eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Today's postmodern consumer culture is characterized by fast pace, continuous changes, power of consumers and merging roles of production and consumption. There is more unlimited information with less emphasis on the meaning. However, one thing that hasn't changed is consumers' need for self-actualization - both through personal artistic expressions and as a member of a community.

This qualitative research belongs to the postmodern paradigm and the category of interpretive research. The research is conducted in a form a video ethnography that included interviews and observations. The interviewees were Finnish street art and graffiti artists who each do their legal art regularly for commercial or noncommercial purposes. The data, which consisted of filmed interviews and documentation of painting activities, was analyzed and reflected to paradigm of liberatory postmodernism.

This research views artistic self-actualization from postmodern consumer culture perspective focusing on the subjective outlooks on life and actors within it. The research belongs to the consumer culture theory and views a consumer as a participant of a subculture drawing from the theories of identity construction as subculture member, aesthetics and conceptual melancholy. An ethnographic research enables to get insight and subjective understanding of the personal process of creating art and carrying out self-actualization.