Unpacking disposal': introduction to the special issue
Traditionally, marketing and consumer researchers have focused more on how people acquire goods, rather than on how they dispose of them. Disposition remains a somewhat neglected and under-theorised area in consumer research. This special issue of the Journal of Consumer Behaviour revisits debates surrounding disposal in attempts to unpack their significance for studies of consumption. We see the study of disposal as important for a range of both substantive and theoretical reasons. Perhaps, most importantly, a study of disposal practices and processes speaks to debates surrounding sustainability. As we move into a postproduction society we are increasingly concerned with dealing with the surfeit of goods created by over-production. Theoretically speaking, editing this special issue on 'Unpacking Disposal' has proved even more inspiring than we first envisaged. A variety of important theoretical questions were raised by the papers we accepted (and those we sadly could not include). We do not have enough space here to do justice to these questions, instead we have chosen to focus on issues of space, transition and identity; and the inter-relationships between them.
The topic of disposal, focused as it is on the 'movement of things', foregrounds issues of space which seem to be under-theorised within consumer research to date. In particular, we see a theorisation of disposal as central to better understanding the role of different spaces within processes of commoditisation. The common assumption in marketing and consumer research has been that goods follow a linear trajectory of decline and devaluation as goods move through spaces of production to spaces of consumption and, finally, to those spaces of disposal. As the papers in this issue show, however, disposal can often result in the re-birth and re-valuation of goods. Such movement of goods, as they pass in and out of different contexts and between owners, underlines the point that 'objects have lives' (Appadurai, 1986). Conceptualising disposal in terms of 'moving things along ' (Gregson et al., 2007), and thus extending their lives rather than terminating them, highlights circularity in the movement of goods. This movement may involve a shift of the goods outside the home sphere through gifting, or the