Vol. 11, No. 1, December 2009

Calls for Papers, Announcements, and Conference Calendar

Call for Papers:  Economic downturn: end of consumer society or business as usual?
ESA CONSUMPTION RESEARCH NETWORK INTERIM MEETING 2010

Hotel and Spa Dorpat, Tartu, 25-28 August 2010

The global economic downturn has changed consumption, production and promotion
patterns all over the world. Some even say – either with regret or joy depending on who is
speaking- that the consumption boom, as we used to know it, will never come back.
Tartu, the academic capital of Estonia is situated in the Baltic region - one of the areas of
the EU that has suffered remarkably in the economic crisis. We find it a good venue for
gathering sociologists of consumption from all over Europe to present their new research
(be it linked to the economic downturn theme more or less directly), discuss the present
and future of consumer cultures in Europe and elsewhere, as well as network and
cooperate in the best tradition of the ESA Sociology of Consumption group.www.consumption2010.edicypages.com

We invite papers that address various aspects of the sociology of consumption. Possible
themes include but are not limited to:
• Food and consumption
• Ethical and political consumption
• Spaces of urban and excess consumption
• Consumption inequalities and exclusions
• Sustainable consumption
• Material culture
• Sociology of taste
• Markets of consumption
• Cultural stratification
• Arts participation
• Consumption and the body
• Theories of consumption
• Gender and consumption
• Children’s consumer culture

Deadline
We invite abstracts of 250 words by February 15, 2010. Abstracts should be sent via the
submission form on the conference website. Please include in the abstract information
about the theoretical framework of the research, the methodology employed, and the
contribution of the paper.

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Call for Papers: CCT5 (Consumer Culture Theory Conference 2010)
Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI, USA  June 10-13, 2010

Conference Co-Chairs: Craig Thompson, University of Wisconsin; David Crockett, University of South Carolina

Keynote Speaker: Bryant Simon, Temple University.Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, University of California Press

Overview:
Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), as defined by Arnould and Thompson in the March 2005
issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, refers to a diversity of research approaches which
address the co-constituting relationships among consumers, consumption practices, cultural
meaning systems, marketplace structures, and their contextualizing socio-cultural and
historical conditions. CCT researchers hail from a multiplicity of academic disciplines and
they investigate consumer culture through a broad spectrum of methodological and theoretical
orientations.

The conference co-chairs and program committee seek submissions in the following four
tracks:

1. Papers (complete written works)
2. Perspectives (multi-paper, special topic sessions organized around a specific theme)
3. Posters (research in developing stages of conceptual and/or empirical development)
4. Alternative Modes of Knowledge Representation (including, but not limited to, video,
multimedia, multi-sensory, and poetic modes)

In keeping with past conference precedent, the chairs and program committee will designate a
subset of accepted papers and alternative modes of representation for publication
consideration in a special issue of Consumption, Markets, and Culture or an edited book
volume. Details TBA.

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2010
Notification: April 9, 2010

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Call for Papers: Surveillance, Marketing and Consumption

Special Issue of Surveillance & Society (Volume 8, Issue 2)
Guest edited by: Jason Pridmore, Infonomics and New Media Department, Zuyd University, Netherlands; Detlev Zwick, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada

This special edition of Surveillance & Society seeks to explore the myriad of ways in which consumers, consumption and market spaces have become subject to, and sites for the development and intensification of, practices of surveillance.

In the affluent parts of the world, contemporary experiences of everyday life are set within the context of a ‘society of consumers’ (Bauman 2005) in which “consumption has increasingly assumed a central systemic role in the reproduction of capitalist society” (Clarke 2003: 2). At the same time, modern forms of surveillance have developed out of systemic processes of capitalist production, bureaucratic organization, and the increasingly globalized struggles between nation states (Lyon 2007). Given the importance of systems of consumption and of surveillance in modernity, it not surprising that spaces of consumption and consumption practices are routinely and systematically being monitored. From the collection of millions of customer transaction records, to the use CCTV in shopping malls, to the monitoring of online chat rooms, surveillance and sorting technologies gather and manipulate data to make meaningful and profitable “the physical, social and cultural mobility of social life, the moving about between environments and activities that has become a key characteristic of post-modern life” (Arvidsson 2004:457).

With the economic rewards associated with superior customer intelligence, marketing practices are often at the forefront in the development and deployment of contemporary surveillance technologies. As social and political discourses shift toward a more generalized model of competition and market-shaped systems of action for individuals, groups and institutions (Lemke 2001) – citizens defined as customers by the state, healthcare dealing with patients as clients, etc. – consumer surveillance has much to tell us about the current and future manifestations and role of surveillance in society.

We seek papers from various disciplines and theoretical standpoints that explore practices, intentions and implications of consumer surveillance in areas such as the following:

Geodemographic profiling; Click stream monitoring;  Brand community and chat room surveillance ; RFID based marketing practices; Data gathering and analytics practices (loyalty cards, contests, surveys); Database market segmentation and customer profiling; Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM);  Customer data mining; Visual surveillance and CCTV in commercial spaces; Behavioural advertising; Brandscapes and the production of consumer lifestyles; Surveillance in market research (‘commercial anthropology’, ‘commercial sociology’, ‘netnography’, etc.)

This is not intended to be an exclusive listing of possibilities for this edition. Other possibilities are welcomed and encouraged and can be discussed in advance with the guest-editors, Jason Pridmore (J.H.Pridmore@hszuyd.nl) and Detlev Zwick (DZwick@schulich.yorku.ca).

All papers must be submitted through the online submission system at http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/ no later than February 28th, 2010.The issue will be published in September 2010. Please use the standard S&S formatting and submit the papers in a MS Word-compatible format.

References:
Arvidsson, A. 2004. On the ‘Pre-History of the Panoptic Sort’: Mobility in Market Research.
Surveillance & Society 1(4): 456-474.
Available at: http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/journalv1i4.htm

Bauman, Z. 2005. Liquid Life. London: Polity.

Clarke, D. B. 2003. The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City. London: Routledge.

Lemke, T. 2001. ‘The Birth of Bio-politics’: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality. Economy and Society 30(2): 190–207.

Lyon,D. 2007. Surveillance studies: An overview. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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