“Perhaps the greatest surprise is how extremely proprietary we can be about certain possessions and at the same time how extremely generous we can be with many of our possessions.”

You may have seen that we have this section called Featured, where we collect interviews with leading scholars and those who have advanced the field of ownership. The section is by far not exhaustive and there are many more interviews to come.

That said we are more than excited to prominently present the first interview with Russell Belk. Russell is a real thought leader in the field of ownership, meaning of possessions, sharing, materialism, gift-giving and research on the extended self and has authored and co-authored more than 550 top journal articles and books. He currently holds the position as Professor and Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University. Further, he is past president of the International Association of Marketing and Development, and is a fellow, past president, and Film Festival co-founder in the Association for Consumer Research.

In his interview he talks about how he got involved and – more importantly – so passionate about the topic, what his favorite possession is and how he sees the field of ownership in the future. In order to read the full article, click here.