From Formaldehyde to Frappuccinos: Enabling a Consumption of Care in the Funeral Industry.

The funeral industry has been undergoing dramatic changes in the past fifteen years. In the present paper I argue that a shift involving service delivery is occurring. That is, funeral industry participants are offering consumers fewer products and services that they characterize as "care." Instead, via organizational reflexivity, workers are increasingly including their customers in the production and planning processes of sacred death rites. I consider two consequences in the present paper. First, this move illustrates the increasing porosity of the conceptual distinction between producer and consumer. Second, it allows for a refiguration of a consumer ethic. Substituting the popular trope that frames the funeral consumer as dupe and the mortician as manipulator, this refiguration opens up the possibility for a consumer ethic of agency and care. This study relies primarily on interview data with participants in the funeral industry but I have also incorporated a multi-sited ethnography that includes participant-observation and a content analysis of trade literature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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