Rhythmanalysis of Street Food Vending: Spatiality, Temporality and Embodiment

Since the 2008 financial crisis, there has been an increased interest in street vending in developed countries. The councils in many UK cities have encouraged street vending activities and viewed them as a welcome addition to the cities’ diverse retailscapes and consumptionscapes. This thesis explores how street markets are co-produced and negotiated between different stakeholders, how the market rhythms of street food vending are interspersed with the daily rhythms of these stakeholders, and how street vending (re)produces capitalist rhythms between marketplace actors.

Chatzidakis and McEachern (2013) call for more socio-relational discussions of space by repositioning ‘space’ at the forefront of the discussions in marketing and consumer research scholarship. Despite an advent of research that centralises spatiality, only a few studies consider the temporal and embodied dimensions of space. To fill this gap, this thesis aims to analyse marketplace relations and practices by considering the tripartite concepts of spatiality, temporality and embodiment in the street food vending context.

Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, this thesis contributes to the scholarship of space in marketing by advancing discussions pertaining to marketplace relations. Rhythmanalysis informs the theoretical framework and methodology of the thesis, which involve an immersive ethnography of the everyday relations that pervade street food vending in over 100 days of observations within 16 months. In addition, I conducted over 50 in-depth and in-situ interviews with stakeholders.

This thesis demonstrates how a holistic approach to temporality, spatiality and embodiment in marketing theory can further the understanding of marketplace relations and finds that a rhythmic approach to understanding time and space is warranted to transcend the entrenched dualistic thinking (of time-space) in marketing scholarship. This study finds that street markets are constituted by polyrhythmic rhythms and the consumption of street food is corporeally fuelled by cyclical rhythms as well as linear rhythms.