Drawing from literary criticism and institutional theory, this article analyzes the public discourse surrounding the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 and BP Gulf Spill of 2010. While industrial accidents such as oil spills can erode consumers’ trust in experts, a macrolevel analysis reveals that...

How do changes in public discourse and regulatory structure affect the acceptance of a consumption practice? Previous research on legitimacy in consumer behavior has focused on the consumer reception of legitimizing discourse rather than on the historical process of legitimation itself. This...

The purpose of this article is to understand how media frames affect consumer judgments of legitimacy. Because frames exist on the sociocultural and individual level, our research takes a multimethod approach to this question. On the sociocultural level, we conduct a content analysis of operant...

This study explicates the coconstitutive relationships between commercial mythmaking and popular memory that arise through myth market competitions for identity value. We develop a genealogical analysis of the representational strategies and ideological rationales that two prominent New South...

Consumer researchers have commonly analyzed marketplace performances as liminal events structured by context-specific role playing, norms of reciprocity, and cocreative collaborations. As a consequence, this literature remains theoretically mute on questions related to the sociological...

From a conventional theoretical standpoint, the corporatization of the organic food movement is an example of co-optation. Co-optation theory conceptualizes the commercial marketplace as an ideological force that assimilates the symbols and practices of a counterculture into dominant norms. Our...

This article provides a synthesizing overview of the past 20 yr. of consumer research addressing the sociocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption. Our aim is to provide a viable disciplinary brand for this research tradition that we call consumer culture theory...

Prior studies have shown that consumers often misjudge their health risks owing to a number of well-documented cognitive biases. These studies assume that consumers have (or should have) trust in the expert systems that culturally define safe and risky behaviors. Consequently, this research...

Marketplace myths are commonly conceptualized as cultural resources that attract consumers to a consumption activity or brand. This theoretical orientation is prone to overstating the extent to which consumers' identity investments in a field of consumption are motivated by an associated...