Search results

Purpose: This chapter investigates how researchers assemble market research test towns as hybrid sociotechnical arrangements. Researchers use various strategies in order to purify such hybrids into simplified representations of a fetishized imaginary, namely the average consumer.

Methodology/approach: The chapter is based on an analysis of secondary sources such as company documents. Theoretically, it draws on the concept of consumption assemblages and on anthropological theories of fetish.

Findings: Fetishization is a powerful way for both researchers and their clients to purify the hybrid assemblages they are part of into easily digestible categories such as “the real” and “the average.” In that process, the test town and its consumers emerge as a fetish that allows corporate clients to alleviate decision-making anxiety. Because of the nature of fetish, purification as a process remains incomplete.

Research Implications: These findings call for more social studies of market research as a set of practices that shape the identities of those who do the testing and forecasting. This chapter thus opens up test marketing and so-called test towns in particular as a field for consumer culture theory research.

Originality/value: This chapter provides insights into how market research creates test sites to simulate purchase behavior and pre-test consumer products. This chapter maps how different groups of actors and different technologies are enrolled in order to enact an ideal-type consumer averageness on an ongoing basis in a particular test town.

Purpose: This chapter explores how Russian fashion designers, as cultural intermediaries operating in the marketplace, interpret patriotism, which has become a noticeable phenomenon in Russia.

Methodology/Approach: Patriotism is approached as an appeal to patria and is considered as a socially constructed category. To explore the construction of patriotism, this research uses Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. In the market, the state, commercial companies, media, and consumers co-produce the dispositif of patriotism, which conducts the creative conduct of fashion designers and encourages them to follow patriotic fashion. At the same time, fashion designers have freedom to conduct themselves and act in different ways.

Findings: Interpretations of patriotism within a patriotic dispositif are explored vis-à-vis the interpretations of patriotism articulated by fashion designers. In addition to patriotic fashion, the forms of their creative conduct or counter-conduct are manifested in such subtypes of patriotism in fashion as cosmopolitan patriotism, economic patriotism, cultural patriotism, and fashion localism.

Research Limitations/Implications: The research is mainly limited to a perspective of fashion designers, and to some extent of the government, and does not consider the perspective of consumers.

Originality/Value: The research develops a theoretical argument of patriotism as a tool of governmentality, juxtaposing it to the approach of patriotism as an ideology. This chapter also contributes to the studies of resistance, adding the perspective of cultural intermediaries contrary to the commonly studied perspective of consumers.

This paper aims to trace the roots and development of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) through the eyes of major participants in this field of study.

The report is a qualitative essay based on data accumulated and integrated from several directions: the CCT literature, reminiscent versions by significant scholars, and participant/observation by the author.

The CCT conferences began in 2005, sparked by the contribution of Eric Arnould and Craig Thompson. However, earlier versions are traced through the growth of interest in the study of consumer behavior starting in ancient times and spurred by the surge of post-World War II prosperity and technological advances. The expansion of consumer studies through the Association for Consumer Research (ACR), the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), and the Heretical Consumer Research (HCR) were precursors of CCT. Perspectives are provided by Shankar and Patterson, Mark Tadajewski, Russell Belk, Fuat Firat, and Markus Geisler, with a special emphasis on early roots by the author.

The paper is novel in its application of The Rashomon Effect which shows how different scholars perceive a particular historical phenomenon. It is also a useful example of the qualitative orientation of CCT culture and style in studying situations, both contemporary and historical, to gain holistic insights.