Dr Thomas Robinson

About

Overview

Dr Thomas Derek Robinson is Senior Lecturer in Marketing and until recently Associate Dean of Student Experience at Bayes Business School, City St George's, University of London. His research sits at the intersection of Consumer Culture Theory, institutional theory, economic sociology, and interpretive consumer research, investigating how markets organise human and non-human existence through time, systems of governance, and processes of identity formation. 

Robinson has developed a distinctive programme of scholarship examining the role of temporality as a cultural, institutional, and existential force in markets. His work explores how consumers, organisations, technologies, and ecological systems negotiate competing understandings of the past, present, and future, and how these temporal struggles shape legitimacy, power, transformation, and social change. Across a sustained body of conceptual and qualitative research, he has contributed new influential theoretical contributions for understanding consumer temporality, market legitimacy, consumer responsibilization, identity transformation, and sustainability.

His research is organised around three interconnected themes.

1) Consumer Temporality and Future Formation. Robinson's work examines how markets create, coordinate, contest, and transform understandings of time. His research has developed influential concepts including Consumer Timework, Future Framing, and Temporal Legitimacy, demonstrating how marketplace actors negotiate competing interpretations of the past and future during moments of innovation, crisis, nostalgia, technological change, but also social and personal transformation. This body of work positions time not simply as a resource but as a cultural and institutional medium through which meaning, action, and collective futures are organised. More recently, Robinson's scholarship has expanded toward more-than-human and neo-animist approaches to marketing, investigating how ecological, geological, and biotic temporalities can become visible within markets and servicescapes. This emerging research develops new ways of understanding sustainability through deep time, material temporality, and human-nonhuman interdependence.  

2) Market Governance, Legitimacy, and Institutional Ordering. A second stream of research investigates how markets become legitimate and how they govern human conduct. Drawing on institutional theory and Foucauldian approaches to power, Robinson has developed contributions on market legitimacy, consumer responsibilization, biopolitical governance, temporal legitimacy, and person-institutions. This work explores the processes and mechanisms through which markets coordinate stakeholders, establish systems of authority, and cultivate the forms of conduct required for participation in contemporary social and economic life mediated by the market.

3) Subjectivity, Vulnerability, and Transformation. His third research stream examines how consumers negotiate identity during periods of uncertainty, vulnerability, and disruption. Through studies of masculinity, midlife crisis, therapeutic markets, counterfactual selves, existential consumption, mortality and consumer transformation, Robinson explores how market systems shape experiences of selfhood and how individuals reconstruct meaning when dominant narratives of identity become unsustainable. This work is united by a broader interest in the relationship between subjectivity, freedom, and social change. Most recently Robinson has begun exploring these themes in the context of consumer deviance, for instance in shoplifting.

His research has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Marketing Theory, Journal of Business Research, Organization Theory and the Marketing Science Institute. He serves as Guest Editor of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research special issue Time in Consumption: Bridging Past, Present, and Future Consumer Research, contributing to the development of temporality as an emerging domain within consumer research, and acts as an Area Editor at the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark, 2013 - September 2016

Employment

• Track Leader, Undergraduate Marketing Specialization, City, University London, United Kingdom, December 2018 - present

Languages

German (can read, write, speak, understand spoken)

Research students

2^ndsupervisor

• Chrysa Gkotsi, Research Student

Publications