Prof. Kushagra Bhatnagar is an Assistant Professor at Aalto University School of Business, Finland. He received his PhD from Aalto Biz in 2020 doing ethnographic fieldwork with employees of luxury hotels. His work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Harvard Business Review, Organization Studies, Marketing Theory, and Journal of Business Research. His research interests relate particularly to the sociology of service work, consumer learning and socialization, and categorization/classification dynamics.
Aalto University School of Business, Finland
December 04, 2023
Farmers as YouTubers? How Social Media Influencers Shape Markets
In this paper we conceptualize social media influence as a form of market reshaping and intermediation. We ethnographically study influencers in Indian agriculture. Content creators reshape supply chain power dynamics. They make crop-pricing transparent and translate complex financial instruments into vernacular frames. They reshape the market from literacy-dominant to orality-dominant.
