“It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it”: Committed consumers' voluntary emotion work in alternative market systems

Abstract

Despite increasing attention to alternative market systems, where consumers perform considerable voluntary labor, consumer researchers have a limited understanding of the nature or implications of the emotion work entailed in making such contributions. This paper addresses this gap, focusing on “committed consumers” defined as those who provide extensive volunteer labor to support alternative markets and their principles. It does so based on hermeneutic analysis of ethnographic and netnographic data collected from participants in local food markets (REKO markets) in Norway. The paper identifies four distinct types of institutional emotion work that contribute to perpetuating alternative markets and conceptualizes how committed consumers' own emotions are affected when making such contributions. This paper extends our understanding of consumers' roles in alternative market systems and of the socially constituted and constitutive emotions entailed in consumer volunteerism.