Understanding How Consumers and Discourses Respond to Ritual Practice Disruption: Two Studies

The COVID-19 pandemic changed almost every aspect of our daily lives. From mundane to milestone ritual practices, during the pandemic people could no longer engage in activities in the ways they had typically been performed. Despite a growing number of studies exploring how people responded to pandemic restrictions, we still have little insight into the factors contributing to these outcomes and their heterogeneity, or the lasting nature of these adaptations beyond disruption. In this dissertation, I address this gap in our knowledge by conducting two studies with the central focus of inquiry being disrupted milestone ritual practices. Using depth interviews and observations, my first essay explores why people choose to reconfigure disrupted rituals in the ways they do, and why some choose to abandon a ritual and not reconfigure it at all. Emergent from my analysis is a multi-staged process that is triggered by disruptions that cause a loss in how consumers envision their milestone and a loss in the social script that guides the ritual practice. In response, I find that consumers engage in three stages of ritual response: first, they engage in a period of reflexivity; then, they reconfigure the ritual in one of five different ways; and third, they experience affective and behavioral repercussions. My second study examines how the social discourse that surrounds rituals evolves through periods of disruption, and how this impacts the ritual script long-term. Using interviews and archival data to inform an automated content analysis over four time periods, I explore how the North American wedding ritual changed during and after the pandemic. My findings reveal a vital shift in influence over the script from the market to consumers. With this shift, I observe an increase in the empowerment of consumers and reflexivity about the ritual’s purpose. With these transformative shifts, I then document that the overall discourse has changed to reflect the priorities of consumers in several lasting ways.

Department dc:contributor.department

Business

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Slobodzian, Adam

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Thomas, Tandy

• Marketing
• Consumer Culture Theory
• Rituals
• Practices

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1974/33435

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/33435