In: Economics
Arnould and Thompson (2005) coined the intellectual moniker of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) to describe a burgeoning genre of consumer research that had been variously characterized, over the course of its development, as qualitative, postpositivist, interpretivist, humanistic, naturalistic, and postmodern. These prior classificatory terms were either overly wedded to methodological-epistemological debates that glossed over the broader theoretical questions being pursued (i.e., qualitative, postpositivist, naturalistic); or were overly restrictive in their ontological scope (humanistic); or invoked a range of irrelevant or misleading associations. By proposing the academic brand “Consumer Culture Theory” sought to redress this paradigmatic ambiguity by profiling this subfield’s core interest in consumer culture (and more specifically the intersection of cultural systems and market logics), combatting misperceptions that such research was an inherently descriptive, atheoretical enterprise; and highlighting conceptual linkages to parallel conversations on the role of markets and consumption in everyday life that were unfolding in the fields of material culture, anthropology.
The development of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and provides a perspective from which this field of research can be framed, synthesized, and navigated. This review takes a conceptual and historical approach to map the rich theoretical inventory cultivated over almost 40 years of culturally-oriented research on consumption. The authors describe how CCT has emerged, chart various approaches to consumer culture studies, outline the dominant research domains, identify debates and controversies that circulate in the field, discuss the latest conceptual and methodological developments, and share managerial implications of a CCT approach.
CCT provides academics and practitioners a brand for research interested in the “real behavior of real consumers” (Wells, 1991, p. iii). Its aim is to unravel questions of how and why exchange and consumption happens in particular ways; the implications of marketplace production, exchange, and consumption for society and culture to critique and offer solutions to the dilemmas imposed by global consumer culture. Naming these phenomena as a group helps academics and practitioners to recognize research that belong to this diverse body of work, and to identify tendencies within the body of work, which facilitates the use of insights that stem from this work in theory development, critique, and practical action. In 2005, Arnould and Thompson proposed this “disciplinary brand” they called CCT to envelop the “flurry of research addressing the sociocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption” (Arnould and Thompson, 2005, p. 868). Arnould and Thompson (2005) focused on describing a set of concepts and research domains used to understand consumption better. They also endeavored to dispel myths that obstructed the legitimacy of the so-called “weird science” of interpretive consumer research (Bradshaw and Brown, 2008, p. 1400). In 2018, an edited introductory text and a handbook appeared that summarize many leading tendencies in this approach to consumer research (Arnould and Thompson, 2018b; Kravets et al., 2018). According to the 2005 formulation, CCT is a field of inquiry that seeks to unravel the complexities of consumer culture. The CCT view of culture differs dramatically from the conventional consumer research representation of “culture as a fairly homogenous system of collectively shared meanings, ways of life, and unifying values shared by a member of society. In CCT, consumer culture refers to what consumers do and believe rather than an attribute of character. Similarly, “being a consumer” is an identity intrinsic to market capitalism, our dominant global economic system, and the two evolve and change in tandem. CCT explores the “heterogeneous distribution of meanings and the multiplicity of overlapping cultural groupings that exist within the broader sociohistorical frame of globalization and market capitalism” (Arnould and Thompson, 2005, p. 869). Further, Arnould and Thompson (2005) emphasize “the dynamics of fragmentation, plurality, fluidity, and the intermingling (or hybridization) of consumption traditions and ways of life.
From a CCT standpoint, consumer culture is as a dynamic network of boundary spanning material, economic, symbolic, and social relationships or connections. Today, CCT scholars focus on the many ways to amend or extend the set of concepts and domains Arnould and Thompson (2005) outlined. They use these concepts to understand the global culture of consumption as mediated by market systems rather than pursuing the “epistemic goal of making incremental contributions to a system of verified propositions” weakly linked to what living consumers think and do (Arnould and Thompson, 2007, p. 5). Moreover, CCT is not a unified theory. Instead, it is a continuously evolving perspective on consumer society and markets that shapes cultural life. CCT offers a way of assessing consumption from particular socio-cultural systems embedded in globalization and market capitalism.
Arnould and Thompson (2005) outlined four analytical domains that systematize CCT scholars’ theoretical contributions; although nearly 20 years later, the field has evolved and hybridized further (Arnould and Thompson, 2018a). These include work at the individual level, which explores the shaping of consumer identity projects; at the group level, which examines the influence of the marketplace on lived culture and cultural resources; at the societal level, which investigates the intersection of social categories, social organization and consumption; and, at the macro level, which addresses consumers’ strategies of interpreting mass mediated marketplace ideologies and discourses. Originally, these levels were outlined as domains of theoretical contribution (Arnould and Thompson, 2005), however, they now seem better approached as research directions, groupings of particular focus or tendencies since “CCT cannot be regarded as a unified system of theoretical propositions” (Arnould and Thompson, 2007, p. 6).