Andrea Davies

The evolution of the empowered consumer

Purpose – An oral history to examine the evolution of the empowered consumer and brand consciousness from 1918 to 1965 as a critical analysis of mass consumer culture in Britain.Design/methodology/approach – The authors trace the changing experience of consumer empowerment and importantly show oral testimony (oral history) as a method able to reveal the complexities of this experience.Findings – Women locate increased choice and responsibility within changing marketing and retailing systems (including self‐service, branding and the media). The authors show how increased choice and responsibility was often experienced (at least initially) as challenging or confusing.Originality/value – The study identifies that empowerment is a complex or paradoxical process. It provides empirical support for a growing number of claims that have challenged the linear benefit assumptions given to increased choice arising from classic economic theory and outline a model of the paradox of the evolution of the empowered consumer.

Buying into motherhood? Problematic consumption and ambivalence in transitional phases

Current theory on transitional consumption seems to rest on the premises that (1) consumption facilitates role transitions; (2) consumers know how to consume their way through these transitions; (3) consumers are motivated to approach new roles; and (4) consumption solves liminality. This perspective, however, offers an incomplete picture of consumption’s role in the management of major life transitions. This article explores the ways in which ambivalence is woven through consumption experiences in times of liminality. It reviews prior research on consumption, role transitions, and ambivalence in the context of women’s transition into motherhood. Findings are presented from an international interpretive study of women’s consumption experiences during their transition to motherhood. This paper’s findings suggest that while consumption can indeed play a positive role during role transitions, it can also, at other times, make transition a complicated, complex and confusing process.Title Buying into motherhood? Problematic consumption and ambivalence in transitional phases Authors(s) VOICE Group; Davies, Andrea; Dobscha, Susan; Geiger, Susi; Prothero, Andrea; et al. Publication date 2010 Publication information Consumption, Markets and Culture, 13 (4): 373-397, Special Issue: Consumer Culture Theory 2008 Publisher Routledge (Taylor & Francis) Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/4966 Publishers statement This is an electronic version of an article published in Consumption Markets & Culture, Volume 13, Issue 4, 2010. Consumption Markets & Culture is available online at: www.tandfonline.com//doi/abs/10.1080/10253866.2010.502414 Publishers version (DOI) 10.1080/10253866.2010.502414

Beyond incommensurability? Empirical expansion on diversity in research

Purpose – This paper is a practical attempt to contribute to the ongoing reappraisal of the dichotomies and categories that have become prevalent throughout marketing research.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews current literature on incommensurability and undertakes a comparative re‐examination of two studies.Findings – How the authors view their research is constituted in retrospective terms through a marketing and consumption logic based on the principles of division, distinction and difference. Re‐examination of some empirical case material suggests that in practice the perceived duality separating research traditions is unsound. A misplaced reading of paradigm incommensurability has resulted in research practices appearing oppositional and static when they are essentially undifferentiated and dynamic. An over‐socialised research epistemology has raised the tangible outcomes of research activities to be dominant in directing research practice.Research limitations/implications – The compara...

Myth and ideology in consumer culture theory

The special issue of Marketing Theory (2013) on consumer culture theory (CCT) updates and restates the main aims and controversies in CCT as well as offers a number of novel interpretations on the history and possible future direction of the movement. Whilst the anchor paper from Thompson et al. (2013) is notable for the invocation of Bakhtin’s concept of Heteroglossia, its main significance is as a reply to ongoing critiques of the CCT project. In this commentary article, we highlight the common tendency among critics to emphasize the paradigmatic and institutional basis for CCT as residing in the context of academic discourse. These accounts utilize what Coskiner-Balli (2013) discusses as the mobilization of cultural myths. One consequence of this process of retelling the CCT creation narrative is that it diverts and obscures other ideological readings of CCT. We highlight what we understand as the underlying neo-liberal sentiment at the centre of the CCT project. A neo-liberal perspective repositions some of the main criticisms of CCT, especially those regarding the overemphasis on consumer subjectivities.

Reflections on collaboration in interpretive consumer research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges and opportunities of collaboration in interpretive consumer research. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews literature on research teamwork, particularly on qualitative and international projects. It also provides an account of research collaboration on an interpretive research project across four countries, involving eight researchers. Findings – Despite the cult of individualism in academic life, most articles in leading marketing journals are now written by multi-author teams. The process and implications of research collaboration, particularly on qualitative and international projects, have received little attention within the marketing literature. Qualitative collaborations call for another layer of reflexivity and attention to the politics and emotions of teamwork. They also require the negotiation of a social contract acceptable to the group and conducive to the emergence of different perspectives throughout the research process. Originality/value – While issues surrounding the researcher-research participant relationship are well explored in the field, this paper tackles an issue that often remains tacit in the marketing literature, namely the impact of the relationships between researchers. The paper draws on accounts of other research collaborations as well as authors’ experiences, and discusses how interpersonal and cross-cultural dynamics influence the work of interpretive research teams.

In the family way: bringing a mother–daughter (matrilineal) perspective to retail innovation and consumer culture

Here we apply the multilevel narrative approach of critical oral history to develop intergenerational narratives that show how social change in consumer culture is enacted through family interrelations. The research uses intergenerational storytelling to describe memories of women as mothers and daughters in families. Places and practices around provisioning, budgeting, cooking, childcare, and domestic labour provide the setting in which the dialectics of family and gender are transformed through evolving family signatures. Families develop enduring myths that function as a means of making sense of consumption. The oral histories show how family signatures proliferate, how they are shaped by retail innovation, and how they become structured into everyday practices and family norms. This further demonstrates that family is important to understand the relationship between individuals and consumer culture.

Beyond the couch: Psychoanalytic consumer character readings into narcissism and denial

The contribution of psychoanalysis to marketing theory does not need to come from putting consumers on the couch. We show how psychoanalysis and marketing can be approached as character analysis using fiction, literature and popular culture through a psychoanalytic informed character reading of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s(1950 [1926]) The Great Gatsby and Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s(1968 [1949]) Death of a Salesman. We examine the consumption desires and practices of these key protagonists to show how the psychoanalytic theories of narcissism and denial can be applied to explain their predicament. Our analysis emphasizes temporality, describing psychic time, its functioning with the ego-ideal and how consumption is implicated. We conclude that the seemingly distant domains of psychoanalysis, marketing and literature fiction offer an interesting synthesis that is able to provide insights for consumer theory, the contemporary consumer and the historical account of consumers of the past.