The revolution will not be televised
(2025) BUSN39 20251Department of Business Administration
- Abstract
- This thesis takes its departure in the critical marketing scholarship where the scholars diverge into conflicting perspectives—the Market either being un-politicizing or de-politicizing. The aim of the research, therefore, was to contribute to the critical marketing stream of literature by reconciling these theoretical tensions. We conducted this research with an empirical case of a contemporary consumer resistance known as the Blockout Movement in 2024. This study places consumer resistance as its central object of inquiry and investigates the phenomenon as a discursive practice in order to answer the research question: how is consumer resistance constructed?
We employed Fairclough’s (1992b) three-dimensional framework of critical... (More) - This thesis takes its departure in the critical marketing scholarship where the scholars diverge into conflicting perspectives—the Market either being un-politicizing or de-politicizing. The aim of the research, therefore, was to contribute to the critical marketing stream of literature by reconciling these theoretical tensions. We conducted this research with an empirical case of a contemporary consumer resistance known as the Blockout Movement in 2024. This study places consumer resistance as its central object of inquiry and investigates the phenomenon as a discursive practice in order to answer the research question: how is consumer resistance constructed?
We employed Fairclough’s (1992b) three-dimensional framework of critical discourse analysis to explicate consumer resistance in light of our research question. By analyzing a corpus of three heterogeneous sources, we consolidated our findings into three overarching themes—“Algospeak”, “Responsibilization”, and “Class and Privilege”—each contributing to the construction of consumer resistance as a discursive practice. Here, “Algospeak” is the intentional distortion of word spellings and innovative appropriation of emojis, which surfaced as a key mechanism of consumer resistance’s construction in digital spaces. “Responsibilization” is the act of demanding accountability where conflicting groups negotiate boundaries between resistance and activism, which works as a central apparatus in construction of consumer resistance. Finally, “Class and Privilege” is the class distinction and concomitant privilege delineating the permission to narrate suffering and exercise ethical responsibility, which emerges as a central means of consumer resistance getting constructed.
The themes are then further explicated with the theoretical frameworks from Ulver (2022) and Žizek (2007; 2008) to reconcile the identified theoretical tensions. Here we identify the main theoretical contribution of this thesis: the perspectives of the market’s un-politicization and de-politicization not only converge, but necessitate each other in order to understand contemporary consumer resistance. Therefore, the practical implication is a reinstatement that conflict produces more engagement for brands in the contemporary market. Finally, this thesis invites future research in exploring consumer resistance with new methodologies and theories. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9205872
- author
- Cederlund, Douglas LU and Orpa, Anbar Nawar LU
- supervisor
- organization
- alternative title
- Consumer resistance as un-politicizing conflict in a de-politicizing market
- course
- BUSN39 20251
- year
- 2025
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- Consumer Resistance, Critical Discourse Analysis, Conflict Market, Un-politicization, De-politicization, Žižek, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Ideology
- language
- English
- id
- 9205872
- date added to LUP
- 2025-06-30 12:09:42
- date last changed
- 2025-06-30 12:09:42
@misc{9205872,
abstract = {{This thesis takes its departure in the critical marketing scholarship where the scholars diverge into conflicting perspectives—the Market either being un-politicizing or de-politicizing. The aim of the research, therefore, was to contribute to the critical marketing stream of literature by reconciling these theoretical tensions. We conducted this research with an empirical case of a contemporary consumer resistance known as the Blockout Movement in 2024. This study places consumer resistance as its central object of inquiry and investigates the phenomenon as a discursive practice in order to answer the research question: how is consumer resistance constructed?
We employed Fairclough’s (1992b) three-dimensional framework of critical discourse analysis to explicate consumer resistance in light of our research question. By analyzing a corpus of three heterogeneous sources, we consolidated our findings into three overarching themes—“Algospeak”, “Responsibilization”, and “Class and Privilege”—each contributing to the construction of consumer resistance as a discursive practice. Here, “Algospeak” is the intentional distortion of word spellings and innovative appropriation of emojis, which surfaced as a key mechanism of consumer resistance’s construction in digital spaces. “Responsibilization” is the act of demanding accountability where conflicting groups negotiate boundaries between resistance and activism, which works as a central apparatus in construction of consumer resistance. Finally, “Class and Privilege” is the class distinction and concomitant privilege delineating the permission to narrate suffering and exercise ethical responsibility, which emerges as a central means of consumer resistance getting constructed.
The themes are then further explicated with the theoretical frameworks from Ulver (2022) and Žizek (2007; 2008) to reconcile the identified theoretical tensions. Here we identify the main theoretical contribution of this thesis: the perspectives of the market’s un-politicization and de-politicization not only converge, but necessitate each other in order to understand contemporary consumer resistance. Therefore, the practical implication is a reinstatement that conflict produces more engagement for brands in the contemporary market. Finally, this thesis invites future research in exploring consumer resistance with new methodologies and theories.}},
author = {{Cederlund, Douglas and Orpa, Anbar Nawar}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{The revolution will not be televised}},
year = {{2025}},
}