Christian Fuentes, Johan Hagberg and Hans Kjellberg
The purpose of this paper is to further develop the conceptualization of music consumption in the digital age by examining how contemporary music listening is interweaved with…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to further develop the conceptualization of music consumption in the digital age by examining how contemporary music listening is interweaved with other practices, how it shapes those practices and how it is in turn shaped by them.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on extensive, qualitative interviews with 15 Swedish music consumers. During the course of these interviews, specific situations of everyday music listening were discussed in detail.
Findings
Drawing on practice theory and more specifically the concepts of dispersed and integrative practices, the authors identify and explore a mode of music listening that they term soundtracking, which involves choosing and listening to music mainly to accompany other everyday practices.
Research limitations/implications
As soundtracking grows in importance, music is increasingly consumed as an affective-practical resource. Its significance is then not derived from its ability to demarcate difference and construct consumer identities but from its capacity to evoke emotions and moods than enable and enrich a set of everyday practices.
Practical implications
When music is consumed as part of soundtracking, issues such as the audio quality of music or ownership of material music media become less important, while aspects such as mobility, accessibility and the adaptability of music increase in importance. This has important implications for how and what music should be produced and marketed.
Originality/value
This paper offers an alternative view of contemporary music consumption compared to previous research, which has considered music listening primarily as an integrative practice on which the practitioner is fully focussed. The paper also contributes to practice theory by offering an empirically based understanding of a dispersed practice, showing that such practices are neither without shape nor necessarily very simple in their structure.
Details
Keywords
Hans Kjellberg, Johan Hagberg and Franck Cochoy
This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the…
Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the consummation of market exchanges. Specifically, the authors investigate the enactment of market infrastructure in the US grocery retail sector by exploring how barcodes and related devices contributed to modify its market infrastructure during the period 1967–2010. Combining this empirical case with insights from previous research, the authors propose that market infrastructures are relational, available for use, modular, actively maintained, interdependent, commercial, emergent and political. The authors argue that this conception of market infrastructure provides a powerful tool for unveiling the complex agencements and engineering efforts that underpin seemingly superficial, individual and isolated market exchanges.
Details
Keywords
Hans Kjellberg and Per Andersson
Taking a set of studies about business action as the empirical starting-point, this paper looks at the various ways in which action is represented. The overall research question…
Abstract
Taking a set of studies about business action as the empirical starting-point, this paper looks at the various ways in which action is represented. The overall research question can be stated as follows: how is business action reconstructed in our narratives? The texts analyzed are collected from research on exchange relationships in the field of marketing. To analyze how these texts depict business action, four narrative constructions are focused: space, time, actors, and plots. The categorization and analysis are summarized and followed by a set of concluding implications and suggestions for narrative practice aiming to reconstruct business action in the making.
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Julia Elyachar, Martin Kornberger, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, Joanne Randa Nucho and Neil Pollock
Tiziana Russo-Spena, Cristina Mele and Jaqueline Pels
This paper aims to focus on how the use of new technologies disrupts markets. To date, marketing literature has lacked studies investigating the link between market practices and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to focus on how the use of new technologies disrupts markets. To date, marketing literature has lacked studies investigating the link between market practices and new technologies. The study adopts the blockchain technology (BcT) context to elicit novel technology-enhanced market practices.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors adopt a qualitative multimethod research design to engage in interpretative theorizing. They investigated 77 companies and used the Gioia method for the data coding and analysis.
Findings
The study of the adoption of blockchain prompts three technology-enhanced market practices. The latter offers new ways of resourcing by removing constraints and expanding actors’ network and knowledge to integrate resources; sensemaking by expressing new language and assigning novel meaning to represent markets; and legitimizing, by structuring new rules and trusting new mechanisms to institutionalize markets.
Research limitations/implications
The technology-enhanced market practices are distinct from extant market practices as well as related, thus, enriching and complementing them. Therefore, this work expands the understanding of the mechanisms of how markets work.
Originality/value
This study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to focus on how BcT features affect market practices. BcT market practices entail how actors perform, share and interpret symbols and objects and set rules for how markets should work.