The marketization of everyday life

With the expansion of web platforms such as Craigslist.org, Etsy.com or Vizeat.com, people are encouraged to commodify their personal possessions as well as their domestic or leisure practices. This is for example the case of creators who sell their products (jewellery, pots…) on Etsy.com. It is also the case of foodies who commodify their services - homemade meals, cooking classes - thanks to online platforms. 

This project explores the marketisation of practices previously considered as recreational or domestic, such as cooking, knitting, doing handicrafts, caring, etc. It aims at contributing to the emerging field of studies on “platform capitalism”by providing case studies of mostly female domestic practices marketised thanks to the Internet.

The project gathers academics from different backgrounds (sociology, economics, management, communication, psychology) who will engage in a series of meetings in order to examine the individual and collective effects of the marketisation of everyday life practices: who are the people engaged in such activities? How do they combine family and work time? What are the consequences of the newly marketised activities on their social status but also on the social status of the activities?

The participants have already conducted fieldwork (semi-structured interviews, observations, quantitative surveys) related to the proposal in their own research. The purpose of the workshop is to reanalyse these existing data through a common perspective in order to extract common features and to enrich the analysis through interdisciplinary dialogue.

The novelty of the project stems from the focus on domestic or leisure activities as a lens to analyse the transformations of capitalism. The encountering of separate bodies of literature – economics and sociology on capitalism and markets and work on the one hand, and on leisure, domesticity and gender on the other hand – will improve understanding of the current transformations of capitalism.