Re-classifying consumer research

ABSTRACT

We cannot fully understand, comment on, or change our consumer culture without recognising class, but in this provocation piece, we want to question if it is possible for business schools (and marketing departments in particular) – embedded as they are in middle-class outlooks and logics – to research, theorise, and teach class-based consumption without distortions that perpetuate class differences. We start with a short recall on why class matters. We then consider what it means to research class and why business schools may be doing it wrong. Then, highlighting the obstacles that working-class experiences, identities, and voices face when they stray into the archetypal B-School, we close with a call to reclassify the business school.

KEYWORDS:

• Class
• consumption
• business school
• consumer research

Introduction

Despite the best efforts of neo-liberal projects, class isn’t going away anytime soon. If anything, with income differences growing alongside a prolonged cost of living crisis and an ongoing agenda of reducing or changing consumption for environmental reasons – all of which impact socio-economic groups differently – the need to understand class and consumption is more significant than ever. We cannot fully understand, comment on, or change our consumer culture without recognising class.

But, in this provocation piece, we want to question if it is possible for business schools (and marketing departments in particular) – embedded as they are in middle-class outlooks and logics – to research, theorise, and teach class-based consumption without distortions that perpetuate class differences and, through this, contribute to the continued exploitation of what we might variously refer to as the working class, underclass, lower class, or precariat. We start with a short recall on who these people might be, how they got to be, and why it matters. We then consider what it means to research class and why business schools may be doing it wrong. Then, highlighting the obstacles that working-class experiences, identities, and voices face when they stray into the archetypal B-School, we close with a call to reclassify the business school. By reclassifying, we mean the centring of class as both an object of study and a valid and vital scholarship subjectivity. We need to take class more seriously in consumer and marketing researcher and to do that we need to ensure that working-class voices can be heard in research and theory. We make this call with a resignation that such a project will likely never happen because B-Schools lack the will to deal with issues of class. The provocation, of course, is to prove us wrong.

Does it still make sense to think about the working class?

The approach marketers and their textbooks typically take towards class is wonderfully old fashioned. Societies can be split into groups of individuals who more-or-less share patterns of behaviour, attitudes, and motivations. This is particularly unproblematic for marketing theorists as a basis of segmentation, targeting and positioning of which class may be a key variable. It is also the basis for any development in theory: class is no more than a way to describe one group of consumers.

This ingrained idea in marketing contrasts with the erosion of social class seen in the sociological imagination. According to Skeggs, a British class-theorists, class has been “wilfully forgotten” in practice and theory in the last few decades (2019, 28). In the UK, for example, Thatcher famously proclaimed that there is “no such thing as society” – only individuals. New Labour’s remaking of past political allegiances took this even further by suggesting that everyone was, or should be, middle class. These ideas were informed and legitimised by innovations in social theory that sort to reframe socio-economic class as a practice rather than a structural feature of a society. Thinking by the likes of Gidden and Bourdieu reframed class as something controlled by individuals through their consumer and career choices. Revisions to class-as-segmentation in marketing theory enthusiastically adopt these assumptions.

But was this denigration of class as a unit of sociological analysis due to a fundamental change in the nature of social interactions or, simply a convenient theoretical justification for expanded neo-liberal ideas (which, as has been well established, tend to have very little correspondence with reality)? Thatcher’s dismantling of the trade union movement might have weakened the institutions of social class, but they also fertilised its roots and sowed the seeds of precarious work and the gig economy, including for many in academia. In other words, at the same time as class relations have become more insidious and consequential, a generation of thinkers have looked the other way or adopted the class-as-practice way of thinking without much critical reflection. As we shall see, even the new participatory widening in HE failed to ignite an accompanying consideration of class privilege or exploitation by or within B-Schools and their specialist disciplines, societies, and journals. For Skeggs, this is not a coincidence. She argues that:

Analysis of class can only be wilfully ignored by those with enough privilege to do so. The occlusion of attention to the processes, structures and forces that produce class (and gender, race, sexuality), i.e. those of capital, capitalism and colonialism, I would argue, was not a conspiracy but a complacency of the comfortable, a perspective of privilege. (2019, 28)

Indeed, the wilful forgetting of society is, perversely, supported by the very nature of social class. It is a class privilege to have the ability to ignore the influence of class. Those affected negatively by class not only lack this luxury, but must, instead, live with the denial of the influence of class even as it impresses itself on their everyday lives. One result is that while there are many ways of measuring social class and many theories that aim to explain the differences between social positions, identities and experiences, a common experience of those in lower social classes is an internalised desire not to be (or at least not to be seen to be). In order to access spaces of privilege, (such as academia), the working class must work even harder to escape, or at least hide their working-class background. Skeggs (1997) calls this “passing”. The working-class individual must pass themselves off as being middle class through alienating body work, affecting both their mannerisms and their conscious consumption. Their experience in middle-class domains involves and relies on them continually passing social tests about their class – tests which those from the middle classes pass with flying colours simply by behaving naturally. As a result, the working-class subject and experience disappear, and the middle-class privilege of wilful blindness is enacted and normalised.

All this also makes it absent that in any account of marketing, or consumer culture, it is the working class that is at the sharp end. Their consumption practices are not only a social test – and increasingly an environmental one – but they are also expected to either serve the experiential economy, or to manufacture and deliver the spoils of a victorious third and fourth industrial revolution, while living precariously and being denied most of the benefits their exploitation makes possible for others. They many dig the ground for ore, then manufacture and service the electric cars that the middle class use to signal their virtue, but few in the working class can afford such commodities. They are therefore present but made manifest absent in preferred accounts of how markets make lives better. All that writing about consumer choice, and service quality does not really capture the experiences of those that make it all happen on the ground.

We have therefore both a politics and a model of marketing that preferences the middle-class experience, and simply assumes that the working class are somehow just doing their thing in the background in ways that do not concern us. We might, for example, summarise the political attempts to dismantle class narratives through a popular Youtube clip of the now Prime Minister Rishi Sunak from 2007 in which, having described the diversity of his friendship groups as “upper class friends, middle-class friends, and working-class friends”, immediately corrects himself by adding “well, not working class”. Of course he has no working-class friends, only the working class have working-class friends and they do not really matter, so let’s leave it at that!

Our societies are, however, structured around capitalism with its inevitable inequalities. This means that marketing and consumer research is always about class privilege and exploitation in some way, it is just that the very dynamics of class, and the middle-class nature of much scholarship ignores it, hides it, abstracts it, or calls it another name. Despite intellectual moves to expose, reflect on and address all sorts of other structural inequalities in the field, and the presence of theoretical tools that both invite class critique (critical theory) and/or the unpack of hinterlands of manifest absence (in ANT, or assemblage approaches, see Law 2004), marketing and consumer research seems unable to take class seriously. It is almost as if we unconsciously know there is an issue but refuse to surface it in anything other than benign and safe ways (class as segmentation; class as a set of practices; class as dealt with via widening participation). Consumer research is repressing class and, in the process, the knowledge of our own exploitations and privileges (Cluley 2015). Yet despite this, the working class is very much still alive and would be kicking if they had not been silenced by the political economy that marketing and consumer research operates within and seems complicit with.

Researching class and consumption

Not surprisingly, direct references to class in recent consumer research are fewer than we might expect, perhaps because of comforting assumptions that differences in class have gone away now that we have fully embraced what Bauman (2000) refers to as an individualised society. Indeed, in consumer research we even see his miserable diagnosis of liquid modernity recast as a virtue of access as “values of flexibility, adaptability, fluidity, lightness, detachment, and speed” (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2017, 582) with little recognition that traditionally it is the working class who must worry about paying rent, whilst the middle class accumulates assets. This apparently liberating development in markets resonates with the memories of one of the authors of the financial necessity of a family car on Hire Purchase and rented televisions and washing machines, and signposts an issue we’ll return to: readings of contemporary theory are themselves inevitably class based. The idea of paying for access may seem liberating for a social class for whom an excess of material possessions is assumed and may have become a burden, but for working-class readers, it can seem like just an iteration of the rental models from which the achievement of a middle-class possessions offered escape, (imagine actually owning your own TV, car, or even home?).

Nevertheless, there have been recent calls to reconsider class. As our intention here is not a systematic literature review, we single out the Journal of Consumer Research because it represents the institutionalised pinnacle of publishing in the field of consumer research for the archetypal B-School scholar. It is what we look up to as the marker of quality, status, and contemporary theorising. If a new class-consciousness is emerging in our field, this is the place where we might see it happening. And lucky for this essay, there is a recent curation on DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion) that has a section on class (Arsel, Crockett, and Scott 2022). Maybe we were wrong about the neglect of class in our discipline after all?

But wait, perhaps we already see a problem with calls to reconsider class as an aspect of diversity. In Arsel, Crockett, and Scott’s (2022) collection, social class is imagined to be like religion, gender/ or ethnicity and is bundled with them as a characteristic of a person, and/or an aspect of identity. Doing this already achieves ideological work in suggesting that class does not represent a social structure that is determined by markets (although this is hinted at in the collection) and that intersects with other characteristics (again, only touched on). Class is instead again presented as a variable to measure, or culture to be explored, rather than something to be challenged, undone, or dismantled. Thinking about class is framed as a way of expressing diversity (representation, equal opportunity, and market inclusion). There is even a suggestion that class is just one aspect of diverse identities to be celebrated and then marketed to. The reason for acknowledging class is in order to create better markets and not to undo their stucturing capacity.

One way to reflect on how the class is understood in consumer researcher is to recognise what it means that none of the articles in Arsel, Crockett, and Scott’s (2022) review deal with epistemological issues in researching class. Class is presented as something that might be researched but not as something that does research. Class is merely something that is “created and maintained by consumption practices that vary across groups and cluster within groups based on similar assumptions about how consumption generates value” (Arsel, Crockett, and Scott 2022, 926). This seems to suggest that consumption in part determines class as if it is merely a lifestyle choice to buy and use certain things in certain places. As the comedian Richard Ayoade, guest presenter of the satirical news quiz Not the Nine O’clock News, puts it when commenting on the UK Home Secretary’s dismissal of homelessness as a lifestyle choice: “it’s a surprise that more people don’t choose to live in opulence”.

Of the 54 articles cited in Arsel, Crockett, and Scott (2022), 10 explicitly discuss class. Although some of these deploy euphemisms (resource poor childhoods), most deploy language that positions class as a hierarchy (lower, bottom of the pyramid) revealing the positionality of the authors. Some deal with regaining a “lost” middle class, suggesting that being, or becoming working class is less an identity project and more a fall from grace. Such language illustrates just how distant an awaking to class is in the field. For writers, editors and readers of the Journal of Consumer Research, it is fine to refer to a group of people as “bottom” or “lower” when it comes to class, even when similar language would cause justifiable outrage if applied to other aspects of diversity (imagine writing about lower gender, or bottom of race hierarchy). The language of class in consumer research normalises class hierarchies and absents its structural disadvantages.

Almost ironically Arsel, Crockett, and Scott’s (2022) summary explains that “prevailing levels of social class inequality in many parts of the world simply demand more focused attention on the inequality-generating actions of businesses and elites”. Putting aside the suggestion that it is the actions of business and elites that need to be researched and so not a matter of the inclusion of work-class voices, this also fails to acknowledge that class inequality applies to consumer researchers too. In a wonderful piece of capitalism realism (Fisher 2022) they conclude: “We can strive to conceptualize and construct a marketplace that is a celebratory and empowering space” without recognising sufficiently that it is the market that creates disempowerment, and only then finally hinting at the possibility that how research is done is clearly part of all this. Imagine, if you will, the possible accusations of middle-class saviourism in a research agenda to “promote positive practices towards lower social class consumers”. That is a long way from addressing class exploitation. Social class is unproblematically presented as possible research areas for professors at elite universities, and not something that elite universities are themselves part of and perpetuate, not least through the exclusion of the working-class from their ranks.

We might also look to CCT directly as a place where class might have received more reflective attention as an aspect of consumption. Again, as luck would have it, it is a topic in the 2nd edition of the Consumer Culture Theory book (Henry and Kravets 2023). However, the middle-class privilege framing of class we see in Arsel, Crockett, and Scott (2022) is repeated here. The central issue presented is how class impacts consumption and not how our consumer society creates, perpetuates, and exploits class. The emphasis in CCT is habitus and distinction from Bourdieu, echoing the idea of contemporary class as a series of practices.

Again, in Henry and Kravets (2023), we also see a “fall from middle class grace narrative” in the need to research job loss and divorce and we might wonder if this framing of class is more a projection of the anxieties of the middle-class researcher rather than a desire for understanding of and solidarity with the working class. Even intersectionality is reduced to “consumers preference and lifestyle orientations” p202. Also of note is the idea that people can “transform their habituated tendencies”. The poor and exploited might sort of cultural capital their way out of poverty all on their own if they simply choose or learn to consume differently. There is not much mention of structural inequalities, or recognition of the risk that academic clubs may exclude, even as they acknowledge the need to consider class.

In short, then, the B-School in general, and consumer research in particular is declassified, treated as if it is not a class-based activity, even if it may research class. Business Schools are spaces in which the structural inequalities of class are wilfully ignored or reframed as consumer practices or lifestyle choices. There is therefore a need to radically expand the way we think of class (and especially the working class) in these spaces. With a debt to similar Enlighted projects that deal with a related a broader issue in all research – that of decolonisation (Eckhardt et al. 2022) – we suggest that a specific and significant part of that project demands reclassifying the business school and consumer research, consciously recognising related academic practices as class-based. We now consider four related issues that might be considered in the process.

First, there is the issue of access. Is it simply easier to research the middle class? And if so, should researchers instead pay more attention to widening participation when it comes to research? How can we design studies that do not exclude through location, timing, and the ability of participants to understand what is being asked of them or to filter class experiences through a middle-class privilege in the researcher.

In qualitative research, we may specifically favour an ability to articulate experience in interviews that make little sense to working-class consumers who have no experience of an interview and may be intimidated by the invitation to talk to a professor about their lives. They are, after all, already positioned to be within a lower status. The reliance on participant stories in interviews, or the completion of lengthy online questionnaires, assumes a confidence that likely comes from an experience of academia itself (doing a degree and a dissertation, for example). Locations chosen to recruit participants or as research sites may also be exclusionary. Where class equates to precarious work, there is a further issue of having the time available. Although there is recognition that time-poor elites may be hard to research and difficult to talk to (Harvey 2010) such restrictions are seldom evoked in consumer research to explore an absence of working-class narratives in articles. Researchers might therefore reflect on how their approaches exclude certain class voices.

Second, there is the issue of exploitation. Even if working class consumers are included in research studies, is this a form of further exploitation of them by middle-class academics who gain status through publication? Picture the ideal B-School Professor flying from the UK to Chicago, or Paris, or Stockholm to give a paper on the working-class consumption of ready meals, at an elite university, followed by discussion over a £100-a-head dinner, (see Parker and Weik 2014). Indeed, some consumer research even relies on exploitative systems such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to generate data (Goodman and Paolacci 2017). Cost-effective data generation relies on there being people desperate enough to do an experiment for well under the minimum wages where you live.

Third (and as we illustrated above when discussing access-based consumption), even if working-class participants are included, data interpretation and theorisation itself likely carry bias related to the class of the researcher. When working with data we might reflect on where interpretive frames come from and how can we ensure that they do not again simply reproduce class structures and biases. This may include the imposition of “class-based” theory. There are plenty of theories of class, but are there working-class theories and if not, how might we generate them? Does the necessary resocialisation of the research process automatically preclude such a thing? Do we even know the class background of the theorists that we use (or of authors themselves)? That might be a start. Is our marketing theory and consumer theory more accurately described as middle-class marking theory pretending to be universal, which by dint of its own classification ignores how it contributes to the reproduction of class?

Finally, there is the possibility of institutional exclusion. Even if an academic decides that class structures should be researched, do marketing departments and highly ranked journals acknowledge and accept work based on and by the working class? Or do the class background, position and dispositions of middle-class editors and reviewer teams encourage working-class scholars who have passed their way into academia to pass further social tests as Skeggs suggests?

For other forms of diversity, there are established solutions. For example, Husain, Molesworth, and Grigore (2024), recognising the problems of the institutional embeddedness of (white, male) academics in Western Universities make use of the hyphen-spaces between researchers and researchers and participants from different cultures and genders to the surface and explore possible bias in the generation, representation, and interpretation of data generated in Pakistan. A similar approach could be deployed for class-based research. A solution to the problems of researching class that we have identified is therefore to find ways of including working-class stories in consumer research, and to have more working-class professors on research teams, review teams and editorial boards. Simple.

The working-class marketing academic

A problem here though (and one hinted at in our first section) is the absence and invisibility of working-class academics in higher education and especially in the B-School where much consumer research takes place. Although we know they are underrepresented, it is actually quite hard to know how many working-class marketing researchers there are for three reasons: (1) there isn’t much data on working-class academics; (2) working-class people are either re-socialised into the middle class when they become an academic, or carefully act as though they are, and (3) some middle-class academics may present themselves as more working class than they really are (Skeggs 1997). Readers might pause for a moment to reflect on their knowledge of the class background of their colleagues. Where working-class backgrounds are presented, readers might further consider the circumstances in which they become apparent; in papers, or presentation, in interview or promotion panels, or in everyday exchanges about life.

Wakeling (2023) notes that more attention is given to the social class of students than to academics – especially professors – and so calls for more of the later, which of course also means more of the former. Although there is generally good data on gender and ethnicity which can rightly be used to press for DEI, there is very little on class. Wakeling (2023) explains:

my analysis of data collected as part of the BBC’s Great British Class Survey in 2011 finds about 23% of the 2,500 academics completing the survey reporting working-class origins, although only 10% self-identified as working-class. By way of comparison, about one-third of UK undergraduate entrants in 2020–21 were from working-class families.

That figure suggests that there is still significant underrepresentation, and a further issue of converting student widening participation initiatives into academic recruitment.

Reynolds (2018) highlights the work still to be done to get working-class students into HE. The issues raised are familiar. It is not just about cost, but fitting in and here Reynolds astutely observes that this also means the presence of academics that look and sound like working-class students. A middle-class academic deportment in the lecture theatre is itself a signal to working-class students that they don’t belong. One of the authors here, for example, can recall a peer observation of a colleague who not only looked and sounded intimidatingly middle class, but provided anecdotes of visiting a BMW showroom to buy a new car and taking a shopping trip to Paris. This resurfaced their own experience as a student where both tutors and peers focussed on examples that seemed from another world. The other author is reminded of a comment from a B-School Dean about them following a job interview. The Dean said to the panel that they did not want “that sort of person” working in their department. We might therefore note the risk of outing one’s class background in an environment that calls for one to pass social tests by denying that background.

We need more working-class academics, not least to widen participation, but also to ensure that such participation is not alienating and confusing, and we might recognise a vicious circle here without conscious and deliberate intervention. We might also note that it is perhaps easier for universities to address a lack of diversity related to gender and ethnicity when seeking to “tick off” DEI than to address the substantial changes required to address class and its obvious intersectionality. It is also fair to suggest that “visibility” is significant here. Virtue signalling and box ticking favours what can most easily be seen, and class cannot be easily seen (and may be actively hidden). Yet evading the significance of class quite possibly ignores a characteristic that compounds any other diversity measure outside of pie charts and website images of a joyfully diverse workforce and student group. How would you even show class diversity on a prospectus? Would we have a picture of a graduation ceremony with one professor smoking a roll-up cigarette and wearing a flat cap? Or a picture of a studious group of students in a coffee shop, only one of them is in an apron and is wiping the table?

Even where working-class people do make it into academia, Williams (2022) reports on an academic Union survey that finds that a working-class background is experienced as a disadvantage for the majority of academics from a working-class background. As Mark Fisher puts it:

I evidently still didn’t believe that I was the kind of person who could do a job like teaching. But where did this belief come from? […] the most likely cause of such feelings of inferiority: social power. The form of social power that had most effect on me was class power, although of course gender, race and other forms of oppression work by producing the same sense of ontological inferiority, which is best expressed in exactly the thought I articulated above: that one is not the kind of person who can fulfill roles which are earmarked for the dominant group. (Fisher 2014)

Accent, mannerisms, ways of talking, and family income matter. It impacts recruitment and promotion, and in general, holds people back. And remember we do not have good data on this within institutions. We can see how many female, or BAME professors there are in a department, but we cannot so easily see a lack of working-class representation in senior roles. Being working class restricts networking and leads to feelings of being excluded. Williams (2022) therefore calls for more attention to class within universities, and especially better acknowledgement of intersectionality with a suggestion that this specific aspect of inclusion is strangely absent from the concerns of senior managers.

Craddock et al. (2018) also confirm the lack of attention to class (compared to gender and ethnicity) highlighting the problems faced by working-class academics in a very middle-class environment. Craddock et al.’s (2018) review of stories from working-class academics highlights a tendency to keep class a secret, whilst noting that a working-class habitus is hostile to education as self-aggrandisement. Think about that in a business school setting where presenting oneself as an expert is a requirement for so many activities. Overall, working-class academics experience a persistent feeling of not belonging, made worse by intellectual moves to dismiss the relevance of class, making it hard to acknowledge and so deal with or account for. Bartholomew (2023) further confirms that “People from working-class backgrounds employed in professional careers earn £6,000 less compared to those from other backgrounds in the same jobs, … underscoring the UK’s ‘shameful’ class pay gap”. Working-class academics are underrepresented, under paid, under promoted, and are potentially seen (and see themselves) as awkward outsiders, even as they tend to hide their working-class backgrounds. And yet we earlier suggested that an obvious solution to the lack of research on working-class consumers is that these academics might push the agenda within departments and through publishing.

Ironically, Friedman, O’Brien, and McDonald (2021) note that at the same time, middle-class academics may pass themselves off as working class by providing extended origin stories that evoke working class relatives or histories in order to hide their privilege and demonstrate that they have earned their position. This, we might argue, is an especially important story for the critical scholar to tell. How can one write about structural inequalities with any authenticity unless oneself can be connected to them and distanced from privilege? Working-class narratives in universities are therefore ironically dominated by “hero” stories from privileged academics that seem to confirm that being working class does not disadvantage the academic, whilst academics from an actual working-class background keep schtum about it.

Although the issue of the working-class background of academics is considered in other fields and widening participation is celebrated in student recruitment, there may be additional reasons why it is absent in the business school where we are all meant to be ideal middle-class role models for our largely middle-class students and their aspirations for middle-class jobs. Academic vocationalism therefore further helps to silence class, or at least perpetuate the idea that the only class worth living starts with an M. The B-School vocational promise of middle-class jobs carries with in further potential class betrayal. Although B-Schools may go to considerable effort to sell the dream of a successful middle-class career (Haywood and Molesworth 2010), most graduates will find themselves in lower management and administrative roles. The reality for a working-class student that enters academia may still be low pay and precarious work. As a Wakeling and Savage (2015) highlight, elite universities only serve to ensure that those from advantaged class backgrounds get the best jobs.

As we have already suggested, much consumer research is therefore the middle-class speaking for themselves and only occasionally speaking with and through working-class voices, but even then in ways that do not or cannot capture the structural inequalities of class in consumption. Even when academics from a working-class background venture to write about working-class consumers, they may be at a disadvantage in terms of their careers. Poole (2023) therefore notes a further focus on heroic overcoming and victimhood in studies of the working-class academic. Being middle class and academic is doxa, accepted, unquestioned, assumed. Whereas a working-class academic is an oxymoron, creating a liminal position between prior class identification and current work environment even as middle-class colleagues do not believe claims to be working class. Indeed, when one of the authors revealed their working-class background to the other, they expressed surprise, and yet when that same academic revealed their working-class background to the editor of this journal, the editor also expressed a degree of scepticism. Oh, how well we hide our awkward class secrets! Poole (2023) nevertheless optimistically portrays the working-class academic as bricoleur that that may open new spaces for intellectual enquiry consistent with Morley’s (2021) interpretation of the working-class academic as in a struggle that can be generative. Can be, but only if B-Schools allow it and publishing institutions encourage it. There is at least one more barrier to this that is worth highlighting, however.

Morley (2021) confirms what we have already argued. Class is more than a demographic variable, requiring that we ask whose knowledge circulates in a higher education system that remains a site of class privilege ripe with contradictions in claims about diversity:

When one intersects social class with gender and the putative “feminisation” of higher education, a range of complexities arise about women’s inclusion and working-class men’s exclusion from new opportunity structures. (Morley 2021, 6)

Morley further notes that there is a risk in attaching class to a nostalgic creation of a group that excludes LGBT+, (and potentially race and gender). For diversity, the white middle-class man may be the problem, but incentives that support white working-class men are a problematic solution in terms of institutional optics, providing incentives not to try. The disadvantages faced by working-class white men easily get othered through association with popularism, nationalism, misogyny, and homophobic stereotypes. It may surprise many to know that white working-class men are the least represented group in higher education (Baars, Mulcahy, and Bernardes 2016) when we might imagine them as the most able to use their privileges to exploit widening participation initiatives. Not surprisingly then, when the University of Bradford offered scholarships specifically for white working-class males, it made the news (BBC 2023). We will leave it to the reader to imaging how the popular press presented the story though. The general awkwardness in accepting the disadvantages faced by the working-class white man can also be seen in institutional initiatives. For example, at the institution where the authors work, there is a quite laudable imitative to provide enhanced mentorship to staff from underrepresented groups that makes no mention of class whatsoever. White working class men need not apply.

Finally, Davis (2023) further reminds us through storytelling with “academics of working-class heritage” that experiences are diverse, resisting simple stereotypes such as the “plucky hero” who overcomes adversity, or the perpetual victim who never can. Davis (2023) again suggests that the liminal movement between classes invites different ways of seeing things. If the academy wants differences in ideas, approaches, experiences, and theories (which is possibly quite a big assumption) then the diversity of all sorts – including class – is a good way to achieve this that is yet to be fully realised.

Reclassing marketing and consumer research and related education

We have argued that class remains significant in consumption, markets, and culture. The big issues of the day include issues of our consumer culture and require an acknowledgement of class. The working class has not gone away and is indeed at the sharp end of societal change. But recent re-energising agendas to capture class are inadequate because they do not sufficiently recognise or reflect on how research – and teaching – is undertaken in our discipline, and by whom. Whether or not we make class explicit, it is always present and is reproduced through our professional practices and priorities. A general absence of sensitivity to working-class experiences is a problem because being working class means being exploited at work (including in academia) and in the market. The result is an inability of current theory to fully represent, theorise, or critique consumer culture. Despite efforts to widen the participation of the working class in academia, even this project contains limitations and contradictions based on the dominance of middle-class sentiments within universities and the relative invisibility and complexity of incorporating class within wider DEI initiatives. Marketing and consumption, and marketing departments, look a lot better and more virtuous (and so are easier to sell as a career focus) if we stick to middle-class consumers researched by middle-class academics for the benefit of middle-class students and managers.

We conclude with some provocative suggestions on how all this might be addressed. Firstly, we might push for DEI policies that specifically surface class within business schools, journal editorial teams, and on discussion panels at conferences. Too often, we accept that one class may unproblematically talk for another, whereas we would rightly baulk at white, middle-aged men speaking for black women, etc. This may include reflections on class in methodological approaches and indeed the discussion of class (of participants and researchers) more generally when methods are presented. It may also include specific sensitivity to structural differences when reviewing work, making class more visible in the production of knowledge in the field. As we illustrated above, class determines how a study is understood and therefore its axiology.

We also need to think about how we teach as part of the knowledge exchange process that academics are responsible for. For example consider the use of examples and case studies that other or deny (or even denigrate) the working class, whilst maintaining a romantic dream of what it is to work in marketing that ignores the reality of many graduate jobs as much as the reality of exploited working-class worker-consumers. Language is especially important here and perhaps we might focus on this as an easy place to start to raise awareness of the embedded class system of which we are part. The ideas of the lower class are problematic, as is bottom of the pyramid, or underclass. Yet such ideas are embedded in marketing. Think of something as apparently benign as ACORN, from Mosaic, for example. Imagine growing up in a D household, getting onto a marketing degree programme, then hearing about yourself as a D in a room of Bs and a few Cs, like some Aldus Huxley dystopia. Yet the more recent idea of working-class consumption practices as little more than a choice is equally problematic. Reclassing marketing and consumer research therefore involves a more complete determination to challenge the assumptions and hierarchies that sustain B-Schools and which they project onto society. As one last example of how language excludes, think about ideas like the “Business School coffee morning”, where staff can informally meet with senior managers. When first invited to such an event one of the authors had to Google “coffee morning” to see what they are and what might be expected at one. They were left unclear about why this event might be so labelled and so decided not to attend. Remember, the othering of class is an everyday series of exclusions of some by others. It is subtle and insidious when we fail to reflect on it and then act to ensure inclusion.

We started by suggesting this as a provocation piece. We therefore hope and suspect that what we have written may be received with a desire to respond. We suspect that the instincts of some will be to refute and challenge what we have presented, but maybe there are academics out there who want to identify themselves as working-class, including within their research, and so find the narrative here an opening or opportunity? Maybe others will reflect on the way the class is reproduced within their work, or in the own “hero” stories? And others still may want to write about their teaching, or the ways in which this issue has been successfully addressed within their own institutions, conferences, or journal editorial policies.

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Notes on contributors

Mike Molesworth

Mike Molesworth is an associate professor at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research explores emerging consumer cultures and related ethic issues in organisations. His work has been published in leading journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Organization, and Marketing Theory.

Robert Cluley

Robert Cluley is an associate professor in marketing at Birmingham Business School. His research looks at marketing and society, with a focus on the practice of marketing in the real world. He is the author of the forthcoming book ‘ Marketing Science Fictions: An Ethnography of Marketing Analytics, Consumer Insight, and Data Science’ (Bristol University Press), exemplifies his thinking.