JIBS Doctoral Student Wins Best Competitive Paper Award

Benjamin Hartmann, with Caroline Wiertz and Eric J. Arnould, have been awarded the Nicosia Award for Best Competitive Paper at the 2011 Association for Consumer Research (ACR) Conference.

Benjamin Hartmann is a Doctoral Candidate in Business Administration at JIBS, department of Marketing and Logistics and Media Management and Transformation Centre. Caroline Wiertz is a Reader in Marketing at Cass Business School, London, and Eric J. Arnould is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern Denmark.

The award for the paper, entitled “Practice Consumption and Value Creation: Advancing the Practice Theoretical Ontology of Consumption Community,” was given on October 15th at the ACR Conference 2011, held in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. With over 1000 participants, the ACR conference is the world's largest conference on consumer research and this year more than 400 competitive papers entered the competition.

The award committee highlighted several strengths of the paper. Among other things, they commented on its substantial theoretical contributions concerning how online communities create (and, interestingly, destroy) value, particularly regarding ‘passive community participation’ (consumption) and emotional consequences of various forms of community participation, which have as yet been unexplored. They also commended the authors for their powerful multi-method design with complementary and synergistic contributions from the different methods, which provides valuable insights that can be built upon to open up the areas of social media and online communities to new and exciting research.