Higher seminar in Business Administration: Employer-Driven Consumption: Rethinking Consumer Experience under Paternalistic Regimes

Presenter

Anthony Beudaert, Guest researcher at University of Borås and Associate Professor in Management Sciences at the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (CERTOP research center).

Abstract

This paper investigates employer-driven consumption in the historical coalmining context of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, focusing on how paternalistic regimes structured everyday life and shaped consumer experience. Drawing on 19 interviews with former miners, widows, and children, as well as archival documents, we identify four dimensions of employer-driven experience: (1) materially prescriptive consumption, (2) ritualized events and collective belonging, (3) moral and domestic surveillance, and (4) intergenerational transmission and collective memory. Findings show how organizational authority extended beyond the workplace, producing ambivalent experiences of comfort, dependency, and belonging. By connecting experiential consumption research with analyses of organizational and institutional power, the study advances theoretical understanding of how structured regimes shape everyday consumption and long-term consumer subjectivities.

Keywords: Employer-driven experience; Paternalism; Consumer experience; Coalmining; Intergenerational transmission; Ambivalence

Note

If you attend and would like to receive hir manuscript, please send a request by email to Nicklas Salomonson.

Bio

Anthony Beudaert is an Associate Professor in Management Sciences at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (CERTOP research center) and part of the research network "Alternative Consumption Research" (ALCOR). His research concerns consumption, vulnerability and inclusion with a particular focus on disabilities, sensory limitations, and bodily and temporal dimensions of market and service experiences. His work has e.g. been published in Journal of Business Research, Consumption, Markets & Culture, Journal of Services Marketing, and Research in Consumer Behavior. He is also the co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Conference on Disability and Consumption.

Language: English

Welcome!