Culture and Everyday Life

Citation

Henry, P. (2006), "Culture and Everyday Life", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 194-196. https://doi.org/10.1108/13522750610658829

In Chapter I, Inglis cites Giddens (Tomlinson, 1997, p. 174):

… we live day‐to‐day lives in which for most of what we do we don't give any reasons. We dress as we do, we walk around as we do … these things are part of the tissue of day‐to‐day social activity which really isn't explained. It's hard to say why we do these things except that they're there and we do them.

Inglis then develops this idea of the banality of everyday life, the bulk of which is mundane, unexceptional, and routine. We get up in the mornings, clean our teeth, eat our cereal, walk the dog, catch the bus, buy a coffee and muffin; and basically continue the same pattern day after day. However, while we take these patterns for granted they constitute the settings where the great majority of our purchasing and consumption activities occur. Human beings are programmed to remember the exceptional. Saliency is fundamental for memory and recall. We talk about the things that stand out. As Inglis notes, however, ask a consumer about their daily lives and they are often hard‐pressed to talk about anything that sounds interesting or surprising. It is difficult to put into words the things that one takes for granted. This is because we rarely if ever reflect upon these matters.

Inglis' core rationale for studying the banal is that these activities are a product of the wider cultural and social order. This book explores how everyday life is deeply routed in prevailing cultural practices, norms, values, and beliefs. These cultural characteristics are themselves taken for granted, yet everyday practices and culture are tightly intertwined. Understanding one informs the other. Given cultural commonalities this means that we share similar everyday routines within cultural groups. Of course there is variation that occurs across subcultures of class, gender, lifecycle, and lifestyles. For example, the everyday experience of a female call centre operator is very different to that of a male in senior management. In the case of the former, experience of work is relatively boring, unrewarding and involves tight supervision. For the latter, experience of work involves relative autonomy, excitement, challenge, and satisfaction. However, for each of these types of people their particular everyday experiences are internalized as the natural reality. This means that (sub)cultural understandings help the researcher to appreciate just how specific group members make sense of, and respond both cognitively and emotionally to the world around them.

So where does that leave marketing researchers trying to understand all the mundane life events which consumers take for granted and find hardly worth talking about? The issue for researchers is that such mundanity can be often overlooked, by virtue of it being so uninteresting and blindingly obvious. Inglis argues for the importance of defamilarizing the familiar. This calls for the researcher to carefully scrutinize routine behaviours and imagine how they could be seen as strange and peculiar, rather than taken for granted. Effectively, we need to be able to imagine ourselves as “outsiders looking in”. One technique in defamiliarization is to break down mundane activities into smaller parts. For example, the book includes a detailed analysis of “car culture”, in which the author demonstrates the extent to which something as ubiquitous as driving a car interacts with broader cultural conditions, for example, the trend towards individuality and decline in sense of community. Cars literally and metaphorically place people in little bubbles and isolate them from others. In this way “car culture” promotes individual goals over collective concerns. Take a look at the common phenomenon of “road rage” and think of how often the term “idiot” comes up in referring to other drivers. How often do you see the same rage displayed where two individuals are face‐to‐face? In this way powerful tensions are played out in everyday temper displays that are totally unacceptable in other social settings.

Using a defamiliarizing strategy, Inglis demonstrates the rationalizing of emotions that takes place in many everyday service encounters. For example, he illustrates how we have come to accept the professionalization of job roles. One must not only have the appropriate qualifications, but also play the role in appropriate ways. Qualifications are not enough. The service provider must also seem professional. For example, doctors must act in certain professional ways. They have to walk a fine line between that of being clinical and detached on the one hand; and being personal and caring on the other. These can be construed as being contradictory. They are trained in a medical bureaucracy to value scientific objectivity, yet human empathy is also‐called for. From the patient's point of view doctors who are too cold and clinical dehumanize. However, doctors who are not sober and serious enough may appear less credible. The same sorts of contradictions are evident in a range of other everyday servicescape interactions where the reality is that marketers rationalize and regulate emotional reactions. Another example illustrated in the book is how airline cabin staff are rigorously trained in exhibiting friendly and upbeat emotions.

In both the doctor and airline crew examples a series of contradictions – in appearing professional – become evident when the observer engages in deliberate defamiliarization. It occurred to me that the people who are most natural and experienced in defamiliarizing the everyday are professional comedians and comedic writers. Their primary material comes from unearthing parody in everyday situations. We laugh at the contradictions they expose in performance and sitcoms. Just think of the mundane settings typically portrayed in Seinfeld episodes or in Woody Allen movies. Perhaps there is a role in marketing research for comedians' assistance in revealing the peculiarities of everyday life.

Another defamiliarization strategy that springs to mind is to study those people whose behaviour does not quite fit with everyday accepted behaviours. Systematically identifying the specific behaviours that “raise eyebrows”, and then applying a critical eye to just what it is that causes the distain may be instructive. Interestingly, Goffman (1963) in his theory of stigma refers to the “normal‐deviant.” His basic insight is that stigma is context dependent and therefore not permanent.

Stigma involves not so much a set of concrete individuals who can be separated into two piles, the stigmatized and the normal, as a pervasive two‐role social process in which every individual participates in both roles, at least in some phases of life (Goffman, 1963, p. 161).

The point is that people do not conform perfectly across every situation. Stigma is routed in everyday life. Basic practices appropriate in one situation can provoke social disapproval, for example, being too casual at the office or too formal at the beach.

For marketing researchers, trawling and defamiliarizing everyday patterns can provide valuable insights. Often they search for small “pain‐points” or “moments of delight” in everyday product usage. Pain‐points suggest product improvement. Delight provides potential for emotional brand development. However, it is interesting to consider products that just plainly fit seamlessly into the everyday. They must have value – because they fit – however, it is interesting to consider that these situations often go unnoticed by researchers, simply because they are unexceptional.