EWS The Nordic Model of Consumer Culture: Exploring Contexts and Concepts

This project seeks to investigate the Nordic variation of consumer culture by bringing together expert researchers from across the Nordic countries in two exploratory workshops to discuss the Nordic model of consumer culture, a domain that is under invest igated in contemporary discussions of the potentials and transitions of the Nordic welfare societies. The purpose of the proposed workshops is to address this gap by developing collective research projects across the Nordic countries among scholars of con sumer culture.

This project seeks to investigate the Nordic variation of consumer culture by bringing together expert researchers from across the Nordic countries in two exploratory workshops to discuss the Nordic model of consumer culture, a domain that is under invest igated in contemporary discussions of the potentials and transitions of the Nordic welfare societies. The purpose of the proposed workshops is to address this gap by developing collective research projects across the Nordic countries among scholars of con sumer culture. The workshops will follow a two-step model based on the preparatory meetings (see Figure 1), the first of which is to develop further the idea of a Nordic consumer culture at a conceptual level and begin to sketch out specific research pr ojects on Nordic consumer culture that would need subsequent funding. At this workshop participants will divide into working groups to develop project descriptions for potential grant applications and subsequent collective publications. This workshop is p lanned to take place at Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Bergen, September 2014 (see tentative programme in Appendix 2). Between the two workshops, participants in the project groups will collect exploratory data as the basis for presentation to the other project groups with the purposes of assessing methodological, contextual and theoretical appropriateness of the projects. The purpose of the second workshop to be held at University of Southern Denmark in April 2015 will be for the working groups to present progress reports and get ciritcal feedback from discussants as well as consultations with grant support staff from the University of Southern Denmark (see Appendix 3). Discussants will be invited from a broader set of marketi ng colleagues not involved in the initiative in order to ensure relevance and dialogue with the marketing and consumer behavior field more generally.