A typology of consumption acquisition practices: Ownership, access, and market mediation

This is an event in the Corporate Social Responsibility series taking place at Leeds University Business School on Wednesday 21 February 2018.

Fleura Bardhi
Professor of Cass Business School
City University London

A Typology of Consumption Acquisition Practices: Ownership, Access, and Market Mediation

The sharing economy has led to a multitude of choices on how consumers can acquire consumption resources that go beyond buying and include sharing, occasional or peer-to-peer renting, bartering, borrowing, etc. While consumer research has begun to explore these developments, an organizing theoretical framework that enables conceptual clarity and cumulative knowledge development is lacking in this domain. This conceptual paper develops a typology of research acquisition practices on the basis of a) the level of market mediation, and b) ownership transfer. The typology distinguishes six consumption acquisition practices: buying, bartering, gifting, renting, sharing, and borrowing. 

We conceptualize each practice, discuss associated consumption consequences, and discuss hybrid cases. Our contribution lies in reducing confusion, synthesizing, and adding clarity about the conceptualizations, boundary conditions, and relationships between consumption acquisition practices, advancing existing knowledge of the resource circulation debate. 

For further information, please contact the Research Office at research.LUBS@leeds.ac.uk

About the speaker

Fleura Bardhi is a Professor of Marketing at Cass Business School, City University London, UK. As a consumer researcher, Fleura examines how socio-historical transformations of modernity shape our contemporary consumption. Her research has explored ideas of liquid consumption, access and sharing, global branding and mobilities, and life transitions. She approaches her research from a consumer culture theory (CCT) perspective. Fleura’s work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, International Marketing Review, Consumption, Markets & Culture, Psychology and Marketing, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, etc. 

Fleura is a member of the Editorial Review Board for Journal of Consumer Research, Consumption, Markets, & Culture journal, Mercati & Competitività. She has co‐chaired twice the Consumer Culture Theory PhD Workshop (2011, 2013) and has been invited as a faculty mentor at several methodology and theory related PhD Workshops. Her work has received attention and was cited in the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Boston Globe, etc. She has also been a visiting professor at Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada; University of Sydney, Australia; and California State University, Long Beach, US.