ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 The Lived Meaning of Symbolic Consumption and Identity Construction in Stable and Transitional Phases: Towards an Analytical Framework Elin Brandi Sorensen, University of Southern Denmark Thyra Uth Thomsen, Copenhagen Business School In this paper, we propose an analytical framework for the investigation of consumers’ lived experience of identity related consumption in stable and transitional phases. The framework integrates the ideas (1) that objects can support the consumer’s identity construction because of their ’signal’ value - or because of their potential to provide the consumer with a certain ’experience’ of self, (2) that these meanings can reside in a ’common’ domain - or in a more ’private’ domain, and (3) that these meanings can be vehicles for the ongoing ‘maintenance’ as well as ‘acquisition’ or ‘disposition’ of important life roles. [to cite]: Elin Brandi Sorensen and Thyra Uth Thomsen (2005) ,"The Lived Meaning of Symbolic Consumption and Identity Construction in Stable and Transitional Phases: Towards an Analytical Framework", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 7, eds. Karin M. Ekstrom and Helene Brembeck, Goteborg, Sweden : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 571-576. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/13720/eacr/vol7/E-07 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/.