Consumer culture theory

Abstract

This special issue grows out of a set of debates on the challenges to and limitations of current consumer culture theory (CCT) research in academic journals including the present one (e.g. Askegaard and Linnet, 2011) as well as two sessions devoted to epistemological perspectives— past, present and future—at the CCT Conference held at Oxford in August 2012. From the papers presented at this conference, we have selected three and added two more for this issue of Marketing Theory. As it turned out, the debates—and consequently, the articles in this issue—inadvertently turned toward the role of various crucial events and publications, various manifestary moments (Bode and Ostergaard, this volume) and their consequential historical legacy. We wish to follow up on that unexpected turn in this editorial introduction. We find it an ironic experience to introduce a series of articles that attempt to give an accounting of CCT’s past in order to argue for desired futures. The sense of irony inheres in the fact that we ourselves were actors in the history of events being described and evaluated. However, we also find that some of the evidentiary gaps, rhetorical agendas and theoretical positions create the contradictory echo typical of irony. Much of this noise is attributable to the exclusive use of written documents as an evidentiary base, a problem well recognized in history but not well understood in marketing, since historical method has so little presence in this discipline. So, we decided to do a quick corrective exercise and pose a set of 10 questions to a short list of living sources—people who were instrumental in the birth of CCT, in Europe and America. We got replies from Morris Holbrook, Russ Belk, John Sherry, Craig Thompson, Eric Arnould, Elizabeth Hirschman, Sidney Levy, Dennis Rook, David Mick, Barbara Phillips, Ed McQuarrie, Jeff Murray, Fuat Firat and Markus Giesler in the North American scene as well as Stefania Borghini, Alan Bradshaw, Bernard Cova, Guliz Ger, Jacob Ostberg, Nil Ozcaglar-Toulouse, Stefano Pace, Diego Rinallo, Lorna Stevens, Pauline Maclaran