Abstract
Keywords
Atmospheres imbue everything, they tinge the whole of the world or a view, they bathe everything in a certain ligh (Böhme, 2013: 2)
This special issue expands our field’s understanding of atmosphere, experiences of place that emerge from the entanglement of affects and emotions, bodies and objects, spaces and rituals, meanings and memories. From the Greek words for vapor (atmos) and sphere or realm (sphaira), the concept of atmospheres bears a meteorological metaphor that emphasises how these experiences seem to surround space – like a ‘haze’ (Böhme, 1993: 114) – flowing among us, affecting us, and shaping our evaluations of locations, objects, and people, often before conscious thought (Ahmed 2014; Thrift 2008). Felt yet intangible, it is no wonder that atmospheres are conceptualised as slippery and elusive (Sumartojo and Pink, 2019).
Marketing scholars have long appreciated the possibility for consumption contexts to stimulate emotions and trigger cognitive responses. Since the 1970s, the concept of ‘retail atmospherics’ has explained how aesthetic features and physical design can influence consumer behaviour in shopping environments and servicescapes (Kotler, 1973). This body of work is dominated by experimental studies that have shown how retailers manipulate discrete sensory stimuli in ways that encourage us to buy more, linger longer, and feel happier within commercial settings (Bille et al., 2015; Bitner, 1992; Kotler, 1973; Yakhlef, 2015).
Recently, however, marketing research has increasingly thought about atmospheres as multisensory, whereby the quality of place emerges from combinations of multiple, heterogeneous (human and more-than-human) stimuli, not just the manipulation of physical attributes such as lighting, sound, or layout (Tombs and McColl-Kennedy, 2003; Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012; Steadman and Coffin, 2024). From the cosy ambience of a café (Linnet, 2013) to the intimidating feelings of a luxury store (Dion and Borraz 2017), it is the constellation of design elements as well as human practices that shapes the feeling of place. As such, atmospheres are effects that affect and are affected by all of our senses (Stevens et al., 2025), meaning that they necessitate novel and emerging sensory and embodied research techniques that can advance how we detect, represent, and theorise multisensory consumptionscapes (Arcoverde Moreira et al., 2025; Canniford et al., 2018; Hill et al., 2014; Patterson and Larsen, 2019; Scott and Uncles, 2018; Stevens et al., 2019; Valtonen et al., 2010).
As much as atmospheres affect our bodies, they are also constituted by our bodies, and this effect is almost inevitably social. Attention to the factors that inform how we sense and make sense of atmospheres (Lonergan et al., 2022; Preece et al., 2022; Steadman et al., 2021) has led scholars to reach beyond the methodological individualism that characterised much experimental work and develop perspectives on atmospheres as comprised of as well as constructive of groups (Lopes et al., 2021).
From sacred sites and stadiums to holiday parks, atmospheres are experienced in groups where affective forces are magnified during shared rituals and through shared understandings (Cayla and Auriacombe, 2025; Higgins and Hamilton, 2019; Hill et al., 2022; Rokka et al., 2023). Appropriately, beyond the material focus that long sustained atmospheric research, scholars have increasingly unpacked the sociocultural ingredients of atmosphere that include ritual, entrained practice, memory, culture, language, and imagination (Goulding, 2023; Lopes et al., 2021; Rokka et al., 2023; Steadman et al., 2021).
These kinds of experiences show us that atmospheres are as much creations of knowledge and imagination as they are of material things. Moreover, these intangible components layer space with ‘predispositions’, that is, the past experiences, personal biographies, histories, and expectations that people bring to atmospheres of consumption (Hill et al., 2022; Preece et al., 2022). As such, even seemingly empty spaces like featureless office blocks can elicit strong atmospheres (Anderson and Hamilton, 2024; Bell, 1997; Goulding et al., 2018), guided by imagination and memories of place. Consider the case of historic sites, whose layered history seems palpable even in its starkest state of absence (Goulding and Pressey, 2023). In such cases, atmospheres can be born out of a sense of absence of what is no longer there, whereby haunting absences are experienced even more intensely than tangible and material presence (Frers, 2013).
Social perspectives on atmospheres at sports events, parades, protests, and festivals also show how atmospheres are impermanent, faltering when affective forces are interrupted, clash, or cancel out (Hill et al., 2022; Lopes et al., 2021; Steadman and Coffin, 2024; Stevens et al., 2019). Importantly, it follows that consumer responses to atmospheres are not necessarily uniform, but can be heterogeneously felt, meaning that how and when we arrive or ‘land’ in atmospheres can influence the way we experience them (Preece et al., 2022). Contrary to early theorising on atmospherics as prescribing emotional, behavioural, and cognitive responses in consumers, we now recognise that certain atmospheres can delight some yet disgust and disadvantage others (Preece et al., 2022; Steadman et al., 2021; Stevens et al., 2019).
However, we should not narrow our scholarly attention to how human bodies shape and are shaped by atmospheres of consumption. Recent accounts have highlighted how both humans and non-humans contribute to our sense of place (Grant et al., 2025) and, indeed, marketing scholars have already acknowledged how humans are entangled in complex assemblages or networks of non-human actants (cf. Bajde, 2013; Franco et al., 2022). However, little attention has been given to how living organisms per se (e.g. plants, bacteria, and animals) directly affect our embodied and sensory experience of atmospheres (Marchais et al., 2024).
In some senses, this portrait of flowing affects, moving among us – and even among different species – as an interface of material, imaginary, linguistic, embodied, and social elements might lead us to shrug our shoulders and accept that atmospheres are too nebulous, too mysterious, too complex to ever pin down in any analytical sense (Böhme, 1993).
As such, multisensory atmospheres have often been implicitly described rather than explicitly theorised (Lopes et al., 2021). Nevertheless, our role as social scientists is to unpack and explain the antecedents and consequences of forces like atmosphere, which affects people’s lives in profound ways.
Accordingly, this special issue called for brave, novel, creative, and disruptive approaches to dig deeper into the non-representational, pre-cognitive, more-than-human and transpersonal construction of atmosphere (Buser 2014). With these foregoing theoretical themes and methodological opportunities in mind, we called for a fresh anthology of research to capture the relational heterogeneity of affective atmospheres: how atmospheres are crafted, managed, and felt; how consumers and researchers affect and are affected by atmospheric encounters; how and why atmospheres affect different scales of life at personal or group levels of experience.
We were delighted to receive a range of papers probing atmospheres in novel contexts: from wild to quiet, from convivial to solitary, from fantasy to mundane, from healing to unwelcoming. Across the collection, the papers share a commitment to repositioning atmosphere as a central theoretical construct for understanding consumption as affective, embodied, relational, and more-than-representational. Collectively, they move beyond managerial or design-led accounts of atmospherics to show that atmospheres are not simply staged environmental backdrops, but emergent and often unstable conditions produced through the interplay of bodies, spaces, materials, affects, social relations, and more-than-human forces.
A central thread across the collection is the body. Whether through the silenced and oppressed body (Arcuri et al., 2026), the cold and immersed body of wild swimmers (Cheetham et al., 2026), the disabled body navigating ableist marketplaces (O’Leary and Higgins, 2026), or the resonating body in service environments (Rokka et al., 2026), this collection of papers foregrounds embodiment as the primary medium through which atmospheres are sensed, negotiated, and lived. When theorising the body, papers in this issue offer helpful considerations of the social body, although authors treat sociality in notably different ways: some emphasise co-presence, resonance, and collective attunement (Rokka et al., 2026); while others show how atmospheres are constituted through withdrawal, solitude, exclusion (Anderson and Hamilton, 2026), or lack of voice (Arcuri et al., 2026). This tension is especially productive, affirming that atmosphere is as much about absence, distance, and disconnection as it is about social interaction and communal feeling.
Theorising space and place is another major point of alignment. Authors in our collection explore servicescapes (Rokka et al., 2026); story worlds (Pradhan and Jones, 2026); ‘blue spaces’ (Cheetham et al., 2026); urban sites (Steadman and Millington, 2026); ‘empty’ spaces (Anderson and Hamilton, 2026); places of healing and well-being (Cateriano-Arévalo et al., 2026); and even liminal thresholds (Kapoor et al., 2026). In these contexts, the papers illustrate ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson, 2009) emerging across diverse settings in which atmospheres are mobile, fluid, imagined, and temporally layered, often spilling across physical, mediated, and remembered environments.
Noteworthy contributions to the theorisation of space and place include Rokka et al.’s (2026) multi-sited ethnography of Club Med resorts, where the authors posit atmosphere as a space of resonance. Drawing on Rosa’s (2019) theory of resonance, they visualise atmospheres as dynamic phenomena made up of co-evolving spheres of bodily encounters that momentarily envelop groups and individuals. Rather than static and fixed, spheres interact and can overlap, merge or even clash, influencing how atmospheres are mobilised and consumed.
In their study of fantasy worlds – as places of escape from the mundane – Pradhan and Jones (2026) also highlight the porosity of atmospheres, noting how imagined atmospheres can bleed into everyday life. They show how the (re)imagining of fantastic atmospheres allows consumers to transport themselves into other worlds as they affectively revisit the stories, characters, and places anywhere and at any time.
The issue also includes special attention to nature and how more-than-human others shape and are shaped by atmospheres of consumption. Cheetham et al. (2026), for instance, elucidate how the haptic and somatic qualities of the sea can prove therapeutic when practising wild swimming. Steadman and Millington’s (2026) sensory ethnography of an urban pier reveals how the material dynamics of non-human others can make atmospheres unpredictable, creating feelings of spatial (dis)order. Nature is protagonised in Cateriano-Arévalo et al.’s (2026) Indigenous account of how more-than-human entities (namely, plants, animals, and spirits) actively shape atmospheres of healing in an Amazonian context thanks to the affective energy they store and transfer to human others in need.
Exploring seemingly empty, abandoned urban spaces, where nature takes over a derelict built environment, Anderson and Hamilton (2026) note how ‘worldly’ and ‘otherworldly’ encounters help in the co-creation of atmospheres, particularly when alone. For them, worldly encounters take place with non-human entities (e.g. animals and plants) as well as elemental features (e.g. weather), whereas otherworldly encounters manifest as inexplicable, more eerie absent-presences. Taken together, these accounts of nature showcase how weather, water, wildlife, fauna, sound, and relational environmental forces actively participate in the creation of atmospheres.
Across the issue, atmospheres are inseparable from power. Several papers explicitly show how atmospheres are unequally distributed and politically charged, producing vulnerability, exclusion and abnormalcy (O’Leary and Higgins, 2026), or gendered oppression and diminished self-worth (Arcuri et al., 2026). These papers show how atmosphere becomes not only an aesthetic or experiential condition, but also a mechanism of inclusion, marginalisation, and control.
Where the papers differ most is in their analytical emphasis: some privilege critical and political concerns, others foreground embodied immersion and environmental entanglement, while the two conceptual pieces of our collection extend atmosphere toward thresholds, liminality, and transformation. Kapoor et al. (2026) posit the notion of threshold atmosphere noting how this concept has been eclipsed by more prevalent theorising on liminality. Turning our attention to thresholds, according to the authors, helps foreground inflection points, that is, the boundary sites and/or moments of change or transformation that shape the affective qualities of atmospheres. Likewise, working in the wake of transformative consumer research literature, O’Leary and Higgins’ (2026) conceptual review of marketplace accessibility illuminates a much-neglected group: consumers with disabilities. In doing so, they highlight existing failings of atmospheres of consumption as these affective spaces and encounters exclude, disable or even disenfranchise minority groups, thus reframing how we might conceptualise consumer (ab)normalcy.
Moreover, we see varied methodological approaches in the empirical studies that make up this collection, from embodied accounts and sensory ethnographies, to autoethnographic introspections, as well as netnographic observations of digital atmospheres (Anderson and Hamilton, 2026; Cheetham et al., 2026; Pradhan and Jones, 2026; Rokka et al., 2026; Steadman and Millington, 2026). Several papers venture into novel onto-epistemological terrain, as well as Global South geographical contexts. Arcuri et al. (2026), for instance, adopt more-than-representational methods – and a sonic epistemology specifically (cf. Patterson and Larsen, 2019) – in their decolonial feminist ethnography of sexual health consumption among adolescent girls in Brazil. Still in the Americas, Cateriano-Arévalo et al.’s (2026) study of atmospheres of healing among the Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous community of the Peruvian Amazon is underpinned by an Indigenous epistemology. With this paradigm shift, the authors challenge human-centric, Western theorisations of affect and atmospheres, arguing that this alternative way of knowing helps them centre the relational energy that is co-produced by humans and more-than-human entities.
Taken together, the collection of empirical and conceptual papers converge in demonstrating that atmosphere is best understood as plural, processual, and deeply consequential to how consumption is felt, inhabited, and contested. A consequence of this is that the special issue shows that there are many challenges and opportunities for further research in the coming years. Haunted by the doom of irreversible climate change, struck (emotionally and financially) by new and ‘forever’ wars, polarised by divisive political landscapes, threatened by artificial intelligence that may well outpace and outsmart us, we are facing a plethora of atmospheres that are troubling, unsettling, unknown.
How might we navigate, interpret, sense and make sense of markets and consumer cultures with such affectively charged atmospheres pressing upon us? What ‘pockets of atmosphere’ (Steadman et al., 2021) might engender hope, escape, community, care, and healing in a world scarred by geo-political turmoil, environmental fragility, and technological uncertainty? We hope that readers will first and foremost savour this anthology of atmospheres. We also hope that both our editorial and the collection of papers will inspire critical marketers and consumer theorists to further consider the embodied, affective, emplaced and relational qualities of atmospheres. Returning to Böhme’s (2013) notion of atmospheres bathing life in a certain light, the time is ripe to shed new light on the emerging atmospheres shaping the world today (Bajde, 2013).
