Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the Journal of Consumer Research: A Curation and Research Agenda

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has become ubiquitous in public and academic discourse. This is despite ongoing contests over definitions and the lack of a clear consensus about the relative importance (and even the appropriate order) of each component. For our purposes, diversity refers broadly to real or perceived physical or socio-cultural differences attributed to people and the representation of these differences in research, market spaces, and organizations. Equity refers to fairness in the treatment of people in terms of both opportunity and outcome. Inclusion refers to creating a culture that fosters belonging and incorporation of diverse groups and is usually operationalized as opposition to exclusion or marginalization. Taken together, DEI is typically accompanied by an axiological orientation toward procedural and distributive justice in organizations and institutions.

In this curation, we highlight representative research published in the Journal of Consumer Research that directly and indirectly explores DEI issues primarily along the following axes of difference illustrated in figure 1: gender, age, and body; race and ethnicity; social class and social status; and religion and cultural identity. These, in many respects, define the visible contours of everyday life. They are at least representative and may not be exhaustive. In the figure, we depict them as distinct but connected “stations” where subjectivities and structures collide and cluster intersectionally, rather than as flat positions of longitude and latitude situated in Euclidian space. We also illustrate two overlapping lenses that focus attention on specific features of DEI’s ontology. Each promotes a situated perspective on the axes, with the “Marketplace structure, stigma, and consumer vulnerability” lens calibrated to structural issues associated with disparity and fairness in the marketplace. The “Consumer identity and agency, mobilization, and autonomy” lens is calibrated to agentic issues associated with identity and practice in everyday life. Although each lens promotes a situated perspective, what they bring into view is neither predetermined nor fixed. Either can bring into view a marketplace premised on equality that promotes well-being or one premised on inequality that promotes oppression.

A research curation necessarily involves imposing order on a disciplinary literature. But we begin by underlining our intent not to single out the small handful of articles we include as exclusive markers of quality. Rather, among the many that have contributed to a rich conversation in the journal, we highlight a representative set that exemplifies and draws the reader’s attention to certain features of each axis in figure 1. Given limited space, we provide a more comprehensive listing of representative work in the journal that touches on DEI issues in table 1. In addition, the reader will note that many articles we highlight are situated along multiple axes simultaneously, even when our discussion focuses on only one. We trust that upon reading this curation, the potential and generativity of existing DEI-oriented consumer research in the journal will be evident, as will be the need for consumer researchers to continue breaking new ground. Given its importance and seemingly natural connection to consumption and market systems, more research that cuts across numerous intersecting axes of difference and intentionally brings DEI implications to the fore is welcome and needed.

GENDER, AGE, AND BODY

We begin by highlighting Scaraboto and Fischer's (2013) work on Fatshionistas, which takes an inclusive axiological position in understanding the relationship between gender, body size, and consumption. Instead of problematizing women with heavier bodies as lesser consumers whose bodies need to be remedied by weight loss or dietary changes to participate in the market, the authors start with the premise that the market provides inadequate offerings for underserved consumers. They demonstrate how the stigmatization of body weight—exacerbated by beauty norms, fashion systems, and medicalized discourses that exclusively pathologize high body mass—contributes to the underserving of larger-sized women in fashion markets.

The Fatshionistas’ market-changing project is notable because underserved consumers routinely choose not to pursue further market inclusion, due in part to internalized stigma and attenuated access to empowering cultural resources or strategies. But rather than accept inadequate market offerings and limit themselves to the “plus-size” niche, the participants in this study utilize their cultural and social capital to mobilize a collective identity and appropriate logics from adjacent fields such as the Fat Acceptance Movement to transform mainstream market offerings into something they could accept. Of course, such a remedy will not be available to every underserved consumer who is potentially stigmatized on any number of bases. The Fatshionistas seek to transform markets based on relative social advantages that exist in contradistinction to their stigmatized bodies.

Barnhart and Peñaloza (2013) explore age as a relatively neglected identity that is often invisible in research and practice, despite increasingly older populations around the world. They show that consumption is never a solitary pursuit for people with diminished physical capabilities (due to aging, disability, or both). They investigate the role of what is often an ensemble of family members, service providers, and friends in providing support to aging adults as they lose independence. The ensemble shapes and co-produces aged consumer identities and inscribes and affirms consumption meanings. The authors show how this co-production of aged identity is fraught with contest and negotiation, based on tensions between aging consumers and their care ensemble, as well as misalignments between old age as a subject position and aging as an identity project shaped by dominant cultural discourses and understandings about “getting old.” They show that despite a cultural shift toward seeing aging more positively, the marketplace still largely constructs it as a stigmatized identity. They also highlight the ways that care can appear to enable aged consumers while actually repressing or discouraging them and stripping them of agency. They discuss ways co-consumers (and co-producers) of care ensembles can generate supportive, dignified, and positive meanings while providing assistance. In understanding the practices of consumers who may frequently need interpersonal or market-based assistance, one should include and acknowledge joint consumption and intersubjective production of consumer identities.

In sum, this research finds that consumers’ gender, body type, or age may be treated as stigmatizing attributes that influence their marketplace experiences. Women in particular face unique and often magnified challenges based on body type norms. Furthermore, personal characteristics like disability or elderly status can diminish an individual’s transformative capacity by rendering them not merely less apt to be respected but also dependent on others’ resources to participate in the marketplace.

RACE AND ETHNICITY

A prominent perspective on race and ethnicity in DEI-oriented consumer research examines it through the lens of disadvantage or vulnerability. In that vein, Bone, Christensen, and Williams (2014) identify marketplace restrictions experienced by Black and Hispanic consumers seeking financial services. The authors lay bare the “systemic, chronic, and uncontrollable” restrictions on options these consumers confront based on service providers’ race and ethnic bias and the corresponding downstream impact on well-being and judgments about the marketplace. They employ a multi-method approach to uncovering insights into the experiences of Black and Hispanic consumers, who are not widely represented in consumer behavior research. This includes an innovative “mystery shopper” field study approach, where a multi-racial and multi-ethnic group of study confederates visit banks as loan seekers. They find that non-White (vs. White) loan seekers are treated more poorly by loan officers in objective terms. They were asked to provide more documentation and offered less information in response to their queries, acts of discretion with direct implications for the potential outcomes of the loan application process. They reveal the psychological impact of such restrictions on consumers through a series of depth interviews, in which non-White (vs. White) consumers correctly perceive a subordinated position that limits their ability to pursue self-directed goals and whatever freedoms the market might provide. They conduct an experiment to identify the underlying psychological mechanisms of this perception, namely diminished self-esteem and autonomy. That is, when Black and Hispanic consumers experience racial and ethnic discrimination in financial services, they liken the loan seeking experience to a hopeless battle. As decades of research have demonstrated, this harms their financial prospects and well-being. We note that discrimination in financial services also has the potential to harm the bank’s brand.

Cultural identity is another perspective on DEI in consumer research. Using that lens, Rodas, John, and Torelli (2021) examine the perception of bicultural consumers, who internalize two cultural identities (e.g., Hispanic-American, Asian-American). The authors propose that bicultural (vs. monocultural) consumers will find “paradox brands,” which reflect contradictory meanings (e.g., a brand personality that is both rugged and sophisticated), relatively more appealing. In a series of experiments, including a field study of Latino and White participants in their respective community markets, they find that bicultural consumers tend to favor paradox brands. This preference for paradox brands is driven by cognitive flexibility. That is, bicultural consumers can be more or less cognitively flexible (with more or less integration among their multiple identities). As cognitive flexibility and cultural identity integration increase for bicultural consumers, so does their preference for paradox brands. For monocultural consumers (e.g., non-Hispanic White), priming cognitive flexibility also increases their favorability toward paradox brands. The underlying process provides important insights into how the lived experiences of bicultural consumers shape their perceptions of marketplace offerings. That is, bicultural consumers, based on internalizing multiple (sometimes contradictory) cultural identities, value and appreciate brands with multiple identities.

SOCIAL CLASS AND SOCIAL STATUS

Social class position is in part created and maintained by consumption practices that vary across groups and cluster within groups based on similar assumptions about how consumption generates value. Consumer research on social class and status has largely operated as part of two distinct but overlapping traditions. One focuses on the generation, maintenance, and expression of social class boundaries in consumption, typically operationalized as status. The other focuses on the social psychological and behavioral implications of social class groupings, typically operationalized as clusters of similar perceptions and attitudes. Both traditions incorporate direct (e.g., income and wealth) and indirect (e.g., postal codes, education level, and occupational status) measures of social rank.

Saatcioglu and Ozanne (2013) explore the generation and maintenance of social class boundaries in everyday life through the habitus, a set of mostly embodied dispositions that functions similarly to a milieu. They uncover five status groups localized among residents of a mobile-home park organized around a distinct set of largely embodied moral dispositions (i.e., Nesters, Homesteaders, and Community Builders; Reluctant Emigrants and Outcasts). These dispositions adopted by park residents, taken together, constitute the habitus, which helps create and reinforce moral identity in the park and in the community immediately outside it. The mobile-home park, perhaps the quintessential residential marker of working-class poverty in the United States, is widely stigmatized as low status. Each moral disposition serves as field-dependent capital at the park, marking distinctions between those who are otherwise stigmatized. Unlike others, field-dependent capital is not convertible to economic, social, or other types of capital when transferred to other settings. Instead, its purpose is to help people navigate social life in a specific setting. Its value to the bearer is, in this instance, confined to the park. And it shapes and is shaped by residents’ mostly home-focused consumption practices. They construct and affirm moral identities by engaging in social comparisons of field-dependent capital with neighbors in the park and the surrounding community. The authors remind us that the relationship between consumption and social class (or status group) is not deterministic. Rather, consumption and social class are mutually constituting.

The literature does, of course, at times, demonstrate regularities in consumption behavior by social class group. For instance, Yan, Keh, and Chen (2021) demonstrate that demand for utilitarian “green” products (e.g., energy efficient light bulbs) is highest among the middle class. They reveal an underlying connection between social class and demand driven by a tension between need for differentiation and need for assimilation. Notably, that tension only emerges when neither need is dominant, and this occurs most prevalently among the middle class. By contrast, a single need tends to dominate among the so-called upper and lower classes. Consumers classified as upper class, whose need for differentiation is dominant, find green consumption too assimilating. Consumers classified as lower class, whose need for assimilation is dominant, find it too differentiating. A dominant need attenuates demand for green products. It is only among members of the middle class, where no single need is dominant, that a legitimate tension emerges that generates a dual motivation to satisfy both needs that green consumption satisfies.

RELIGION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

Consumer researchers have long studied the nexus of consumption, markets, and religion. We highlight Appau, Ozanne, and Klein’s (2020) study of Ghanaian converts to Pentecostalism, as an exemplar of research situated at that nexus. The Ghanaian context is especially well-suited to generate insights into this phenomenon because it is both a highly marketized and an exceptionally competitive religious consumptionscape. It also operates with very different notions of personhood than the fully-agentic, utility-maximizing consumer who is largely taken for granted in marketing and consumer research set in North America and Western Europe. In many places outside those settings, personhood is conceptualized in dividual rather than individual terms. The dividual is a microcosm of social relationships, a site where they all meet. The authors use the dividual to explain the permanence among Ghanaian Pentecostal converts of what is generally thought to be a transitional phase—from secular to “born again” life. They conceptually unpack the paradoxical notion of “permanent liminality” among converts, which they experience as a state of being an unfinished dividual, caught between a desired and an undesired in/dividuality.

BREAKING NEW GROUND IN DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION IN CONSUMER RESEARCH

Although it is obvious to the point of trite to state that the Journal of Consumer Research needs additional research on DEI, it is not our intent in this curation to frame this entirely as a problem to be solved. Rather, it is to show, by dimensionalizing and highlighting well-regarded, recently published JCR, that DEI-oriented consumer research has taken institutional root at the journal and to point to opportunities to continue its cultivation. In table 2, we present opportunities at each axis in the form of potential gaps in current knowledge, which shapes a collection of corresponding sample research questions that might guide future work. We note straightaway that some important consumption domains remain all but entirely absent in the journal. For example, more research is needed on human sexuality, and there is opportunity for more work on disability and diminished physical capacity. We need to know much more about a diverse range of consumption-oriented identity projects as people navigate the marketplace. In addition, consumer research needs deeper exploration of subject positions at various intersections, some of which exacerbate marketplace challenges and some of which consolidate privilege (see Güliz Ger’s curation on intersectionality published in 2018). Nevertheless, we remain excited about the potential for emergent DEI research to transform the field. To generate discussion, ideas, and future research streams, we propose a selection of key topics at each axis where additional research could address significant gaps in current knowledge about consumers and consumption and point readers to a more extensive treatment in table 2.

GENDER, AGE, AND THE BODY: GAPS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In this historical moment, everyone is grappling with the profound challenges to the discourses on gender expression and the body that has emerged in socio-cultural life. Contested alterations to taken for granted aspects of gender and the body are intensely multi-polar, far too complex and liquid for traditional dyadic notions of the masculine and feminine. They are as subversive as non-gendered pronouns and as radical as gender reassignment. Consumers’ aging journey is fluid in other ways, and they navigate changes to health, financial and social status, and balancing their corresponding needs (e.g., reduced stigma, increased dignity, using technological resources to support these needs and continue to make meaningful contributions to society). The implications of these challenges for consumers and consumption, for marketers, for policy makers, and every other possible market systems stakeholder are widely acknowledged to be profound but are at present scarcely theorized. Research questions that would explore these implications should not be hard to craft, but we would point to classic research questions around role portrayal and representation in media and popular culture as being of immediate importance.

RACE AND ETHNICITY: GAPS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

As many scholars have noted, products and brands commonly draw signifying power from the socio-cultural world that can help draw attention and gain mindshare. They embed themselves in various consumer collectives (e.g., brand communities, subcultures of consumption, tribes) in ways that can grant them an aura of authenticity. At moments, consumers and other actors oppose and resist their extraction of socio-cultural value through what they justly describe as cultural appropriation. It is not uncommon, however, for accusations of appropriation to operate as a derogatory term rather than a concept with analytical power. We believe that important theoretical and conceptual work remains to be done on cultural appropriation as a phenomenon. What does it mean? What are its boundaries? More importantly, through what processes and practices does it occur?

SOCIAL CLASS AND SOCIAL STATUS: GAPS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Marketplace inclusion has long stood as a taken for granted objective for vulnerable and so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers. Since the consumer disadvantage studies of the 1970s and 1980s, increased marketplace literacy in various forms (economic, financial, technological, and literal) has been widely touted as the foundation upon which any other interventions intended to remediate vulnerability and disadvantage must build. Our intent is certainly not to disparage any such efforts. Rather, it is to add that prevailing levels of social class inequality in many parts of the world simply demand more focused attention on the inequality-generating actions of businesses and elites. Where that has traditionally been the province of scholars interested in what happens on the factory floor, the marketplace has long been an independent site of inequality production. In the neoliberal era, defined in no small part by financial sector dominance over the state, consumers are commonly made vulnerable or disadvantaged by structural features of their communities and the predatory actions of marketers rather than by their limited stores of knowledge. We believe research that explores the inequality-generating and reducing practices of marketers and public policy makers remains as relevant today as ever.

RELIGION AND CULTURAL IDENTITY: GAPS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, some evidence from the United States suggests that the lines separating religious theology and nationalism are blurred. Their intersection and interaction typically reduce the inclusion of the vulnerable and underrepresented. For instance, religious extremism is associated with negative attitudes toward equity in healthcare and education. Ideological resistance to equity and inclusion raises more general questions about the connection between ideology, religious identity, nationalism, and consumption. Namely, what is the relationship between contemporary nationalistic and religious extremist movements and self—or cultural—expression via consumption? That is, what role does consumption play for movement organizations and adherents, respectively, as a problem whose resolution mobilizes resources and action versus a means of submission or subversion?

ASKING PRESSING QUESTIONS AT INTERSECTIONS AND BEYOND

Lastly, we ask scholars to tackle big picture questions that rest on the intersections of the four themes above and deal with macro issues and society as a whole. We note that the fluidity across all these axes must be addressed in future research. As more discussions about DEI takes place in academia, policy spaces, and boardrooms, how can scholarly work develop frameworks and tools to help society be more inclusive? How can media representations of diversity translate into inclusion and equity, and combat harmful stigmas around skin color, body size, and aging? How can we transform beauty and fashion industries? How can we provide dignified and accessible essential services to all members of society without predatory design?

We end the curation on an emancipatory note. We hope that researchers and practitioners will be mindful of our contributions to marketplace exclusion and stigma in practice. Too often we problematize identities that fall outside societal norms and offer consumption-oriented remedies that purport to “solve” already marginalized identities. These can push consumers toward risky (or harmful) products such as weight loss remedies, skin lightening and “age defying” creams, conversion therapy, plastic surgery. We can strive to conceptualize and construct a marketplace that is a celebratory and empowering space. This requires a more egalitarian and pluralist approach to understanding and serving consumers who are ascribed minority status, more participatory forms of research and data collection, and ensuring that amongst researchers and practitioners we also strive for representation, equity, and inclusion.

Zeynep Arsel ([email protected]) is a Concordia University Research Chair in Consumption, Markets, and Society at Concordia University, 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. West, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada.

David Crockett ([email protected]) is a Professor of Marketing and a Moore Research Fellow at the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, 1014 Greene St., Columbia, SC 29209, USA.

Maura L. Scott ([email protected]) is the Persis E. Rockwood Professor of Marketing at the Florida State University, 821 Academic Way, Tallahassee, FL 32305, USA. The authors greatly appreciate the help, guidance, and involvement of June Cotte and the support of the entire JCR Editorial Team. Author names are listed alphabetically, and all authors contributed to this curation equally. The authors thank the journal’s editors Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen, and Stacy Wood for granting the opportunity to write this curation.

This curation was invited by editors Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen, and Stacy Wood.

REFERENCES

ARTICLES IN CURATION

Frustrated Fatshionistas: An Institutional Theory Perspective on Consumer Quests for Greater Choice in Mainstream Markets

Daiane Scaraboto and Eileen Fischer

DOI: 10.1086/668298

Volume 39, Issue 6, April 2013

Why and how do marginalized consumers mobilize to seek greater inclusion in and more choice from mainstream markets? We develop answers to these questions drawing on institutional theory and a qualitative investigation of Fatshionistas, plus-sized consumers who want more options from mainstream fashion marketers. Three triggers for mobilization are posited: development of a collective identity, identification of inspiring institutional entrepreneurs, and access to mobilizing institutional logics from adjacent fields. Several change strategies that reinforce institutional logics while unsettling specific institutionalized practices are identified. Our discussion highlights diverse market change dynamics that are likely when consumers are more versus less legitimate in the eyes of mainstream marketers and in instances where the changes consumers seek are more versus less consistent with prevailing institutions and logics.

Who Are You Calling Old? Negotiating Old Age Identity in the Elderly Consumption Ensemble

Michelle Barnhart and Lisa Peñaloza

DOI: 10.1086/668536

Volume 39, Issue 6, April 2013

As the elderly population increases, more family, friends, and paid service providers assist them with consumption activities in a group that the authors conceptualize as the elderly consumption ensemble (ECE). Interviews with members of eight ECEs demonstrate consumption in advanced age as a group phenomenon rather than an individual one, provide an account of how the practices and discourses of the ECE's division of consumption serve as a means of knowing someone is old and positioning him/her as an old subject, and detail strategies through which older consumers negotiate their age identity when it conflicts with this positioning. This research (1) illuminates ways in which consumer agency in identity construction is constrained in interpersonal interactions, (2) demonstrates old identity as implicated in consumption in relation to and distinction from physiological ability and old subject position, and (3) updates the final stages of the Family Life Cycle model.

Rejected, Shackled, and Alone: The Impact of Systemic Restricted Choice on Minority Consumers' Construction of Self

Sterling A. Bone, Glenn L. Christensen, and Jerome D. Williams

DOI: 10.1086/676689

Volume 41, Issue 2, August 2014

This research investigates the experience of systemic restricted choice and its impact on self-concept among racial and ethnic minority consumers seeking financing. Choosing loans is an involved consumer choice journey, and encountering systemic, chronic, and uncontrollable restrictions on choice at any level of the goal/choice hierarchy limits and even prohibits minorities' ability to make desired choices. Across a multimethod investigation, these three studies demonstrate that minorities experiencing systemic restricted choice endure deleterious impacts to self-concept, including framing the self as fettered, alone, discriminated, and subservient, as well as marked reductions in self-esteem, self-autonomy, and self-efficacy. Minority consumers also frame themselves as striving in a world of limited resources and fighting uphill, often losing battles. Juxtaposing the experiences of racial/ethnic minorities against the choice journeys of educationally and economically similar white consumers puts those minority experiences in sharp relief. The theoretical and transformative consumer research implications of these findings are discussed.

Building Brands for the Emerging Bicultural Market: The Appeal of Paradox Brands

Maria A Rodas, Deborah Roedder John, and Carlos J. Torelli

DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucab037

Volume 48, Issue 4, December 2021

Bicultural consumers now represent a third of the US population and are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States. This shift in consumer markets presents a challenge for marketers as they try to design brand strategies to serve this important group. In this article, the authors show that certain types of brands, specifically paradox brands that incorporate contradictory brand meanings, are particularly appealing to bicultural consumers. Results from seven studies reveal that bicultural consumers evaluate paradox brands more favorably and choose paradox brands more than traditional brands without contradictions. Furthermore, bicultural consumers exhibit more favorable evaluations and greater choice of paradox brands than do monocultural consumers. These cultural differences are attributable to greater cognitive flexibility found among biculturals, particularly those who adopt an acculturation strategy of integrating their different cultural identities. Greater cognitive flexibility, in turn, prompts stronger engagement with a paradox brand, which contributes to more favorable brand evaluations and choice. Contributions of this research for understanding bicultural consumers, marketing to bicultural consumers, and directions for future research are discussed.

Moral Habitus and Status Negotiation in a Marginalized Working-Class Neighborhood

Bige Saatcioglu and Julie L. Ozanne

DOI: 10.1086/671794

Volume 40, Issue 4, December 2013

Examinations of the moral and ethical dimensions in identity construction are scant in consumer research. This ethnography of a trailer-park neighborhood investigates how different moral dispositions shape low-income, working-class residents' consumption practices and status negotiations. Drawing from Bourdieu's conceptualization of habitus and cultural capital, the authors extend this theory by foregrounding the moral aspects of habitus and demonstrate how morally oriented worldviews are enacted through consumption practices and social evaluations within everyday communities. The study reveals five moral identities that shape the residents' social construction of status within the microcultural context of a trailer park. These findings point to the multiplicity and richness of social-class-based dispositions as well as the importance of studying micro-level contexts to better understand macrodynamics.

Assimilating and Differentiating: The Curvilinear Effect of Social Class on Green Consumption

Li Yan, Hean Tat Keh, and Jiemiao Chen

DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucaa041

Volume 47, Issue 6, April 2021

Building on optimal distinctiveness theory, this research examines the effects of social class on green consumption. Across six studies, we find a curvilinear effect of social class on green consumption, with the middle class having greater propensity for green consumption compared to the lower and upper classes. This effect can be explained by tension between need for assimilation (NFA) and need for differentiation (NFD) that varies among the three social classes in establishing their optimally distinctive identities. The lower class has a dominant NFA, the upper class has a dominant NFD, and the middle class has dual motivation for assimilation and differentiation. Concomitantly, green consumption has the dual function of assimilation and differentiation. The middle class perceives green consumption as simultaneously assimilating and differentiating, which satisfies their dual motivation and enhances their propensity for green consumption. By contrast, the lower class perceives the differentiation function of green consumption as contradicting their dominant NFA, and the upper class perceives the assimilation function as contradicting their dominant NFD, which lower both their propensities for green consumption. Furthermore, these effects are moderated by consumers’ power distance belief. These novel findings have significant theoretical and practical implications on building a more sustainable society.

Understanding Difficult Consumer Transitions: The In/Dividual Consumer in Permanent Liminality

Samuelson Appau, Julie L. Ozanne, and Jill G. Klein

DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucaa010

Volume 47, Issue 2, August 2020

Some life transitions are difficult and prolonged, such as becoming an independent adult, forming a family, or adopting healthy consumption habits. Permanent liminality describes transitions that can span years and even a lifetime with no anticipated end. To understand how consumers are caught in permanent liminality, we examine how Pentecostal converts consume religious services in their difficult transition from the secular “world” to Pentecostalism. We draw on the concept of in/dividual personhood to explain how the Pentecostal dividual is coconstituted in an endless movement between the undesired “worldly” in/dividual and the contiguous incorporation into the desired Pentecostal in/dividual and structure. Pentecostals’ permanent liminality thus involves ongoing cycles of separation and incorporation within zones of indeterminacy, in which neither separation nor incorporation is ever completed. This theoretical framework explains the unfinished transition of Pentecostal converts as contested dividuals. We extend this theoretical explanation for future research on liquid modernity and consumers caught in permanent liminality.