ABSTRACT
Are markets capable of nurturing genuine communities? If so, what do these communities look like, what functions do they serve, and what consumption phenomena do they revolve around? These questions have occupied consumer researchers over the past decade (e.g., Cova, 1997; Cova and Cova, 2001, 2002; Kates, 2002; Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001; Schouten and McAlexander, 1995; Schulz, 2006). For a long time, the received view was that anomie, dislocation, and disconnectedness were the results of modernity’s fatal assault on the pre-modern community. Recent consumer research has increasingly acknowledged that the marketplace seems to be a place where new types of communities spring to life. In this chapter, one such community – the Stockholm Brat enclave, an exclusive group of young, affluent consumers living their lives in the fast lane, and frequenting the trendiest nightclubs in Stockholm – will be looked at in more detail.
