This is the text of this week’s lecture. I’m going to suggest that online business models and the behaviours they help to enact might usefully be seen as ‘playful’, or ‘game-like’. I’m going to focus on eBay, but I’ll add other illustrations. The lecture is broadly taken from a paper I published with Janice in… [Read more…]
January 13, 2010
It’s the first week back for students (those now trapped under snow anyway) and we have been discussing shopping. Online shopping is apparently up quite a lot. So it’s all about price then obviously then? People go online because they can get things cheaper. Probably it’s more convenient too. And maybe there is greater choice.… [Read more…]
April 15, 2009
In the stories that sellers tell us, we note that some they come to see the things they own as ‘stock’. This seems significantly different from the curative practices captured in previous research into the divestment of cherished possessions (Lastovicka and Fernandez 2005; Price et al. 2000; McCracken, 1987). Possessions as stock suggests that goods may take a different sort of trajectory from their commodity phase to personal good then back to commodity state again.
April 2, 2008
This is an extract of a paper janice and I are currently working on. Comments and example would be welcome… The experience economy is a playful one and like videogames, eBay represents a recent example of the market’s response to a consumer culture that seeks endless new opportunities to play. Like Grayson, (1999) we specifically… [Read more…]
November 10, 2007
This is a much shortened version of a paper written by Janice Denegri-Knott Mike Molesworth (and with some imput by Detlev Zwick) and currently under review. Don’t cite without permission please. I wonder, though, at the extent to which eBay facilitated my passage through this particular consumer obsession. Into it and out the other… [Read more…]
January 21, 2010
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