Date: 11 November 2026, Wednesday
Time: 10.30 – 11.30
Place: MA-330
“Counterfactual Consumer Identity –
Market Reorientations in Male Midlife Crisis”
by
Thomas Robinson
City St George’s, University of London
Abstract
Consumer research commonly assumes that identity is maintained through narrative processes that establish coherence and continuity across time. Drawing on an interpretive study (n=38) of men experiencing midlife crisis, we identify a process of counterfactual consumer identity construction. Rather than repairing identity through narrative linkage between past, present, and future selves, consumers actively imagine alternative timelines rooted in past critical life junctures and unrealised possibilities to reassess new futures. Consumers subsequently import other selves from alternate timelines, which selectively incorporate new dispositions, practices, skills, and consumption activities into their present lives appearing as sudden and dramatic life changes. We argue that counterfactual consumer identity contributes a distinct mode of identity work characterised by lateral temporal orientation to existing past, present and future dimensions of identity wok. This establishes a more episodic concept of self than currently recognised in consumer research. This leads to the theorization of novel processes of market-mediated reorientation and possessions.
Bio
Dr Thomas Derek Robinson is Senior Lecturer in Marketing and until recently Associate Dean of Student Experience at Bayes Business School, City St George’s, University of London. His research sits at the intersection of Consumer Culture Theory, institutional theory, economic sociology, and interpretive consumer research, investigating how markets organise human and non-human existence through time, systems of governance, and processes of identity formation.
Robinson has developed a distinctive program of scholarship examining the role of temporality as a cultural, institutional, and existential force in markets. His work explores how consumers, organisations, technologies, and ecological systems negotiate competing understandings of the past, present, and future, and how these temporal struggles shape legitimacy, power, transformation, and social change. Across a sustained body of conceptual and qualitative research, he has contributed new influential theoretical contributions for understanding consumer temporality, market legitimacy, consumer responsibilization, identity transformation, and sustainability.