Mike Molesworth

COVID-19 disrupted ‘non-essential’ work and consumption, providing an unparalleled opportunity to examine work-and-spend culture, which we do via 44 in-depth interviews that capture experiences and reflections during UK lockdowns. Deploying Graeber’s conceptualisation of ‘bullshit jobs’ and related critiques of consumption, we first consider the possibility that contemporary work-and-spend lifestyles may deny the normative separation of work as worthy toil and consumption as its pleasurable opposite. Within such experience, and in addition to Graeber’s bullshit jobs, we find a parallel in bullshit consumption at work , in order to work , and because of work . Yet our findings also highlight that when freed from bullshit, participants engage in more caring practices for the self, others, and their possessions. We propose that much of our work-and-spend lives might be bullshit: routines that promise status, virtue, freedom, and pleasure, but feel meaningless, while displacing satisfying experiences of care. We conclude that a focus on subtractive logics – cutting the bullshit! – can activate both new critiques and optimism about societal arrangements.

In this article, we focus on relational labour as a form of emotional labour associated with the use of platformised possessions, such as pins, messages, photos, videos and playlists hosted on digital platforms, to maintain relationships with friends and family. We argue that this ongoing effort is a type of consumer labour because it generates profitable engagements for digital platforms, which intentionally exploit negative emotions, namely, anxiety and guilt, associated with maintaining social connections. Drawing on 47 depth interviews with people living in the South of the UK, we identify the direct (communication via platforms) and indirect (information gathered via platforms to attain relational goals) relational work undertaken by consumers via their platformised possessions. We then consider the emotional experiences related to this work, demonstrating how such experiences differ from reports of possession work on material goods, while maintaining platform profits. Recognising that this work is the basis of much platform engagement, and hence profit, we further show how this effort becomes a form of unpaid labour. We thus contribute to the nascent literature on platformisation and emotion, to broader studies of possession work, and to critical marketing scholarship on consumer labour.

The objects we consume increasingly exist in digital form, from audiobooks and digital photographs to social media profiles and avatars. Digital objects are often argued to be less valued, personally meaningful, and self-relevant than their physical counterparts, and are consequently dismissed as poor candidates for possession. Yet, studies have identified highly meaningful, even irreplaceable, digital possessions. In this paper, we account for these contradictory narratives surrounding digital possessions, arguing that digital objects are not inherently unsuited to possession, but rather their affordances may not align with consumers’ imagined affordances (i.e., the object affordances that consumers anticipate). Drawing from a qualitative study of 25 consumers and their digital possessions, we identify three recurring types of affordance misalignment - missing affordances, covert affordances, and deficient affordances - that mediate how consumers and digital objects interact (pragmatic mediation) and, consequently, consumers’ experiences of, and beliefs surrounding, digital objects as possessions (hermeneutic mediation). We demonstrate that these affordance misalignments can create obstacles to consumers’ desired experiences of possession and document consumers’ attempts to overcome these obstacles by employing alignment strategies, with varied behavioural outcomes. This paper advances debates surrounding digital possessions and presents an enriched affordance theory lens that provides new insights into possession.

Existing scholarly work on corporate social responsibility (CSR) frequently emphasizes either normative/ethical claims about social progress or instrumental/strategic claims about corporate effectiveness, yet less often acknowledges the moral conditions of those undertaking CSR within a specific cultural context. In this paper, we draw attention to the social conditions in which CSR takes place and the related ethics of the subjects that must enact it. Our approach is to document the lived experiences of practitioners in Romania, a post-communist society. Drawing from fifty-three depth interviews with both corporate responsibility practitioners, and managers in non-profit organizations who together work on CSR projects, we describe their experiences of the social and organizational environment, the CSR practices that are undertaken in this context, and the intended and unintended consequences of such work. Using Bauman’s theorization of ethics, including adiaphora and moral distancing, and Borţun’s interpretation of Romanianness, we then theorize liquid CSR as an ambivalence between adiaphoric practice (instrumental morality, careerism and self-interest) and the moral impulse to do good, resulting in both intended (short-term promotion and competitive victimhood) and unintended consequences (a potential for corruption and collateral beneficiaries).

In the spirit of dystopian science fiction, this story imagines marketing in a near future. A reader might recognise that there is a relationship between aesthetic forms (stories) and the dramas that play out in society and so although this is fiction, it is also about the critical concerns that are emerging in the use of corporate technologies. The story draws from theory that suggests our most intimate relationships are embedded in and create market structures, and on theory that accounts for how technology (and especially AI) has significant impact on market practices. Core ideas also reference my previous and ongoing research on the imagination, on marketplace relationships and on digital virtual consumption, and from previous accounts of AI and market/political systems in speculative fictions. I invite the reader to reflect on the sorts of dominating human–technology–market relationships that may be with us soon, and on the risk of perverse instantiations in commercial AI deployment. Overall the tone is critical, but themes are also presented as ambiguous, recognising the seductive quality of marketing technologies.

This article shows how Script Analysis can produce new marketing theory by applying it to contemporary shopping behaviour via British novelist Madeleine Wickham’s novel, Confessions of a Shopaholic. We show how Becky Bloomwood, the central character, is a Scripted Shopaholic for whom shopping is the activity around which everything else in her life falls in and out of place. In presenting a Scripted Shopaholic Racket System, we theorize: how shopping is used to structure time and relationships with others; the role of injunctions and attributions and related discounting in fulfilling shopping scripts and the possibility of freedom from excessive shopping scripts. We therefore bring together psychoanalysis, literary texts and shopping theories to generate new insights about why people shop (and often shop too much) and how such behaviours might be transformed.