Soothing resistance: reclaiming symbolic meanings of intermediation

Neither agency (Arnould, 2007) nor escape (Kozinets, 2002) are attainable ideals for consumers striving for emancipation from the market. A growing body of studies acknowledges that consumers seeking for feelings of agency engage in retailing activities to provoke social change (Bradford and Sherry, 2015; Hietanen et al., 2016). Consumer-driven retailing initiatives, such as community-supported agriculture but not exclusively, has been often studied as means to express resistance against consumer culture or markets; Moraes, Szmigin and Carrigan (2010) argue that communities of consumers proposing alternative forms of retailing are in fact better described as being animated by positive entrepreneurial practices and discourses. The retailer socialization process, defined as the process through which consumers become retailers in a pure entrepreneurial surge, does not lead to any proposed alternative form of retailing (McGrath, 1989). Free of any desire for change, this concept does not seem suitable to explain the growing number of consumer-driven alternative forms of retailing. The process by which consumers seeking for change decide to become retailers and to propose alternative forms of retailing is the purpose of this study. Building on studies of markets dynamics from the perspective of symbolic appropriation (Arsel and Thompson, 2011; Bradford and Sherry, 2015; Debenedetti, Oppewal and Arsel, 2014; Dion and Arnould, 2011; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995; Kozinets et al., 2004; Murray, 2002; Thompson and Haytko, 1997; Visconti et al., 2010; Wallendorf and Arnould, 1991; Weinberger, 2015), we propose that consumers producing retailing alternative engage in a reclaiming (reappropriation) process (Schiele and Venkatesh, 2016). We define reappropriation as a process by which actors feeling alienation seek to regain control of cultural resources that they consider to have been deprived of, and manipulate these resources to redefine or restore their symbolic meanings. Our study is based on two case studies of consumer-driven alternative retailing forms. The first one is an 18-months long ethnographic case study (Visconti, 2010) of a collaborative supermarket initiative directly inspired by the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn which is based on a model of participation through work and shared ownership. The second case is a multi-site study (Yin, 1994) of four consumers using a multi-sided Internet platform to build, animate and connect a community of local producers and a community of consumers which are not contractually engaged to buy. Weekly distributions are organized to allow consumers to meet producers and to collect their purchases. Both case studies combine semi-structured interviews (consumers-entrepreneurs, producers, consumers), observation and collection of secondary data (‘corporate' documents, websites and social networks' pages; blogs posts, press articles…). Data have been thematically coded and analyzed, and a discussion between the two cases has been organized to seek for similarities and differences between them. Results depict a six-stage, non-linear reappropriation process: 1/ feeling of deprivation and refusal of passivity, 2/ intra and intersubjective dialogic process of reinterpretation of the meanings of intermediation, 3/ appropriation of retailers' practices and strategies, 4/ development of a feeling of possession, 5/ sharing and development of community belonging feelings, 6/ feelings of emancipation and regained control over consumption. In engaging in this reclaiming process, consumers contribute to shape retailing networks which are alternative in the way that they embody a renewed symbolic meaning of intermediation providing them with high levels of "linking" value (Cova, 1997). They have the feeling of regaining a soothing control over their food consumption which is not anymore symbolically contaminated by dominant retailing and market practices they wanted to depart from.