Creating a Consumable Past: How Memory Making Shapes Marketization

Katja Brunk, Markus Giesler, Benjamin J Hartmann, Darren DahlEditor and Craig ThompsonAssociate Editor

Journal of Consumer Research, 2018, vol. 44, issue 6, 1325-1342

Abstract: Consumer researchers tend to equate successful marketization—the transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy—with the consensual acquiescence to an idealized definition of the socialist past. For this reason, little research has examined how memories about socialism influence marketization over time. To redress this gap, we bring prior consumer research on commercial mythmaking and popular memory to bear on an in-depth analysis of the marketization of the former German Democratic Republic. We find that, owing to a progressive sequence of conflicts between commercialized memories of socialism promoted by marketing agents and countermemories advocating socialism as a political alternative, definitions of the past, and by extension, capitalism’s hegemony are subject to ongoing contestation and change. Our theoretical framework of hegemonic memory making explains relationships among consumption, memory making, and market systems that have not been recognized by prior research on consumption and nostalgia.

Keywords: popular memory; marketization; nostalgia; myth; hegemony; German reunification; Ostalgie (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jconrs:v:44:y:2018:i:6:p:1325-1342.

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Journal of Consumer Research is currently edited by Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen and Stacy Wood

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