data were generated through a multi-method approach of interviews, field observations and Facebook discussions collected between 2014 and 2017.

The empirical context is the rejäl konsumtion local food network in Finland. The analysis presents two types of resisting practices – resisting facelessness and resisting carelessness – which are connected to spatial, material and social elements.

The study focusses on one local food system, highlighting the socio-material structuring of resistance in this specific cultural setting.

The practical implications highlight that recognising the socio-material elements provides tools for better engagement of consumer actors with local food systems.

The study adds to the extant research by interweaving the consumer resistance literature and local food systems discussions with the neo-material approach. The findings present a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which consumer resistance is actualised in a non-recreational, mundane context of consumption. Consequently, the study offers new insights into the agentic socio-material actors structuring the local food system.

This paper aims to provide a typology of perceived risk in the context of consumer brand resistance and thus answers the following question: how do consumers perceive the risk they take when resisting brands?

Two qualitative methods were used. In-depth interviews were carried out with 15 consumers who resist brands. An ethnography was carried out for ten months in an international pro-environmental NGO.

This multiple qualitative method design led to the identification of four types of risks taken by consumers. The four categories of perceived risks identified are performance (lack of suitable alternatives for the brand), social issues (stigma and exclusion), legal reasons (legal proceedings) or physical considerations (violation of physical integrity). These risks are located along a continuum of resistance intensity. Resistance intensity levels are avoidance, offline word-of-mouth, online word-of-mouth, boycott, activism and finally extreme acts.

This study provides a framework that integrates perceived risks within the context of brand resistance. The paper highlights extreme acts of resistance and questions the limits of such behaviors.

Consumers are increasingly connected to, and make use of, a multitude of technologies in their daily lives. The exponential growth in the use of Internet of Things (IoT)-based services is ushering in a new era of e-services, in which the service experience is becoming autonomous (intelligence), devices are intercommunicating (connectivity) and consumers can access the service anytime, anywhere and using any device (ubiquity). However, a number of challenges have arisen. The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that reduce consumer resistance to smart services (factors against resistance) and factors that promote this resistance (factors for resistance), by means of a dual-factor approach.

To test this theoretical model, the authors developed a Web-based survey and used structural equation modeling.

Results show that consumer-lifestyle factors (individual “mobiquity” and self-image congruence) reduce consumer resistance to smart services (factors against resistance). Conversely, innovation-related factors (perceived security, perceived complexity) and ecosystem-related factors (perceived government surveillance and general skepticism toward IoT) promote consumer resistance to smart services (factors for resistance). In addition, general skepticism toward IoT has a significant positive effect on perceived complexity, perceived security risk and perceived government surveillance.

This research investigates consumer resistance to smart services using a dual-factor perspective (Cenfetelli, 2004; Claudy et al., 2015): factors reducing resistance versus factors promoting resistance. This paper provides evidence for the importance of consumer lifestyle-related factors, innovation-related factors and ecosystem-related factors in explaining consumer resistance to smart services. This work enriches previous studies of consumer resistance to innovation (Ram and Sheth, 1989; Ram, 1987) by studying original variables (individual mobiquity, technological innovativeness, government surveillance).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is experiencing growth and prosperity worldwide because of its convenience and other benefits. However, AI faces challenges related to consumer resistance. Thus, drawing on the user resistance theory, this study explores factors that influence consumers’ resistance to AI and suggests ways to mitigate this negative influence.

This study tested four hypotheses across four studies by conducting lab experiments. Study 1 used a questionnaire to verify the hypothesis that AI’s “substitute” image leads to consumer resistance to AI; Study 2 focused on the role of perceived threat as an underlying driver of resistance to AI. Studies 3–4 provided process evidence by the way of a measured moderator, testing whether AI with servant communication style and literal language style is resisted less.

This study showed that AI’s “substitute” image increased users' resistance to AI. This occurs because the substitute image increases consumers’ perceived threat. The study also found that using servant communication and literal language styles in the interaction between AI and consumers can mitigate the negative effects of AI-substituted images.

This study reveals the mechanism of action between AI image and consumers’ resistance and sheds light on how to choose appropriate image and expression styles for AI products, which is important for lowering consumer resistance to AI.

With the upgrade of natural language interaction technology, the simulation extension of intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) and the uncertainty of products and services have received more and more attention. However, most of the existing research focuses on investigating the application of theories to explain consumer behavior related to intention to use and adopt IVAs, while ignoring the impact of its privacy issues on consumer resistance. This article especially examines the negative impact of artificial intelligence-based IVAs’ privacy concerns on consumer resistance, and studies the mediating effect of perceived creepiness in the context of privacy cynicism and privacy paradox and the moderating effect of anthropomorphized roles of IVAs and perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) of IVAs’ companies. The demographic variables are also included.

Based on the theory of human–computer interaction (HCI), this study addresses the consumer privacy concerns of IVAs, builds a model of the influence mechanism on consumer resistance, and then verifies the mediating effect of perceived creepiness and the moderating effect of anthropomorphized roles of IVAs and perceived CSR of IVAs companies. This research explores underlying mechanism with three experiments.

It turns out that consumers’ privacy concerns are related to their resistance to IVAs through perceived creepiness. The servant (vs. partner) anthropomorphized role of IVAs is likely to induce more privacy concerns and in turn higher resistance. At the same time, when the company’s CSR is perceived high, the impact of the concerns of IVAs’ privacy issues on consumer resistance will be weakened, and the intermediary mechanism of perceiving creepiness in HCI and anthropomorphism of new technology are further explained and verified. The differences between different age and gender are also revealed in the study.

The research conclusions have strategic reference significance for enterprises to build the design framework of IVAs and formulate the response strategy of IVAs’ privacy concerns. And it offers implications for researchers and closes the research gap of IVAs from the perspective of innovation resistance.

Consumer resistance has been a popular research area in the previous decades, and concepts such as boycotting, brand avoidance, voluntary simplicity and anti-consumption appeared to be hot topics in exploring the ways the consumers resist market dominance in the postmodern culture. However, research on this topic in the Turkish (and partly Eastern) context is very limited, inhibiting our understanding of the topic in different economic and cultural settings. Through a comprehensive discussion that provides institutional-, structural- and community-level perspectives relating to consumer resistance phenomena in Turkey, a developing country with historical and cultural roots in both the East and the West, the chapter intends to equip scholars and practitioners with a better insight to conceptualise this phenomenon as well as to formulate further studies and marketing strategies.

Despite the efforts of governments and firms, consumer resistance toward digital innovations in the retail finance space continues to manifest rather visibly. Yet, the causes of consumer resistance toward innovations such as online procurement of financial products continue to remain under-explored. The present study attempts to address this gap by examining barriers that may constitute Indian consumers' resistance to buying financial products marketed digitally, using insurance as an exemplar. Precisely, the study measures five classic innovation resistance theory (IRT) barriers constituting consumers' resistance toward procuring digitally marketed insurance and examines the influence of consumers' demographic characteristics, measured through age and gender.

The conceptual model, resting on the theoretical proposition of IRT, was tested using data collected from 420 smartphone users. Given that, the data did not satisfy the multivariate assumptions of normality, homoscedasticity and linearity, artificial neural network approach was used for analysis. The analysis served as the basis for determining the relative importance of the five barriers in influencing consumer resistance.

The results indicated that the image barrier was the most influential barrier impacting consumer resistance, followed by usage, tradition, risk and value barriers. Moreover, as revealed by the values of correlations, the direction of influence was positive. Notably, the relationship of all barriers except tradition with consumer resistance was found to be nonlinear.

The study makes a novel contribution in two ways – one by extending IRT to a new area, i.e., resistance to buying financial products online, thereby further enhancing its applicability, and the other by exploring consumer resistance to e-procurement of life and nonlife insurance, which to the best of the authors' knowledge, has not been examined so far despite the established exigency.

This study aims to investigate the impact of environmentally sustainable innovation practices on consumer resistance to innovation in eco-hotel enterprises and the moderating influence of value co-creation based on the service-dominant logic and innovation resistance theory.

Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to test the study’s hypotheses on a sample of 382 eco-hotel enterprise consumers surveyed online.

Results reveal that adopting environmentally sustainable innovation practices and consumers’ participation in value co-creation can negatively influence consumer resistance to innovation. In addition, value co-creation partially moderates the influence of environmentally sustainable innovation practices on consumer resistance to innovation, implying that other variables can influence this relationship. Finally, the results showed that value co-creation is a multidimensional construct with dimensions of meaningfulness, collaboration, contribution, recognition and affective response.

This study contributes significantly to knowledge of value co-creation and innovation resistance in service ecosystems through the lens of sustainability. Incorporating value co-creation as a moderator demonstrates how to address sustainable activities to decrease consumers’ resistance to eco-hotel enterprises’ environmentally sustainable innovation practices. By empirically analyzing these relationships, this study makes various contributions and gives helpful decision-making insights.

Since its inception, mobile payment is rapidly gaining popularity over the years, and starting to replace traditional modes of payment. The usage of mobile payments has further escalated following various precautionary measures (i.e. social distancing) in curbing the transmission of the COVID-19 outbreak. However, most of the elderlies are still sceptical about the usage of mobile payment services. The current study was set to investigate the impact of functional, psychological and risk barriers that resulted in elderlies' resistance towards using such services. The impact of stickiness to cash was also examined as a moderator on the investigated relationships.

Online survey questionnaires were used to collect the responses from 400 elderly consumers at the age of 60 and above. Data analysis was then performed using the SPSS and AMOS statistical software packages.

Findings obtained acknowledged the significance of functional (i.e. perceived complexity, perceived incompatibility and perceived cost), psychological (i.e. lack of trust, inertia, and technological anxiety) and risk (i.e. privacy risk, security risk, financial risk and operational risk) barriers in influencing resistance towards mobile payment services among the elderlies. Consequently, resistance would influence their attitude and non-adoption intention; with attitude as the mediator between resistance and non-adoption intention. Finally, moderation analysis also confirmed the moderating effect of stickiness to cash towards elevating the correlation between resistance and non-adoption intention.

This study is one of the very few studies that explored the minimally investigated territory on the consequential importance of mobile payment usage among the elderlies, specifically, through extending the literature on the impact of functional, psychological and risk barriers towards the individuals' resistance. Besides, this study also successfully contributed to existing body of knowledge by highlighting the mediating role of attitude and moderating role of stickiness to cash in the interrelationships between resistance, attitude and non-adoption intention.