Conflict Culture and Conflict Management in Consumption Communities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study explores conflict culture as a distinct and influential element of a consumption community's broader culture, and explores how communities initiate, perform, manage, and resolve intracommunity conflicts. A four‐year interpretive study of the Premium Cola consumption community reveals two sets of formal and informal elements of conflict culture; explains how community members perform routine, and manage transgressive conflicts; shows how members garner positive and negative practical, identity, and relationship value from these two types of conflict; and documents how a community's conflict culture develops through inventing new conflict behaviors to resolve transgressive conflicts. The study thus contributes new theoretical insights to the literature on social conflict in online consumption communities, discusses managerial implications, and initiates a discussion about conflict culture.