Consumer Entrapment

Fredah G Mwiti, Maria G Piacentini, Andrew Pressey

Journal of Consumer Research · Tue

Abstract

Why do consumers sometimes remain trapped in the very practices and communities that once helped them? Consumer practice research has largely emphasized the enabling outcomes of sustained practice participation, with less attention given to how those same practices can become entrapping. This article explores how consumer entrapment emerges within interconnected collective practices. Drawing on an ethnographic study ofChama, a community-based savings and support group in Kenya, it integrates practice theory with Hodder’s theory of entanglement. The study identifies three mechanisms (prefiguration, socialization, and entrenchment) through which participation generates commitments, dependencies, and obligations that produce recurring practice misalignments. Consumers continually work to realign these misalignments, yet under specific conditions, these efforts reproduce the contingencies that sustain participation while progressively deepening entrapment. The findings reveal a central tension: efforts to restore practice alignment can sustain what consumers value while simultaneously reproducing the interdependencies through which consumer entrapment emerges.

Keywords

practice theory, consumer collectives, practice misalignment, practice realignment, entanglement, entrapment

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