Marketing Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Marketing Theses and Dissertations by Author "Grove, Kivalina"

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    Consumer Practices: Recovering and Repairing Daily Community Life
    (University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Grove, Kivalina; Price, Linda
    Consumers engage in a multitude of daily practices which contribute to their individual and community wellbeing. I take a multi-method approach to investigating three consequential and interrelated consumer practices with important implications for wellbeing at an individual and community level. In the second chapter, I uncover a new multi-stage theoretical process, practice recovery, in my investigation of how consumers recover or return to practices they have previously abandoned. I examine this process and the potential difficulties inherent in it, in the context of young adults recovering the practice of bicycling for transportation on a college campus, a practice which promotes individual, community, and environmental wellbeing. In the third chapter, I examine and test the model I uncovered in Chapter II in the context of an individually held consumer practice which was interrupted at a community level, namely consumers’ gym exercise practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with community stakeholders, I problematize the model of practice recovery and examine this consumers’ actual and anticipated recovery of these consequential health practices. In the fourth chapter, I examine how individual consumer practices contribute to community wellbeing through examination of user-maintainer repair practices of a bicycle sharing platform. I uncover emergent commons-based peer production at a community level, carried out through individual practices of stewardship which contribute to the repair of the bicycle sharing platform, which is perceived as an inalienable community wealth, despite its underlying market motivations. In closing, I reflect and provide recommendations on the challenges and opportunities of conducting community-focused research.