Mutuality: critique and substitute for Belk’s “sharing”
Event Date: 16 September 2014
Speakers: Eric J Arnould (Department of Marketing and Management,) University of Southern Denmark, DK, and Alexander S Rose (Department of Marketing,) University of Arkansas, USA
Time: 2pm, with lunch from 1 pm.
Location: McCance building, room 303.
Abstract: The recently introduced construct of consumer sharing is represented as a nonreciprocal, pro-social distribution of resources given without expectation of reciprocity (Belk, 2010). The desire to develop criteria to differentiate sharing from market exchange and gift giving in the context of late consumer culture is no-doubt seductive. It speaks to a pervasive fear evident in scholarship and lay discourse that market logic pervades and colonizes every social relationship and thus can color even the most innocent of social encounters. And it is likewise a response to the growth in scale of peer-to peer networks of resource circulation. However, the approach adopted so far rests on shaky ontological and epistemological grounds and reproduces an array of problematic modernist dichotomies (e.g., agency- structure; nurturing family-instrumental public; gift-market, altruism-self-interest) that significantly constrain the analytical enterprise. The present work redresses some of the conceptual problems in the current formulation. Such an analysis highlights that a focus on resource distribution that develops a more holistic socially grounded perspective on circulation, one that adopts the alternative concept of mutuality or generalized exchange, and the metaphor of inclusion rather than exchange as central, may provide a more sound basis for understanding.
Biography: Dr. Eric Arnould is Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern Denmark. He has pursued a career in applied social science since receiving his BA in 1973. While enjoying the challenges of working as a consultant in agricultural, marketing systems, and natural resource management in more than a dozen West African nations between 1975 and 1990, he earned a Ph.D. in Economic Anthropology with a minor in Archaeology (1982), and pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in the Marketing Department (1982-1983), all at the University of Arizona. Eric’s research on consumer culture theory, services marketing, marketing & retail strategy, and marketing in developing countries appears in over 90 articles and chapters in major social science and managerial periodicals and books, including Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Retailing, Human Organization, Journal of Marketing Research, and Recherche et Applications en Marketing. He has served on several journal review boards and as an Associate Editor of Journal of Consumer Research. Eric also has benefited from teaching students in universities on four continents. He has consulted for a number of interesting public and private sector entities.
Published: 20 March 2018
