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ItemNo Preview AvailableTheorizing consumption and markets in the context of religion: A commentary section on Appau’s (2021) ‘divine economic system’(SAGE Publications, 2023-09-01)This commentary section presents a dialogical discussion on Appau’s (2021) ‘Toward a divine economic system’, an article in which he explores religious exchanges in the context of a Pentecostal Church in Ghana and proposes ‘the divine economy’ as an alternative economic system to interrogate and extend scholarship on the relationship between the market and religion. In a thought-provoking conversation, four commentators (including Appau) engage in a critical discussion aimed at generating new ideas on theorizing the complex relationship between the market, consumption, and religion.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableResearching the sacred: a conversation with Samuelson Appau, Russ Belk and Diego Rinallo(Emerald, 2023-04-06)Purpose Once the domain of theologians, sociologists and (religion) anthropologists, we have seen more recently how consumer researchers have enriched the study of spirituality and religion. Researching the sacred can be fraught with challenges, in and out of the field. Russell Belk, Samuelson Appau and Diego Rinallo address key questions, issues and conceptualisations in the scholarship on sacred consumption, contemplating the past and mapping future research avenues. A reading list is also included for those interested in joining the authors in this collective discovery of the sacred. Design/methodology/approach Contributors answered the following four questions: How has the study of sacred consumption evolved since you started researching the field? What would be the critical methodological issues that researchers need to consider when approaching the “sacred”? What are some of the key authors that have influenced your thinking? What do you think will be the key questions that researchers will need to focus on? Findings Rinallo, Belk and Appau’s reflections on studying the sacred provide food for thought for both novice and weathered researchers alike. Researching the sacred both shapes and is shaped by our positionality: by our insider/outsider status, our gender and race and our cosmovisions as believers or sceptics. Researchers should be mindful and reflective of their subject positionings as they approach, enter and leave the field. Researching the sacred requires an open mind as we broaden our vision of what constitutes the sacred. Such research calls for scholarly as well as phenomenological curiosity. Reading widely and across disciplines to better familiarise ourselves with our sacred context helps to craft novel and meaningful research. Originality/value This paper provides a multivocal genealogy of consumer culture work on religion and spirituality, methodological advice and reading resources for researchers.
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ItemWealth in People and Places: Understanding Transnational Gift Obligations(OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC, 2023-03-15)Abstract In some cultures, migrants bear an obligation to bring gifts from the foreign country for their relations when returning to their homeland. Why, and to what end? We examine the reasons for these transnational gift obligations in a multisite study of Ghanaian migrants in the United States and Australia, as well as people in Ghana with migrant relations living overseas. We adopt a wealth-centered perspective that problematizes the underexplored mutual impact of migrants and their gifts on social hierarchies within societies and transnational spatial hierarchies between societies. We show how the concepts of wealth in people and wealth in place connect with local gift economies to explain transnational gifting obligations. Specifically, informants use transnational gifts that embody wealth in place to acknowledge “being wealth” to people and to acquire wealth in others. We highlight the wealth in things that are exchanged as gift objects and the wealth in people who are exchanged as gift subjects between here and there. Our findings implicate a “glocal” gift economy that results from the global flows of things and people as gifts within transnational places of differing statuses. We discuss how this glocal gift economy (re)produces transnational spatial hierarchies and local (national) status hierarchies.
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ItemThe rise of 'smart' solutions in Africa: a review of the socio-environmental cost of the transportation and employment benefits of ride-hailing technology in Ghana.(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022)Governments in Africa are licensing major global ride-hailing firms to launch operations in the continent. This is often presented as a refreshing development for the continent to leverage technology to address its twin problems of inefficient urban transport and rising youth unemployment. Interviews with ride-hailing adopters (drivers, riders, and car owners) and researchers in Ghana suggest, however, that whereas the technology is driving up the standards of road transport experience, the benefits are accessible to a select few (largely, the younger, highly educated and relatively high income-earning class). The lopsided power relations underlying the ride-hailing industry have also meant that the economic opportunities it avails disproportionately benefit a few powerful players (e.g. ride-hailing firms and car owners) while stimulating 'turf wars' among online and traditional taxi drivers; deepening existing gender inequalities in access to income-earning opportunities in the commercial passenger transport sector; encouraging unhealthy driving practices, shifts from shared public transport, and inundation of the roads with more private cars. While it will be imprecise to say that the private gains of ride-hailing outstrip the public costs and, therefore, the technology is detrimental to Ghana's development, the considered evidence raises the need for sustained scrutiny of the hailing of technological interventions as though they are the magic bullets for socio-economic transformation in Africa. Overall, the paper argues that dismantling the power structures underlying Africa's urban challenges will require more than splashing 'smart' apps and other tech wizardries around. Indeed, the lessons from Ghana's ride-hailing industry suggest that such exclusively technical solutions could easily take root and pattern after existing strictures of unjust power structures in ways that could exacerbate the social and environmental problems they are supposed to address.