Consumption as Serious Leisure: Understanding the Analog Revival

Seminar abstract 

A growing stream of research examines how consumers decelerate via extraordinary, transformative experiences that take place within an oasis of deceleration.

however, these experiences are temporary, spatially bounded, and their effects wear out.

The work presented in this seminar extends this research by examining how consumers can decelerate and gain meaning in more regularly accessible leisure pursuits.

Invoking the serious leisure perspective to explore the analog revival, focusing on consumer experience with three legacy technologies;

• Vinyl records
• Photographic film
• Analog synthesizers

This study draws on interviews and ethnographic insights to reveal how the adoption of legacy technologies is a form of serious leisure that redresses consumers' alienation from the ease of consumption.

It is articulated in a four stage SLP process by consumers experience difficulty, discipline and mastery in solid consumption to enable them to achieve the desired deceleration outcome of flow.

The study makes four primary contributions to the consumer research literature;

1. expanding our understanding of the value of consumer work
2. providing a wider cultural perspective on techno-cultures and the re-adoption of analog technology
3. explicating how deceleration can be achieved via solid consumption and escaping the digital in everyday life
4. building upon the serious leisure perspective via consumer.

Booking

This event is free to attend and there is no need to book in advance. We welcome you to share this with your friends, colleagues and classmates.

Speaker bio

Professor Giana M. Eckhardt is a Professor of Marketing and Director of the Centre for Research in Sustainability at Royal Holloway University of London.

She received her BSc in Marketing from the University of Connecticut and her PhD in Marketing from the University of Minnesota.

Giana is a leading expert in the field of;

• consumer behaviour,
• consumer culture,
• consumer ethics,
• branding
• and the sharing economy,

having published over forty articles in journals such as;

• Harvard Business Review
• Journal of Marketing
• Journal of Marketing Research 
• Journal of Consumer Research.

She is a co-author of The Myth of the Ethical Consumer (Cambridge University Press) and also co-editor of the Handbook of Sharing Economy (Edward Elgar).

Giana is the past co-chair of the Consumer Culture Theory conference, as well as Associate Editor of Journal of Consumer Research and is on the editorial review board of the Journal of Marketing.

Her research has won awards from the Sheth Foundation and the Marketing Science Institute, and has been featured in outlets such as

• The Wall Street Journal,
• The Economist,
• The Atlantic
• Fortune 
• Vogue
• Scientific American
• the BBC
• National Public Radio

Giana has received research grants from the Australian Research Council, the Marketing Science Institute and the British Academy of Management and has presented her work at top institutions and conferences around the world.