Walking Towards an Embodied Work Identity

On-route consumer practices have long been overlooked in consumer research, even though lifestyles, tastes and consumption practices are omnipresent on the streets to shops, on route to home and to places of work. Consumption studies have tended to prioritize retail and home places, and relied on sedentary retrospective interviews to understand how consumption and market practices shape and are shaped by people’s identities and subjectivities. We use the walking method to look again at professional work identities and how walking to and from work opens up a rich and historically embedded narrative description of evolving work identity for 10 senior Hong Kong executives. Inquisitive prolonged conversations while walking with participants uses the sense-stimulation of old and new in walking routes in Hong Kong city to bring what we locate as multi-sensual resonant validity. We show how the non-retail consumption spaces of pavements (sidewalks), subways, bridges, lifts, and the changing contours of the cityscape open up theoretical and practical insights including ‘falling into the rhythm of participants' life’, ‘a narrative time travel portal’, and ‘socialized bodily knowing’ that contribute to understanding more about the embodiment of cultural capital. The ‘walking-with’ method is more than simply a way of providing physical stimulus to help recount narrative insights. We find that career identities are materially-enmeshed in the routes to and built environment, and that the routes-to and being on-route have rhythms and bodily knowing important to understand embodied identity that cannot be readily captured in a sedentary interviews that we also conducted.