Quality‐of‐life as chronotopefication and futurization: Subsistence consumer experiences in India

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Sujit Raghunathrao Jagadale,Himadri Roy‐Chaudhuri,Djavlonbek Kadirov
• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12309

SPECIAL ISSUE

Quality-of-life as chronotopefication and

futurization: Subsistence consumer experiences

in India

Sujit Raghunathrao Jagadale

1

|Himadri Roy-Chaudhuri

2

|

Djavlonbek Kadirov

3

1

Faculty of Marketing, Xavier University

Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar, India

2

Faculty of Marketing, XLRI Xavier

School of Management, Jamshedpur,

India

3

Faculty of Marketing, School of

Marketing and International Business,

Victoria University of Wellington,

Wellington, New Zealand

Correspondence

Sujit Raghunathrao Jagadale, Faculty of

Marketing, Xavier University

Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar, India.

Email: sujit@xub.edu.in

Abstract

In the poverty-ridden settings in neo-liberal India, we

explore how subsistence consumers construct their qual-

ity-of-life (QOL). Drawing on the concepts of chronotope

and futurization, we posit two additional dimensions of

subsistence consumers' construction of QOL namely, chro-

notopefication and futurization. Our findings suggest that

chronotopefication and futurization are defining processes

of subsistence consumers' construction of QOL percep-

tions; their sacrifices, efforts, and costs, however painful

they may be, would be perceived as QOL enhancing from

the prism of chronotopefication and futurization; and sub-

sistence consumers chronotopize and futurize QOL for the

whole extended household within the intergenerational

temporal space by focusing on stable input–outcome path-

ways. Based on the evidence, we propose QOL as chro-

notopefication and futurization framework (QOL-CFF).

The framework suggests that subsistence consumers con-

struct QOL as chronotope building, futurized and having

a symbolic effect. They consider current agonies as a foun-

dation for future building.

KEYWORDS

quality-of-life, subsistence consumers, subsistence marketplaces

Received:1January2019 Revised:15February2020 Accepted:30March2020

DOI: 10.1111/joca.12309

© 2020 American Council on Consumer Interests

J Consum Aff. 2021;55:59–86.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joca 59

1|INTRODUCTION

A mother and her two children have died within the first week of Sept 2018 in

Uttar Pradesh (India) allegedly of hunger and malnutrition…The family belongs to

the extremely poor Musahars, listed as Scheduled Castes (the lowest cast group).

Visuals from the village and the family's home tell a story of extreme poverty…The

family had a ration card (the targeted public distribution system, TPDS that subsi-

dizes food), but there seems to be no trace of any food in the one-room house”

(NDTV 2018).

Globally, a majority of consumers live in societies underscored by subsistence marketplaces

(Viswanathan and Rosa, 2007; Venugopal and Viswanathan, 2017). Research on subsistence

marketplaces adopts “a bottom-up approach that aims to build from a microlevel understanding

of individuals and communities in subsistence contexts rather than adopting a priori theoretical

stances”(Venugopal and Viswanathan, 2017, 342), while at the same time focusing on well-

being outcomes for subsistence consumers as part of its broader research program (Vis-

wanathan, 2017; Viswanathan et al., 2019). Responding to Viswanathan et al.'s (2019) call for a

nuanced understanding of subsistence consumers' lived experiences of well-being, this research

offers unique theoretical lenses (i.e., QOL-CFF Framework, to be discussed in the subsequent

sections) for exploring extremely impoverished consumers' well-being experiences.

The plight of consumers living in absolute poverty involving excessively harsh life condi-

tions on a global scale needs a renewed attention by consumer researchers (Hill and

Adrangi, 1999; Hill, 2002; Hill and Gaines, 2007; Martin and Hill, 2011; Chaplin et al., 2014;

Farrell and Hill, 2018; Schembri and Ghaddar, 2018; Chang, 2019; Hill, 2019). This task is

extremely important because it is becoming evident that the global trends of hunger and malnu-

trition, indisputable proxies of extreme poverty, are expected to further increase in the future

(FAO, 2018). Specifically, the conceptual and empirical perspectives on quality-of-life (QOL) of

extremely impoverished consumers living at a cusp of existence need immediate attention. In

India, such consumers are called subalterns who represent impoverished, mute, marginalized,

and unprivileged strata of the population living at the fringes of society and consumption cul-

ture (Spivak, 1988; Lal, 2001; Vikas et al., 2015). In fact, these people represent those layers of

population whose “voices”have not been systematically “heard”(Viswanathan, 2017). On the

complex multidimensional continuum ranging from survival to transformation (Venugopal and

Viswanathan, 2017), subalterns would be concentrated about the survival edge of the

continuum.

A number of consumer research scholars studied how renewed market dynamics influence

consumption in India (Baker and Palmer, 2006; Varman and Belk, 2008; Varman and

Costa, 2008; Viswanathan et al., 2009; Askegaard and Eckhardt, 2012; Eckhardt and Hum-

aira, 2012; Varman and Belk, 2012; Jagadale et al., 2018; Varman and Devi, 2018). Several

researchers focused on subaltern consumers in the context of health care (Varman and

Vikas, 2007a; 2007b), marketization and marketing (Vikas and Varman, 2007; Roy-

Chaudhuri, 2010b; Vikas et al., 2015), consumer behavior (Roy-Chaudhuri, 2010a; Jaiswal and

Gupta, 2015), lack of freedom (Varman and Vikas, 2007a; 2007b), material culture (Varman

and Belk, 2008), and public policy failures (Varman et al., 2012). Moreover, the recent literature

in consumer studies situated the issues facing subaltern consumers at the nexus of consump-

tion, morality, and governance (Khare and Varman, 2016, 2017; Belk and Ghoshal, 2017;

Jagadale et al., 2018; Varman and Devi, 2018). However, what is missing from the literature is a

60 JAGADALE ET AL.