The Inescapable Quest for Happiness: Exploring How the Ideology of Happiness Shapes the Contemporary Consumer Marketplace

This paper draws attention to the ideology of happiness and examines how it structures a marketplace. The quest for happiness has an extensive presence in contemporary Western culture (Burnett 2012) and is ubiquitous in the context of the marketplace. Prior happiness research conceptualizes happiness as a positive psychological state, emphasizing individuals’ experience (Layard 2005; Thin 2014; Veenhoven 2015). Building on the sociology literature (Cabanas and Illouz 2019; Davies 2015), this study posits that happiness can also be understood as an ideology associated with different values and cultural meanings. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986), this study shifts the focus away from the individual experience of happiness to a cultural level of understanding, exploring the following question: How does the ideology of happiness in contemporary consumer society inform the actions of consumers and producers? Using a qualitative investigation, this study contributes to the marketplace literature by investigating the ideological nature of happiness. The findings highlight four happiness discourses that interact in the marketplace and reveal how consumers and producers negotiate these different and contradictory cultural discourses.

Department dc:contributor.department

Business

Author dc:creator

• Patry-Beaudoin, Gabrielle

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Handelman, Jay

• Marketing
• Marketplace
• Happiness
• Ideology
• Heterotopia
• Consumption culture

Statement dc:rights

• Queen's University's Thesis/Dissertation Non-Exclusive License for Deposit to QSpace and Library and Archives Canada
• ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
• Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
• Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
• This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.
• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1974/29930

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/29930