This study illustrates how consumers produce different culturally constituted accounts
of assigning meaning to a past traumatic event, such as slipping into poverty.
Positioned in Consumer Culture Theory’s (CCT) consuming identity stream of
research, it adresses a gap in the literature on tracing long-termed identity formation
following disruption. As such, the study’s originality stems from offering a focus on
the temporary nature of relative income poverty and its implications on consumers’
identity (re)-construction. Both a narrative theoretical lens and methodology were
deployed to explore the cumulative impact of such multiple transitions over time
(downward and upward) on identity re-construction. Following others who have
drawn consumption insights from autobiographic work (Hirschman, 1990; Turley and
O’Donohoe, 2012; O’Donohoe, 2015), published autobiographies from German
poverty survivors were analysed and informed subsequent long (narrative) interviews
with 14 transient poor informants, including book authors.
Findings obtained from analysis of both autobiographical work and interviews make
three broad contributions to consumer research. Firstly, the study reveals that
consumers having undergone major disruptions in their assumptive worlds make use
of different past selves by, for example, rejecting or revisiting them in order to
construct their present and future post-trauma consuming identities. Secondly, the
findings shift the perspective on traumatised consumers from restoring what was lost
during a disconcerting life event (Caldwell and Henry, 2017; Thompson, Henry and
Bardhi, 2018) to transformative identity construction in terms of enduringly leaving
behind pre-crisis selves. Thirdly, this study demonstrates that (transient) low-income
consumers form an important part of voluntary simplicity theorisations.
| Date of Award | 4 May 2020 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Awarding Institution | - University Of Strathclyde
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| Supervisor | Kathy Hamilton (Supervisor) & Aliakbar Jafari (Supervisor) |
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