Intellectually, we are all Sidney Levy’s next of kin, and he has left us rich. (John Schouten on CCT Facebook page – March 27th, 2018)
In his introductory speech to the 2015 CCT conference, the late Sid Levy, presented the historical vicissitudes of interpretive consumer research “as a classical Homeric voyage into the present seeking to free itself from the oppressive clutches of positivism.” The founding members of the ICR workshop, who gathered for the first time in Oxford in 1998, shared the excitement and the fears of such a journey (see Shankar and Patterson Citation2001). Indeed, interpretive methodologies and other qualitative approaches have been taken up enthusiastically since the beginning of the 1990s by a cohort of European researchers who were expanding the compass of the subject area and generating considerable excitement. At the time of the first ICR workshop, these approaches were becoming less the obsession of an enthusiastic minority and more an accepted perspective. The aim of the workshop was to foster inclusiveness whilst providing a forum for researchers interested in all aspects of ICR to discuss the ongoing cross-paradigm movements, analyze current developments and review the possibilities for integration and differentiation of theoretical assumptions and identification of the limitations of the approaches.
ICR workshops are held biennially, first in Oxford, and subsequently in Brussels, Copenhagen, Marseilles, Milan, Odense, Brussels (again), Edinburgh, Stockholm and Lyon. Twenty three years after its creation, the focus continues to be theoretical and methodological innovation in ICR: in other words, organizers and participants are not overly concerned with empirically grounded papers. A key differentiating feature of the workshop is that members strive to maintain it as a “workshop.”. This means that it’s relatively small and intimate and offers an opportunity to discuss ideas in an informal, friendly and supportive atmosphere.
The 8th ICR workshop held in Edinburgh in April 2015 offered an extremely rich range of content and stimuli. The questions addressed included epistemological debates, interpretive methods and their managerial implications, but also brands, ideologies, cultural and gender perspectives, and alternative visions of consumption. Here, we are not able to do justice to the breadth and depth of the debate and analyses that were conducted over the two days of workshop. Nevertheless, the selected papers provide an indication of the wide range of topics addressed and introduce to a wider audience some of the contributions that had a significant impact on the discussions. The bulk of the contributions presented in this Special Issue were initially selected by the Editorial Committee as among the most interesting papers presented by Early Career Researchers at the 8th Workshop on Interpretive Consumer Research, which were then submitted to a double blind review.
Elizabeth Mamali has written a very interesting piece about researcher guilt in the ethnographic fieldwork process that deals with important issues for consumer researchers, issues that tend to remain unacknowledged in final accounts of data collection and presentation of findings. She proposes that conflicts arise between the demands of a knowledge economy on researchers and the time, emotional and intellectual capital investment required of ethnographies. Facing the proliferation of the ethnographic approach in consumer research, she argues that confessional accounts may provide a practical tool to operationalize reflexive practice.
Amanda Earley’s paper pays particular attention to the ontological status of “the real” in Badiou, Žižek, and Ferraris, and consider whether such new “realisms” raise questions about the very nature of interpretivism. Among other contributions, the paper contextualizes the erasure of politics throughout as a phenomenon that occurred across the academy, and which is not particularly specific to our field. As a consequence, she details the implications of these realist philosophies for social research methodologies – with consumer research appearing as a specific case – by proposing amendments to current interpretive practice.
Drawing on the context of road bowling in Ireland, and Lefebvre’s triadic model of social space, Killian O’Leary, Maurice Patterson and Lisa O’Malley use their four-year ethnographic study to revisit our understanding of space beyond an object or context of consumption.Footnote1 Their analysis offers an alternative account, presenting space as produced through consumption practices, shaped by historic and contemporary socio-cultural discourses. Their case study also suggests that in the liminal space created by road bowling, normative communitas is a precursor to existential communitas.
The next paper, by Chloe Steadman, Emma Banister and Dominic Medway, explores entanglements between the space of the body and time through a rich multi-method study of tattoo consumption practices. Arguing that relationships between bodies, time and memory are undertheorized in consumer research, they draw on Ricoeur’s work concerning time, narrative and memory to explore embodied processes of remembering and forgetting through tattoos. Although consumer culture is often thought to be accelerating, these authors highlight the importance of temporal continuity, durability and the past, and encourage future research on embodied temporality in consumer culture.
Andrea Tonner considers consumer authored poetry as a source of data about the “consumer voice” within the context of consumer culture. Following Tonner, there may be two reasons why consumers’ poetry is largely absent as a source of consumer insight. One is that consumer researchers are not familiar with poetry as data and the other one is that these scholars do not place value upon such data. The author provides robust methodological considerations that allow researchers to engage with poetic materials and illustrate the variety and depth of insight which poetic accounts of consumption might illuminate. The paper provides empirical evidence demonstrating how poetry illuminate every day and mundane consumption, hidden and vulnerable consumption; and anti-consumption and resistance.
With the passing of Sid Levy, we have lost one of the foundational figures in interpretive consumer research. His most impactful work, Symbols for Sale (Citation1959), is as relevant today as it was 60 years ago, when it was first published in the Harvard Business Review. However, while a chapter has ended, these papers testify that the story continues.
Notes
1. The article entitled, “Road bowling in Ireland: social space and the context of context” by Killian O’Leary, Maurice Patterson, and Lisa O’Malley was published in another issue of Consumption Markets & Culture. (doi: 10.1080/10253866.2018.1516726)