Recent PhD Graduate

Dr Miranda Mirosa

Research: Dynamic ideologies: Insights from the Slow Food Movement

Degrees: PhD, BCom Marketing (Hons, Distinction), BA French

Area of PhD Research: Consumer Behaviour, Consumer Movements and Activism, and Food Marketing.

PhD completed: December 2009

Supervisors: Professor Rob Lawson and Dr Ben Wooliscroft

Short description of research:

The thesis examines ideological change in the context of consumer activist movements. The Slow Food Movement is a contemporary example of such a movement and provides an interesting research case for investigating ideology. The thesis makes a number of significant theoretical and practical contributions:

The research provides a comprehensive historical narrative of the Slow Food Movement.
The research extends on current marketing conceptualisations of ideology by investigating how it is operationalised in a marketing context.
The research shows how consumer activist movements can be conceptualised as a subset of social movements and how these can be differentiated from other types of collective actions that occur in the marketplace. A systematically logical and simple way of differentiating between different types of consumer activist movements is identified.
The research emphasises the importance of ideology as a leadership resource and provides consumer activist movement leaders with the knowledge of how to approach and assess their movement’s ideology.

The major finding of this thesis is that new social movement theorist Alberto Melucci’s framework for evaluating ideology — when used in conjunction with a number of marketing theories such as tribal marketing — is useful in helping marketers understand ideological change in the context of contemporary consumer activist movements.

Current research interests:

Anti-consumption especially in the context of food, household energy behaviours and understanding the adoption of energy efficient practices and technologies.