Research Article in Marketing Theory “Inclusionary Labour: Theorizing…”
Please see below abstract from my colleague Hossain Shahriar and my new article in Marketing Theory:
Marketing and consumer research predominantly conceptualize inclusion and exclusion as dichotomous or merely coexisting, leaving their relationship undertheorized. This paper explores their dialectical interplay in market interactions through the experiences of migrant consumers. Drawing on Relational Dialectics Theory, we employ a contrapuntal methodological approach that integrates a semantic network analysis of the interpretive marketing and consumer research literature with a hermeneutic analysis of interviews with Bangladeshi immigrants in Sweden. Our findings identify four competing discourses that structure four key relational dimensions, generating corresponding experiences of inclusion and exclusion. These tensions persist as self-sustaining dynamics in which moments of inclusion and exclusion are relationally co-produced through ongoing discursive struggle. We conceptualize “inclusionary labor” as the disproportionate work that ethnically marginalized consumers undertake to be included. The study theorizes marketplace inclusion and exclusion as dialectically co-constitutive and reframes migrant consumer vulnerability as a relational condition that is often outsourced by markets to marginalized consumers.
To cite: Shahriar, H., & Ulver, S. (2025). Inclusionary labor: Theorizing the relationship between consumers’ inclusion and exclusion in the marketplace. Marketing Theory, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931251406915
