Repair practices in a virtual smartphone community: Fostering more sustainable usage through branding

Over the past decades, consumer culture has turned the mobile phone into a market place icon. Despite consumers' fondness for the functionalities of these devices, mobile phones come at a considerable social cost, leaving ethical and environmental footprints. This article discusses repair and maintenance practices of smartphones as outcomes of constitutive contexts that ethical brands may provide. The objective is to provide a better explanation for the emergence of such practices around organizations. Social practice theory approaches to consumption often consider teleo-affective structures or engagements to be the key to transform bundles of practices and material arrangements of which the built environment consists. The article traces the affects that branding transports as consumers appropriate their phones e.g. through performances of tinkering and fixing. Inspired by a Consumer Culture Theory reading of social practices this article conceptualizes brands as an organizational vehicle needed to transport affects. Seen as cultural systems, brands carry the potential to leverage affects towards repair and maintenance practices. This investigation focuses on the role that ethical branding can play in the creation of public encounters with concepts, practices and embodiments of sustainability. The findings from a netnography of a brand community highlight how brands persuade consumers to introduce by-standers to repair and maintenance practices of smartphones. This article claims that leveraging consumer engagement through ethical branding is a practical and effective way to promote sustainability. Brand sustainability imperatives translate into cultural conversations and political processes that help to imaginatively examine and re-configure the intersectional challenges of sustainability.