Reverse stigma in the Freegan community

Hieu P. Nguyen, Steven Chen and Sayantani Mukherjee

Journal of Business Research, 2014, vol. 67, issue 9, 1877-1884

Abstract: Freegans are anti-consumers who sustain themselves through dumpster diving and the consumption of disposed goods. Mainstream consumers consider Freeganism dirty and tainted—a stigma. Through a qualitative investigation of Freeganism and its practitioners, this research contributes a multi-dimensional framework of reverse stigma. The framework explicates the mechanisms by which stigmatized individuals re-direct stigma onto normative culture. Specifically, these mechanisms are ideological reversal, practice reversal, and resource reversal. While past research emphasizes defensive, self-directed stigma management strategies, this research shows that some communities adopt offensive, others-directed strategies to reject their stigmatized status and redirect the stigma to normative others.

Keywords: Stigma; Anti-consumption; Sustainability; Freegans; Dumpster diving (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296313004256
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:67:y:2014:i:9:p:1877-1884

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.12.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().