Joonas Rokka

This study extends prior research seeking to understand the reproduction and persistence of excessive busyness in professional settings by addressing the relationship between organizational controls and temporal experiences. Drawing on 146 interviews and more than 300 weekly diaries in two professional service firms, we develop a framework centered on the emerging concept of optimal busyness, an attractive, short-lived temporal experience that people try to reproduce / prolong because it makes them feel energized and productive as well as in control of their time. Our findings show that individuals continuously navigate between different temporal experiences separated by a fine line, quiet time, optimal busyness, and excessive busyness, and that optimal busyness that they strive for is a fragile and fleeting state difficult to achieve and maintain. We show that these temporal experiences are the effect of the temporality of controls—that is, the ability of controls to shape professionals’ temporal experience through structuring, rarefying, and synchronizing temporality. Moreover, we find that professionals who regularly face high temporal pressures seek to cope with these by attempting to construct/prolong optimal busyness through manipulating the pace, focus, and length of their temporal experiences, a process we call control of temporality. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the reproduction of busyness by explaining why professionals in their attempts to feel in control of their time routinely end up overworking.

ABSTRACT Although previous studies have shown that social-media platforms offer companies new ways to gain business value, they have also identified fundamental brand-related challenges in social media. The purpose of this paper is to complement the extant literature by addressing the ways in which companies manage their reputation in social media, focusing on the role of employees. We first illustrate how social-media environments amplify the need for distinct corporate reputation-management practices and, second, how challenges and solutions vary across companies in different sectors and businesses. We contribute to prior research by conceptualising corporate reputation management in social media as balancing acts, which take place in relation to different, contradictory, and sometimes paradoxical priorities related to branding and managing employees.

ABSTRACT In this commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013) we offer an alternative perspective on the use of video in consumer research. The dominant modus operandi for visual research, as recently demonstrated by Schembri and Boyle in the pages of this journal, follows a paradigm typical of anthropological tradition. We propose an alternative approach: an expressive imperative in consumer videography emerging from theory on cinematography and experimental filmmaking, which emphasizes the evocative power of moving images.

This commentary offers a view into the contributions of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) in marketing and charts promising future avenues for research and marketing practices building a culturally sensitive and reflexive approach. After highlighting pioneering CCT perspectives, an outline for future directions in marketing is offered emphasizing the assembling of experiences, shaping of brands' symbolic universes, institutional and creative market processes, and networked and algorithmic mediation of consumption ideologies and desires. Overall, CCT's future looks promising in its commitment and ability to foster critical, contextually sensitive, and reflexive cultural insights into marketing-an important foundation for marketing strategy and practices.

The visual character of contemporary consumer culture is a matter of extensive record. So too is the fascination audiences express for cinema, television and all manner of related digital media culture circulated by ubiquitous screens, both small and large. Beyond the intense emotional engagement of immersive moments of visual consumption, the potent impact of moving images on the consumer imaginary and their infinite remixability provides compelling reason for rethinking spaces of affect and agency, intelligibility, immanence and the bodily encounter with the audiovisual moving image (see Barker, 2009; Cubitt, 1993; Lemke, 2007; Marks, 2000). However, the context for this Special Issue extends beyond the event horizon of the digital turn in contemporary visual culture. For it seems to the editors that the status of the image and that of filmmaking practice in narratives of research both warrant rethinking; for in a world of everyday screening praxis, images are not mere innocent representations of phantasmatic illusions of reality, but critical actors in worlds of cultural reproduction (see Hietanen, Rokka & Schouten, 2015). And it is in this sense that we seek to contribute to the emerging literature on the moving image as research narrative, analytical frame and methodological system. This special issue is intended to continue that line of thought by focusing on the emerging filmic school of research inaugurated 10 years ago by Belk and Kozinets (2005; also Kozinets & Belk, 2006) and known as videography in marketing and consumer research. The founding theme for this SI is to map out the potential and futures of videographic work while seeking better ways to articulate visual research narratology. We need a more robust vocabulary for discussing video. This idea is by no means an attempt to bring videographic research under the subjugation of textual ordering; or an attempt to make the videographic experience straightforwardly decodable as text. As a discursive order, we are accomplished at talk and textual critique, yet surprising inarticulate with regard to the moving image and the videographic research experience. Perhaps it is a matter of video's mostly nonlinguistic nature (see Deleuze, 1986, 1989); we feel that with care and further study we could surely do better. In this special issue, we invite contributions dealing with issues and topics similar to, but not limited to the following:  Videography's potential for addressing the complexity and nuance of the digital media turn in contemporary consumer culture;  Its generative potential regarding the shaping of theoretical topics around self‐identity, body, gender, affect, ethnicity, materiality, space, movement and temporality;  Its potential to expand the narrative capital of marketing and consumer research in relation to other video production genres such as documentary filmmaking, animation, collage and visual ethnography;  Matters of filmic technique and technologies of practice and process as they concern production, editing, viewing, sharing and streaming;  Methodological considerations and their aesthetics as embedded in an institutional order of critique and evaluation;  Videographic praxis in relation to theory‐building;  Ethical considerations

Purpose – Digital technologies are changing the ways in which the meanings and identity of both consumers and brands are constructed. This research extends knowledge of how consumer-made " selfie " images shared in social media might contribute to the destabilization of brands as assemblages. Design/methodology/approach – Insights are drawn from a critical visual content analysis of three popular champagne brand accounts and consumer-made selfies featuring these brands in Instagram. Findings – Our study shows how brands and branded selves intersect through 'heterotopian selfie practices'. Accentuated by the rise of attention economy and 'consumer microcelebrity', we argue that these proliferating selfie images can destabilise spatial, temporal, symbolic, and material properties of brand assemblages. Originality/value – Our study illustrates how a brand assemblage approach can guide investigations of brands at multiple scales of analysis. In particular, we extend knowledge of visual brand-related user-generated content in terms of how consumers express, visualise and share selfies and how the heterotopian quality of this sharing consequently shapes brand assemblages. Implications – Implications include a consideration of how selfie practices engender new challenges for brand design and brand management.

What makes a simple wine, grown in a rather mediocre wine-growing region one of the most famous and magical marketplace icons of today? How did champagne establish such a unique position, against all the odds, and become the global symbol of celebration? In seeking answers to these questions, this marketplace icon contribution elaborates on what 250 years of avant-garde champagne marketing can tell us about champagne's ever shifting image and role in consumer culture. I argue the " imperishable fame " of champagne stems primarily from four epic myth-making moments that not only came to shape a national identity but also modern consumption ideologies in important ways.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how web-based online communities bring about new forms of environmental dialogue. We suggest that these online sites play an important role in setting the stage for new forms of cultural production, dissemination of environmental knowledge and environmental dialogue, through which particular forms of ecological citizenship and consumer culture are being created and sustained. Based on an empirical study of an online community of ‘global travelers’ carried out using netnographic methods, the study shows how environmental knowledge is being disseminated, negotiated and made sense of in the online environments of the global marketplace. Our findings illustrate, in particular, how online communities may work out an agenda for sustainable consumption practices and lifestyles, and create new forms of consumer citizenship. Regarding the environmental policy implications of our study, we argue that there is a need to facilitate the creation of online environments where consumers can participate in the construction of active consumer citizenship.

As consumers' lives are increasingly gliding into online worlds and global information networks, researchers face a range of important methodological questions particular to the digital times. In prior research, online ethnographic methods or netnography has been suggested to address some of these challenges, especially when new forms of post-modern and sub-cultural consumer collectives and cultures have been the focus. Extending this work further, the article investigates the transnational nature of online cultural phenomena, and suggests a theoretical–methodological approach as a netnographic variant well suited for accessing its logics. In doing so, the article argues that a better understanding of the new ‘translocal sites’, such as transnational online communities and consumer networks, can open up new avenues for research on the ever globalizing and tribalizing consumer culture.

Purpose – Drawing from recent work on online social networking and communities of consumption, the purpose of this paper is to explore, identify, and postulate key factors facilitating the growth and success of marketing in virtual worlds. ... Design/methodology/approach – ...

In this paper, consumer environmental choice is studied by analysing the relative importance of green packaging when compared with other relevant product attributes. The empirical study is based on a choice-based conjoint analysis of preferences for functional drink products of a sample of 330 consumers using these products. Our choice-based approach on environmental behaviour brings new insights to previous research, which predominantly relies on attitude models. Results indicate that consumers differ in their preferences for packaging, brand, price and convenience of use of daily products. In addition, various distinctive consumer segments can be identified on the market. Contrary to several previous studies, we found that the largest consumer segment, one-third of consumers, favoured environmentally labelled packaging as the most important criteria in their choice. The findings emphasize the increasing importance of ethical and environmental dimension in product choices. We also propose that the attention in environmental consumer research should be shifted from general attitude studies towards the study of actual product choices.