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An expanding array of available services allow parents to outsource almost any caregiving activity (e.g., nannies, potty training, birthday party planning). Sociologists document a care deficit—resulting from dual-earner households and distance from extended family—coupled with rising consumerism to account for outsourcing. These studies, as well as those in consumer research, clarify outsourcing motivations, but stop short of explaining the differential impacts of outsourcing tensions parents regularly face when assembling care. As such, consumer researchers know little about how parents navigate such tensions when deciding what is acceptable to outsource. Based on depth interviews with 23 families, our analysis uncovers complex care assemblages that are shaped by parenting discourses and tensions of control, intimacy, and substitutability. The resulting framework explains parents’ strategies for minimizing outsourcing tensions, reveals processes for (re)assembling different types of care resources, and challenges what is known about the relationship between the market and family life.

Stigmas, or discredited personal attributes, emanate from social perceptions of physical characteristics, aspects of character, and \"tribal\" associations (e.g., race; Goffman 1963). Extant research has emphasized the perspective of the stigma target, with some scholars exploring how social institutions shape stigma. Yet the ways stakeholders within the sociocommercial sphere create, perpetuate, or resist stigma remain overlooked. The authors introduce and define marketplace stigma as the labeling, stereotyping, and devaluation by and of commercial stakeholders (consumers, companies and their employees, stockholders, and institutions) and their offerings (products, services, and experiences). The authors offer the Stigma Turbine as a unifying conceptual framework that locates marketplace stigma within the broader sociocultural context and illuminates its relationship to forces that exacerbate or blunt stigma. In unpacking the Stigma Turbine, the authors reveal the critical role that market stakeholders can play in (de)stigmatization, explore implications for marketing practice and public policy, and offer a research agenda to further understanding of marketplace stigma and stakeholder welfare.

This research takes place during a time of social change, when society is reconsidering the basic categories (e.g. gender and sexuality) that structure our ways of thinking and being in the world. This work examines whether and how these reconfigurations at a broad cultural level filter into the marketplace. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s work on symbolic violence (1989, 1998), and based on interviews with same-sex couples and participant observation in the wedding industry, this study explicates this filtering process. In doing so, it identifies roadblocks – including local and industry norms – that constrain the encoding of social change into the marketplace. The perpetuating taken-for-granted nature and adherence to heteronormativity and narrow ideals of femininity and masculinity by local communities and industries can cause even those companies and consumers trying to embrace social change to hinder its realization in the marketplace. Further, the findings uncover how differences in how marketers and consumers are questioning cultural categories generate discrepancies, or misalignments, in their assumptions and expectations for what should now be accepted and recognized in the marketplace. The overall aim of this research is to gain insight into how increases in legitimacy borne out of broader political struggles reorganize consumers’ positions of (dis)advantage in the marketplace.

Paper 1 (Velagaleti and Epp) studies the recent unprecedented shifts in public opinion and regulatory gains around same-sex marriage, the subsequent increased attention from the marketplace, and same-sex couples' responses to this increased access. [...]Paper 4 (Coleman and Tuncay Zayer) looks at discursive access, tracing how stigmatizing associations have called into question the legitimacy of feminism, resulting in constrained accessibility to feminist discourse in the marketplace. [...]how might the heterogeneity within a stigmatized group contribute to variation in responses to access? [...]social capital protects, facilitates, and legitimizes in the context of increased marketplace access.