Consumer Culture Theory
Craig Thompson2017, Oxford Handbook of Consumption (2018), eds. Frederick F. Wherry and Ian Woodward, Oxford University Press.
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Abstract
In this chapter, we aim to describe some of the disciplinary fault lines—to use Alexander and Phillips’s (2001) metaphoric framing of disciplinary tensions—that have shaped the intellectual contours of CCT, profile the primary theoretical motifs that have defined this pluralistic research tradition, and discuss the intellectual trajectories that are being marked out by recent CCT research. We will conclude by reflecting on the dilemmas and opportunities posed by the fairly rapid institutionalization of CCT.
Key takeaways
- We will conclude by reflecting on the dilemmas and opportunities posed by the fairly rapid institutionalization of CCT.
- Given this historical backdrop, we will now discuss some contemporary developments in CCT research that more or less map onto the heuristic categories outlined by Arnould and Thompson's (2005): 1) Consumer Identity Projects; 2) Marketplace Cultures; 3) the
- A key implication of this graphic representation is that a given CCT study will typically address interrelationships among these four heuristic domains, such as analyzing how the sociohistoric patterning of consumption (as manifested, for example, the central-peripheral dynamics of globalization) organize the marketplace cultures in which consumers constitute their collectively shared identity projects (e.g., Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006) or the ways in which the intersection of religious and consumerist ideologies shape consumers' practices of resistance to the complex networks of relationships that characterize the respective studies we cite, we believe this review provides a reasonable distillation of their respective contributions to the CCT literature and the theoretical trajectories they present.
- CCT studies focusing on consumer identity projects address the ways in which consumers' deploy marketplace resources to enact particular identity positions and to integrate their heterogeneous identity practices into a coherent narrative of identity.
- Holt (2017) addresses a related concern about the institutionalization of CCT in his proposals for a parallel stream of research that he anoints as Consumer Culture Strategy.
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This article provides a synthesizing overview of the past 20 yr. of consumer research addressing the soclocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption. Our aim is to provide a viable disciplinary brand for this research tradition that we call consumer culture theory (CCT). We propose that CCT has fulfilled recurrent calls for developing a distinctive body of theoretical knowledge about consumption and marketplace behaviors. In developing this argument, we redress three enduring misconceptions about the nature and analytic orientation of CCT. We then assess how CCT has contributed to consumer research by illuminating the cultural dimensions of the consumption cycle and by developing novel theorizations concerning four thematic domains of research interest.
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2 Consumer Culture Theory
This article provides a synthesizing overview of the past 20 yr. of consumer research addressing the soclocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption. Our aim is to provide a viable disciplinary brand for this research tradition that we call consumer culture theory (CCT). We propose that CCT has fulfilled recurrent calls for developing a distinctive body of theoretical knowledge about consumption and marketplace behaviors. In developing this argument, we redress three enduring misconceptions about the nature and analytic orientation of CCT. We then assess how CCT has contributed to consumer research by illuminating the cultural dimensions of the consumption cycle and by developing novel theorizations concerning four thematic domains of research interest.
Consumer Culture
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Consumer culture is a concept that defines our contemporary societies by highlighting the importance of consumption as a dominant social ethos—that is, as a system of dispositions that orients and structures actors’ conduct and thus shapes relations to the self, others, community, society, and the world. It is intimately linked to the concept of consumerism, which emphasizes the ideological, normative, and encompassing dimensions that are constitutive of consumption in industrial and postindustrial economies. The concept posits the novelty and distinctive nature of modern consumption. Although modern consumption emerged in the West, the last wave of globalization has extended the penetration of consumerism to virtually all non-Western societies, and to an increasing spectrum of social classes, to the extent that the concept of consumer culture is now a powerful definer of life in the global age. This entry follows the trajectory of consumer culture and its global dissemination, with particular attention to its manifestations in the realm of the religious and spiritual dimensions of the self, as discussed in the work of a number of scholars specializing in the sociology of religion. (...)
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This paper argues for an epistemological positioning of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) research beyond the lived experience of consumers. CCT, it is argued, brought sociocultural context to consumer research, not least through the introduction of existential phenomenology as a paradigm for CCT studies. However, it is time to expand the contextualization of lived consumer experiences with another contextualization, this time the one of systemic and structuring influences of market and social systems that is not necessarily felt or experienced by consumers in their daily lives, and therefore not necessarily discursively expressed. There is a need to take into consideration the context of context. We therefore suggest an epistemology for CCT that explicitly connects the structuring of macro-social explanatory frameworks with the phenomenology of lived experiences, thereby inscribing the micro-social context accounted for by the consumer in a larger socio-historical context based on the researcher's theoretical insights.
critical approach to consumer culture
We can define identity from several dimensions. Before the rise of the modern society, social institutions were authoritative, even on top of the society. When we were born there were social institutions defining us who we are, what hierarchy we belong to. Religion, family, neighbourhood, and etc., institutions were used to help identify individuals. Capital is anther dimension. People who owned the land are different from the ones who actively engaged in producing from it ). In a capitalist society, people worked to obtain the "capital" rather than "goods" per se.
Consumer cultural studies
Catálogo editorial
This collaborative publishing project was built following those trends; it embraced the participation of diverse international authors, whose perception, rationale and research development helped signify the interest and need for an in-depth approach in consumer cultural studies to provide perspectives to tackle the market’s influence over popular culture, its diverse identity resources and intersections between influential analytical categories, such as surroundings, organizations and circulation and distribution of tangible and intangible products
Discursivity, difference, and disruption: Genealogical reflections on the consumer culture theory heteroglossia
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"We offer a genealogical perspective on the reflexive critique that consumer culture theory (CCT) has institutionalized a hyperindividualizing, overly agentic, and sociologically impoverished mode of analysis that impedes systematic investigations into the historical, ideological, and sociological shaping of marketing, markets, and consumption systems. Our analysis shows that the CCT pioneers embraced the humanistic/experientialist discourse to carve out a disciplinary niche in a largely antagonistic marketing field. However, this original epistemological orientation has long given way to a multilayered CCT heteroglossia that features a broad range of theorizations integrating structural and agentic levels of analysis. We close with a discussion of how reflexive debates over CCT’s supposed biases toward the agentic reproduce symbolic distinctions between North American and European scholarship styles and thus primarily reflect the institutional interests of those positioned in the Northern hemisphere. By destabilizing the north–south and center–periphery relations of power that have long-framed metropole social science constructions of the marginalized cultural ‘‘other’’ as an object of study—rather than as a producer of legitimate knowledge and theory—the CCT heteroglossia can be further diversified and enriched through a blending of historical, material, critical, and experiential perspectives."
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Consumer Culture Strategy
I argue that CCT can play a powerful role in contributing novel strategic insights to solve important social problems. But this contribution is dormant, held back by CCT's axiomatic research model. So I propose an alternative tradition within CCT, what I call Consumer Culture Strategy, to unlock this potential.
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