The role of consumer-entrepreneurs in the context of tribes

Research on consumer tribes, creative consumption, and consumer-driven market emergence have widely recognized the creative and productive role of consumers in generating symbolic and material outputs. This literature points also to the interplay between the network environment which consumers are part of (i.e community and tribes) and their capability to envision and activate entrepreneurial projects. This working paper develop an ethnographic approach to understand how consumer-entrepreneurs construct, develop and negotiate their identity and role combining market instances and social bonding sensitivities within their business projects and in relation to their consumer tribes. Our findings will allow to tackle with the consumer entrepreneurship phenomenon from two intertwined endogenous and exogenous perspectives (the differences between consumer entrepreneurship stemming from a tribe/community or referring to it for its development) that will contribute to advance knowledge in the consumer tribes and in the consumer-driven market emergence conceptual domains of Consumer Culture Theory.