JONATHAN BEAN University of Arizona BERNARDO FIGUEIREDO RMIT University HANNE PICO LARSEN Copenhagen Business School Download PDF The paper outlines a methodological approach for investigating how consumers create brand meaning using the material resources companies provide. The approach draws from Material Engagement Theory—to discuss the role of consumers in creating patterns of meaning by engaging with objects. It also explicates the role of objects in supporting this patterning. We explain how an in-situ diary tool (dscout, in our case) can be useful to support this approach. We demonstrate our methodological approach in the context of the Red Rooster Harlem, a cosmopolitan restaurant in New York, owned by the celebrity Chef Marcus Samuelsson....

DAIANE SCARABOTO Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile BERNARDO FIGUEIREDO RMIT University Gift-systems build relationships and create various types of value for the individuals who participate in them. Organizations may also reap the benefits of gift-systems when they understand, support, and foster practices of object circulation within these systems. We adopt a theoretical framework based on anthropological approaches to value-in-action to explain value creation for individuals in contemporary gift systems. We mobilize ethnographic and netnographic data on the circulation of small wooden chapels containing a statue of the Virgin Mary among Catholic households to develop a conceptual framework that illuminates value creation in gift systems and demonstrates how practices of circulation (setting, protecting, registering, retrieving, keeping, passing on, monitoring, interacting, and storytelling) can be used to generate value for organizations....