A recent thread on Facebook seemed to touch a nerve in the small community concerned. The issue raised is whether senior members of the community are too harsh on the more junior or less experienced members, particularly in the context of an annual conference. This led me to think about what a scholarly conference is. After all this is an invention, but like other apparatus it then takes on a life of its own. There are at least three templates that could be organizing participants’ experience of, and behaviour at this academic conference. Following Wilk, Stoeltje and colleagues, one model is the beauty pageant, a tournament of value in which exotic local beauty ideals mix with globalized standards. This model is one that some colleagues may have learned at the big academic conferences they attend, especially those at which employee recruitment plays a role. But it is also one where if one thinks the applicable beauty standards are those applying to Ms. Garifuna, when in fact, they are those applying to Ms. Universe, the opportunities for misunderstanding and disappointment, not to mention comic relief is apparent.  Reference the film, Little Miss Sunshine.

A second model that may be organizing behaviour and expectations is that of consciousness raising.  But this consciousness raising model is one that we can trace to the scholarly circles of critical theory and their incarnation in marketing as critical marketing and critical consumption studies. As Jeff Murray and Julie Ozanne, and Michael Saren and James Fitchett and others would e quick to note, the critical project contains a negative moment and a positive critical moment, but the aims of these moments is ultimately liberatory, to transcend a partial, oppressed or repressed state of knowledge or awareness. These two moments are not necessarily easy to distinguish or disentangle particularly for the more junior participants in the critical hermeneutic process.  Indeed, it is not so easy for senior colleagues either. In these circles textual products are objects for collective critical reflection. Confusions between the negative and positive critical moments leading to personal unhappiness may emerge if the hermeneutic critical model gets muddled with a third possible template.

The third template for action and interpretation that intervenes and interpellates participants in a scholarly conference is a powerful one. And this is the therapeutic model of group intervention that has become a generalized mode of action under late capitalism, under the Romantic Ethic that Colin Campbell discussed. This therapeutic model intervenes in activities as diverse as second wave feminist consciousness raising, alternative medical support groups described by Craig Thompson and colleagues, and obviously in groups like Weight Watchers so ably described by Maia Beruchashvili and Risto Moisio. The organization of such groups emphasizes individual testimonies coupled with relatively uncritical collective voicings of solidarity and support with soul soothing a key aim.  In this system, it seems like a text might be treated more like a health or weight loss target achieved rather than an object for criticial investigation. It seems patently obvious that when these latter two models collide the potential for misunderstanding is vast, and in particular, where the concern that the old may be “eating the young” might emerge.

These reflections emerge from efforts to navigate the discursive space of the cultural turn in consumption studies. From the first author’s confessional perspective, after 30 years of struggle several institutional conditions pose significant challenges to ongoing fruition of the cultural turn in marketing departments US B Schools despite the heroic efforts of anthropologists Grant McCracken, Annamma Joy, John Sherry, Janeen Costa, and a host of anthropologically friendly colleagues and fellow travelers. If I listed all their names it would be a long list: Douglas Holt, Melanie Wallendorf, Alladi Venkatesh, John Schouten and Robert Kozinets are among the more senior contributors who are on it. First, marketing’s enduring infatuation with the modernist project of discovering  universalizing and foundationalist explanations—now manifested through the reductionistic rhetoric of neuro-marketing (see Schneider and Woolgar 2012), evolutionary psychology, and astonishingly behavoural economics continues to cast cultural modes of marketing analysis as propaedeutic knowledge, always a handmaiden never a bride. Second is the absence of corporate funding for professorial chairs and programs in culturally-oriented research despite the ubiquity of such research in the corporate world. Funding is a sign of value in the B School; its lack is telling. Third unfortunately are the knowledge/power dynamics in the parent disciplines of anthropology and sociology for which the cultural turn in marketing in the B-school goes largely unremarked or ghettoized with the sobriquet Danny Miller seems to prefer, “business studies.”  And we all know what that means!

On the other hand, if we look at consumer culture theoretics as a field of rhizomatic resistance to status quo power structures per Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we see a growing host of colleagues invested in the cultural turn throughout the world; identify fellow travelers in many corners of the global academy; and register a significant presence in the blogosphere and in popular business publishing. The knowledge game is changing so rapidly we may optimistically presume a future based on the more realist tale we’ve also told above. Thus, whither the cultural turn?

Whereas the primary threat to culturally oriented marketing research in Northern American B-schools had once been marginalization, a bigger looming threat may now be appropriation without attribution, of culturally oriented constructs by mainstream scholars, and consequent dilution. Myriad forms  of path breaking cultural work on identity, brand community, status consumption, consumer co-creation, and the hedonic, emotive, and social properties of consumption experience once excoriated for exoticism and irrelevance have been now normalized in this way. No need to name names here.

Fortunately, the critical perspective among practitioners of the cultural turn holds out the promise of ongoing maneuvers to flank mainstream recuperation. Moving beyond a white Euro-American vision of consumer behavior represents a major opening for research reflected in many efforts to grasp the dynamics of non-white and non-western consumer behavior. I love Sammy Bonsu and Benet De Berry Spence’s work in this regard. In other terms we still need more work both on the shape of global flows of resources following Arjun Appadurai and perhaps earlier work in world systems theory by Immanuel Wallerstein (see my 1989 Journal of Consumer Research article), approaches that combine interests in emergent marketplace cultures, ideology and the socio-historic patterning of consumption. This postcolonial shift also offers opportunities to significantly open up the consumer identity research beyond the bricoleur self. Ali Jafari and Chritina Goulding work on the torn immigrant self and Üstüner and Holt’s discussion of the shattered identity projects of low status internal migrants in developing countries, as well as Marius Luedicke’s fascinating ideas about mainstream reactions to migrants’ acculturation work enlivens this critique.

The postmodern legacy also presages a dedicated effort to develop more critical approaches to consumer culture and to question the ontological status of consumers, consumer goods, sites and borders, work the ever enlightening Bernard Cova and Pauline Maclaren, Fleura Bardhi, Giana Eckhardt and me along with Norah Campbell and Detlev Zwick and Nikhilesh Dholakia have enriched.. In this vein, global-network discursive practices have begun to produce a critical reflection on consumption. This provides an opening to engage in two critical inquiries. First, we can question the scolding rhetoric of modernist critiques of “materialism” and “overconsumption” to consider how to extend the benefits of market culture to base of the pyramid consumers as Daniel Miller argues while overcoming the market imperialism Catherine Dolan and Rohit Varman have deplored, while moving to more sustainable consumer cultures as many colleagues such as Nil Özçağlar-Toulouse and Dominique Roux encourage. Furthermore, a global-network perspective could be used to shed new theoretical and public policy light on the ecological consequences of mundane consumption practices. Consider institutional studies and modes of practices that situate the consumption of air, water and energy within frameworks of global nodes, scapes and flows, and as sites for political controversy. This builds on amazing work by Rick Wilk and Hal Wilhite back in the early 1980s, and more recent work by Melea Press and me, Yolanda Stengers and others.

Soon to come some thoughts about the interesting behavioral economies done by anthropologists in exotic societies and why behavoural economists in consumer research must continue to ignore this work to support their foundationalist ontology.