Abstract
In this chapter, we will continue to explore the similarities and differences between “traditional” fans and “brand fans,” but with a greater emphasis on (post)subcultural aspects and fans as consumers in a capitalist consumer society. Concepts such as structure and agency will be discussed, particularly through the lens of the French theorists Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle 1967/1995), Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction 1979/2010), and Jean Baudrilliard (The Consumer Society 1970/1998)—and with reference to fan studies scholars such as Cornel Sandvoss (2005), Henry Jenkins (1992, 2006, 2007, 2016), Mark Duffett (2013) and Matt Hills (2002). While fan studies in its early stages—what Jonathan Gray et al. (2007) refer to as the “Fandom is Beautiful” era—focused largely on fans and fan cultures as communities who worked together to help democratise the meaning-making in popular culture discourse, in recent years more emphasis has been placed on fandom as empowering for individual members of fan networks. What aligns these two modes of approaching fan studies is the focus on fandom as participatory culture, thus emphasising the agency elements of being a fan. Albeit idealistically presented as potential instigators of change in cultural studies literature, and as counterparts to established media producers, the world of business and marketing managers views fans as ideal consumers—thus seemingly exploiting the creativity and loyalty of fans.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Adams, Matthew. 2006. Hybridizing habitus and reflexivity: Towards an understanding of contemporary identity. Sociology 40(3): 511–528.
Althusser, Lois. 2014 [1971]. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideological State and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso Books.
Anderson, Chris. 2006. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.
Baudrilliard, Jean. 1998 [1970]. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage.
Bennett, Andy, and Keith Kahn-Harris. 2004. Introduction. In After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, ed. Andy Bennett, and Keith Kahn-Harris, 1–18. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2010 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.
Coppa, Francesca. 2014. Fuck yeah, fandom is beautiful. Journal of Fandom Studies 2(1): 73–82.
de Certeau, Michael. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Debord, Guy. 1995 [1967]. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.
Dichter, Ernest. 1960. The Strategy of Desire. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
———. 1979. Getting Motivated by Ernest Dichter: The Secret Behind Individual Motivations by the Man Who Was Not Afraid to Ask “Why?”. New York: Pergamon Press.
Duffett, Mark. 2013. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. New York: Bloomsbury.
———. 2014. Introduction. In Popular Music Fandom: Roles, Identities and Practices, ed. Mark Duffett, 1–15. Abingdon: Routledge.
Featherstone, Mike. 1991. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage.
Fletcher, John, Alan Fyall, David Gilbert, and Stephen Wanhill. 2013. Tourism: Principles and Practice. New York: Pearson.
Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge.
Fromm, Jeff, and Christie Garton. 2013. Marketing to Millennials: Reach the Largest and Most Influential Generation of Consumers Ever. New York: AMACOM.
Gelder, Ken. 2007. Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice. London: Routledge.
Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gottfried, Jeffrey, and Elisa Shearer. 2016. News use across social media platforms 2016. Pew Research Center, May 26. http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/
Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. 2007. In Introduction: Why Study Fans? In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 2006. Is there a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. In The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. David Marshall. London: Routledge.
Haenfler, Ross. 2014. Subcultures: The Basics. London: Routledge.
Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge.
Hodkinson, Paul. 2004. The Goth Scene and (Sub) Cultural Substance. In After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, ed. Andy Bennett, and Keith Kahn-Harris, 135–147. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hognestad, Hans K. 2012. Split loyalties: Football is a community business. Soccer & Society 13(3): 377–391.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002 [1944]. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hutchins, Amber L., and Natalie T. J. Tindall. 2016. Introduction. In Public Relations and Participatory Culture: Fandom, Social Media and Community Engagement, ed. Amber L. Hutchins, and Natalie T. J. Tindall. Abingdon: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
———. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
———. 2007. Afterword: The Future of Fandom. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, Henry, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd. 2016. Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jenks, Chris. 2005. Subculture: The Fragmentation of the Social. London: Sage.
JWT. 2011. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) [Market Report]. London: JWT Business Intelligence.
Kiple, Kenneth F. 1993. The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kotler, Philip, and Gary Armstrong. 2015. Principles of Marketing [Global Edition]. Harlow: Pearson.
Krishna, Arinuma, and Soojin Kim. 2016. Encouraging the Rise of Fan Publics: Bridging Strategy to Understand Fan Publics’ Positive Communicative Actions. In Public Relations and Participatory Culture: Fandom, Social Media and Community Engagement, ed. Amber L. Hutchins, and Natalie T. J. Tindall. Abingdon: Routledge.
Larsen, Jonas, John Urry, and K.W. Axhausen. 2006. Mobilities, Networks, Geographies. Aldershot: Ashgate.
London & Partners. 2016. Punk.London: From 1976–2016, 40 years of challenging convention. London & Partners, 19 January. http://www.londonandpartners.com/media-centre/press-releases/2016/20160119-punklondon-from-19762016-40-years-of-challenging-convention
Luttrell, Katrina, and Karen McGrath. 2016. The Millennial Mindset: Unraveling Fact from Fiction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Margaret Thatcher Foundation. n.d. [1987]. Interview for Woman’s Own (“no such thing as society”). Margaret Thatcher Foundation. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
Marwick, Alice E. 2013. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
McNay, Lois. 1999. Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity. Theory, Culture and Society 16(1): 95–117.
Muggleton, David. 2000. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. New York: Berg.
Obrist, Hans Ulrich. 2014. Ways of Curating. New York: Faber and Faber.
Packard, Vance. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: D. McKay Co.
Pine, B. Joseph II, and James H. Gilmore. 1998. Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review 76(4): 97–105.
Polhemus, Ted. 1997. In the Supermarket of Style. In The clubcultures reader: Readings in popular cultural studies, ed. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne, and Justin O’Connor, 148–151. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Przybylski, Andrew K., Kou Murayama, Cody R. DeHaan, and Valerie Gladwell. 2013. Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out. Computers in Human Behavior 29(4): 1841–1848.
Punk.London. 2016. About. Punk.London. http://punk.london/about/
Redhead, Steve. 1990. The End-of-the-Century Party: Youth and Pop Towards 2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Scott, Suzanne. 2013. Fangirls in Refrigerators: The Politics of (In)visibility in Comic Book Culture. In Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books, ed. Matthew J. Costello. Special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 13. doi:10.3983/twc.2013.0460.
Snelgrove, Ryan, Marijke Taks, Laurence Chalip, and B. Christine Green. 2008. How visitors and locals at a sport event differ in motives and identity. Journal of Sport and Tourism 13(3): 165–180.
Storey, John. 2010. Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture. New York: Pearson.
Sweetman, Paul. 2004. Tourists and Travellers? “Subcultures”, Reflexive Identities and Neo-Tribal Sociality. In After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, ed. Andy Bennett, and Keith Kahn-Harris, 79–93. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. 2009. The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. New York: Free Press.
Walsten, Jessika. 2015. Millennials quest recalls TV’s focus on young and restless. Broadcasting & Cable, 9 March.
ZenithOptimedia. 2015. The Pursuit of Happiness: Creating Meaningful Brand Experiences for Millennials. London: ZenithOptimedia.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Linden, H., Linden, S. (2017). Fans and (Post)Subcultural Consumerism. In: Fans and Fan Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50129-5_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50129-5_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-50127-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50129-5
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)