Makeshifting Matters: How Consumer Informal Production Reconfigures Consumption Practice

Consumer informal production (CIP) refers to practices where individuals make or modify their own consumption goods, bypassing market offerings and professional services. It includes craftwork, do-it-yourself (DIY), repair, and makeshifting. Our study adopts a practice-theoretical lens to distinguish among CIP practices and explore those that are market-autonomous; practices that transgress market praxis without reliance on its resource provisions. We conducted a netnographic study on gambiarra, the Brazilian makeshifting, investigating how this highly market-autonomous CIP impacts established consumption practices. Our findings reveal that the ingenuity and resourcefulness in makeshifting drive it to reconfigure established consumption practices, disrupting their normative rules, deconstructing their material arrangements, and diversifying practice performances. Consequently, makeshifting democratizes these practices, enabling excluded consumers to participate in and benefit from them. Our study further contributes to marketing research by mapping CIP practices along a market autonomy spectrum, accounting for their reliance on market resources and adherence to market praxis.