The Role of Collective Value Judgment in Mediating Doll Collector Community
Date
2024
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Haverford College. Department of Sociology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
The doll collector community is one ostensibly tied together by a shared common interest in a product, but there are other forces that mediate how the community is formed. Past literature on doll collectors have focused on their relationships to the objects themselves, leaving out much of the human interaction that goes into a hobby of collecting. This interaction, however, especially with the rapid growth of the doll collector community in the early 2020’s, makes up a large part of the hobby. Using a combination of data from participant observation of doll spaces, content analysis of doll communities on social media platforms, and in-depth interviews with doll collectors, I investigated what forces hold doll collectors together and structure their community. In line with collecting as a consumer hobby, doll collectors found their community centered around discussions of monetary value that could involve quite intense discourse. My findings indicate that the community format of the secondary market, the engagement of collectors in conspicuous consumption, and the fear of their community being made inaccessible by people trying to profit off of them combined to give deference to this price discourse as a mediator for community.