Market Detachment

Helene Brembeck is Senior Professor in Ethnology, and previous Director of the Center for Consumer Science at Gothenburg Research Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research areas are aspects of consumer culture and consumption from a cultural perspective. She has been a project manager of several large projects and published extensively in this field. Among other things, she was Editor of the special issue of Consumption, Markets & Culture, "Moving Consumption" together with Franck Cochoy and Johanna Moisander (2014) and contributed to the anthology Overwhelmed by Overflows? edited by Barbara Czarniawska and Orvar Löfgren (2019).Franck Cochoy is Professor of Sociology at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University, France, a researcher at the LISST-CNRS, and Senior Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. He works in the field of Economic Sociology, with a focus on market devices. He has conducted several projects and case studies in such areas as the role of marketing, packaging, self-service, trade press and so on. His most recent articles in English have appeared in Journal of the Association for Consumer Research; Marketing Theory; Science, Technology & Human Values.Gay Hawkins is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. She researches in the areas of markets and materialities, cultures of waste with a particular focus on plastics and more than human politics. She has conducted several research projects into waste economies, the political history of plastic packaging and the rise of bottled water markets. Recent books include Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water (co-authored with Kane Race and Emily Potter, 2015). Recent papers have been published in Journal of Cultural Economy; Science, Technology and Human Values and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

• Introduction – Letting go: economies of detachment 1. Allowing for detachment processes in market innovation. The case of short food supply chains 2. Market research as ascetic detachment: product testing in a German market test town 3. Fashionable detachments: wardrobes, bodies and the desire to let go 4. Minimalism and lightweight backpacking in France: a material culture of detachment 5. Detachment as a privilege: industry participation at TV programming and distribution marketplaces 6. Can energy savings certificates help in boiler scrappage programs? Exploring the market agencing of a detachment policy 7. Detaching from plastic packaging: reconfiguring material responsibilities