About

Michaela DeSoucey is an associate professor and director of the Sociology Graduate Program in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at NC State University. She is a cultural and organizational sociologist with research expertise in studying the business and politics of consumption. Her research and teaching focus on how relationships among markets, social movements, and state systems shape the cultural and moral politics of food. She is interested in cultural ideas about risk, trust, and responsibility, as well as the valuation of heritage and the construction of authenticity. DeSoucey's work explores the intersections of culture, food, consumer markets, and politics, employing qualitative methodologies to analyze these complex social phenomena.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Marketing
• Business
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Ecology
• Psychology
• Anthropology
• Media studies
• Advertising
• Art
• Law

Selected publications

• Gastronomy

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-08-05

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• Tapping History:

  University of Arkansas Press eBooks · 2023-03-06

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• Mobile trust regimes: Modes of attachment in an age of banal omnivorousness

  Journal of Consumer Culture · 2022-09-15 · 7 citations

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  The 21st century rise of culturally omnivorous tastes and classifications proffers a new dilemma for how markets create attachments and achieve trust for global consumers. Consumer entities must be both globally circulatable and offer a sense of localized authenticity without compromising either. Drawing from research on market trust and attachment, this article introduces the concept of mobile trust regimes to account for how sets of actors and repertoires attempt to address this tension. Through two case studies from gastronomic industries—food halls and natural wine—we investigate the devices of mobility used to facilitate the global circulation of the local. These include standardized aesthetic and affective templates communicated through physical décor, recurrent narratives, and social media curation. We argue that the concept of mobile trust regimes helps clarify two key issues in contemporary consumer culture: tensions between homogenization and heterogenization and how the symbolic value of omnivorous tastes becomes institutionalized and even banal.

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• How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2022-10-29

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• Convivial Quarantines: Cultivating Co-presence at a Distance

  Qualitative Sociology · 2022 · 14 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Media studies

  , cooking and eating together through video-call technology such as Zoom and FaceTime. We explore the implications of these new foodways and ask: has digital commensality helped cultivate co-presence amidst pandemic-induced physical separation? If so, how? To address these questions, we analyze two forms of qualitative data collected by the first author: interviews with individuals who cooked and ate together at a distance since March 2020 and digital ethnography during different groups' online food events (e.g., happy hours, dinners, holiday gatherings, and birthday celebrations). Digital commensality helps foster a sense of co-presence and social connectedness at a distance. Specifically, participants use three temporally oriented strategies to create or maintain co-presence: they draw on pre-pandemic pasts and reinvent culinary traditions to meet new circumstances; they creatively adapt novel digital foodways through online dining; and they actively imagine post-pandemic futures where physically proximate commensality is again possible.

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• Distillations of authenticity: a comparative global value chain analysis of pisco

  Regional Studies · 2022-09-20 · 5 citations

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  Place-centred branding is increasingly perceived as a mode of product differentiation and a rural development strategy that emphasizes the singularities of production regions and methods to meet global market demands for quality and authenticity. We use a global value chain (GVC) analysis to compare the trajectories of Peruvian and Chilean pisco – a distilled spirit like brandy – finding that each country’s efforts to claim its authenticity are grounded in different cultural–economic imperatives as well as vexed historical bilateral relations. Our analysis suggests that antagonism can compromise the authenticity premium. A GVC lens offers important analytic leverage for locating pisco producers’ market strategies as nested within the larger GVC for alcoholic spirits, and we suggest this perspective would benefit from more robust considerations of local–global trade-offs therein.

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• Another Person’s Peril: Peanut Allergy, Risk Perceptions, and Responsible Sociality

  American Sociological Review · 2022-01-12 · 15 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines perceptions of health risk when some individuals within a shared space are in heightened danger but anyone, including unaffected others, can be a vector of risk. Using the case of peanut allergy and drawing on qualitative content analysis of the public comments submitted in response to an unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to prohibit peanuts on airplanes, we analyze contention over the boundaries of responsibility for mitigating exposure to risk. We find three key dimensions of proximity to risk (material, social, and situational) characterizing ardent claims both for and against policy enactment. These proximity concerns underlay commenters’ sensemaking about fear, trust, rights, moral obligations, and liberty in the act of sharing space with others, while allowing them to stake positions on what we call “responsible sociality”—an ethic of discernible empathy for proximate others and of consideration for public benefit in social and communal settings. We conclude by discussing the insights our case affords several other areas of scholarship attentive to the intractable yet timely question of “for whom do we care?”

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• Raising the Bar: Values-Driven Niche Creation in U.S. Bean-to-Bar Chocolate

  Strategy Science · 2021 · 19 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Marketing
  • Business

  We examine how entrepreneurs might build a viable, values-driven niche. Extant templates for niche creation typically employed in moral markets depend on instrumentally rational logics that privilege economic ends such as profitability and efficiency. Entrepreneurs seeking to construct a nascent niche whose purpose and objectives include the amelioration of social ills, however, may find such templates inadequate. Using the emergence of the U.S. bean-to-bar chocolate niche, through which entrepreneurs attempt to address the social and environmental shortcomings of conventional chocolate production, we demonstrate that constructing an alternative model for niche creation is feasible. Most bean-to-bar entrepreneurs deliberately opted out of extant private regulation initiatives, developing instead alternative encompassing, values-driven sourcing and cooperative relationships, which we term collaborative governance. This is enacted throughout the niche by promoting shared values, best practices, and transparency and is supported by strategic meaning-making work to cultivate customers. Together, these three values-driven strategies form a novel template of niche creation based not on cognitive repositioning or exploiting exogenous change within existing structures and institutions, but on a reconceptualization of how markets might work to support the implementation of nonmarket goals. Based on our mixed-methods analysis, we find that, instead of hoping to accomplish nonmarket goals through established market structures, entrepreneurs built a niche centered on the achievement of specific social goals. Our findings suggest that to understand the strategies supporting emergent socially oriented markets, researchers must explore the intersections of values, entrepreneurial motivations, and operational complexities.

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• Watered Down: Market Growth, Authenticity, and Evaluation in Craft Beer

  Organization Studies · 2021 · 43 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Marketing

  Research in organizational theory suggests that category-spanning organizations typically suffer penalties in evaluations, as consumers downgrade producers they see as violating authenticity norms. We challenge this view by linking two heretofore separate insights: first, that categorical boundaries erode as categories become taken for granted and, second, that consumers in a given category tend to become more heterogeneous as their numbers increase. We argue that newer consumers employ diverse evaluative schemata and rely less on established conceptions of authenticity than do veterans, leading to more generous evaluations as the ranks of consumers grow. Using the canonical case of craft beer, we test the effect of audience growth on consumer evaluations, particularly when producers violate categorical authenticity norms. Our analysis of an original dataset of more than 1.2 million unique ratings of craft beers from a popular online forum finds both that overall beer ratings increase and that penalties to authenticity norm violations attenuate as the number of new reviewers participating in the evaluative process rises. These results refine our understanding of shifting demands for categorical purity, conceptions of authenticity, and consumer evaluations as functions of market growth.

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• The Emergence of National Food: The Dynamics of Food and Nationalism

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2020-11-01 · 2 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Jo‐Ellen Pozner

  Santa Clara University

  5 shared

• Gary Alan Fine

  Northwestern University

  4 shared

• Katarina Sikavica

  University of Zurich

  3 shared

• David Schleifer

  Edwards Lifesciences (United States)

  3 shared

• Richard E. Ocejo

  2 shared

• Daphne Demetry

  McGill University

  2 shared

• Isabelle Téchoueyres

  Université Bordeaux Montaigne

  1 shared

• Jennifer Smith Maguire

  1 shared

Labs

• Research and EngagementPI

Education

• Ph.D., Communication Studies

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2008

• M.A., Communication Studies

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2003

• B.A., Communication Studies

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2001

Awards & honors

• 2017 ASA Sociology of Culture Section Mary Douglas Prize for…
• 2017 Gourmand World Cookbooks Awards, national winner in Cul…
• 2016 ASA Consumers & Consumption Section Distinguished Schol…
• 2023 ASA Section on Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarit…
• 2010 ASA Political Sociology Section’s Graduate Student Pape…