Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Eudaimonic consumption is a long-term engagement in transformative experiences. • Some consumers quit 9–5 jobs to pursue eudaimonic consumption as full-time careers. • This ethnography of snowsports instructors explains Eudaimonic Consumption Careers. • We identify how consumers enter, exit, and manage this career. • Contributions to extraordinary consumption, liquidity, consumer work, modern life. While consumers increasingly turn to the marketplace seeking meaning and happiness, others search for experiential opportunities to escape the dull existence of everyday life. Yet these experiences are often temporary, and consumers return to their “everyday” after engaging in the transformative experience. We know little about those who decide to escape more permanently by turning their pursuit of deeper meanings and fulfillment (eudaimonia) through consumption into a career. We conceptualize this pursuit as eudaimonic consumption careers (ECCs). In a 10.5-year ethnographic study of snowsports instructors across Canada and New Zealand, we examine the key stages and experiences of ECCs over time. We conceptualize ECCs by first noting the integrative triggers that encourage people to embark on the career. We discuss two aspects of the ECC stage that begins with undergoing a eudaimonic transition followed by developing capabilities and skills to manage the career demands of an ECC. Finally, we discuss the disintegrative triggers that lead to people’s exit. We contribute to literature on extraordinary consumption, consumer work and serious leisure, and critical research on the limits of modern life and work. We achieve this by explaining a corpus of consumption careers and extraordinary consumer experiences that has been overlooked and undertheorized. This research offers implications for managing consumers and employees in multiple ECCs to understand how to best support people in ECCs, and promote service jobs with the promise of fulfillment, personal growth, and greater life purpose.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".