Speaker: Professor Finola Kerrigan
Title: Market System Curation: Placing Care at the Heart of Markets
Date: Monday, 20 October 2025
Time: 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Venue: Building 24, Copland, Room 1106, RSM Seminar Room
Toni Eagar is the host of this visitor
Abstract:
Amid growing imperatives for markets to advance equity, inclusion, and sustainability, this paper asks: how can markets become more caring? We explore how market system transformation can emerge through small-scale, care-centered interventions that foster cooperation and reconfigure relationships among market actors. Drawing on a longitudinal, qualitative ethnographic study, we conceptualize market system curation as a two-stage process that enables the diffusion of care within markets. First, we show that interventions begin at the micro-level through care aesthetics, everyday practices that embody and signal care. These practices are then scaled via care infrastructures, allowing care to be integrated more systemically. We argue that such gentle, care-driven disruptions offer a more viable blueprint for sustainable futures than attempts to radically overturn or hybridize dominant market systems. We offer implications for marketers seeking to reconcile market and care systems and contribute to the development of non-extractive market forms.
Bio:
Finola Kerrigan is Professor of Marketing in the Department of Marketing at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham where she teaches and researches marketing and consumption.
She has published her research in a range of international journals, edited collections and is the author of Film Marketing (2010/2017/forthcoming 2026). She is the co-editor in chief of Marketing Theory. Drawing on a range of qualitative and creative research methods, Finola has researched subjects on branding, digital identity, ethics and the incorporation of new technologies into marketing practice and how this impacts consumers. With a specific focus on researching the cultural and creative industries, Finola centres the arts both in terms of arts-based methods and as a context for her research. As well as her academic research, which has been funded by the ESRC, EPSCR, British Academy and a range of charitable organisations. Finola has completed several industry research projects in collaboration with public bodies and commercial companies and is a Trustee of the Jasmin Vardimon Company.