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Abstract

This paper explains how disadvantaged consumers challenge their subjugated positioning through self-discipline, recursive reflexivity and narration. Although it is possible to interpret their agency as complicit with their responsibilization, viewing responsibilized consumers’ entanglement in dynamic market formation as complicity in their disadvantage forecloses on their ability to resist. Instead, this paper argues resistance at the human level involves subjectivation processes according to different spatiotemporal logics. This means resistance paradoxically resembles conformity within a heroic path of resistance against their social disadvantage. Drawing on Arendt’s (1958) categorization of human activities helps surface the politics of resistance at the human level from self-interest to collective interest and social change. The findings suggest theoretical realignment is needed to (1) delineate the limits of responsibilization to adequately explain heterogeneous types of self-discipline within subjectivation processes; and (2) expose the spatiotemporal and political nature of compliance and resistance to market and non-market forces.

Keywords

Responsibilization political theory heroes ADHD Arendt narratives consumer resistance agency subjectivation

Introduction

This paper contributes to marketing theory a framework that explains how disadvantaged consumers exert their agency to resist subjugation. In doing so, it responds to the call for theory that explains phenomenological consumer experiences in their cultural context (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011). It argues that use of consumer responsibilization as a theoretical lens tends to diminish consumer agency and overlooks how disadvantaged consumers contend with responsibilization in their lives. Responsibilization is a form of governance through self-discipline that makes individuals morally responsible for their consumption choices in exchange for market-based freedoms (Shamir, 2008). However, as researchers tend to focus on able-bodied and able-minded consumers, we know little or nothing about responsibilized consumers that are excluded from market and non-market contexts based on perceived disabilities, an oversight addressed in this paper. It also introduces Arendt’s (1958) political theory to marketing to explain how women with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) alternately conform to and resist their subject positions, bringing a novel perspective on resistance to spatialised power relations.

The paper builds upon work explaining conditions in which consumer agency is exerted over time, historically, geographically, and culturally (Botez et al., 2020; Karababa and Ger, 2011; Maclaran and Brown, 2005; Peñaloza, 1994). In this paper, agency is considered in terms of subjectivation, a process whereby consumers constitute their relationship to power ‘using techniques available to [them] historically and under the influence of myriad factors outside [their] control’ (Kelly, 2013: 513). The formation of the disadvantaged consumer subject occurs through processes of subjectivation that are responses to different spatiotemporal contexts. To examine how the disadvantaged subject is positioned within spatialized power relations, I draw upon Arendt’s (1958) categorization of human activities.

This paper is positioned in relation to normative debates about markets and consumer well-being (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). Scholars explain the neoliberal preoccupation with market-based governance assumes an equivalence between markets and the social institutions it tries to replace (Graeber, 2011), from gift-giving (Kozinets, 2002), and familial love (Varman et al., 2021), to professional principles (Mol, 2008). Replacement can lead to tensions as consumers interpolate market logics into non-market relationships (Epp and Velagaleti, 2014). Arguments that favour non-market settings like family or social collectives (Federici, 2018) tend to deemphasise the undesirable social obligations they incur (Lewis, 2021; Tronto, 1993) and can be avoided through recourse to markets (Marcoux, 2009). Therefore, discouraging systematic estrangement from markets is a key predicament in societies favouring market-based solutions to problems like social inequality and poverty (Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria, 2021; Eckhardt and Dobscha, 2019; Varman et al., 2012). While it is tempting to demonise markets for their inefficiencies, and idealise families, scholars must be reflexive about the ideologies underpinning their theorising (Hietanen et al., 2018; Skålén et al., 2006). In considering the perspectives of overlooked and silenced consumers (Hutton and Heath, 2020), this paper explores the relationship between subjectivation, the complicity of consumers and researchers in the formation of consumer disadvantage, and issues surrounding confinement to non-market contexts.

Conceptual background

For some time, scholars have questioned the myth of consumer sovereignty (Korczynski and Ott, 2006), lately suggesting that consumer agency is so highly constrained as to foreclose on the possibility of their acting autonomously, thereby undermining consumers’ intentions to resist and generate impetus for systemic change (Ahlberg et al., 2022; Bettany and Kerrane, 2011; Canniford and Bajde, 2015; Hill et al., 2014). To illustrate the conceptual entanglement of disadvantaged consumers, consider the example of responsibilized consumers who are made to feel responsible for addressing the social and environmental problems caused by market inefficiencies (Giesler and Veresiu, 2014; Shamir, 2008). Responsibilized consumers are ostensibly free to cocreate the value they seek through markets (Hietanen et al., 2018); however, the promised freedom is highly constrained by a network of relations (Canniford and Bajde, 2015), resulting in a set menu of options rather than freedom per se. This menu itself is determined by a market logic, accommodating markets of ‘valuable’ consumers. But since all consumers play a valuable role in market dynamics—whether they choose to participate in it, reject it, or are systematically excluded from its offers (Varman et al., 2012)—this limiting market logic disempowers consumers because (a) participation is inescapable due to the aforementioned appropriation of consumer resistance (Fisher, 2009) and (b) markets saddle consumers with moral responsibility for environmental devastation, social injustice and poverty through their choices (Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria, 2021; Eckhardt and Dobscha, 2019).

Thus, dynamic market forces offer limited power to responsibilized consumers, as agency is distributed across a network of market actors (Hill et al., 2014). While current views of distributed agency promote a sensitised overview of the topographies of power relations between actors and their emergence, there is little emphasis on the (re)distributive capabilities of disadvantaged actors. Focusing on network relations de-centres the consumer subject. The consumer’s relevance to power relations is also diminished by concerns about the transformative potential of consumers’ reflexivity and narrative reframing to engender systemic change (Ahlberg et al., 2022; Botez et al., 2020). Such views over-emphasise consumers’ lack of agency and complicity with markets, conflating consumers and markets for analytical purposes, and results in reduced scope for considering the effects of resistance occurring at the human scale.

This line of thinking ignores the plight of victims and their resistance to victimhood and surfaces the dehumanising politics of research. Politics maintain conditions that enable markets to systematically exclude many consumers, exacerbating their disadvantage (Bone et al., 2014; Mirabito et al., 2016; Varman et al., 2012). Thus, it is critical that theory contains sufficient scope for consumer agency and hope for social change through and around markets to guide interventions to alleviate present and future suffering. This paper aligns with transformative consumer research focused on the experiences of disadvantaged consumers in market systems (Mick et al., 2012). It introduces an Arendt (1958) lens to understand how consumer agency operates in relation to disadvantaging political structures. By considering the ways in which disadvantaged consumers reflexively use subjectivation techniques for self-care and how they change their precarious subject positioning to be more secure (Foucault, 1990; Iftode, 2013; Shankar et al., 2006), it is possible to view their subjectivation as agentic liberation from painful experiences that imperil well-being now and in the future.

The formation of the agentic consumer subject under responsibilization

In their seminal paper, Karababa and Ger (2011) explain that formation of the agentic consumer occurred under conditions of uncertainty over who (e.g. consumers, markets, state, or religious leaders) has authority to define acceptable behaviour in a given space (e.g. private household or public sphere). In the newly established Ottoman coffee houses, consumers decided for themselves, challenging rules about the pursuit of pleasure and religious morality in the public sphere. Customers tactically flouted tradition to negotiate new forms of social interaction. Early transgressions included ignoring distinctions between professional classes to discuss poetry, gambling, and circumventing of sumptuary laws designed to maintain public order. The exertion of consumer agency to challenge authority increased as coffeehouses became commonplace. Thus, individual capacity to resist established social structures occurred in relation to different spatiotemporal logics, e.g. active resistance in the early stages of coffeehouse culture compared to less transgressive behaviour in the context of an already established coffeehouse culture. From this we see that the extent that agency resembles complicity with established social rules depends on how we analytically extricate resistance from complicity with regard to spatiotemporal logics.

Agency as resistance is determined in relation to the dynamic context of power. At the individual level we can consider this as subjectivation, a process whereby consumers constitute their relationship to power ‘using techniques available to [them] historically and under the influence of myriad factors outside [their] control’ (Kelly, 2013: 513). Foucault’s work on the formation of neoliberal state power and the constitution of its subjects explains that subjects are formed in relation to disciplinary power, and people avoid being punished (e.g. correction by the state, religious authority, or the market) by adopting regimes of self-discipline (Lemke, 2002). Known as governmentality, self-regulating citizens are promised certain freedoms in exchange for following the rules (Lemke, 2002), which under neoliberalism are broadly market-based (Varman et al., 2012). Conceding to the rules established by a market-based morality, or consumer responsibilization, is a form of governmentality (Giesler and Veresiu, 2014; Shamir, 2008).

Responsibilization tends to be treated as a totalizing and too flexible category (Collier, 2009). This doesn’t make sense when people are regularly ‘ir-responsibilized’ by scientific discourses (Biebricher, 2011) to determine if someone should be relieved of moral responsibility for their actions, or ‘de-responsibilized’ by state interventions (Pellandini-Simányi and Conte, 2021). This suggests responsibilization is neither universally applicable nor a reliable framework to capture consumer resistance under neoliberalism without further contextualisation.

How can responsibilized consumers resist being complicit in their systematic disadvantage? Foucault describes various forms of resistance (discursive resistance, reversed discourses, techniques of the self and counter-conducts, and other anti-authority struggles) that have their own temporal logic, with some having immediate effect and others requiring a longer duration. Resistance also has a spatial dimension, as will be discussed in the next section.

Arendt’s theory of heroic political action

Arendt’s famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’ (Arendt, 1963) suggests that evil acts result from a failure to think critically. This conviction stems from her earlier work, The Human Condition (Arendt, 1958), in which she elaborates a theory of political action centred on the idea of active citizenship which is used to fight tyranny through thought and judgement. Critical thinking involves questioning and judging for oneself, which is essential for freedom from tyranny (Bernstein, 2018). Critical thinking is also linked to a key concept of ‘natality’ or new beginnings, which is a hopeful description of what can be achieved through individual thought when one (1) is unencumbered by biological and socioeconomic necessity, (2) has the courage to think beyond traditional modes of routine reaction and behaviour, and (3) can participate in the public realm of deliberating how to live together well.

Arendt (1958) categorises human activities into three domains: (a) the private realm (i.e. classically understood as the household domain of women, slaves, and others excluded from the public realm, e.g. children, the aged and infirm), and (b) the social realm of the oikos, or the economic sphere of creative work to make material goods. Both spaces are organised to serve (c) the political class of the public realm or polis (the ancient Greek city-state) where the concerns of how to live together were voiced, deliberated, and agreed upon. People who emancipate themselves from the private and social realms to participate in the public realm do so by overcoming significant challenges, which pertain to a range of heroic acts.

Life management activities, classified as the unending labour needed to stay alive, belong to the private realm, and creative work to produce material things necessary for survival and flourishing belongs to the social realm (or market). Arendt (1958) laments modernity’s preoccupation with private and social realm activities because they are self-interested and involve complacent forms of instrumental rationality rather than critical thinking (Holt, 2020; Thiele, 2009). Instead she prizes and equates political action to public freedom (Tsao, 2002). Political action is heroic because it signals emancipation from the considerable labour and work entailed in survival. Heroic action is not akin to traditional sovereignty, though, which aims to control the outcomes of political action (thereby veering toward tyranny, as a tyrant makes definitive demands based on certainties rather than openness to possibilities).

Tyranny and traditional sovereignty involve the complacent repetition of rituals and traditions; as unthinking reactions or behaviour (Thiele, 2009), they are the opposite of freedom because they involve a certainty of outcomes from action (as in administrative reproduction and unthinking drudgery). Whereas public freedom is a condition of accepting that conclusions are held in abeyance and are constantly under consideration. Such freedom from necessity (characterised by certainty of outcomes) is a privileged condition of exciting and uncertain possibility (Thiele, 2009). People confined by necessity to activities in the private and social realms will find it difficult to act politically.

Not only do you need to extricate yourself from the demands of necessity, but you must also become vulnerable. This characteristic is important because political action requires courage to perform acts in the public realm as actions invite a plurality of responses with uncertain outcomes, i.e. it makes one vulnerable to critique.

The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own. [Courage] and even boldness are already present in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing one’s self. (Arendt 1958: p 186).

Heroic action is therefore manifest in the courage to disclose a self whose story will be told by others (Ricoeur, 1983; Thiele, 2009), risking misunderstandings and challenges. Creating a space in which citizens can act as public-spirited individuals with higher order values (Dossa, 1989) means action is pluralist – it can only invite responses - like an open story or proposition that audiences interpret narratively. Telling your story entails vulnerability to others’ opinions. Reflexively predicting the audience’s reactions makes a narrator sensitive to others’ perspectives. Being attuned to different peoples’ responses is inherent to prioritising pluralist public interest and is foundational for setting aside self-interest. Having the skill to narrate a compelling and coherent story helps audiences question tradition and begin anew (natality).

Public narratives (Thiele, 2009) challenge tradition to engage others in reflexive self-projects (Giddens, 1991, 1994) and resistance occurs through reflexivity to disrupt routinely accepted attitudes and behaviours for social change (Archer, 2010). The paper proceeds by explaining how Arendt’s (1958) categories of action and narration were used to code data.

Methodology

As part of a research programme considering the role of marketing in mental well-being (Go Jefferies and Ahmed, 2022; Machin et al., 2019), theoretical sampling was used to select a case (Yin, 2009) of an online initiative that supports an under-served market of women with neurodevelopmental disorders (Stenner et al., 2019). The KaleidoscopeSociety.com (KS) is an online community ‘for and by women with ADHD’ founded in 2015 by Margaux Joffe, former Associate Director for Accessibility and Corporate Social Responsibility of Verizon Media (HuffPost, Yahoo!, TechCrunch, etc.). A Director of the American Association for People with Disabilities, she worked with Getty Images to commission 5000 stock images of people with disabilities for wider commercial use. Joffe was motivated to develop KS to destigmatise ADHD due to a number of factors: being diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 29 after a history of mental health issues, learning about how her mind works, the prevalence of six million American women with the condition, and the fact that 75% of women with the condition are undiagnosed until adulthood.

A documentarist by training and a media specialist using communication techniques appealing to millennial women, Joffe conducted interviews with women with ADHD working in a variety of fields. KS contains inspirational stories framing ADHD as a superpower to ‘smash stigma for women and girls with ADHD’ that can delay diagnosis (McNamara, 2016). KS has been featured in Teen Vogue and Vogue, reaching aspirational mainstream audiences. KS content generates engagement through social media and podcasts, and features video, images, and personal narratives to build a supportive international community.

Data collection and analysis

After receiving ethical approval, 37 individual cases were downloaded from the KS website. The cases (‘stories’) include text, images and sometimes videos that were saved in the published format as a PDF using NVivo’s NCapture browser extension tool and analysed using NVivo 12 for Mac. Videos were manually saved as MP4 files and analysed. Through iterative rounds of thematic coding and applying principles of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2008), 407 open codes were systematically condensed into aggregate themes. Interpretation involved reflexivity about epistemic biases (Hutton and Heath, 2020) for conducting mental health research (Chamberlain, 2000; Charmaz, 2019). Further abductive analysis (Charmaz, 2016) involved iteratively triangulating between the findings, marketing, and political theory.

Table 1 describes the sample using demographic information gleaned from the ADHD stories and shows a heterogeneous community of women who have ADHD in common but otherwise differ in terms of age, ethnicity, occupation, location, ADHD subtype, and age of diagnosis. Stories are structured like interviews, asking women to describe their ‘ADHD superpower’. When a superpower was not specified, the text was analysed using an Arendtian (1958) approach to narrative (what is the category and context of action that characterises the heroic narrative?) (Thiele, 2009) to denote the relevance of superpowers in their lives, and thereby make visible how political structures affect their lives (Charmaz, 2019). Therefore, superpower characteristics were less important than how they were deployed. The final stage of abductive analysis involved coding superpowers according to Arendtian (1958) activities (private labour, social work, political action).

Table 1.

Sample description. The author wishes to clarify that classification of ethnicity or nationality uses verbatim terms. For cases where this data was not provided in the text, the decision to indicate likely belonging to an ethnicity or nationality based on available data, is provided only to show heterogeneity of the sample. The author acknowledges these labels may be challenged by the individuals involved. Dx = diagnosis.

Name	Age	Occupation	Location	Age of dx	Education	Ethnicity or nationality	ADHD subtype	ADHD superpower	Type of action
Cristina Medina	33	Enrollment processor, The Art Institute of Houston	Houston, TX	23	College student	Latina	ADHD, combined subtype	Being creative, generating new solutions to problems	Private labour
René Brooks	31	Founder and editor in chief, “Black girl, lost keys”, writer, mother, activist	Harrisburg, PA	25	Dropped out of college	Black	ADHD, combined subtype	Persistence and conviction of eventual success	Private labour
Eartha a.k.a ‘muvva earth'	—	Lifestyle and beauty freelance writer	Youngstown, OH	25	Bachelor	Black	ADHD, inattentive subtype	Can think of many things at the same time, bring unique and creative ideas, and make masterful creative work during flow	Private labour
Kristen Mooney	29	Director of strategy and planning, Publicis	Brooklyn, NY	27	—	White	ADHD, inattentive subtype	Women’s intuition, but even stronger	Private labour
Susy Parker	—	Author, blogger, mother talking about herself and her school age daughter	Perth, Australia	Daughter: 6	—	White	—	Curiosity, creativity, high energy levels, hyperfocus	Private labour
Erika Wenzel	—	Nursing student	Arizona	11	—	White	—	Hyperfocus. ‘I find different ways of thinking about things […] able to harness my [impulsivity].’	Private labour
Laura Roehrick	62	Certified foot care nurse	Santa Rosa	30	—	White	—	Ability to hyperfocus, use the energy that comes in waves, creativity, “the gift of gab”, and love for people	Private labour
Nikisha Brunson	33	Creator, UrbanBushBabes.com, Pineapple.life, Folie	Austin, TX	31	—	Black	—	Sensitivity, creativity, intelligence, ability to multi-task. Emotional, sensitive, observant, and sense of adventure	Private labour
Nikita Hudson	—	Coach, an author, a speaker and a blogger	N/A	As an adult	—	Black	—	Hyperfocus and seeks new opportunities out of the avoidance of boredom	Private labour
Melissa Dickson	-	Program director tackling homelessness	New York	—	Masters	White	—	Openness, ability to focus, efficiency	Private labour
Shae Jackson	-	Actress and YouTuber	Fenton	—	College student	Black	—	Creative, encouraging, supportive, and spontaneous	Private labour
Katie Martinez	28	Instructional aide, special education	Fontana, CA	9	Masters	Latina	ADHD, combined subtype	Physically active hiker, makes friends easily, works many jobs, curious, and solo traveller	Private labour
Toya Haynes	41	Freelance writer working on the dream	Somerdale, NJ	41	—	Black	ADHD, combined subtype	Using diagnosis to re-evaluate drivers of low self-esteem toward rebirth and new possibilities	Private labour
Kirsten ter Borg	31	Interior stylist, photo stylist, de-clutter coach and blogger	Amersfoort, The Netherlands	17	—	White	ADHD, combined subtype	Makes her a better interior designer because she is more influenced by light, colors, materials, and composition in space. Creative, makes order in chaos, and empathetic	Social work
Mariel Henkoff	—	Mentoring program manager	Brooklyn	17	College	White	ADHD, combined sub type	Brain works really fast, think differently than others, great problem-solver, connection with people, energy, curiosity, extraordinary recall names and facts about people, super-focus on conversations. My superpower is my hearing, and it stems from my surplus of attention; I can read a room really well, I usually know what’s going on with my friends and colleagues without asking	Social work
Tiffany D. Jackson	—	Author	Brooklyn	16	Masters	Black	ADHD, inattentive subtype	Creative, curious, and super-focused	Social work
Nicole	27	Designer	Canberra, Australia	18	—	Singaporean	ADHD, inattentive subtype	Keeping calm in the face of chaos, creative solutions to complex problems, observant, and understanding of people’s thoughts and feelings and human behaviour - a better service and product designer	Social work
Eileen Carey	30	Founder and CEO, Glassbreakers	San Francisco	As an adult	MBA	White	—	Can concentrate for hours, have meetings all day, and “turn myself on like a switch” for networking events	Social work
Rhonda Khan	35	Therapist, actor, and founder of Simply Speech Solutions	Brooklyn	29	College	Black	ADHD, combined subtype	Hyperfocus with bursts of ideas, optimism, and resilience	Social work
Christy Turner	—	—	Texas	6 and 18	—	White	ADHD, combined subtype	It makes her loyal, feisty, an excellent multi-tasker, and gives her great motor skills	Social work
Francis Mariela	29	Automotive advertising executive, TV producer, and entertainment publicist	Fort Myers, FL	26	—	Latina	ADHD, hyperactive subtype	Passionate and goal-driven, natural leader	Social work
Haye	25	Art director at an advertising agency	NYC	6	—	White	—	Fearlessness, determination and a ‘go for it’ attitude, comfortable with risk	Social work
Kelly Dooley	—	Social activist, entrepreneur, founder of BodyRock Sport and her line Strenue	Santa Ana, CA	32	—	White	ADHD, hyperactive subtype	Creative, adventurous, prepared to eat problems for breakfast, go full speed 24 h a day, and multitask	Social work
Beatrice Ursula	-	Explorative artist, photography and social media strategist	Hayward, CA	19	—	Asian	ADHD, inattentive subtype	Gives her deep focus while creating	Social work
Gabrielle Moss	33	Associate lifestyle editor, Bustle.com	New York	28	—	White	ADHD, inattentive subtype	Focus from distractions when writing	Social work
Penny Jarrett	30	Blogger, mental health activist and youth mentor	London, UK	As an adult	—	White	—	Humorous, open, hyper-focused, and a good leader	Social work
Angela Aguirre	—	Published poet, performer, teaching artist, writer, community advocate	Los Angeles	—	—	Chicana	—	Makes her different and creative	Social work
Alyson Gerber	—	Author of young adult novels	—	21	—	White	—	Problem-solving	Social work
Dani Donovan	29	Artist, designer, ADHD comic artist, comedian	Omaha, Nebraska	18	—	White	Combined subtype	—	Social work and political action
Nicole Frangione	29	Creative recruiter, SolomonPage group	Brooklyn, NY	24	—	White	—	Communication through clear open conversations about setting goals and expectations in collaboration	Political action
Amanda Fischer	22	Miss Great Lakes 2019, special education outreach worker, university student, works part-time tech start up, dancer, choreographer	Notre Dame, Indiana	16	College	White	Combined subtype	Passion. I’m […] super passionate about, […] advocating for people with learning disabilities. […] empowering women with ADHD is definitely a superpower that I have. My advocacy skills are innate in me, and I feel that I’m obligated to pass along the torch to other people	Political action
Margaux Joffe	37	KS founder, executive producer, disability advocate, Verizon, VP accessibility	Oakland, CA	29	College degree	White	—	Highly creative, hyper-focused, entrepreneurial, hardworking, passionate, and resilient. Trailblazing and pioneering	Political action
Moonlake Lee	52	Founder, Unlocking ADHD	Singapore	50, when teenage daughter was diagnosed with ADHD	4 university degrees	Singaporean	—	Spontaneity, multi-tasking	Political action
Dr Jnanee Krishnasama	30	Veterinarian, volunteer with Unlocking ADHD	Singapore	28	Doctorate	Singaporean	—	—	Political action
Cheyenne Seah	39	Volunteer with Unlocking ADHD	Singapore	29–30	Former PhD student	Singaporean			Political action
Annabelle Bernard	25	Program assistant at WISH drop-in centre society	Vancouver, Canada	7	College	White	ADHD, combined subtype	Helps me respect people who process information or learn differently, to question the rules, and to empower people to voice their concerns	Political action
Julie Casali	33	Marketer, podcaster, documentary filmmaker	Watertown, MA	7	Masters	White	—	Curiosity and sensitivity to ‘invisible’ difficulties	Political action

Findings

Each co-constructed KS story follows roughly the same format, providing the individual’s name, age, city, age of ADHD diagnosis, and the ADHD subtype they have – (1) hyperactive/impulsive; (2) inattentive; or (3) combined subtype. The stories contain detailed personal experiences with ADHD including when and how they were diagnosed; what challenges they overcame and how; what ADHD feels like; their employment history; what are their ‘ADHD superpowers’ (Table 1) and what advice they would give to their younger selves. The story includes attractive photographs or videos featuring the individual and showcasing her professional work or lifestyle.

These web profiles are both performative and informative (Schau and Gilly, 2003). All stories frame women with ADHD in a positive light, highlighting how they overcame adversity caused by ADHD, and constructing a heroic narrative to show how they successfully adopt new perspectives that emancipate them from being systematically disadvantaged toward being successful in careers.

Three main themes in the narratives are: (1) the ‘ADHD as a superpower’ concept as a tool for ontological reframing; (2) the role of the past as a site of contention characterised by traditional modes of thinking; and 3) becoming political by sharing strategic counter-narratives that encourage questioning. This process involves viewing one’s life as a dynamic reflexive self-project that becomes increasingly political through the sharing of stories that involve ongoing critique of dominant discursive frames. The three themes highlight alternating stages of emancipatory transformation: from a compliant subject to one that challenges dominant discourses. Mapping the themes to Arendtian (1958) categories of action and domains reveals how KS women progressively escape confinement to private and social realms through subjectivation (Kelly, 2013) that by turns involves compliance with and resistance to subjugating roles. Through iterative subjectivation processes, KS women emancipate themselves from disadvantaged positions by (a) managing their self-care, and (b) overcoming market exclusion by altering traditional forms of social work, before (c) actively taking part in public deliberation of how to live well together by challenging and reframing disabling discourses for their own and others’ benefit Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The Path of Heroic Action.

Escaping from the private realm

According to Arendt’s (1958) framework, caring for ill bodies entails labour belonging to the private realm. The following quote shows how the usual care expected for children from parents, teachers and friendships was emotionally turbulent and ineffective for Nicole due to her undiagnosed ADHD:

I had trouble controlling my impulsivity and would often get into many fights in school. I would say or do things that upset my classmates and teachers even though I didn’t mean to […] I was never able to concentrate […] a constant flow of poor exam scores. My father had a very bad temper and was prone to physical and verbal abuse […] My behavior was always interpreted as being rebellious and ungrateful… I carried the shame and guilt of being labelled as ‘the problem child’ that drove a wedge between my parents and that I was responsible for all the fights they had over me. (Nicole)

Nicole recalls being subject to opinions about her as a disruptive and underperforming student, and as a ‘rebellious and ungrateful’ daughter. After diagnosis and therapy, Nicole’s subjectivity is reframed by clinical knowledge classifying and ir-responsibilizing her (Biebricher, 2011; Foucault, 1973, 1978). Although freed from responsibility for transgressive behaviour, she becomes responsibilized for managing emotional dysregulation through adopting self-disciplining techniques. For example, she describes her ‘greatest superpower’ as ‘keeping calm in the face of chaos [to] come up with solutions to complex problems […] and understanding human behaviour’. Thus, superpowers help her make sense of and escape difficult and uncaring family relationships in the private realm. Nicole’s case exemplifies how ADHD superpowers feature in the way women revise their identities and past life stories in order to envision a different future (Stenner et al., 2019). By avoiding traditional framing of ADHD as a deficit or defect and thereby constituting herself as a ‘problem’, Nicole reconstitutes her position by employing historical and other contextually available techniques i.e. subjectivation (Kelly, 2013).

The next quote shows how Gabrielle is similarly constituted as a stigmatized and self-stigmatizing subject (Goffman, 1963):

I was told that I was just being a brat and acting spoiled. I knew I wasn’t doing it on purpose but struggled to come up with any better explanation, so I kind of bought into it and became very confrontational. […] Everyone […] thought I was just self-sabotaging when I didn’t finish things or got distracted, and I got so frustrated by my inability to explain my own behavior that I was very self-destructive for a very long time. […] I felt depressed because I had ADHD but had no idea how to cope with it. […] I was afraid of the stigma […] thought that when people found out, they would think I was trying to make excuses for my problems. (Gabrielle Moss)

Shunned by others and even estranged from understanding herself, Gabrielle describes the self-care involved in managing relationships to stigmatised identities (Goffman, 1963). Any temporary respite offered by a diagnosis ir-responsibilizing her from her former behaviours (Biebricher, 2011) is helpful for Gabrielle to understand how distractibility is stigmatized and punished for appearing ‘self-sabotaging’. By exercising instrumental knowledge (a ‘better explanation [for] my own behavior’), she adopts self-disciplining techniques: engaging in self-care instead of self-destruction, and disclosing her diagnosis in a neoliberal culture that values individualistic self-enterprise (Rose and Wickham, 1993).

In complying with diagnosis and treatment KS women appear to advocate for diminished responsibility to obtain access to appropriate care in the private realm. This allows them to develop self-care techniques for survival. Escaping the private realm involves attaining the competencies required by the social realm to prosper.

When I was younger, there was still a lot of stigma attached to ADHD. Finally, as an adult, I went to a doctor who suggested that I explore those symptoms to re-frame what was going on… At that point, I was really desperate to find a solution to this ongoing problem holding a job and keeping my head in a role past a specific time frame at work, so was open to anything! As I have evolved with the diagnosis, I am enjoying the flexibility and control that I can give myself through both medication and activity. (Nikki)

If you have had ADHD, and you have learned tips and tricks to manage it you’re probably going to be super-organized, and you’re going to have amazing time management skills. You’re going to take on a lot and you can deliver. (Haye)

Nikki and Haye show mastery of private labour involves developing self-discipline (managing symptoms, coping with stigma, time management) to inhabit the social realm (holding a job). Transformative subjectivation changes their idea of self and social positioning (evolving with the diagnosis, reframing experiences, reducing accountability, taking medication to regulate symptoms, and destigmatizing ADHD). Their recursive reflexive practices involve a sense of continuity and progress in reference to past constructions of selfhood (Akaka and Schau, 2019). The past is a time of pre-enlightenment, related to victimhood, emotional dysregulation, irrationality, poor performance and attainment, suffering in silence and dislocation to society’s margins. The past is a place against which the current adoption of a strengths-based notion of ADHD as a gift or superpower is the narrative for reshaping the self. The future is new and uncertain (natality) because although the hero has changed, the challenges stay the same with unknown outcomes.

In sharing their transformative narratives, KS women risk being seen as continuously subjugated by: an ableist neoliberal culture; biomedical diagnosis; and the limited power ceded by the market. Women were historically pathologized and subjugated for their differences (Bondi and Burman, 2001; Rose, 2001) and superpowers reinforce an ableist approach to human value (Kearney et al., 2019; May and Ferri, 2005) traditionally used to exclude KS women from the social realm of work. However, for KS women survival means reflexively instrumentalising diminished agency by diagnosis and ableism to emancipate themselves from the private realm.

Social work to prosper

Recall that the aim of Arendt’s (1958) categorisation is to show how escape from both private and social realms is a necessary precursor to achieving freedom from tyranny in the public realm. KS women escape the private realm through dalliances with ableism by embracing the metaphor of superpowers. Arendt decries instrumental knowledge for being self-interested but it is necessary for subjectivation, or the process of (re)constituting a subject’s power relations (Kelly, 2013) and understanding how the social realm is ordered to enable effective self-regulation. This does suggest subjectivation also requires confronting one’s own complicity in being silenced, triggering reflexive repositioning:

…learn who you are and what you need to be and do your best, and then advocate for yourself and set expectations. It can be hard for me to ask for extra time, and I still get embarrassed asking for clarification on directions, but I force myself to do it, because I’m always glad I did. (Alyson Gerber)

No, I didn’t speak openly about [my ADHD diagnosis] for many years. I didn’t want to be judged or have an employer question my abilities. So I just kept it to myself, but now I’ve realized it’s that little extra edge that makes me think differently and my ability to think differently is what makes me a successful creative. […] I used to think that if I asked, “Hey, can you repeat that?” Or, “I don’t understand.” I would come across as daft. And I don’t feel that way anymore. I used to be really intimidated to ask “I’m not following, do you mind repeating it?” because I knew it was the ADHD or the dyslexia that required me to need it explained in a different way, but now I’m very comfortable doing that. And chances are from explaining something in a different way, you discover something different as well. (Haye)

By advocating for themselves, KS women disregard marginalising traditions. Furthermore, when Alyson and Haye request extra time and clarifications, they arrest their colleagues’ assumptions about effective communication, thereby challenging practices to be more inclusive. Speaking up makes typically private labour of caring for ADHD a part of the social realm of work, enabling KS women to bridge boundaries between realms.

Sharing counter-narratives in the public realm

ADHD is shown to affect women’s lives and prospects because of traditionally disempowering epistemologies (Hutton and Lystor, 2020) determining who is kept in the private realm and viewed as incapable of flourishing in the social realm. However, strategically reframing ADHD as ‘an ability to think differently [and providing an] extra edge’, as Haye says above, is complicated by the way ADHD intersects with gender, race and other identities (Gopaldas and DeRoy, 2015). Materialising ADHD as an individual advantage is therefore difficult without also challenging conventions at the community level.

When I looked around for other people with ADHD to share my experience with, I found there was virtually NOTHING on the web where someone was talking about ADHD as a black person, much less a black woman. I wish they knew how much the traditional social expectations that come along with femininity burden and limit us. […] We are innovative, charismatic, dynamic women. Don’t box us into what kind of contributions we can make. (René)

René thinks critically about ‘how much the traditional social expectations that come along with femininity burden and limit us’. Arendt’s (1958) description of private labour is gendered through preoccupation with feminine bodily issues like reproduction and care which makes participation in the public realm difficult. However, inciting change by engaging a KS community means challenging multiply limiting conventions collectively by sharing in public narratives emancipatory stories and resistance to disadvantaging subject positions (‘don’t box us into what kind of contributions we can make’). Awareness that traditions and ritualised beliefs (Giddens, 1994) can be disadvantaging (e.g. the ‘femininity burden’) creates the impetus to break with ‘traditional social expectations’ (René) to remain closeted due to shame and stigma:

Women with ADHD are still so isolated from one another — not because there aren’t many of us, but because so many of us are encouraged to keep our diagnosis a secret. (Gabrielle)

Entering the public realm to debate traditions requires courage to overcome vulnerability; it also requires access to communities in which strategic counter-narratives can be shared to encourage others to resist disadvantaging discourses. Cheyenne’s story illustrates the heroic path to act politically for freedom.

[Diagnosis gave me] clarity. I’m not broken, as in ‘a worthless human being.’ My brain is not wrong but maybe it’s not suitable for this post-industrial era where I have to sit down and really spend hours focusing. I have my strengths elsewhere. I also occasionally coach girls with ADHD. Because girls with ADHD – how they face it and how they internalise it, their emotions are quite different from how boys generally get it. I hope to buy these girls an opportunity at a better life than the one that I had. (Cheyenne Seah)

After a prolonged period of being depressed and suicidal about her inability to function and flourish with ADHD, Cheyenne now questions and reframes her position in relation to tradition, and through subjectivation engages in heroic political action to benefit others. Similarly, Annabelle shows respecting silenced voices means questioning tyrannical rules.

[My superpower] helps me respect people who process information or learn differently, to question the rules, and to empower people to voice their concerns. (Annabelle Bernard)

These examples show how KS stories describe a heroic path from private suffering to collective interest in social change. Their agentic subjectivation challenges the totalizing views of responsibilization that foreclose on the possibility of cumulative acts of resistance within and between market and non-market contexts. Arendt’s (1958) framework locates resistance and compliance in terms of a realm’s spatiotemporal logics. Changing one’s subject position means accessing different realms through reflexive resistance to traditional assumptions that characterise their position within them (Chamberlain, 2000). Critical thinking and heroic action result in sharing strategic counter-narratives to disrupt the unthinking reproduction of disadvantaging subject formation.

Figure 1 illustrates the path of heroic action from confinement in private and social realms toward acting in the public realm. The emancipatory processes of subjectivation require instrumental rationality for self-enterprise, responsibilization, and reflexivity about disadvantaging traditions like certainty based on diagnosis and ableism. Various forms of resistance (self-disciplining techniques and strategic counter-narratives) have their own temporal logic. For example, learning about their marginalized identity as medicalised subjects occurs through diagnosis (Foucault, 1973), which makes visible the political structures that constrain and confine them to the private realm. Entry into the public realm is intimately connected with the ongoing transformative self-project because it raises questions and challenges dominant discourses through strategic counter-narratives. In voicing and representing minority perspectives and possessing ‘superpowers’, KS women risk appearing incoherent by paradoxically embracing ableism, which excludes them. KS women become vulnerable when challenging stigma by inviting critical responses with uncertain outcomes. The path to heroic action shows how disadvantaged consumers emancipate themselves through subjectivation to attain natality.

Discussion

This paper explored the relationship between subjectivation, the complicity of consumers and researchers in the formation of consumer disadvantage, as well as issues concerning confinement to non-market contexts. It contributes a study of disadvantaged consumers to work problematizing the use of responsibilization (Collier, 2009; Thompson and Kumar, 2021) to explain consumer agency. By introducing Arendt’s (1958) categorisation of human activities it offers a spatial framework of power relations shaping disadvantaged consumer agency. It shows how disadvantage occurs in different realms that require instrumental complicity and resistance for political freedom. Resistance is targeted to reflexively redress traditions that systematically disadvantage consumers in a neoliberal context. It extends understanding about the importance of market and non-market contexts for disadvantaged groups and why escape from non-market settings can be critical for well-being (Epp and Velagaleti, 2014; Marcoux, 2009).

The heroic path to action introduces subjectivation to show how complicity and resistance occur over time and space at the human scale. Complicity enables inclusion in the social realm and then affords opportunities to shape and challenge traditional assumptions and behaviours that structure disadvantage. Sharing narratives online increases the chances that individual self-interest is transmuted into public interest. This is a novel contribution to prior work explaining consumer responses to responsibilization as individual indifference, or a non-specific wish to negotiate norms about who should be responsible for social change, or to force engagement in non-consumption (Eckhardt and Dobscha, 2019) which can exacerbate disadvantage for certain groups (Jagannathan et al., 2020).

The path to freedom from tyrannical thinking involves staged processes of subjectivation that draw on techniques of compliance to understand the rules of the game before strategically developing counter-narratives (Valor et al., 2017) for pluralist involvement in subjectivation. Thus, through heroic political action, disadvantaged consumers are empowered to challenge traditional modes of thinking, build communities of support and mobilize resources for social change (Chatzidakis et al., 2021; Gollnhofer et al., 2019; Gollnhofer and Schouten, 2017).

Arendt’s (1958) categorisation dislodges assumptions about unconditional consumer agency – winding paths involve people being alternately disempowered and absolved of responsibilities or responsibilized and empowered, paradoxically through self-disciplining techniques. These changes point to the fact that subject positions change through subjectivation according to conditions of space (Arendt, 1958; Karababa and Ger, 2011) and the time it takes for resistance to register an effect.

Online narratives for emancipation are important because they afford an unmediated articulation (Mcquarrie et al., 2013) of stories that challenge audiences’ perceptions; because they are self-representations rather than misrepresentations (Kearney et al., 2019). The paper offers a new model of heroic action as an alternative construction of the responsibilized consumer subject, marginalized by neoliberalism’s ableist biases (May and Ferri, 2005) but with potential to become empowered through subjectivation.

As the paper draws on a limited set of secondary data to understand the experiences of people with neurodevelopmental differences, it is possible that the interpretation of experiences from the published accounts may be challenged by the individuals involved. In attempting to privilege their voices as authoritative and experts in their experience, there may be limited generalisability to the population of women with ADHD. Further research is needed to develop marketing theory and practice using primary data analysed using an Arendtian (1958) perspective to understand how social movements unfold at the human level for social change.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Andrea Stykket for stellar research assistance.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Josephine Go Jefferies

Josephine Go Jefferies is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Newcastle University Business School in the UK. Her research interests include transformative consumer research, responsibilization, the role of technology in service innovation, and social change through increased participation. Participation can be at the individual level (e.g. self-service technologies, co-production) and at the organisational level (e.g. cross-sector collaboration). Her work has been published in the Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Public Policy and Management, Journal of Consumer Marketing, and the Routledge Handbook of Service Research Insights and Ideas.

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An Arendtian perspective on responsibilized heroes: Why marketing needs a new model of heroic action

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Conceptual background

The formation of the agentic consumer subject under responsibilization

Arendt’s theory of heroic political action

Methodology

Data collection and analysis

Findings

Escaping from the private realm

Social work to prosper

Sharing counter-narratives in the public realm

Discussion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References