Disruptions and Consumer Resilience

This book offers a comprehensive examination of how consumers develop resilience in response to disruptive events. Bringing together a diverse collection of studies spanning low-income consumers, families displaced by conflict, and individuals interacting with disrupted material objects, it demonstrates the varied ways in which people adapt to challenging circumstances, rebuild identities, reconstruct roles and routines. This book highlights the important influence of religiosity on consumer adaptation and behaviour during periods of major socio-economic disruption.

This book advances understanding of resilience as relational, cautioning against the over-individualisation of responsibility and emphasising the essential role of stakeholders, such as governments in shaping consumers’ adaptive capacities. Extending these insights, the book explores disruptions in higher education, where marketisation and digitalisation have transformed expectations for both students and staff. The book also examines the rise of consumer prepping, raising concerns about inequalities embedded within the resilience discourse and illustrating how expectations to “be resilient” can reinforce existing socioeconomic and gender disparities.

The chapters, originally published as part of a special issue in Journal of Marketing Management, offer a rich, multidimensional perspective on consumer resilience and are valuable resources for researchers and practitioners across marketing, consumer research, sociology, and related fields.

A. R. Shaheen Hosany is Associate Professor of Marketing, Hult International Business school, UK. Her interdisciplinary research on scarcity and sustainability, draws on marketing, psychology, and behavioural economics, addressing impact-driven topics. By integrating multiple sustainable development goals, her award-winning work tackles pressing societal challenges with benefits for communities and practitioners.

Girish Prayag is Professor of Marketing, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His research focuses on the nexus of services and resilience, with a particular emphasis on organizational resilience. He has published in leading tourism and marketing journals and is currently the Editor of Method and Practice for the journal Current Issues in Tourism.

Shona Bettany is Professor of Marketing, University of Huddersfield, UK. She is a consumer ethnographer, focusing on consumer culture in all its guises but more specifically on material-semiotic approaches to consumption. These approaches have illuminated such topics as gender and sexuality, consumer resilience, contemporary family consumption, and animal-human relations.