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This article examines the digitization of consumption from a field work at fairs for e-commerce. It aims to investigate the cultural understandings of consumption and consumers that circulate at these events. Trade fairs stage the future and configure markets, technology and consumers. As a topic of research, trade fairs are interesting because they summarize what markets actors in a particular field find fascinating or troubling at a given moment. Building on an actor-network-theory inspired study of “market-things”, the article analyses the new digital market-things that are promoted on trade fairs and their relationship with the growing concern many shop keepers have for losing control over consumers; a result they fear follows on digitalization. The article argues that, at these trade fairs, consumers and consumption were always understood in relation to new technologies aimed at increasing sales. Five tightly intertwined innovations are identified: the expansion of physical boundaries; new time and spaces for consumption; new roles for consumers; the compensation for loss of senses; and attract and contain. All these innovations represent particular solutions that respond to the concerns many market actors have. Consumers were configured in specific ways in order to promote certain devices and technologies. Thus, the depiction of consumers at these trade fairs followed a particular agenda; that of characterizing consumption in a certain way in order to promote particular devices.

This article focuses on labour processes among workers in retail in Sweden. It is a study of the commodification of body and affect in a field organized around commercial exchange and builds on participant observations in stores and thirty interviews with workers in different fields of retail (fashion, perfume, home electronic and diy-stores). Retailing is a part of the service economy that is signified by short-term employments and precarity on the one hand and on the other hand of a high degree of demands on skills that involve and commodify the bodies, dispositions and emotions of the individual workers. The article discusses why so many working as sales staff in retailing say that they love their job and why “passion” is considered so important. During the interviews and observations it was striking how the workers identified strongly with their employers. Words such as “natural”, “obvious” and “taken for granted” were very often used to describe why work was organized the way it was. Workers’ attitudes are examined as a result of the development on the labour market in the last decades and as an affective identification with relations on the neoliberal work market.