‍ My research examines how market systems shape public life by blurring the roles of citizens and consumers in online environments. I focus in particular on the socio-technical arrangements of digital platforms, from advertising infrastructures to the creator economy. These arrangements do more than enable commercial exchange: they set the agenda for public debate. This is especially important in a media environment where controversy and conflict can themselves become sources of economic value. My work, therefore, asks how consumption operates as a market-mediated form of public participation in society.‍

This question cannot be answered by treating consumption merely as a commercial act governed by economic factors. It requires a broader understanding of consumption as constitutive of contemporary social life: as a site where identities are formed, publics are assembled, categories are contested, and political conflicts are made visible. My research agenda advances this understanding in three related directions, which I have pursued chronologically throughout my research career.

1. First, I studied how markets are structured through consumer representations: how consumers are imagined, segmented, measured, and acted upon.

2. Second, I examined consumer collectives that affect market formation, focusing on how consumers themselves shape categories and challenge boundaries.

3. Third, I extend this market-systems perspective to disinformation, where digital advertising and platform monetization shape public knowledge, controversy, and democratic participation.

‍In the first stream, I examined how consumption is organized through socio-technical assemblages that (re)present consumers. The article, “From Consumers to Consumption: The Socio-Technical Assemblage of the ‘Persona’ in Market Segmentation,” published in the Journal of Business Research, studies personas as market devices that organize and direct managerial attention in markets. The article shows that consumers are produced as representations that not only guide how firms target them but also organize how people take part in consumption practices.

Socio-material representations have been a central concern throughout my research journey. My doctoral dissertation examined how marketers represent consumers in practice, and subsequent publications showed how market research turns consumers into actionable targets for managerial intervention, regardless of how consumers identify themselves. Across this work, I have been interested in how representations become operative: categories, metrics, and models are performative because they organize markets rather than merely describe them. This provides the foundation for my current research on digital platforms that operate through similar representations, such as rankings and engagement metrics, which then organize public participation.

‍If the first stream examines how market systems act on consumers through representations, the second turns to how consumers act back on market systems. In “Market Bifurcations in Boardsports: How Consumers Shape Markets Through Boundary Work,” published in the Journal of Business Research with Marian Makkar, we analyze how consumers created new sport categories through creative consumption. The article shows how consumers generate new variations of consumer practices that gradually become recognized as distinct markets. In doing so, the article extends my interest in market systems from the representations that organize consumers to the collective practices through which consumers reshape markets.

‍One example is my research about how the dynamics of consumer collectives generate new forms of consumption. The article “Moments of Luxury: Hedonic Escapism as a Luxury Experience” in the Journal of Business Research explores how consumers generate luxury experiences without a high price tag; instead, consumers co-create extraordinary experiences as a form of hedonic escapism from everyday life.

My third stream brings these concerns together in the context of digital platforms. Platform markets depend on representations of attention: they capture user activity, classify it, price it, and thus, make it actionable for advertisers. In such systems, controversy and conflict are not merely social problems; they are commercially valuable forms of engagement. This is the basis for my research on the consumption and circulation of disinformation on social media. Rather than treating disinformation solely as misleading content, I analyze it as an outcome of market systems in which societal polarization is profitable. In other words, disinformation can be understood as an unintended yet consequential outcome of attention-based platform economies, in which advertising technologies and engagement metrics reward incendiary content.

‍My 2025 book, Market-Oriented Disinformation Research: Digital Advertising, Disinformation and Fake News on Social Media, consolidates this third stream of research. Published by Routledge, the book develops a market-systems account of disinformation by showing how advertising and monetization technologies turn attention into a measurable and tradable resource. From this perspective, misleading content circulates because platform markets monetize conflict and polarization.

I have extended this market-oriented account of disinformation into consumer society research by examining how misleading content circulates through identity-driven controversies. In “Disinformation and Echo Chambers: How Disinformation Circulates in Social Media Through Identity-Driven Controversies,” published in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Tomas Nilsson and I show how disinformation thrives when consumers build and circulate adversarial narratives against real or imaginary antagonists. This paper received the 2025 Thomas C. Kinnear/Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Award for the most significant marketing contribution to public policy in the last three years, demonstrating how disinformation is sustained through identity projects.

‍Moreover, my article “Echo Chamber Dynamics on Social Media,” published in New Media & Society, advances this agenda by theorizing echo chambers as socio-technical machines that provoke reactions and extend controversies beyond online groups into wider offline publics. Together, these publications consolidate a research approach that connects disinformation research, market studies, and consumer society by showing how platform markets amplify conflictive forms of consumption.