About Conflict Market

The “Conflict Market” was introduced by Ulver in a Journal of Consumer Culture article in 2022, and is theorized as today’s preferred “business model” where market actors need to orchestrate and escalate affected conflict between consumers to get attention. This ‘capitalization on conflict’ is algorithmically manipulated online, but may collapse into real world polarization and even violence. More philosophically, this ongoing performance is theorized to lead to a more de-dialectic model of social change as compared to Hegel’s dialectic.

Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Ulver will from 2023-2025 develop this theoretical model empirically, and explore contexts where this conflict market dynamic is manifested.

Sofia Ulver is a PhD, Consumer researcher and Associate Professor at the School of Economics and Business Management, Lund University, Sweden. As a researcher in academia her research critically analyses how consumer culture(s) operate in relation to the market system and social trends in society.