Sub-Cultures and Consumer Tribes: Mapping Inter-Community Relations in Marketplace Cultures

Current descriptions of community such as subcultures of consumption, brand communities, hyper communities, neotribes, and new social movements provide differing concepts of interpersonal relations in consumer cultural settings. In this paper we advance a process-oriented theory to address a series of gaps in these concepts, namely a sense of how different descriptions of culture relate to one another in time and in space. In particular we suggest that whilst disparate categories of community provide useful theoretical toolkits to describe social action, we lack a systematic understanding of how one form of community may have emerged from another form of community, or how two different communities may be involved in concurrent processes of negotiation and conflict. In order to address this problem we consider a historical-ethnographic study of market-place culture.  

Citation:

Robin Canniford and Avi Shankar (2007) ,"Sub-Cultures and Consumer Tribes: Mapping Inter-Community Relations in Marketplace Cultures", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8, eds. Stefania Borghini, Mary Ann McGrath, and Cele Otnes, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 426-426.