Consumer Vulnerability

Susan Dunnett is Senior Lecturer at University of Edinburgh Business School, UK. Her research focuses on consumer culture, health and well-being and consumer vulnerability, with a particular focus on patient-led cancer support groups and the patient-as-consumer.Kathy Hamilton is a Reader in Marketing at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. She is interested in interdisciplinary research and her work focuses on consumer vulnerability and poverty, and the role of community in contemporary culture. Maria Piacentini is Professor of Consumer Research, and Director of the Centre for Consumption Insights at Lancaster University, UK. Her research focuses on consumer vulnerability, and she is concerned with the strategies employed by consumers in difficult consumption contexts and situations.

• Introduction – Consumer vulnerability 1. Children as vulnerable consumers: a first conceptualisation 2. Exploring spatial vulnerability: inequality and agency formulations in social space 3. Neither passive nor powerless: reframing economic vulnerability via resilient pathways 4. Exploring the impact of packaging interactions on quality of life among older consumers 5. Understanding the vulnerability of blind consumers: adaptation in the marketplace, personal traits and coping strategies 6. Unpacking the interplay between organisational factors and the economic environment in the creation of consumer vulnerability 7. Poetic inquiry, consumer vulnerability: realities of quadriplegia Commentaries 8. Poverty as we never knew it: THE source of vulnerability for most of humankind 9. A conversational approach to consumer vulnerability: performativity, representations, and storytelling 10. Vulnerable consumers in the ‘fourth age’: theoretical reflections upon the case of Sandra Bem