Christian Fuentes

Faculty of Textiles, Engineering and Business (including The Swedish School of Textiles)

Department of Business Administration and Textile Management

Telephone: 033-435 4427

Signature: CHFU

I am a Professor in Business Administration, specialization Digital Retail. My research explores the digitalization of retail, marketing, and consumption.

I have examined how e-tailing companies develop and reinvent themselves in process of retail formation, how new digital technologies such as smartphones reconfigure in-store shopping practices, how ”sustainability” apps reconfigure everyday life and enable ethical consumption, and how digital devices changes the way we listen to music. I have also taken an interest in "digital failures”, the instances and processes when digitalisation fails, examining for example how and under what conditions apps fail to connect with users, leading to the unravelling of smart consumers. My work on digitalisation has often taken a socio-material approach and paid particular attention to consumer-device interactions.

In addition, much of my previous work has examined sustainability issues. I have conducted research on sustainable retail, green marketing, sustainable consumption, and alternative markets. I have, for example, studied how marketing inscribes outdoors product with green moral, the strategies that consumers develop to green their shopping practice, and how marketing devices work to construct alternative food markets. This work has often been critical and driven by an ambition to understand the complex practices involved in green/sustainable marketing and consumption.

Theoretically, I draw on theories of practice to explore how digitalised retail marketing practices and devices shape consumption in various ways. Methodologically, I employ mainly ethnographic methods - online and offline - to empirically understand the digitalizing of retail practice and consumption and its consequences. My work contributes to the fields of retail marketing, consumer culture studies, and market studies.

Currently, I lead three research projects – “Alternative food markets: new modes of food provisioning and consumption”, “PLATEFORMS”, and “Digital platforms and new food practices: food consumption in times of crisis” – that all, in different ways, investigate the ongoing digitalization and reorganisation of food markets.

My studies on these topics have been published in the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Business Strategy and the Environment, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, International Journal of Consumer Studies, as well as in a number of other outlets.

I am co-supervisor for Lars Hedegård and Partik Stoopendahl.