Consumption between market and community: emancipation from and/or identification with the market

In this paper we focus on the relationship between consumption communities and the market. Some communities appear integrated with the market and they seem to share meanings, values, rules, and other institutional elements of market ideology. In other cases they assume critical positions, explicitly or not, and they seem to counteract the ideology and, in some instances, the entire exchange process of the market. The paper aims at describing various forms of consumption communities’ attitudes toward the market, relying upon extant literature. We have selected around 50 articles that present empirical evidence about specific consumption communities and we have compared their characteristics and attitudes in order to position them along a sort of “market vs. community continuum”, that is from more committed toward and integrated into the market to more radical and critical communities. Between the two extremes a large area of intermediate cases does exist, in which both resistance and integration coexist. It is our opinion that in all of these communities some level of resistance is present, even in the more integrated ones: for instance, within brand communities conflicts arise between members and the company about (e.g.) the way of designing new products. In the intermediate ones, we can find both resistance and integration: consumers develop alternative forms of exchange, but this does not necessarily imply the radical refusal of the market. Resistant communities that overtly criticize companies for their conduct can be considered as extreme cases of market antagonism, even if they do not necessarily refuse the market as a whole.