Personal interviews in cultural consumer research – post‐structuralist challenges

Abstract

This paper takes a post‐structuralist perspective on consumer research and discusses the role of personal interviews in cultural analysis. It problematizes the use of the phenomenological interview in cultural consumer research, arguing that the underlying research paradigm, existential‐phenomenology, is not necessarily adequate for cultural analysis because it focuses attention primarily on the individual and the first‐person experience. Such a paradigmatic perspective is problematic because it tends to sustain a view of human agency that is highly individualistic and thus fails to account for the cultural complexity of social action. Overall, the paper contributes to the further development of the post‐structuralist approaches to postmodern marketing thought. Post‐structuralist ideas and assumptions challenge the central principles of modern marketing and consumer research in many ways and it is the aim of the paper to contribute to a better understanding of the methodological implications that they entail.

Keywords:

• consumer culture
• personal interviews
• postmodern marketing
• post‐structuralism
• consumer subjectivity
• methodology
• discourse

Notes

1. With the term “postmodern” we refer here to a philosophical position and perspective that opposes foundationalism, essentialism and realism (Audi 1999). Postmodernism emphasizes the perspectival, socially constructed nature of knowledge (Barker 2004), and stresses the locality, partiality, contingency, instability, uncertainty, ambiguity and contestability of any particular account of the world, self and good (Anderson 2007). In this sense, it may be viewed as a constructivist epistemological position (Schwandt 2003). It needs to be distinguished from “postmodernity” as the contemporary historical formation and from postmodernism as a cultural style that is marked by intertextuality, irony, pastiche, genre blurring and bricolage, for example (see, e.g., Barker 2004).

2. Realism, as it is discussed in much of the postmodern marketing literature, may be described as a commitment to the following ideas about science: the aim of science is to accept true statements (veritism); truth is correspondence to mind‐independent reality (correspondentism); the acceptance of statements in science is guided by rules of method (methodism) and individual scientists aim to contribute to the attainment of a single, complete, true account of nature (monism) (e.g., Kitcher 2002).

3. By discourse we mean an institutionalized way of thinking, talking and representing knowledge about an object. It may be viewed as a cluster of ideas, images and signifying practices that involves a configuration of assumptions, categories, logics, claims and modes of articulation (Hall 1992, 291; Miller 1997). It provides people with a coherent interpretive framework and a set of practices for representing or constructing knowledge about a particular topic or practice.