Explorations in Consumer Culture Theory

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Explorations in Consumer Culture Theory Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research Series Sherry, John F.; Fischer, Eileen Taylor & Francis Routledge 0415776406 9780415776400 9780203886809 English Consumer behavior--Congresses, Consumption (Economics)--Congresses. 2009 HB801.C62813 2007eb 306.3 Consumer behavior--Congresses, Consumption (Economics)--Congresses. cover

Page i Explorations in Consumer Culture Theory The literature of marketplace behaviour, long dominated by economic and psychological discourse, has matured in the last decade to reveal the vast expanse of consumption activity not adequately addressed – in either theoretical or empirical perspective – by the discipline’s favoured approaches. The lived experience of consumption in cultural and historical context, rendered in a fashion that is both intellectually insightful and authentically evocative, and that recognizes the dynamics of accommodation and resistance that characterize the individual’s relationship with the market, is the central interpretive thrust of an emerging interdisciplinary field inquiry broadly labelled “Consumer Culture Theory.” In this volume, some of the leading scholars in this field explore in great empirical detail and theoretical depth the relationships that the consumer has developed both with goods and services and with the stakeholders that animate markets. Beginning with an examination of the underpinnings of cultural inquiry, the focus then shifts to specific consumption venues. Analyses of advertising in personal, critical and historical perspective; examination of lifestyle trends from dwelling practices of transnational nomads and regimes of personal training to genetic testing and gambling; interpretations of the dynamics of brand loyalty and corporate image management; and investigation of family consumption rituals are among the topics explored in ethnographic and humanistic perspective. The topics and treatments are wide-ranging and provocative. Readers with either a social scientific or managerial interest in marketplace behaviour will find both original case material and insightful discussion in this book. Substantive, methodological and representational contributions abound. The authors provide a solid platform for additional research and classroom debate in these chapters. John F. Sherry Jr. is the Herrick Professor of Marketing and Department Chair at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Eileen Fischer is the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto. page_i

Page ii Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research Edited by Stephen Brown and Barbara B. Stern University of Ulster, Northern Ireland and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA Recent years have witnessed an “interpretative turn” in marketing and consumer research. Methodologists from the humanities are taking their place alongside those drawn from the traditional social sciences. Qualitative and literary modes of marketing discourse are growing in popularity. Art and aesthetics are increasingly firing the marketing imagination. This series brings together the most innovative work in the burgeoning interpretative marketing research tradition. It ranges across the methodological spectrum from grounded theory to personal introspection, covers all aspects of the postmodern marketing “mix”, from advertising to product development, and embraces marketing’s principal sub-disciplines. 1. The Why of Consumption Edited by S. Ratneshwar, Glen Mick and Cynthia Huffman 2. Imagining Marketing Art, aesthetics and the avant-garde Edited by Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson 3. Marketing and Social Construction Exploring the rhetorics of managed consumption By Chris Hackley 4. Visual Consumption By Jonathan Schroeder 5. Consuming Books The marketing and consumption of literature Edited by Stephen Brown 6. The Undermining of Beliefs in the Autonomy and Rationality of Consumers By John O’Shaugnessy and Nicholas Jackson O’Shaugnessy page_ii Page iii 7. Marketing Discourse A critical perspective By Per Skålén, Markus Fellesson and Martin Fougère 8. Explorations in Consumer Culture Theory Edited by John F. Sherry Jr. and Eileen Fischer Also available in Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research series: Representing Consumers: Voices, views and visions Edited by Barbara B. Stern Romancing the Market Edited by Stephen Brown, Anne Marie Doherty and Bill Clarke Consumer Value: A framework for analysis and research Edited by Morris B. Holbrook Marketing and Feminism: Current issues and research Edited by Miriam Catterall, Pauline Maclaran and Lorna Stevens page_iii Page iv This page intentionally left blank. page_iv Page v Explorations in Consumer Culture Theory Edited by John F. Sherry Jr. and Eileen Fischer

LONDON AND NEW YORK page_v Page vi First published 2009 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 selection and editorial matter; John F. Sherry Jr. and Eileen Fischer, individual chapters; the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Consumer Culture Theory Conference (2nd : 2007 : York University) Explorations in consumer culture theory / edited by John F. Sherry Jr. and Eileen Fischer. p. cm. Selected papers and poetry presented at the Consumer Culture Theory Conference held at the York University in Toronto, Ontario in 2007. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Consumer behavior—Congresses. 2. Consumption (Economics)— Congresses. I. Sherry, John F. II. Fischer, Eileen, 1959– III. Title. HB801.C62813 2007 306.3—dc22 2008023478 ISBN 0-203-88680-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-77640-6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-88680-1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-77640-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-88680-9 (ebk) page_vi Page vii Contents Contributor biographies

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Introduction Explorations in Consumer Culture Theory:what are we exploring now? EILEEN FISCHER AND JOHN F. SHERRY, JR.

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PART ONE Forming and framing

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1 From CCT to CCC: building consumer culture community JOHANNA MOISANDER, LISA PEÑALOZA, AND ANU VALTONEN 2 Theoretical realism: culture and politics in commercial imagery LINDA M. SCOTT

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PART TWO Time and space

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3 Rethinking marketing’s evolutionary paradigm and advertisers’ role as cultural intermediary BARBARA OLSEN 4 Home away from home: home as order and dwelling in mobility FLEURA BARDHI AND SØREN ASKEGAARD page_vii

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PART THREE Setting and self

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5 Are we there yet? Co-producing success and failure in a “consumer-intensive” service context 101 EILEEN FISCHER, CELE C. OTNES, BRYNN WINEGARD, ERIC P.H.LI, AND SARAH J. S. WILNER 6 Designer genes: DNA testing services and consumer identity 114 ELIZABETH C. HIRSCHMAN AND DONALD PANTHER-YATES PART FOUR Brands and images

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7 Allomother as image and essence: animating the American Girl brand JOHN F. SHERRY, JR., STEFANIA BORGHINI, MARY ANN MCGRATH, ALBERT MUÑIZ, NINA DIAMOND, AND ROBERT V. KOZINETS 8 Engineering a mainstream market for sustainability: insights from Wal-Mart’s perfect storm DIANE M. MARTIN AND JOHN W. SCHOUTEN

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PART FIVE Rites and games

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9 Tinsel, trimmings, and tensions: consumer negotiations of a focal Christmas artifact CELE C. OTNES, ELIZABETH CROSBY, ROBERT KREUZBAUER, AND JENNIFER HO 10 Stacking the deck: gambling in film and the legitimization of casino gambling ASHLEE HUMPHREYS page_viii

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Page ix PART SIX Poetry

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11 Poetry Living Things Small Things JOHN W. SCHOUTEN Heading Home Consumption Kaddish in Four Koans JOHN F. SHERRY Haiku for EATNIKS EUGENE HALTON Imagined (Musical) Experiences: Across Four Centuries GEORGE M. ZINKHAN Conclusion Reflections and revanche JOHN F. SHERRY, JR. AND EILEEN FISCHER

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Page xi Contributor biographies Søren Askegaardis Professor of Marketing at SDU Odense University, Denmark. He has a Masters Degree in Social Sciences from Odense University, a post-graduate Diploma in Communication Studies from the Sorbonne University, Paris and a Ph.D. in Business Studies from Odense University. His research interests lie in the field of consumer behavior analyzed from a cultural perspective. Fleura Bardhi is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University, Boston. Her research examines the ways consumers cope through marketplace resources with the social impact of globalization, more specifically geographical mobility and virtuality. Some of her research projects include a study of dwelling on the road among transnational mobile professionals; an examination of the virtual workplace among IBM employees; a study of media multitasking phenomenon among Gen Ys; and a study on the welfare and social mobility among Army wives in the US Army. Her prior work has been published in Psychology and Marketing, Journal of Consumer Behavior, Sloan Management Review, Advances in Consumer Research, and Tourism Analysis.

Stefania Borghini is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Università Bocconi, Milan. Her research interests are related to children’s marketing, brand consumption, place attachment and organizational buying behavior. In her studies she adopts a consumer culture perspective and privileges ethnographic methods. She has published her works in books and academic journals. Elizabeth Crosby is a marketing doctoral student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has an MBA from the University of Massachusetts as well as bachelor degrees in Business Administration and Economics from the University of Maine. Ms. Crosby primarily studies how socio-cultural differences affect consumption. She has presented papers at various conferences including the Association for Consumer Research, Consumer Culture Theory, International Association of Business Disciplines, and the Eastern Academy of Management. Nina Diamond is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at DePaul University and the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business in Chicago where she conducts page_xi Page xii research on consumer behavior and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in new product management, marketing strategy, and consumer behavior. Nina is also a partner in the B/R/S Group, a market research and consulting firm, where she works with Fortune 500 companies on a variety of marketing strategy, new product, and marketing communication projects. Earlier in her career, Nina served as a brand manager, group brand manager, vice president of marketing, and general manager at The Pillsbury Company, American Home Products, Dow Chemical (DowBrands), and The Whirlpool Corporation. Eileen Fischer is a Professor of Marketing and holds the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise in the Schulich School of Business at York University. She publishes in both entrepreneurship and consumer research journals. She is an Editorial Board Member for Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, Journal of Consumer Research and Consumption, Markets and Culture. Elizabeth C. Hirschman is Professor II of Marketing at the School of Business, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her research interests include product and brand symbolism, cultural archetypes, evolutionary theory, gender, and ethnicity. Having discovered about a decade ago that she is of mixed-race and multi-ethnic ancestry, she has become fascinated by DNA testing and the implications it has for upending conventional notions of race and identity. She believes in the eventual reconciliation of the social and biological sciences (always the optimist!). Eugene Halton ([email protected]) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He writes on contemporary materialism as brain suck, possessions, and home life, consumption as socialization, objects, and animism, and the things that things say. He is the author of The Great Brain Suck (2008), Bereft of Reason (1995), and Meaning and Modernity (1986), all with the University of Chicago Press. He is co-author, with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, of The Meaning of Things (1981, Cambridge University Press). His website is http://www.nd.edu/~ehalton/ Jennifer Ho received a BS degree in Business Administration from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign in 2007. She served as a research assistant at UIUC. She is currently working in a marketingrelated position in the Chicago metropolitan area. Ashlee Humphreys is an Assistant Professor at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the interaction between consumers and institutions, including the dynamics of consumer-built institutions in the context of online communities such as YouTube and Wikipedia and the effects of institutional barriers (legal, social, and cultural) on consumer-company interactions in the context of casino gambling. Her research has been published in Advances in Consumer Research, Social Science Computer Review, and is forthcoming in Sociology Compass. page_xii Page xiii Robert V. Kozinets is Associate Professor of Marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto. He has extensive consulting and speaking experience with corporations around the world, including Amex, Campbell’s Soup, Merck, and eBay. His research interests include online communities, technology consumption, entertainment marketing, and subcultures. He has written and published over 50 articles and chapters on topics ranging from boycotters to Star Trek, Burning Man to ESPN Zone, American Girl to coffee connoisseurs, Wal-Mart to online creative consumers. Consumer Tribes, his co-edited volume (with Bernard Cova and Avi Shankar), was published by Erlbaum in 2007. Sage will publish his book on the method of netnography in 2009. Robert Kreuzbauer is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the School of Business and Information Management and the School of Design and Product Management at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule Salzburg). He has also been a visiting scholar in the Copenhagen Business School, at Bocconi University in Milan and at the University of Arizona. Before returning to

academia, Dr. Kreuzbauer was a brand consultant in a leading European design consultancy firm. His main research area is related to industrial design, brand identification and consumer motivation. He also works on topics of social marketing. His research has been published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management as well as in the proceedings of the annual conference of the European Marketing Academy and the Advances in Consumer Research. He graduated in business science and received his doctorate in social and economic sciences from the University of Innsbruck. Eric P. H. Li is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University. His research interests include global consumer culture, material culture, visual ethnography and consumer acculturation and assimilation. His research studies how consumers and marketers produce and re-produce culture in the marketplace. Diane M. Martin is an ethnographer, ardent feminist, cut-through-the-crap consultant, and Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Portland. Her research and teaching are shaped by her modest desire to change the world through environmentally and socially sustainable marketing practices. Her life reflects a passion for dance, mountains, deep forests, and fairness. Diane shares a tree house with John Schouten in Portland, Oregon. Mary Ann McGrath is a Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Business at Loyola University Chicago, where she also directs the Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications program. A former mathematician and marketing consultant, she discovered and embraced qualitative research techniques while pursuing her Ph.D. degree. Her area of academic research is consumer behavior, specifically related to research page_xiii Page xiv on retailing and gift exchanges. She received both her Ph.D. and MBA degrees in Marketing from Northwestern University. Johanna Moisander is a Professor at Helsinki School of Economics, Department of Marketing and Management. She is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Business and Tourism, and at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry. Her research interests currently center on critical and cultural approaches to business research and qualitative research methodology. She has published, for example, in Consumption, Markets & Culture, Organization, Business Strategy and the Environment, and International Journal of Consumer Studies. Email: [email protected] Albert M. Muñiz, Jr.is an Associate Professor of Marketing at DePaul University. His research interests are in the sociological aspects of consumer behavior and branding, including consumer generated content and value creation in consumption communities. He has researched extensively in the area of consumer brand communities for over a decade and his work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Advertising, the Journal of Interactive Marketing and the Journal of Strategic Marketing. Professor Muñiz received his BS, MS and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to DePaul, Professor Muñiz taught at the University of California at Berkeley. Barbara Olsen is an Associate Professor in Marketing at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. In her career in advertising she began working as an illustrator, progressed to account executive and founded an international agency that specialized in promoting television syndication. Currently, besides teaching consumer behavior, brand theory and strategy, and marketing, she continues to advise on brand strategy as a consultant. Her latest research interests include aesthetic consumption, branding, marketing history, and cultural dimensions of consumer behavior. Cele C. Otnes is the Investors in Business Education Professor of Marketing in the Department of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is co-author with Elizabeth H. Pleck of Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding (University of California Press, 2003), and has co-edited two other books on rituals and consumption. She has published numerous articles on ritualistic consumption in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and Psychology & Marketing, among others. She is co-editor of the 2008 European Advances in Consumer Research. She primarily teaches courses in Consumer Behavior on the undergraduate level, as well as doctoral seminars in marketing theory and consumer insights. Donald Panther-Yates is Principal of DNA Systems, Scottsdale, Arizona. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University and has published several books and page_xiv Page xv articles on the Native Americans of the Southeastern United States, as well as the Melungeons of Appalachia. Donald is of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Cheraw descent and is co-administrator of the Melungeon DNA Project and the Southeastern Native American DNA Project. Lisa Peñaloza is Scientific Director, InteraCT Research Center, EDHEC Business School, Lille, France, and Co-editor of the journal Consumption, Markets and Culture. Her current research explores identity

formation for US middle class consumers, as values of freedom, security, and national achievement are threatened by costly credit and falling housing prices. Other research projects have examined the challenges of ranchers and consumers maintaining cultural traditions and memories at a western stock show, the mutual adaptation of Mexican immigrant consumers and marketers in the US doing business with them, the development of community among subsequent generations of Mexican Americans, and the bittersweet impacts of remittances in Mexican families. Her research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Public Policy and Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Marketing Theory, Journal of Strategic Marketing, and the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. Linda M. Scott is Professor of Marketing at the Said School of Business and a Fellow of Templeton College at the University of Oxford for two years. She came to Oxford from the University of Illinois, where she held appointments in art, advertising, gender studies, and communications research. Her research is composed of two streams: one focuses on the response to advertising as an art form and the other is women and markets. She has written one book, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism, and edited Persuasive Imagery: A Consumer Response Approach, in addition to publishing extensively in academic journals. John W. Schouten is a poet, novelist, ethnographer, and Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Portland. He has also worked, with varying levels of distinction, as a ski instructor, a machinist, a missionary, a mental health worker, an optician, a roofer, and a Spanish teacher. John is stupidly optimistic, occasionally depressed, and always in love. He currently shares a hillside nest with his lifelong traveling companion, Diane Martin, in Portland, Oregon. John F. Sherry, Jr. joined the Notre Dame Marketing faculty in 2005 as the Herrick Professor of Marketing and Chairman of the Department. For the two previous decades, he was a member of the Marketing Department at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Sherry is an anthropologist who studies the sociocultural and symbolic dimensions of consumption, and the cultural ecology of marketing. He is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association as well as the Society for Applied Anthropology, and past President of the Association for Consumer Research. Sherry’s work appears in numerous journals, book chapters, professional manuals and proceedings. He has edited page_xv Page xvi Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An Anthropological Sourcebook, as well as Servicescapes: The Concept of Place in Contemporary Markets; he is co-editor of Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 19 (with Brian Sternthal), Time, Space and the Market: Retroscapes Rising (with Stephen Brown), and Consumer Culture Theory (with Russell Belk). Anu Valtonen earned her Ph.D. at the Helsinki School of Economics. She works currently as marketing professor at the Faculty of Tourism and Business, at the University of Lapland, Finland. Her major research interests relate to consumer culture, leisure and tourism studies, time studies, and qualitative research methodologies. Her recent publication includes Qualitative Marketing Research: A Cultural Approach, SAGE, co-authored by Johanna Moisander. She is currently involved in two interdisciplinary research projects entitled Tourism as Work and Global Marketplace Cultures. Sarah J.S. Wilner is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University. Drawing on a range of material and expressive consumer culture, her research examines the spaces and processes where firms and consumers interface, particularly acts of interpretation and co-creation in the context of product design. Brynn Winegard is Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University. She is interested in brand management and other aspects of marketing strategy; in particular she is interested in the institutional factors that shape and constrain strategic practices. George M. Zinkhan (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is the Coca-Cola Company Professor of Marketing at the University of Georgia. Besides teaching at the University of Michigan, he has also served as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Business, and at the University of Houston, where he was the Conn Appliances Professor of Marketing. Since 1996, Professor Zinkhan has served as a Judge for the Peabody Awards, which recognizes excellence in broadcasting. page_xvi Page 1 Introduction Explorations in Consumer Culture Theory: what are we exploring now? Eileen Fischer and John F. Sherry Jr. In 2005, Arnould and Thompson coined the term Consumer Culture Theory a.k.a. Consumer Culture Theoretics (Arnould and Thompson, 2007), to refer to the studies within the field of consumer research that address the sociocultural, experiential, symbolic and ideological aspects of consumption. The body of work they evoked has emerged in the 25 years since a cadre of consumer researchers first began to advocate that the discipline make room for interpretive perspectives on consumer phenomena. Efforts to brand this work

appear to have been highly effective: “CCT” has become institutionalized as one of the three major types of consumer research, as reflected in the Association for Consumer Research’s conference programs. Within the now-branded institutional field of CCT, not surprisingly, growth continues, and institutional entrepreneurship thrives. As Arnould and Thompson (2005) envisioned, their efforts provided not only a heuristic framework for mapping a diverse set of studies, but also a fertile ground for debate, innovation and advancement. And as one forum wherein the debate, innovation and advancement can occur, an annual series of Consumer Culture Theory conferences has arisen. The second annual conference was held at York University in Toronto, Ontario in 2007 (the first having taken place on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in 2006). This volume represents a selection of the papers and poetry that were presented at the 2007 CCT conference as well as several invited papers from influential fellow travelers. It provides a contemporary snapshot of the latest thinking among those who count themselves as members of the consumer culture community, to borrow a term from Johanna Moisander, Lisa Peñaloza, and Anu Valtonen, the authors of Chapter 1. As their paper makes clear, the question of what comprises consumer culture research is by no means settled (though it is equally clear that Arnould and Thompson had no intention of providing rules as to what should not be included in the field). In their chapter, entitled “From CCT to CCC: building consumer culture community,” Moisander et al. argue for greater recognition of the many diverse strands in the intellectual traditions that inform consumer culture research, emphasizing that there exists a wide variety of distinctive institutional and sociocultural trajectories, philosophical assumptions, methodological techniques, and types of theoretical contributions, some of which differ dramatically from those that dominate much of North American consumer culture scholarship. Linda Scott page_1 Page 2 tacks between her lived experience of advertising and the reigning cultural criticism of that medium in Chapter 2, in an essay entitled “Theoretical realism: culture and politics in commercial imagery” to unpack the constructed layers of “reality” that have obscured our understanding of material life. Her critique of the politics of interpretation informs much of the contemporary CCT agenda. Even while debate about the contours of the field continues, the range of topics attracting attention from scholars who ally themselves with it continues to diversify. As the papers in Part Two of this volume show, consumer culture theorists are concerned with situating phenomena of interest in historical and socio-spatial context. In Chapter 3, “Rethinking marketing’s evolutionary paradigm and advertisers’ role as cultural intermediary,” Barbara Olsen uses extensive archival data to compare early twentieth-century advertising executives’ assumptions about gender and social class (as revealed in minutes of meetings), with the gender and class assumptions implicit in later twentieth-century advertising strategies. Her archival sources lead her to remark on the continuity of advertised notions of gender and social class and to reassess frameworks that argue for significant discontinuity in the period in question. Reflecting an ever-increasing sensitivity to the role of place as it constitutes and reflects consumer identity, Chapter 4, “Home away from home: home as order and dwelling in mobility” by Fleura Bardhi and Søren Askegaard shines a spotlight on home space in relation to commercial space. This analysis highlights the notion of “home-as-order” and investigates how the notion informs consumption practices within commercial spaces, such as hotels. The third portion of this volume advances one of the longstanding areas of interest to CCT researchers: consumers’ pursuits of identity quests. Chapter 5, “Are we there yet? Co-producing success and failure in personal training” sees Eileen Fischer, Cele Otnes, Brynn Winegard, Eric Li, and Sarah J. S. Wilner examine consumers and trainers in a “consumer-intensive” service setting, personal training, in which consumers often fail to attain the outcomes they desire a priori. They find that consumers form distinct types of relationships with trainers, and that what constitutes success or failure is emergent within and varies according to the type of relation formed. Elizabeth Hirschman and Donald Panther-Yates, in Chapter 6, “Designer genes: DNA testing services and consumer identity,” describe how a technology that allows consumers to identify their paternal, maternal and biogeographic ancestries can affect conceptions of identity. They explore how identity challenges that occur when results are surprising may serve as a catalyst not only for the construction of new identities, but also new communities. Part Four of the volume provides new insights into marketers’ culturally situated projects of brand and image building. In Chapter 7, “Allomother as image and essence: animating the American Girl brand,” John Sherry, Stefania Borghini, Mary Ann McGrath, Albert Muñiz, Nina Diamond, and Robert Kozinets explore intergenerational brand invocation in the context of the American Girl brand. They develop the concept of allomothering – the provision of maternal nurturing to children by non-mothers – to develop an understanding of social surrogacy and to unpack the brand’s image and essence. Intriguingly their paper sheds light not only on brand building processes but also on the feminized reproduction of domestic page_2 Page 3 culture. Diane Martin and John Schouten, in Chapter 8, “Engineering a mainstream market for sustainability:

insights from Wal-Mart’s perfect storm,” draw on their ethnographic fieldwork with the retailer to analyze the emergent process that has involved various teams within the corporation, its associates, its vendors, its customers, along with representatives from NGOs, government, and academia. They document a process of engineering an entire market driven by a commitment to sustainability, and, along the way, of re-engineering the image of Wal-Mart. The fifth part of this collection includes two papers with fresh and important observations on the negotiation and institutionalization of consumer practices. Chapter 9, “Tinsel, trimmings, and tensions: consumer negotiations of a focal Christmas artifact,” is by Cele Otnes, Elizabeth Crosby, Robert Kreuzbauer, and Jennifer Ho. They examine how family members negotiate as they create aesthetic aspects of a ritual that is central within many families: obtaining and decorating a Christmas tree. They identify both tensions and resolution strategies for the collaborative production of this ritual artifact. Ashlee Humphries analyzes film images as they reflect and inform consumer and marketing practices in Chapter 10, “Stacking the deck: gambling in film and the legitimization of casino gambling.” She notes that, within the space of twenty years, casino gambling has gone from being illegal to being legitimate. Drawing on institutional theory, she investigates the part representations of casinos in film have played in the legitimation process. Humphries’ work is particularly interesting in that it highlights how images such as those in film may play a mediating role in the processes that take place as marketplace practices such as gambling gain (or lose) credibility among consumers. The sixth and final portion of this volume features a selection of the poetry that is being produced by scholars within the CCT field. John Schouten, John Sherry, Eugene Halton, and George Zinkhan voice their insights in a format that breaks with constraining representational styles of conventional prose. Their insights deftly defy synopsis, delving directly into the densest thickets of contemporary consumption. As this volume reflects the terrain being explored by consumer culture researchers today, we anticipate with interest the field’s evolution. The geography of contemporary consumption, as it must, will be re-written and re-mapped continuously. page_3 Page 4 This page intentionally left blank. page_4 Page 5 Part One Forming and framing page_5 Page 6 This page intentionally left blank. page_6 Page 7 1 From CCT to CCC Building consumer culture community Johanna Moisander, Lisa Peñaloza and Anu Valtonen Introduction This paper began at the 2005 European Association for Consumer Research (EACR) conference in Goteborg as a conversation, one of many spurred by Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) work on Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). We applauded the many theoretical contributions these authors recognized in their review and shared their intentions of uniting us under an umbrella acronym and putting to rest continued derogatory labels of interpretive consumer research as weird science. Even so, we wondered what sorts of hegemonic inclusions and exclusions might be brought about by this academic brand in research conventions, in university jobs and promotions, and in topics and geographic areas. Further, we pondered why pockets of interpretive work have flourished in particular places and not in others, and why so little of the work of European scholars has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), observations even more surprising since so many of the theoretical foundations of CCT have come from Europe, for example, Karl Marx, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu, and the list goes on. Above all, we were concerned about the implications of the CCT paper for the quest for pluralism that has been a central epistemic value throughout the history of interpretive consumer research. We thus take a self-reflective, genealogical perspective (Foucault 1970) on the project of building CCT in order to lay further groundwork for the evolution of expanded forms of consumer culture community (CCC). In doing so, we participate in the litany of conversations among interpretive consumer researchers strategizing to increase our numbers in the pages of journals and in university positions, firms,

and graduate programs.1 We begin to seek answers to these puzzling observations in tracing the historical roots of the epistemic community CCT represents in the field of consumer research in the US.2 By epistemic community we refer to a network of scholars that works to construct and give authority to particular ways of knowing (Knorr Cetina 1999; Longino 1990; Longino 2002). The CCT paper began as a review of 20 years of interpretive work published in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) solicited by editor Dawn Iacobucci in encouraging her associate editors to reflect upon the contributions and future directions of their respective areas. Here, authors Arnould page_7 Page 8 and Thompson (2005) refer to the work of a community of mainly American “interpretive” scholars, whose formative development entailed making space within the logical-empiricist, quantitative, and utterly managerial research approach dominant in the top US marketing academy and its journals. Our interest lies in drawing out particularities in the issues and points of contention scholars have dealt with within this body of work as the basis for comparisons to additional strands of interpretive consumer research. Thus our objective in mapping out what might be differs from Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) in overviewing interpretive work published in JCR. In crafting our genealogy, we draw from studies of ethnic minority discourse (Bhabba 1994; JanMohamed and Lloyd 1991; Lipsitz 2001). Noteworthy in this work are accounts of the differential acceptance rates of literary work penned by persons of color. To summarize their findings, writings more like the mainstream canon in structure have been accepted more readily into English literature programs in US universities than those that differ in structure from the canon. Like these literary scholars, we are concerned with two levels of difference. While the literary scholars are concerned with differences between the creative writing of whites and authors of color, and within the writings of nonwhite authors, we are concerned with differences between interpretivist and noninterpretivist work, and those within interpretivist work. We suggest that while the early interpretivist work focused on its differences from positivist research, at present differences within CCT are as relevant to our long-term development. That is, as interpretive scholars mature as an epistemic community, increasingly relevant are within group distinctions, as it is us, interpretive researchers, who are the gatekeepers, evaluating colleagues for promotions and jobs, and reviewing and editing interpretive papers in journals and conferences. Of course, of continued importance are differences between interpretive and positivist work, as competition between paradigms remains an issue in journal and conference reviews and job searches. To continue, we suggest that forms of interpretive work more similar to the mainstream have been more readily accepted into the mainstream journals than those more different in structure, even though both have differed in content. We emphasize differences in consumption content as the explanation why interpretive work was labeled “weird science” early on in dealing with extreme forms of consumption such as collecting (Belk et al. 1991), pop music fanatics (O’Guinn 1991), and sex (Gould 1991), and agree with Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) conclusion that such work has probably distorted the larger body of interpretive work even as it has contributed to the notoriety of the latter. To return to our argument, we contend that the strategy of emphasizing ontological and epistemological differences between interpretive and quantitative work (Belk et al. 1988; Hirschman 1986), has glossed over their similarities. We are concerned with similarities continuous with classical economics and psychology in emphasizing the rational, universal, individual consumer we playfully call the “heroic consumer.” Finally, we challenge Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) assertion that methods are no longer relevant and their exhortation to use established methods to study page_8 Page 9 new problems and canonical constructs. To the contrary, we show that interpretive work has consistently developed new research methods and ways of viewing the nature of reality and of ways of knowing that have enabled researchers and reviewers to see new problems (Thompson et al. 1989; Scott 1994; Ozanne and Murray 1991). We thus encourage the more explicit, simultaneous development of new methods and topics that transcend the individual unit of analysis, adjudicate multiple dialectics of consumer meanings, and bridge consumption phenomena with regional and global politics. For each of these avenues we cite work moving in these directions and make suggestions for further research. CCT as an epistemic community Epistemic community definitions and functions In directing attention to the epistemic culture continuously produced, reproduced, and negotiated in CCT, we seek better understanding of the way it offers specific forms of intelligibility for people to make sense of “knowledge production” and themselves as “knowers.” Importantly, the epistemic culture guides and constrains action in academic research organizations by making available particular ways of thinking and talking about knowledge and knowing that are grounded in social practice. It effectively accomplishes

hegemonic inclusions and exclusions of knowledge production in organizing and orienting taken-for-granted cognitive goals and values, received theoretical background assumptions, and conventions of normal practice (Longino 1990; Longino 2002). Further, like other organizational cultures, epistemic culture exerts its influence through implicit norms and received ideals and practices (Linstead and Grafton-Small 1992). Importantly, as an epistemic community, CCT is an act of power – far more than a mere label or brand for promoting “interpretive scholars,” as Arnould and Thompson (2005) have positioned it. The label and the practices it represents effectively highlight various topics and methodological approaches over others. As its nomenclature reverberates among interpretive colleagues, and between interpretivists and noninterpretivists, CCT plays a not insignificant role in governing the review practices for journals, the selection of tracks and papers in conferences, the formation and contents of doctoral courses, and the selection of speakers in academic programs. For colleagues and students, for example, to say that they are doing CCT situates them within existing methodological customs and theoretical ways of thinking. This in itself is useful, especially for students in establishing themselves with graduate committees and in seeking jobs. Our concern is that such positioning may limit the willingness and development of skills to critique and extend the body of work and its methods, both of which is vital to their careers and to CCC in the long run. In this paper we echo Arnould and Thompson’s (2007) addendum that there is no single consumer culture theory, and we hope that it stays that way. However, we believe it is important to go beyond acknowledging that CCT consists of numerous theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to emphasize page_9 Page 10 their different ontological and epistemological commitments. Specifically, we refer to issues within hermeneutics, ethnographic field work, and critical theory in their respective emphases on individual agents versus group units of analysis, on interpretations of textual data versus social activity in accessing the meanings of consumption, and on treatments of consumption politics as apart from versus engaged with regional and global power structures. Given these differences, our concern is with the subtle formation of research conventions privileging the former over the latter over time. As Helen Longino (1993) has argued, if we recognize the partiality of theories, we can recognize and work towards pluralism in the community as an important condition for the continued development of knowledge. Thus, we write this paper in the hope of nurturing this pluralism in the field of interpretive consumer research for the diversity, creativity, and innovation that it stimulates. While the attempt to institutionalize “interpretive” consumer research through CCT helps us all, the sedimentation of CCT as the brand is suspect if not dangerous when it represents the one best theory or correct methodological approach in interpretive consumer research. In the next section we overview the North American socio-cultural and institutional trajectory of CCT, drawing from writings, observation, and our own personal experience towards the goal of encouraging open discussion and transformative criticism of the background assumptions and beliefs that have come to guide its research topics and practices. A historical tale Like other epistemic communities (Longino 1990), CCT is constituted in the discourses and interactions of those within the group of CCT researchers, and in relation to noninterpretivist modelers, experimentalists, and survey consumer researchers. Individual personalities are part of every community, including CCT, yet its mainstays are found in the numbers of people, the quality and timing of their work, the support of key academics and industry people, and exchanges with those in opposition. The founders of CCT were personalities, as playful as they were serious in applying their multi-disciplinary theories and methodological toolkits, intellectual creativity, and determination in trailblazing new consumer research paths and topics. The early conferences buzzed with stories speculating whether Paul Anderson, Russell Belk, Elizabeth Hirschman, Morris Holbrook, Sidney Levy, Melanie Wallendorf, John Sherry, and company3 would pull off their “weird science,” in bringing forth interpretive ways of doing research and topics that recentered the consumer, reinstated the joys of discovery long buried in the confines of lab experiments and mathematical models, and reappropriated the marketplace as the eminent site of inquiry (Belk 1991a). Differences of opinion reverberated in hallways, lunches, and well into the night over drinks regarding how far they would/should go in claiming space in conferences, journals, academic departments, etc. Seldom did conversations not feature conflicts among interpretivists regarding feasible/appropriate ways to proceed in refuting gatekeeping journal editors, conference organizers and colleagues; in advancing the scientific page_10 Page 11 versus humanistic merits of the work in responding to charges of its lack of relevance and rigor; and in infiltrating existing power structures and forming new ones. In tracing the history of this epistemic community, it is useful to include sentiments in the field at the time. Kuhn (1970) speaks of the necessity of a critical mass recognizing the inability of the existing way of thinking and doing research, which Suppe (1979) termed the “received view” to address pressing contemporary phenomena. The scientific revolutions Kuhn detailed begin at the periphery, where “desert

scientists” investigate “anomalies” either ignored or not dealt with adequately in the received view of “normal science.” Over time “weird science” becomes viewed as central and valuable in addressing issues increasingly recognized to be relevant, and ultimately becomes the mainstream. It is our assertion that early interpretive work entailed such a revolution in the US, and is now well on its way to becoming a global mainstream. The following excerpt from Elizabeth Hirschman’s preface to her 1989 edited volume stands in stark contrast to the present global diffusion of interpretive work. Here she relates a lunch conversation at the 1987 AMA doctoral consortium pondering the present marginalized status and future challenges of interpretive methods and relativist philosophies. There was a fair amount of agreement that interpretive research was not faring as well as we had hoped: editors were recalcitrant, reviewers hostile, colleagues less than enthusiastic. The moods of the lunch table participants ranged from the mildly ironic to the radically cynical. Various anecdotes of disappointment and distress were recounted. What to do? Retreat was intellectually unacceptable; once you’ve crossed over that mental bridge to interpretivism, there’s no turning back. Rebellion and secession seemed certainly doomed to failure; internecine warfare is always destructive to all parties, and besides, we had nowhere to go, anyway. Starting our own journal appeared too grandiose and egocentric; holding a conference, too small and redundant with the many special topic sessions at ACR that would have preceded it. Someone, perhaps Paul Anderson or Morris Holbrook, suggested a book. (Hirschman 1989) The budding group earned vital legitimacy from senior marketing academics and executives in highly esteemed institutions, such as Needham Harper Worldwide and the Marketing Science Institute, disillusioned with quantitative consumer research. Their support of the Consumer Behavior Odyssey would become a key turning point in the development of the group and a vital tool for it in making headway in the field. For example, in their letters of support, Hall Kassarjian expresses excitement and contrasts the field studies and interpretive analysis with “dull” consumer research he attributes to “technocrats” who have “overpowered the field and squeezed it dry of fun” (cited in Belk 1991b: 4), while William Wells writes of his distress and encourages colleagues to counter the tendency of academic researchers to migrate from real consumers to labs and “theoretical never-never land” (cited in Belk 1991b: 5). page_11 Page 12 Flashing forward to the present, it is an understatement to say CCT has outgrown the derogatory label of weird science. Over time members of this ever-expanding group4 have taken positions in marketing and other university departments; published scores of articles in JCR and other journals; edited and written books and book chapters; made hours of presentations at ACR, AMA, and other conferences; disseminated the work in textbooks (Arnould et al. 2002; Solomon 2003); and engaged in consulting activities. Its increasingly widespread use among practitioners is found across the realm of advertising, new product development, retail/ environmental design, and internet communication and distribution; in the proliferation of cultural branding texts (Anholt 2003; Atkin 2004; Gobé 2001; Holt 2004); and in the many consultants currently traversing the globe. Yet our main focus is with the academic community. Here we note important distinctions in the status of interpretive consumer researchers in the top ranked US marketing departments and elsewhere. While interpretive scholars have yet to infiltrate some of the top marketing departments, the body of work enjoys a mainstream status and global reach that is as gratifying as it is alarming. The prestigious Journal of Consumer Research now sports not one, but three interpretive associate editors. The journal is one of four top journals listed by the London business periodical, the Financial Times, and the only one dedicated to consumer research. We note that all four of the top journals come from North America, and that the Financial Times (FT) list has become the evaluative standard of European business schools and in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) sweeping across the UK. That these schools are speedily developing research traditions is laudable and plays to the strengths of interpretive researchers internationally. However, because the traditions of this epistemic community and its journals are located in the US, the pressures to publish tied to institutional funding are cause for concern among faculty working in other nations. Institutionally, the Association for Consumer Research now regularly holds European, Asian, and Latin American conferences. Further, members recently modified the structure of the organization to add one director to represent Europe, Asia, and Latin America. However, the new structure retains hegemonic representation and power for the North American organization. The decision to hold the European, Asian, and Latin American conferences every three years is a case in point, in favoring the travel schedules of North American members over the respective concerns of members in these other regions in having more frequent meetings to help further develop vibrant consumer research traditions in their areas. Imagine if the North American ACR had been limited to meeting once every three years! As ACR grapples with its place in a changing world, global networks of interpretive researchers are thriving. CCT colleagues are akin to celebrities, traversing the globe teaching doctoral seminars, speaking at regional marketing association meetings, serving as consultants in setting up academic programs and research centers, and in evaluating colleagues for promotions and jobs. The result has been a number of fruitful collaborations

in papers, seminars, conferences, and workshops, and much cross-fertilization of ideas and methods, and we look forward page_12 Page 13 to many more. But here we have gotten ahead of ourselves, and so return to the early days for strategic insights as to how this global diffusion has come about in redeploying them for CCC. Ontological and epistemological maneuvering was essential to the early interpretivists in making space in the quantitatively dominated discipline. Paul Anderson’s (1986) treatise on relativism and Despandé’s “Paradigms Lost” (l983) parried universalistic ontological assumptions, while Hirschman’s “Humanistic Inquiry” (1986), and Belk et al.’s “Naturalistic Inquiry” (1988) made explicit the epistemological beliefs and practices underlying existing quantitative research conventions as the means of articulating alternatives better suited to the work they wanted to do. A subsequent breakthrough was made by Firat and Venkatesh (1995) in offering an account of how deeply mired the field was in modernist ideals, and developing contrasting potential contributions applying postmodern insights and research conventions. Yet alarmingly, Arnould and Thompson (2005) cast methodological differences between CCT and other traditions of consumer research as a misconception and mere predilection stemming from a more primary theoretical agenda (p. 870). We forcefully and respectfully challenge this representation. While this positioning may be accurate for some persons, we doubt the strategy of minimizing methodological differences between interpretive and positivist researchers will result in more positions in top US marketing departments. Instead, we suggest scholars advance the body of interpretive work by playing to our strengths and reinstate the importance of methodological as well as ontological and epistemological work in maintaining and gaining intellectual ground in relation to noninterpretive work, and as a vibrant source of dynamism and growth within the interpretive community. In both ways such work serves as preventative medicine lest our ways of thinking and doing research become sedimented. As members of the group, we agree there is much room for junior and senior scholars to carry out work within the CCT tradition, and appreciate Arnould and Thompson’s (2005; 2007) syntheses of previously published work as excellent accountings of what Kuhn (1970) referred to as normal science within CCT. However, our concerns are that adhering to these conventions seriously limits our long-term developmental potential, given the ways theoretical knowledge advances in pushing the borders of extant methods, and in working through matters of ontology and epistemology (Dubin 1978). Ultimately, we suggest the more promising long-term strategy in expanding this growing body of work is to interrogate the background assumptions and beliefs underlying and making intelligible existing interpretive research conventions. Just as Firat and Venkatesh built upon Anderson’s, Hirschman’s, and Despandé’s research, we all have continuing opportunities to invigorate CCC in keeping up with contemporary developments in consumption phenomena. page_13 Page 14 From literary to consumer research canons As a guide we make comparisons of consumer research epistemic communities to ethnic literary ones. Ethnic minority literature contains many variations, which JanMohamed and Lloyd (1991) have categorized based on differences and similarities in structure and content to the Anglo Saxon literary canon. It may come as no surprise that the work of minority creative writers that has been most readily accepted into university classrooms has tended to be more similar in literary structure (i.e., writing style, voice, rhetoric, etc.) to the Anglo Saxon canon; while works that differed in structure have been less likely to be incorporated into university literary studies programs. Notably the minority work accepted and not accepted differed from the Anglo canon in dealing with elements of the lives and cultures of people of color. While consumer research differs from ethnic literary work, we find parallels in the formation of their canons useful in fashioning creative, alternative streams within CCT. In proceeding we assert the importance of each of these types of interpretive work in CCC. We compare interpretive work and its logical empiricist, quantitative, and managerial mainstream counterpart, and we make comparisons within interpretive work. In deriving our categories we feature beliefs about the nature of consumers, consumption behavior, and research conventions, and in regard to the substantive consumption phenomena studied. We thus go beyond the early assertions of differences between interpretive work and quantitative work (Hirschman 1986; Belk et al. 1988) to draw attention to their similarities. Notably, we have yet to realize many of the ontological differences these pioneering consumer researchers mapped out early on, and doing so thus represents continuing theoretical and methodological opportunities. We label assimilationist interpretive work that is similar in research conventions to positivist research canons, even as it differs in the substantive consumption content examined. Examples include Belk’s (1988) work on extended self, Wallendorf and Arnould’s (1988) study of consumers’ favorite possessions, and Belk et al.’s (2003) work on consumer desire for its emphasis on individual, psychological extensions and connections with consumption objects. Assimilationist work has been impressively successful in trailblazing

into forums dominated by quantitative consumer researchers and in drawing attention to vitally important aspects of consumption meanings and object attachments overlooked by this mainstream. However, its emphasis on ontological differences in the nature of reality and epistemological differences between naturalistic inquiry and quantitative research has masked similarities in retaining the individual, autonomous, rational, and goal-directed consumer whose consumption is rendered intelligible and meaningful in terms of intentional, coherent meanings. We use the label reformist for interpretive work different in research conventions, yet similar in substantive content. Examples include Fournier and Mick’s (1999) work on consumer satisfaction and Scott and Vargas’s (2007) work on advertising imagery. Both papers bring interpretive approaches, semiotic and rhetorical, respectively, to bear on the study of mainstream topics previously the purview of page_14 Page 15 quantitative methods within the information-processing paradigm. Reformist work promises perhaps the strongest theoretical contributions in challenging these seminal concepts, constructs, and processes in the field, and others such as identity, intentionality, decision making, and free choice. As importantly, because it is based on different ontological beliefs and epistemological conventions, it makes methodological contributions as well. We use the term revolutionary for work differing in research conventions and substantive consumption content. Examples include Belk et al.’s (1988) swap meet study, Thompson et al.’s (1989) study of women’s consumption experience, Scott’s (1994) reader response approach to advertising symbolism, and Ozanne and Murray’s (1991) critical theoretical account of consumption politics. Each of these studies delineated and carried out methodological innovations from other fields useful in examining novel consumption phenomena. As such, revolutionary work represents arguably the most promising long-term strategy for advancing interpretive consumer research, in rendering intelligible uncharted consumption phenomena ontologically, epistemologically, and substantively. However, we note the partiality of these early innovations, which has left ample room for further contributions in naturalistic inquiry, grounded theory, and reader response criticism, leaving additional opportunities in these and other approaches/topics including material studies in anthropology and archaeology, aesthetics in the arts and humanities (Schroeder 2002), advances in political organizing and cooperatives from political science and labor history, to name a few. In stimulating these additions we emphasize the importance of recognizing ontological and epistemological differences within interpretive work. Further, as interpretive scholars continue to mature as a discipline and expand, we look forward to seeing the theoretical and methodological advances incorporated into the fields we have historically borrowed from. In the next section we proceed to give further examples of these types of interpretive work in discussing avenues for advancing CCC. We suggest that fertile opportunities lie in: 1) reconceptualizing the nature of the consuming subject and her/his consumption and accounting for changing relations to others and to society; 2) bringing to the fore inter-relations between consumers, between consumers and marketers, and between researcher and researched in sifting through multiple consumption meanings; and 3) reconsidering the intersections of these socio-market relations and meanings in mapping out consumption politics, as appropriate given regional and national changes brought about and shaping the increasingly global economy. Transcending the individual unit of analysis Much of the early and recent CCT work continues to view the individual as the primary unit of analysis. In the psychological tradition, researchers typically draw from intra-personal psychological constructs and processes such as extended self, self-identity, and personal values and meanings in making sense of consumption behaviors. The research method suggested for the approach, the phenomenological page_15 Page 16 interview, is based on Gestalt psychology and clinical practice, and is claimed to be “perhaps the most powerful means of attaining an in-depth understanding of another person’s experiences” (Thompson et al. 1989:138, italics added). It makes much sense that interpretive scholars continue to examine the individual as unit of analysis, as individualism is both a powerful agent and effect of marketization globally. Even so, in carrying out studies of the individual, it is difficult to see changes over time, such as the losses of tradition (Hefner 1998) and the increasing emphasis on children (Cook 2003), although making cross-cultural comparisons is one way to observe such change (Belk et al. 2003). We join many researchers (Bristor and Fischer 1993; Cova and Cova 2002; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Ritson and Elliott 1999) in calling for and grappling with shifting the unit of analysis beyond the individual consumer, echoing the early call by Nicosia and Meyer (1976) to examine sociological dimensions of consumption. It is our contention that the major obstacles for doing so stem from the different background assumptions within interpretive work, in this case fundamental differences within the field as regards the ways in which the unit of analysis/object of inquiry has been defined, conceptualized, and operationalized. Colleagues have worked to broaden the scope of research by situating the individual consumer within

relevant networks of social and market relations to examine their effects on the ways consumers, such as adolescents (Ritson and Elliott 1999), women (Scott 2005), and upper and working class persons (Henry 2005) use advertising or product symbolism in constructing their identities. Other researchers have contributed to understandings of how consumers are constrained by others and how marketers become involved in forging relations between groups in this process through the range of marketing practices they apply. Some of the social relations examined feature those between men and women (Commuri and Gentry 2005), homosexuals and heterosexuals (Kates 2004), whites and persons of color (Crockett and Wallendorf 2004; Peñaloza 2004), and immigrants and non-immigrants (Askegaard et al. 2005; Peñaloza 1994). In addition, research on communities and social groups has proliferated steadily in recent years (Cova and Cova 2002; Geisler 2008; Cova et al. 2007; Muñiz and O’Guinn 2000; Izberk-Bilgin 2007). Such work is usefully taken further in a theoretical shift from the psychological subject and his or her socialpsychological relations to others as more than social “effects” or “constraints” to comprehend the nature of various consumer groups and communities. Notably, while interpretive work has emphasized social constructions and multiple realities from the start (Belk et al. 1988; Hirschman 1986), research conventions writing of social and market influences and constraints tend to effectively reinstate the heroic consumer described above in emphasizing his/her production of coherent meanings, albeit in ways constrained or affected by social groups. Calls for triangulation (Wallendorf and Belk 1989) and including the social and market context as part of consumption phenomena (Bernthal et al. 2005; Crockett and Wallendorf 2004; Peñaloza 1994, 2001) begin to comprehend the group and are more consistent with the view of consumers as social beings. For example, page_16 Page 17 previous work has investigated how family relations and social hierarchies are maintained and negotiated through consumption rituals (Miller 1998; Wallendorf and Arnould 1991), value systems (Crockett and Wallendorf 2004) and intergenerational and interfamilial transfer of possessions (Curasi et al. 2004; Lindridge et al. 2004). Our call goes further than situating the group socially and culturally in research in order to examine how these families operate as site and agent in the reproduction of social and cultural systems at large. In exploring family consumption, for instance, the very idea of family, and its particular in-group and out-group relations, must be situated with attention to the specific historical and political processes through which the notion of family – such as the nuclear family – has come into being in the particular social, consumption context(s) under investigation, and how these familial relations serve as mechanisms for social class and other national distinctions and hierarchical relations. It is our contention that this sort of investigation requires that CCT scholars engage in innovative “methodological bricolage” (Lincoln and Guba 2003a: 6–9) to generate more collaborative and more polyvocal research strategies. On the one hand, we need to be more creative in using the tools of our trade, reconfiguring traditional ethnographic field methods and projective techniques (Rook and Levy 1999), for example, for cultural analysis and for better contextual fit with the research setting. The use of projective techniques and elicitation materials in conjunction with focus groups, for example, may serve to facilitate conversation and dialogue between the different participants of a study. Elicitation materials and projective techniques that are specifically designed to invoke specific cultural distinctions may also help to produce data that is rich and diverse in cultural meanings and somewhat more transparent with regard to relations between researcher and the researched (Moisander and Valtonen 2006). A second suggestion leverages relations between researchers and those studied in encouraging the researcher to use the means of address at his/her disposal to empower consumer groups. Esther Madriz (2000) discusses how the voices of women of color have been silenced in many research projects, and how group discussions “may facilitate women of color ‘writing culture together’ by exposing not only the layers of oppression that have suppressed these women’s expressions, but the forms of resistance that they use everyday to deal with such oppressions” (p. 836). In this regard, Madriz argues for the use of focus groups, since by creating multiple lines of communication, the group method offers participants an environment where they can share ideas, beliefs and experiences in the company of the same socioeconomic, ethnic, and gender backgrounds. As one of her participants points out: “I’d rather talk this way, with a group of women … When I am alone with an interviewer, I feel intimidated, scared. And if they call me over the telephone, I never answer their questions. How can I know what they really want or who they are?” (p. 835). Therefore, focus group discussions may offer one possible element in the advancement of an agenda of social justice for women of color. We return to this point in the last section on consumption politics. page_17 Page 18 In short, we call for a serious problematization of the individual unit of analysis in consumer research, the attendant method, personal interviews, and ways of writing about consumers’ individual meanings and values. To begin with we can better situate our studies of consumption phenomena within their historical,

economical and political conditions. In addition, we can direct greater attention to how we write about the various market and socially based mechanisms in which consumption meanings and social relations among consumers and between marketers and consumers are forged. Hence, instead of merely relying on the “evidence of experience” (Scott 1992) of individual consumers in constructing knowledge on consumption phenomenon, we call for situating consumers and their experiences into the relevant socio-cultural distinctions and hierarchies and including within our studies consumers’ understandings of how they are thus situated. Incorporating dialectics of interpretation Much of the empirical work on CCT has been based on the use of “naturalistic” methods and methodologies (Wallendorf and Belk 1989), drawing particularly from Glazer and Strauss’ (1967) grounded theory methodology and Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) “naturalistic inquiry” programs for post-positivistic educational research. Like most versions of qualitative research, naturalistic research focuses on phenomena in their natural settings, aiming to glean the meanings that people produce in an attempt to build knowledge and understandings of consumption phenomena as they occur “in situ,” in their natural empirical market, household, online or other material and socio-cultural contexts. Naturalistic inquiry thus laudably directs researchers’ attention to the ways in which people behave, talk, think, and feel when absorbed in the consumption practices and experiences of their everyday life (Belk et al. 1988; Belk et al. 1989). Naturalistic scholars have contributed significantly to the general development and legitimatization of qualitative methods in the field of marketing and consumer research, and of consumption meanings more generally in social theory. At the level of methodology, however, we draw attention to several problems within the “naturalistic” position. Naturalistic ethnographic inquiry, as it has been practiced among CCT scholars, has typically been premised upon the assumption that with the help of “emphatic identification” (Schwandt 2003), referred to as the “emic” view (Belk et al. 1988) and in using specific research methods the researcher may function as a human research instrument and have access to people’s personal views and motives, i.e., to the “native world view” (Sherry 1991). Repeatedly, naturalistic consumer researchers have maintained that through following specific, rigorous methods, such as member checks and external auditors, researchers are able to develop trustworthy interpretations of consumption phenomena and the world view(s) in which they are situated (Wallendorf and Belk 1989). Belk et al. (1988:450–57), for example, maintain that with the help of careful depth interviewing techniques the researcher, as the human instrument, may develop “surprising” levels of intimacy with the interviewees and may even be able to extract page_18 Page 19 “unique confessions” from their informants. These researchers thus assert that by means of particular naturalistic methods and emphatic understanding it is possible for the interpreters to transcend their historical circumstances and to access and reproduce the meanings or intention of others (see Schwandt 2003:296–297). On the whole, the literature on naturalistic marketing and consumer inquiry offers a set of valuable techniques for qualitative fieldwork contributing to more insightful and more convincing interpretations of data. However, in using these methods our epistemological conventions are such that we have inherited the tendency to write as if the consumption and marketing phenomena we study have specific fairly fixed meanings that can be more or less objectively identified and meaningfully interpreted by the researcher. These are the “reality effects” when we as writers describe consumption meaning in singular or static ways, and when we as reviewers hold scholars to standards of accuracy in accounts of such meanings. Many scholars emphasize that the meaning of a product for a particular person is plural, contextual, and varies with the situation in which it is used, necessarily including the research context. Yet, because researchers seldom speak of multiple meanings or contexts, or their effects on consumers in the ways the latter articulate and give their meanings for brands or other consumption objects in data sets, the net effect is to reinstate the independence of researchers from the researched and reinforce attributions of accuracy to the “natural setting” in which the consumer is studied. From a constructionist perspective it may be argued that no matter how successfully employed, naturalistic methods and techniques can give no guarantee of producing trustworthy or correct interpretation of people’s personal meanings, motives and intentions, as sometimes maintained by the naturalistic scholars. As Douglas Holt (1991) has cogently argued, a “correct” interpretation of meaning is forever elusive because numerous different context specific interpretations are always possible: “When meaning is construed in a dialectic process between the object and its interpreter, rather than an immanent attribute, evaluation of the accuracy of an interpretation, based purely on methods used, becomes impossible” (p. 58). When we concede that accounts and descriptions of social reality are culturally constructed, it follows that the accuracy of such representations is always subject to contestation and negotiation (Moisander and Valtonen 2006:24–26). The recognition that no criteria exist to objectively judge the trustworthiness of interpretations is foundational to literary criticism (Frye 1976) and textual approaches to social phenomena (Geertz 1977). Our contention is that this fundamental interpretive tenet has been compromised in

assimilationist CCT in response to very real demands of gatekeeping editors and reviewers that such work be more scientific. Yet while this compromise has been a successful short-term strategy, it is not in the long-term interests of CCC because it truncates important issues in dealing with multiple meanings by multiple persons and relations between researchers and those researched. We thus turn attention to the importance of acknowledging different and competing interpretations. We suggest that it is crucial to first acknowledge that meaning and understanding are participative, conversational, and dialogic in the page_19 Page 20 interview setting, and then critically assess the situatedness of these interpretations and their effects, in terms of those being researched and those doing the research. In analyzing consumption meanings researchers can benefit from attending to the available discursive or interpretive resources, such as the cultural models Holt and Thompson (2004) and Thompson and Arsel (2004) refer to, yet in additional ways beyond what the interviewees have to include those offered to them in the interview situation by researcher(s) that guide and constrain the ways in which consumers represent themselves and their relations to consumption objects, and that further constrain the researcher(s) in developing interpretations in any particular setting. An example of work in this tradition is Thompson et al.’s (1998) work revisiting Arnould’s fieldwork with Hausa women from a feminist perspective, in showing the different interpretations obtained from different theoretical perspectives. It may be that interpretive scholars need to invent new techniques and strategies that help us display multiple refracted realities simultaneously and thus invite our readers and those being studied to explore competing views of those realities (Lincoln and Guba 2003a, b), in this case of the interests of consumers and workers. The contemporary forms of narrative inquiry, for example, would seem to offer particularly potent strategies for these purposes (Chase 2005; Rappaport 2000). A recent study by Gephardt et al. (2006) develops in-depth understanding of the complex historical, social, and cultural processes through which firms successfully create a market orientation. The authors acknowledge multiple dialectics of interpretation within the organization and in their market environment more broadly, as well as those between the researcher and the researched in conducting ethnographic field work, observing and interacting with the firms’ different stakeholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and consultants, and in analyzing historical documents that shed light on processes of organizational learning as managers develop marketing strategies. However, in asserting the market legitimacy of consumers’ meanings in the organization, they downplayed employee-generated meanings and participation, longstanding elements of vibrant organizational cultures (Humphreys and Brown 2002; Mills et al. 2001). Their work further illustrates the importance of developing conventions to deal with multiple meanings by multiple agents and of educating reviewers and editors of the methodological and theoretical value of such work that crosses disciplinary divides between consumer research and organization culture. In sum we posit that the meanings of an object of knowledge, in a specific context, are not always, only, or even primarily a product of individual experience (Moisander and Valtonen 2006) but importantly are also a function of the discourse (Foucault 1972), system of representation (Hall 1997) or matrix of intelligibility (Butler 1990) that is brought to bear. Therefore, we suggest it is important to be attentive to the specific representational systems – the socio-culturally normalized and institutionalized ways of thinking, talking, and representing knowledge about the consumption agent object or activity that are available and offered by the researcher to those being studied as resources for making sense of the topic in the specific context of the study. page_20 Page 21 Here Lincoln and Guba (2003b) shed some light on the criteria for judging “reality” and validity, and turn to the role of community consensus regarding what is real, what is useful, and what has meaning. Most typically this process is carried out in journal reviews and conference discussions. Yet here we must go further in considering the effects of our work on those studied, and extending this process beyond reviews and conferences to address it more explicitly in epistemologically-oriented papers. Because the validity of cultural research is ultimately something that the audience of the research reports and papers – in this case the epistemic community – adjudicates, rather than those studied, it is the task of the former to discuss and debate how intellectually rigorous, creative and critical our accounts of social reality are. Crucial questions are: 1) Do the interpretations of social reality that we offer in our research provide those people studied with new opportunities to make sense of their everyday life and the world around them? and 2) What different viewpoints and/or interests constrain or serve as obstacles to such sensemaking and related action. Once we have acknowledged multiple agents and meanings, how to sift between them? We therefore argue here that naturalistic streams of CCT would significantly benefit from the further development of research methods and methodologies that better incorporate these multiple dialectics of

interpretation into research practice. Treating consumers as active agents making meaning (Kozinets 2002a) and engaging in collaborative forms of data collection and analysis (Lindridge et al. 2004; Thompson et al. 1998) do not necessarily remedy these problems. We find it important to develop research strategies that are more sensitive to the ways in which meanings, interpretations, and knowledge emerge in specific contexts and research sites as the result of complex social, cultural, and historical processes. Individual accounts of consumer experience can only be understood in terms of the cultural meanings and implicit social rules that apply at the research site, and cultural meanings can only be understood in terms of those accounts. Therefore, the research task should be broadened to investigate the rules, practices, and contexts that make consumption meanings possible, as well as to articulate the processes through which such consumption meanings are accomplished. Breaching critical theoretical understandings of consumption politics As a body of thought and research approach, critical theory was born in times of post-World War II disillusionment with the fascist appropriation of modernist beliefs in progress by Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan in marrying industry and state, as critical theorists endeavored to reinstate lost democratic rights and forms of governance. Our work continues to resharpen and redirect the edges of critical theory, building upon the work of Ozanne and Murray (1991), Hetrick and Lozada (1994), and Murray et al. (1994), with attention to the ways consumers, culture, and markets have morphed since then. page_21 Page 22 A key axis of this work has focused primarily on points of contention between marketers and consumers, with labor posited as the site of liberation, and consumption utterly suspect, if not outright discredited as false consciousness or as a meaningless, frivolous activity. As such, redeploying critical theory for use in critical studies of consumption has been no small feat, accomplished in part due to the major contributions of cultural consumption scholars in powerfully and consistently asserting the meanings of consumption and their significance both individually and in groups, as discussed in the previous sections. A major political challenge relates to tensions among consumers in the contemporary marketplace. In this sense, then, we add to our understandings of consumption politics between consumers and firms critical tensions among consumers of various religious groups, social classes, racial/ethnic groups, homosexuals and heterosexuals, etc., with an emphasis on how consumption and marketing practice become platforms for maintaining social hierarchies or lowering them. Thus, we are concerned with how relations between mainstream and marginal subcultural groups play out in consumption behavior. Here we are concerned that cultural consumer research has been carried out, cited, and extended in such a way that props up universalizing treatments of consumer behavior based on studies of US, white, uppermiddle class, college-educated consumers. These universals are especially problematic because they set a global bar for what is normal in ways that exclude consumption phenomena much more generalizable in terms of gross numbers of the world’s population. A more subtle problem lies in research conventions that extend North American constructs to other countries to show cultural differences, rather than begin with different consumption/market phenomena in developing theoretical constructs that challenge the universal constructs (Venkatesh 1995). In addressing these political challenges, we return to earlier discussions of minority discourse to suggest advances along the categories of assimilationist, reformist, and revolutionary interpretive consumer research. Our call is for continued revolutionary, reformist and assimilationist forms of consumer research that examine consumers and forms of consumption different from this mainstream, and for additional work that examines relations between these groups. We thus encourage the elaboration of new forms of critical theoretical consumer research fashioned from multiple positions, such as religious, national, racial, class, gender, etc., varying in levels of difference from this white, upper-middle class, college-educated mainstream to render it more visible, to document other subject positions, and to push forward well-needed innovations in ontologies and epistemologies in addressing the nexus of social and market relations. The points of critical theoretical intervention here are cast in terms of consumer researchers’ attention to the ways our use of the individual unit of analysis and convergent interpretive meanings discussed in the previous two sections come together in aligning with and/or serving the interests of one group over another, or specific factions within a group. All too often consumer researchers have been – purposely or unconsciously – aligned with the mainstream group, whatever it may be in a particular social/market context, inadvertently furthering its interests. Even page_22 Page 23 when attention is directed to the consumer behavior of minorities, it is often done in such a way that either implicitly accepts or condones the extant power hierarchy. Thus, our call is to consumer researchers to more explicitly acknowledge and even work with minority and/or mainstream consumer groups, and marketers within firms and multinational corporations in redeploying consumption and marketing practices towards the goal of more equal social relations.

Utopian? Perhaps. But then critical theorists have been unabashedly utopian from the start. As critical theoretical consumer researchers, we can redefine our roles in ways beyond a positivist social science that documents what is, to exploit normative and imaginative ways in working with consumers and marketers in fashioning what might be. One way to proceed is to appropriate for consumers and for the environment philosophical justifications for normative work carried out on behalf of marketers (Hunt 2002). An increasingly pressing issue is extending our work globally and institutionally in investigating the role of consumption and marketing discourses and practices in reproducing and challenging extant relations within and between nations (Johansson 2004). Such work should go further than documenting similarities and differences in the consumption practices and discourses of mainstream and minority groups. Thus, it is not enough to show that consumers disassociate from socially stigmatized groups (Berger and Heath 2007). More telling questions expose this navigational ability as an act of power, and direct attention to those who have and those who lack this navigational ability, as well as to the specific forms of consumption and the social arenas in which consumers are and are not able to do so. In this sense it is important to examine how consumption discourses and practices reinforce and even challenge existing social relations, and develop recommendations to consumers and marketers that work towards a more equitable society. Thus, we suggest critical interpretive work go beyond broadening the analytical scope of cultural consumer inquiry in accordance with the recognition that consumption phenomena take increasingly global forms in the present-day economy. Such work builds on previous studies of transnational consumers (Ucok 2007; Arroyo and Peñaloza 2007), immigrants (Askegaard et al. 2005; Peñaloza 1994), and ethnic subcultural members (Oswald 1999; Ustuner and Holt 2007) positing consumers as cultural agents whose activities transcend intra- and international boundaries with attention to the ways these boundaries are inscribed by and reproduced in consumption. This shift in scope and focus requires modifications in methodological practices to draw attention to local and regional consumer groups and relational consumption phenomena while not losing sight of macro, global currents. In addition to relying on personal interviews, methodologies such as the extended case method and critical ethnography offer fruitful approaches to retaining these complexities of the marketplace in our studies. As important, such methods bring to the fore social action eclipsed in more narrative approaches emphasizing discursive texts and analysis. While the extended case method attends to racial relations and situates them within larger international market exchanges (Burawoy 2000), the ethos and practice of critical ethnography (Foley and Valenzuela 2005; Peñaloza 1994) page_23 Page 24 addresses important relations between the researcher and researched anticipated early on by Hirschman (1986) and Belk et al. (1988) challenging their independence in quantitative work. Further, such work reinscribing consumption politics is rendered increasingly important as consumers step up their participation in making meaning for consumer objects and activities with firms (Geisler 2008). Of particular importance as firms appropriate financial and cultural benefits of the increased consumer-labor, and as consumers are increasingly dependent on market-generated objects in producing their identities and social relations is investigating whether this leads to greater power on the part of consumers or less. Consumer research is thus necessarily broadened in scope beyond consumers, as in the work by Zwick and Dholakia (2004) reconceptualizing consumers and marketers as active agents co-producing understandings of consumer behavior and what it means to be a consumer. Sifting through the political interests and actions of consumers and marketers becomes even more complex in virtual and on-line environments (Kozinets 2007). Firat and Dholakia (2006) suggest a shift in orientation from consumer satisfaction to consumer empowerment. At the level of methodology, this is consistent with what Ozanne and Murray (1991) suggested in that the researcher becomes an active agent in the process of constructing appropriate modes of living and being. Important in developing such empowerment is including in our research attention to how consumers view their circumstance and the social relations within which they are embedded in our studies of consumption. Additional political concerns are with the increasingly global relations between consumers and workers, as labor remains an implicit referent in consumption. Storper (2000) and Wade (2003) have documented how US consumers and firms benefit from international trade practices and agreements in the form of lower prices and financial economic benefits from international exchanges pegged to the dollar. Thus, globally attuned critical theoretical consumer cultural researchers can examine how such international relations are fostered in the institutions of the IMF and World Bank and join forces with activists seeking to make more democratic reforms to these institutions (Danaher 2001). Further opportunities lie in investigating how democratic is the “democratization of consumption” (Guedes and Oliveira 2006; Kizuk 1984). The access of more and more people to more and more consumption objects and services is aided in no small part by low-paid workers in developing countries. Yet somehow consumption becomes more acceptable when products are produced by firms sporting the discourses of environmental and social sustainability (Hartman 2006). For interpretive consumer researchers, what is

important is traversing the disciplinary divides separating consumers from workers and separating consumption institutions from governmental ones, to attend to fundamental contradictions between consumer-subjects and citizens (Bevir and Trentmann 2007), to bring contradictions of having progressive political ideals and having things to the fore, and to work to bring about more progressive market institutions. In a final nod to our self-reflective genealogy, we return to the concerns of the early interpretivists in resisting disciplinary pressure to forward the interests of page_24 Page 25 firms in their research to suggest that because so much in the marketplace has changed, so too our understandings of consumption politics must change. Suggestions for further research call for continued study, mapping out overlaps and diversions in the interests of consumers/marketers, with attention to their respective cultural roles in national narratives of development, the roles of consumer researchers, and the roles of our journals with respect to these interests towards the goals of contributing to knowledge and to advancing more just distributions of resources. Conclusion This is a very exciting time for culturally attuned interpretive consumer researchers. While savoring interpretive scholars’ success in making headway into JCR, university departments and programs, and marketing practice in comparison to the positivist mainstream, we can look forward to a promising future. We, as interpretive scholars, can draw strength from the way change comes from the margins to enhance the future potential of CCC work in addressing major challenges in the world today such as religious, racial/ethnic, class, and gender tensions as they result from and exacerbate tensions between nations and peoples who have more and those who have less because these tensions occur at the nexus of culture, consumption, and markets. It is our belief that CCC harbors incredible future potential in realizing the initial moves of recentering consumers and making sense of the increasing cultural vitality and strength of consumption practices, discourses, and institutions by welcoming innovative ontologies and epistemologies. Our premise in this paper is that as we mature as an epistemic community, lines of contention between interpretivists and positivists become less relevant to our long-term development as a community than those within our ranks. Our point is to issue a caution that like ethnic minorities who assimilate values and ways of being from their mainstream, we interpretivists may internalize and reproduce ontological and epistemological beliefs and research customs from the predominantly quantitative, individualist and managerially oriented scientific mainstream and resist innovations vital to our long-term development. We have encouraged work that transcends the individual consumer in theorizing the social group and examining relations between consuming groups. We have called for more explicit examination of the multiple layering of meanings and their relation to various subgroups of consumers, directing particular attention to sifting through various meanings produced by consuming groups, researchers, and marketers. Finally, we have called for research directing increasing attention to how consumption impacts national and global social hierarchies and factors into international market institutions, and encouraged critical theory oriented cultural consumer researchers to foster these expanded understandings of consumption politics. In these ways we bring consumption practices to bear on relations of power, with consumption viewed as the terrain in which inter-group dynamics are situated and reproduced. page_25 Page 26 In conclusion, we situate various forms of CCC in relation to what may be called the emergent global marketing academy. While interpretive consumer research has not gone as far as some would like in the top ranked marketing departments in the US, it has made much progress in growing our numbers, in forming critical masses in key university departments, and in establishing conferences and journals worldwide. However, it is our concern that, as business schools outside the US have endeavored to compete over the past several decades, they have adopted the top US journals and with them, the dominant, positivist research ontologies and epistemologies of this epistemic mainstream. For this reason, even as interpretive work becomes a global mainstream, like other minorities we need to be much more explicit in acknowledging and advancing an ongoing process of education of our differences and similarities externally and internally. In employing such education externally with non-interpretive consumer researchers, administrators, practitioners, and members of local/ regional publics, we should keep in mind that outsiders tend to be less attuned to differences that are relevant within a particular group. Internally interpretive consumer scholars can learn from each other, given the different social, historical, and institutional trajectories that demand partially unique and partially shared strategies and positionings in moving forward. Pockets of CCC are increasingly found across the globe, as evident in the growing list of journals, such as Consumption, Markets and Culture, the Journal of Consumer Culture, the Journal of Consumer Behaviour, the Journal of Research for Consumers, Journal of Marketing Management, and Marketing Theory; books, such as Brown and Turley’s Postcards from the Edge (1998), Brownlie et al.’s

Rethinking Marketing (1999), Ekstrom’s Elusive Consumption (2004), Caru and Cova’s Consuming Experience (2006), and Saren et al.’s Critical Marketing (2007); conferences and workshops, such as HCR,5 the biannual seminars at the University of Southern Denmark and Bilkent Univeristy in Turkey, the European, Latin American, and Asian Pacific Association for Consumer Research meetings, and the Mediterranean Marketing Association; and research centers, such as the Cultures of Consumption research program at the University of London, the Center for Research in Advertising and Consumption at Bath University, England, and the InterAct Center at EDHEC University in France. Again, we list but a few of the many encouraging developments. Being in a community, epistemic or otherwise, means giving and taking in learning from others in adopting our ways of thinking about and doing research with consumers. As long as scholars share the goal in furthering cultural knowledge of consumer behavior, we can retain the common ground so important to the development of CCC. Yet having a common ground should not preclude multiple forms, goals, and audiences for our work. While publication in major journals remains a key consideration, it is not the only one in growing our numbers. As universities seek to become globally competitive, many academic visionaries in and beyond consumer studies are redefining relevance to contribute to the quality of people’s lives regionally, advance public discourse regarding key social issues, and work towards environmental sustainability, to name a few such goals, and page_26 Page 27 innovative administrators are steadily bringing these metrics into faculty and department review processes. Institutionally within ACR, the recent theme of transformative consumer research reverberating throughout the 2005 North American ACR Conference and the 2007 EACR Conference has energized consumer researchers of all types to bring our work to beneficially impact the lives of consumers. It is our hope that by encouraging work in the three directions discussed in this paper we will further stimulate and strengthen consumer cultural communities in all their incarnations to craft additional theoretical and methodological contributions and engage pressing social issues, and in these ways advance more rewarding professional careers for ourselves as incoming graduate students and seasoned researchers alike. Notes 1. A comprehensive updating of the epistemic communities of the field would be a very valuable contribution. In addition to distinctions by methods are those based on topics, for example the marketing and development community, the public policy community, the strategic marketing community, the services marketing community, etc. Key in mapping out these contours, is documenting their trajectories as a series of evolutions in thought, practice, and institution, etc., as carried out earlier by Sheth and Gardner (1982). 2. We encourage additional genealogical efforts in tracing strands of interpretive work outside the US to generate further insights into our collective consumer cultural community. 3. Lamentably, due to space limits, we highlight but a subset of those who contributed to the founding of this intellectual community. Also important to the community at this time were others including, but not limited to Jerry Olson, Tom O’Guinn, David Mick, Ed MacQuarrie, Julie Ozanne, Jeff Murray, and Dennis Rook. 4. Again, we highlight but a few of the many contributors in the second (Craig Thompson, Linda Scott, Doug Holt, Susan Fornier), and third waves (Hope Schau, Markus Geisler, Anders Bengtsson, Jean-Sebastien Marcuse, Giana Eckhart, Julien Cayla) of interpretive consumer research, which we chart roughly in seven-year periods from the mid to late 1990s, and then from the late 1990s to the present. The work of others traverses across the first and second waves (Grant McCracken, Eric Arnould, Eileen Fischer, Alladi Venkatesh, Fuat Firat, Nikhilesh Dholakia, Dominique Bouchet, Stephen Brown, Richard Elliott), and across second and third waves (Rob Kozinets, Al Muñiz, Guliz Ger, David Crockett, Søren Askegaard, Dannie Kjeldgaard, Darach Turley, Margaret Hogg, Pauline MacLaran, Miriam Catterall, Lorna Stephens), with important bridges and fruitful collaborations across various places in Europe and Asia. 5. The HCR group has been meeting the day before ACR for the past eleven years. 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bridge, and escalator. Each execution has the same basic components. There are two pictures, repeated once to form a span of four images. The first two have one-word legends, each word the antonym of the other. One ad shows a piece of broccoli with the legend “good” next to a piece of chocolate cake with the caption “bad.” The second two pictures are what make the campaign distinctive. In every instance, the same two pictures reappear, but this time the captions are reversed: broccoli is now “bad” and cake is now “good.” Broccoli is “good for you”; chocolate cake is not. Most people like chocolate cake; many are not enthusiastic about broccoli. But the comparisons HSBC presents do not end with commonplace oppositions. Instead, each ad poses a different puzzle. Some compare cultural traditions or art forms. For instance, one shows a black woman with an Afro playing an electric guitar next to an Indian woman, wrapped in a sari and playing a sitar. The captions: enjoyable and unbearable; unbearable, enjoyable. Another shows medicinal herbs contrasted with capsules in a blister pack: useless, useful; useful, useless. A third ad points to personal grooming practices (Figure 2.1). While tattooing and hennaing are long-standing traditions in several world societies, they have recently enjoyed the cachet of the current in North America and Western Europe. So both are equally “trendy” and “traditional.” The pictures challenge us to bring ourselves into this judgment – do we, ourselves, see these practices as trendy or traditional? The campaign makes us aware that our answers would firmly place us in a global hierarchy of space, time, age, and consumer practices. The headline focuses our attention on the essential message of the campaign: “Isn’t it better to be open to other people’s points of view?” The intention behind the campaign, in fact, is punctuated by the several variations on this headline: “There is always more than one way of looking at the world”; “Everyone looks at the world from a different point of view”; “An open mind is the best way to look at the world”; “How the world sees you depends on how you see the world”; “Another point of view can sometimes open up a whole new world”; “Who knows what you’ll see when you see someone else’s point of view?”; “A different point of view is simply page_34 Page 35

Figure 2.1 the view from a place where you’re not.” By taking this global perspective on local particulars, HSBC tries to position itself as “The world’s local bank.” Once you’ve seen about ten of these ads, you understand that, taken in sum, the campaign explores objects and practices from a variety of perspectives: some of the posited judgments refer to cultural difference, others to the place an individual holds in the hierarchy of a culture (their gender or class, for instance), and still others to differing personal tastes and sensory experiences. The HSBC campaign is a simple, but brilliant illustration of the complexity of living in a world that is self-consciously globalizing. The web site that underpins the campaign (and on which the ads are posted), http://www.yourpointofview.com, goes farther in demonstrating and exploring the point. Periodically, HSBC posts a question – “Is wrapping paper a waste of resources?” – so that anyone around the globe can express an opinion. The bank then sums the responses and posts them, mapped by country. So, you can see, concretely, the ways the different parts of the world “view” different questions, many of which involve consumer goods and habits. The variation in response is often surprising, sometimes shocking or disturbing, even for those of us who consider ourselves rather cosmopolite. Whenever I see this campaign, which is nearly always in an airport, though it runs in print and on television, I am struck by the way it instantiates a fundamentally postmodern perspective on reality. Postmodernism, along with its counterparts in theory (both poststructuralism and rhetoric), is often said to “celebrate” different points of view. At this point in history, I feel we are learning that it is not always possible to celebrate our differences, but it is the least we can do to recognize them. This is not always pleasant, since our differences are often rooted so deeply they affect what we see as “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong,” and even “real” and “unreal.” The HSBC campaign also presents an excellent illustration of the place where a postmodern (or poststructuralist or rhetorical) perspective would make entry into the world of images. Nearly every image in this series was photographed in a “straightforward,” “realistic” way, usually from a head-on direction that preserves as much as possible of what pictorial psychologists call the “visual invariants” of the object being pictured. As such, the photographs are those that the people who race through the world’s airports will see as a realistic, “objective” mode of representation. And, yet, with the irony so typical of postmodern artifacts, the

page_35 Page 36 captions undercut that “realism” by reminding us that the way we see things, even reality, depends on where we stand in time, place, and power. Which brings me at last to the purpose of this paper. During the review process for a JCR article that recently appeared (Scott and Vargas 2007), it was suggested that I needed to refute interpretive theories used in the past to analyze advertising images, such as Williamson (1978) and Leiss et al. (1986), before I could put forward an alternative view. I countered that these interpretive works shared the same assumptions that the theory I was then criticizing held: that the purpose of picturing was to reflect reality. I also promised to lay out my argument against this particular literature on advertising images in another venue. So, in this chapter, I intend to address a basic flaw in the arguments made by cultural critics writing on advertising images, most of whom published in the 1980s and virtually all of whom based their critiques on the presumption that advertising images should conform to some (usually unspecified) view of “reality.” I have opened with the HSBC campaign because it exemplifies my argument in a finely distilled manner: the judgment of what is real – like the judgment of what is good or bad – is a function of social perspective. This applies both to content and to form. To insist on the superiority of your own reality is to close your eyes not only to the multiple realities that are possible and present, but to accept as real the illusions world dominance brings. I am advocating here, as I have elsewhere (Scott 1994; Scott and Vargas 2007), that pictures in advertisements should be read as a text – and specifically that a poststructuralist or rhetorical approach is the best way to read them – rather than simply sorting them into “good” or “bad” representations of reality. Here I will briefly reiterate arguments I have made about the conventionality of picturing, but I will do so to a different end: to unmask the disguised power grab that asserts a single theoretical reality must be pictured for a text to be truthful. My goal is to convince CB researchers that the “critical theories” of the past need to be re-examined and updated – in particular, they should reflect recent knowledge in our own field – and not just adopted wholesale. First, I wish to illustrate my own approach by looking closely at another HSBC ad; in the process, I will begin to highlight some problematic contrasts to the view espoused by traditional advertising criticism. Order and chaos My favorite of all the HSBC ads is this one about carrots (Figure 2.2). The first thing to understand about culture and pictures is that seeing is, in the first instance, about order-making. An infant, trying to “make sense” out of the chaos of stimuli all around her, learns to carve out shapes, colors, faces, and eventually to distinguish specific objects in the mass of data before her eyes. Over about a two-year period, the growing toddler will learn to “read” the shadows and angles of sight in a way that will allow him to negotiate the objects and space of his environment by judging things like depth and distance. He or she will be guided by parents, teachers, and others in this process, one of the first steps in what we recognize as “enculturation.” page_36 Page 37

Figure 2.2 Thus, the act of seeing itself is not merely “natural” – though most of us are born with the potential to see, just as we are born with the potential to speak – but develops as an act of culture, of sense-making, of lumping and splitting the chaos of the environment into perceptible, intelligible (orderly) chunks. The unpeeled legion of whole carrots in the first frame of this ad could represent the “natural order,” the order of things as they are, without the intervention of culture. Certainly the neat lines of upstanding carrots is orderly in appearance. The soup picture destroys that order by pureeing the carrots, adding spices, pouring the mixture into a bowl, and inserting a spoon. What were once whole carrots have now become, in a physical sense, chaos. Yet, the soup is itself an exquisite kind of order, the aesthetics of cuisine, in which a culture’s sense of what tastes good together, how food looks best, and which manner is right for eating, is brought to bear on a ordinary object. From that perspective, the unpeeled carrots now seem the rough, unordered instance of unruly nature. And yet, even this is not the way carrots look in nature. In “reality,” carrots are submerged in the dark ground, a root that remains unseen until someone, following a culturally-determined notion of what is safe and good to eat, pulls it out and takes it home. For this ad, some person also selected the straightest, most uniformly-colored carrots, washed them, and stood them up, side-by-side, like a choir (carrots this end up do

not occur in nature at all), so that they could have their picture taken. What order is this, in which carrots pose? We can steadfastly hold in our minds the opposite poles here, order and chaos. We can try, as idealist philosophers have done for centuries, to relegate one picture/condition to “order” and one to “chaos,” but in truth the choices will be arbitrary, an expression of our own prejudices (Fish 1990). Or, we can simply learn to work within that neither/both moment when we realize that each picture represents order and chaos, and that the meaning of the full text lies in that space where we know no defensible choice is possible. That moment, that space, that cognitive sensation, is what the poststructuralists call the “mise en abyme” and the interpretive act of working between the two poles (carrots and soup as representations of order or chaos) until the gap of meaning opens up, is the original definition of the term “deconstruction” (Davis and Schleifer 1989:205–213). The whole point of deconstruction as an interpretive strategy was to attack the essential conceit of structuralism, which insisted on a bipolar construction of meaning, including not only theoretical building blocks like “sign” and “referent” page_37 Page 38 or “paradigmatic” and “syntagmatic,” but also conceptual oppositions like “order” and “chaos” (DeMan in Davis and Schleifer 1989). Structuralism was built on the assumption that language had this kind of underlying order, perhaps unseen, but operative nevertheless. That sense of invisible order was, in turn, connected to a belief in what was often referred to as “the philosophical center,” some anchor of truth for language and life. This “center” could be variously described as “the real,” “the ideal,” or even “God.” So, what terrified people about poststructuralism (in the beginning) was not so much the language theory (which simply argued for a multipoint, provisional theory of language instead of a rigidly structured system of polar opposites, see Scott 1991a), as it was the denial of ultimate orders. The moment of mise en abyme illustrated the lack of an underlying structure or center – thus undercut the plausibility of a foundational moral order (including notions of “ultimate truth” or “History”). Today, in the HSBC world, we have less trouble accepting that different people have different realities because we are confronted with that fact every day. Outside religious fundamentalism, people have learned to accept that other cultures have different notions of what is good and bad, of what the center is, of what God is like – and we deal accordingly, even if we are uncomfortable. Please notice further that this HSBC ad isn’t trying to sell carrots or carrot soup. This is not an ad for a grocery store or a restaurant. While it is true that the images refer, through our accustomed manner, to carrots and a bowl of soup, what is actually being said here (“signified,” if you must) is something about the instability of concepts like order and chaos. Yet that message does not reside in the words, which, without the images, would say next to nothing (“order, chaos; chaos, order”). Instead, the whole text – two images, two words, reverse and repeat – is required. Thus, the pictures are not really “about” the objects at all, but are partial pieces that, when assembled, make a sophisticated philosophical statement that is rather hard to translate to words alone. As an ad for a global bank, that statement tries to distinguish HSBC as having the scope of perspective to operate in this very difficult, complex, multivocal, planetary economy. And, it seems to me, being able to accommodate different viewpoints would be an important aspect of differentiation for a global bank. This is not to say that HSBC necessarily is so accommodating in practice, only that the claimed benefit is a logical one for a bank. This little reading I have just done of the HSBC carrot ad demonstrates a poststructuralist or rhetorical approach to messages. Instead of positing elaborate underlying structures for either language or pictures – or making moral judgments about the truth value of any part or the whole of the message – I have assumed that the pieces are understood based on shared cultural knowledge, that the meaning of each piece shimmers against past contexts and usages, and that the whole of the message is constructed as a kind of “bricolage” that can be read by those in the same culture who understand how to reassemble it. I have included acknowledgment that, as I have argued elsewhere, the historical technology of picturing and writing produced a complex origin for both the production and consumption of this advertisement, as opposed to some preexistent structure or simplistic biology (Scott 1993). I have named the intent of the statement, based on the general page_38 Page 39 circumstances of the appeal and the background of the other ads in the campaign, but leave the question of whether the bank’s claim is “real” to others, who might have more data and different experiences. (Indeed, in a casual survey of friends and neighbors, I find that people like HSBC in about the same way they like carrots – some do, some don’t.) Therefore, my analysis implies that readers can assemble these pieces, infer the meaning for themselves, and make their own judgments about the truth value of the claim for their particular circumstances. Exactly how people read and process images and words is still a complex research question that is very much

open and in dispute, as any reader of the marketing literature should know. Much like the experience of consciousness, the ability to read such texts is more or less shared by all humans – but research and theory has not caught up with a full explanation for a phenomenon that is as common as dirt in practice. Theories about how language and pictures “work” are complex and arcane whether you are looking at the psychology literature or at linguistics, but, in all cases, the focus of study is on something that very nearly every child born to humankind has the incipient ability to do easily. Indeed, the facility with which ordinary people interpret images is the reason it seems so plausible that pictures are “natural signs.” It is important to bear in mind this distinction between the difficulty of studying image interpretation and the ease with which it is executed in everyday life. The literature in question The body of advertising criticism I wish to address begins with Judith Williamson’s 1978 Decoding Advertisements, but there are many examples, ranging from Leiss, Kline, and Jhally’s Social Communication in Advertising (1986) to Diane Barthel’s Putting on Appearances (1988) to Paul Messaris’ (1997) Visual “Literacy.” We could also include Stuart Ewen’s All Consuming Images (1988), Robert Goldman’s Reading Ads Socially (1992) and his book with Stephen Papson, Sign Wars (1996), as well as Michael Schudson’s Advertising the Uneasy Persuasion (1985) and James Twitchell’s Adcult USA (1996), in addition to Jennifer Wicke’s Advertising Fictions (1988). Roland Marchand’s history, Advertising the American Dream (1985), has a great deal to say about images; however, Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness (1976) does not. Please note that Jennifer Wicke and James Twitchell are English professors, Roland Marchand was an historian, but all the rest of these writers had/have appointments in communications departments. During the 1980s and 1990s in communications schools, both Marxism and structuralism, which figure prominently in these books, were hugely fashionable. This is no longer true. Virtually all of these works judge the advertisements in their pages according to whether the representation of the object advertised is realistic. Exactly what standard of reality is being employed is seldom made clear, as I will elaborate below, but the outcome is never ambiguous: the advertisement is condemned as an untruthful representation. The outcome, in fact, is a foregone conclusion because the agenda that motivates these works must lead to it. Most of these authors were concerned primarily with criticizing capitalism by applying concepts derived from page_39 Page 40 Marx to advertising, rather than building theories about images as such. If they use any theory of signification at all, they usually use structuralism. Though some of the later works show influence from other theories, including poststructuralism, the intransigent clinging to the notion of a necessary, but broken, connection to reality makes the transfusion unsuccessful (for instance, Goldman 1992; Goldman and Papson 1996). Except for Messaris (1997), none of these works cites or shows evidence of familiarity with the broad range of scholars who have focused on images, their history and ways of signification (such as Gombrich 1960; Goodman 1968, and others). Instead they selectively build on a narrow slice of 1960s and 1970s French theorists who also focused on ads and the other imagery of modern culture in order to mount a Marxist critique of capitalism, such as Roland Barthes (1977), Jean Baudrillard (1988) or Guy Debord (1994). It is especially significant that the writers of advertising criticism pulled from this particular subset of French theorists because, in doing so, they drew on a body of work that was terrifically anti-pictorial, as both W. J. T. Mitchell (1986) and Martin Jay (1993) have documented. By taking this iconophobic stance, these French theorists also echoed centuries of prejudice against imagery, in which elites (churchmen, aristocrats, academics) perceived in popular images a force they could not control (Belting 1994; Scott 1993). This literature thus also has the nostalgic and apocalyptic tone one might expect from a disenfranchised elite. This literature also draws from other streams of Marxist thought, including, of course, the Frankfurt School, as well as Gramsci and Althusser (though much less than the French theorists because of the focus on structuralism). This second group of theorists provides the justification for analyzing culture and “the culture industries” as a means and locus of control, as an essential component of the structure of capitalist societies. We now understand that ideology is produced, delivered, and perpetuated by cultural institutions in all societies – churches, schools, and governments, as well as song, pictures, and stories – not just in capitalist ones. In the 1980s, however, it was still legitimate to write as if culture production was something peculiar to capitalism. Generally, this theoretical base has little to say about pictures as such, the notable exception being Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on art in the “age of mechanical reproduction” (1969). That essay is mostly concerned with railing against the popular technologies of the time and their alleged impact on high art and so does not really contribute much toward a general theory of human response to images or signs. Even the more sophisticated of the advertising critics work from an expectation that images are supposed to reflect reality. Marchand, for example, opens his book by telling the story of how he approached his topic expecting ads to accurately reflect society and how he had to adjust his thinking to accommodate what he found (1985). The more blatantly political of these books (such as Williamson 1978 and Barthel 1988) make the issue of realism central to their argument and the swing point of their evaluation. Nearly all depend on

the threadbare structuralist definition of pictures as “icons,” loosely borrowed each time from Peirce or de Saussure, as the sum total of their training in imagery. page_40 Page 41 There have been important works that attempted to correct errors in this stream of thought about images, especially Raymond Williams (1977, 1989) and John Berger (1972). However, these efforts were largely ignored or misused. Importantly, a few major works of this genre have since been revised, rewritten, or reframed. For instance, Leiss et al. (1986) was recently dramatically rewritten by its new fourth author, Jacqueline Botterill, who also added a brand new introduction and nine new chapters, thus producing a very different third edition (2005), double the size of the first. The first edition of this book was very concerned with the perceived gap between advertisements and reality; the third edition takes the view I will take here (and have taken elsewhere), that images need to be analyzed culturally and historically, not according to some facile notion of resemblance and falsehood. Leiss, Kline, Jhally, and Botterill (2005) make an observation I have already made, but wish to expand. They note that virtually everything written about advertising in the 1980s and early 1990s was concerned, first, with mounting a Marxist critique of capitalism, using ads only as a vehicle for the primary objective. These authors offer the judgment that using ads in this very motivated way was a poor basis for building a literature that intended to understand advertisements themselves. I would add that the same literature makes a poor basis from which to glean a theory of images, not only because that was never its purpose and because the authors failed to make use of existing expertise in that area, but because the two theoretical building blocks, Marxism and structuralism, are so poorly suited to the interpretation of pictures (see Mitchell 1986). This is so because both these theories insist on an initial premise in which pictures either do signify or should signify by resembling reality. Questioning reality Some of these authors are explicit about what they mean when they refer to the “reality” that advertising should represent. Most do not offer a definition of reality at all, but merely assume that we all know what it is – and share the same view of it – and then proceed to talk about reality in multiple ways. Even those who offer a definition fail to stick to it, proceeding to ping-pong between multiple implicit definitions. These multiple concepts of realism (or truthfulness) in representation can be distilled into four main categories. 1. Reality is the conventionally realistic photograph. 2. Reality is the object being sold “as it is.” 3. Reality is the social relations that went into that object’s production. 4. Reality is a sign-referent relationship where the sign is clearly tied to an object. The first premise is sometimes implicit – as the underpinning of an attack on a highly stylized drawing, for instance – but is without question the most ubiquitous assumption. (The belief that a conventionally naturalistic photograph is the basepoint of realistic representation is a default typical of Marxist thought, which is ironic, given the alliance with modern capitalism that historians have attributed page_41 Page 42 to Western photographic realism. See Mitchell 1986 and Jay 1993.) Argumentation often points rather explicitly at items 2 and 3, though never considers how problematic these concepts are, as I will explain momentarily. The last argument appears mostly in the later works. I think there are two main reasons for this: 1) the discourse of images from the 1970s to the 1990s became observably more stylized, so that the selection of ads with only naturalistic pictures was more obvious than it had been earlier and 2) Baudrillard’s critique of the sign system in contemporary imagery, though hysterical and unsupported, had become an influence on the communications academy. Now let’s unpack these categories a little bit. Reality is the conventionally realistic photograph These books were published during what John Berger (1980) refers to as “the very brief moment” in twentieth-century history when the (seemingly) straightforward photograph typical of journalism or home snapshots was the totem for what was “real.” This backdrop in which readers would be likely to concur with the momentary standard for realism made it easier for the critics to equate picturing with seeing. Several open with some argument asserting the naturalness and primacy of seeing over speech, apparently oblivious to the realities of enculturation in the context of vision. By identifying pictures with a biological proclivity – present at birth, as is often argued – the critics are able, rhetorically, to remove vision from the realm of the cultural and thus negate the potential for cultural difference to impinge on judgment. Note that this can only happen via a process of exclusion and naturalizing. As I have documented extensively elsewhere (1994), the system of representation that the snapshot photograph uses is a specifically identifiable technology, with relatively recent (about 1400 CE) and local (Western European, especially Italian and Dutch) antecedents. Though it is true that some scholars do not go so far as I have done (along with Gombrich, Mitchell, Goodman, Wartofsky, and others) in asserting the conventional basis for Western realism, there are certain aspects of Western realistic picturing that are agreed upon even by skeptics.

First, while some skeptics still argue that Western realism can and often does represent what we really see, it is universally agreed that the system has culturally specific and recent origins. There is agreement that the means of seeing implied by Western realism (single station point, monocular, unmoving, etc.) are not directly (nor certainly exclusively) analogous to the way humans see in the environment, thus there remain other possibilities for representing the real. It has also been demonstrated empirically – many times – that the habit of viewing Western realistic pictures leads to strikingly predictable errors in visual estimation of objects in the environment. These errors are absent, with similarly striking predictability, in young children. Thus, it is generally agreed that the system is learned, but becomes so naturalized over time that it leads to a demonstrably local habit of seeing the environment, as well as pictures (see Hagen 1986 for an extensive discussion and documentation of all these issues). page_42 Page 43 Other cultures have devised different “geometries” of representing the environment. Hagen (1986) extensively explains three of these – Egyptian, Japanese yamato-e, and Northwest Coast Indian painting – and, in so doing, not only shows that there are other possibilities for representing the real, but also demonstrates the implicit assumptions and selections inherent in the Western system. The most salient of these is that the Western technique (unlike the Japanese and Northwest Coast Indian methods) presumes a single point of view, from one place at one moment in time. In contrast, the Northwest Coast Indian style represents animals in all their parts from all viewpoints in one work – so, for instance, you see two eyes and four legs and both flanks, where in Western realism only one side is fully visible while the rest is occluded. In the Japanese yamato-e style, the single station point is maintained, but the location lifted above ground such that a multipoint vista can be seen; furthermore, this vista often also surveys several moments in time, which is not normal for the Western mode. What informs Hagen’s discussion throughout is something that any trained artist already knows: that the translation of what is seen in the environment to what appears on paper or canvas follows a highly artificial, rule-governed system that is usually deployed in a conscious, sometimes even mathematical, fashion. The translation from three dimensions to two is not natural, easy, or automatic. The camera is simply a machine that makes the translation for us – thus makes it seem automatic and easy, much like a microwave makes cooking seem like pressing a button. Interestingly, Hagen also documents the ways that photographers must change lenses and angles in order to make what they actually see conform to the expectations of viewers whose ideas of “what things really look like” have been formed by five centuries of Western painting. Any photograph is intrinsically rhetorical because the technology on which it is based is so selective: the shot necessarily captures one view, one angle, one setting, of an object at a fleeting moment in time. Any one photograph necessarily excludes all other views, settings, angles, and moments. Because of this inherent selectivity, the frequent insistence in this body of criticism that pictures in ads should include all the possible people in all their possible roles (e.g., showing fat women, black women, ugly women, handicapped women, in their roles as mothers and workers and citizens and parishioners and so on, rather than only as one person in one role at a time) is pictorially impossible in the Western system (see Scott 2005 for a discussion). Another aspect of picturing on which scholars on both sides of the convention/ realism divide agree is that the purpose of picturing is seldom to accurately reflect reality. People take or draw pictures for a variety of reasons, sometimes artistic, sometimes commercial, sometimes sentimental, sometimes religious, so that the times that a purely documentary photograph is taken are comparatively few. Certainly when other cultures and historical times besides our own are considered, the purposes of picturing extend well beyond the capturing of reality. Thus to impose a politics in which the ontology of picturing is the Western reflection of reality would be both oppressive and grossly exclusive. The problem of style has concerned art historians for many decades, but this body of advertising criticism deals with it in only one way: stylization is a distortion page_43 Page 44 of reality. However, art scholars generally see style embodying several complex components, the most salient of which is the manner of rendering peculiar to a particular culture or historical moment (e. g. Egyptian style, Baroque style). Other important aspects are the particular inflections typical of an individual artist’s hand (much like handwriting) and the purposive deployment of style as a philosophical disruption within the field of art (as in Cubism or Impressionism). More recently, we see the use of style as a way of communicating particular messages (see Scott and Vargas 2007) that reach beyond the mere representation of objects. The materials (the image technology) used always have an impact on the appearance of picturing. Thus, the recent explosion in image technology – everything from X-rays to video to infrared to spectral photography to micro-optics to nanophotonics – gives us a potential range of pictures that, while they all stem from some form of exposure to “reality,” nevertheless look very different from the default snapshot this literature treats as realistic. Indeed, this last group of photographic technologies points up what is often the most hidden assumption of the critique: that an object is as it appears to the naked eye.

Reality is representing the object as it is The insistence that advertisements show objects as they “really are” stems from Marx’s principle of the commodity fetish. Indeed, the reason for the focus on advertisements, as opposed to films or other pictorial forms, is the functioning of advertising to imbue goods with meaning. That is, advertisements allegedly create a commodity fetish out of what is otherwise more or less inert matter (or “real”). I invite – indeed strongly encourage – CCT readers to look back at the original chapters on the commodity fetish in Capital to fully understand how limited this concept is and how very far removed it is from our own thinking about consumption and objects. In Marx, an object’s legitimate value – in whatever peregrination one points to – is a combination of its utility in the merest material terms and the “concrete labor” that produced it: The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labor required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use-value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. (Marx 1999, 13) Both the concept of object utility and the definition of labor are reduced by Marx to a degree that some would see as suitably “rational” or “scientific,” but that most CCT people would see as hopelessly impoverished. Marx never considers the impact that artistry or design might have – that different lengths of linen may be worth different prices because of the color or pattern or page_44 Page 45 texture chosen by the weaver, that the cut of coats varies by tailor and therefore in price. Labor is explicitly reduced, repeatedly, to unskilled labor, to physical work. Marx insists that any labor legitimately associated with the object would be measurable in terms of the time that it took to produce the object (16). “Skilled labor counts only as simple labor intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labor, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labor” (20). Thus any skill is just a way of doing the physical somehow faster or easier; Marx affords no acknowledgement of the value production that may come from labor that is not physical. (One can only imagine what Marx would have thought about valuing Google or Adobe or Amazon.) Capital eliminates from consideration any variation in physical properties – scent, color, texture – that might cause a difference in the conditions of the object’s use and, therefore, its value. Indeed, consumption is left out of Marx’ scheme entirely. The idea that objects might figure in a consumption constellation that affects value – as opposed to a mere equation of commodity pricing – is pushed aside as something very “queer.” A fine and useful buggy whip isn’t worth much now because not many people drive buggies – that fact doesn’t seem particularly “queer” to me. Indeed, the fact that objects have social biographies that cause their value to change over time (Appadurai 1986), sometimes irrespective of their materials, the labor that went into making them, or their actual use, simply does not seem to have occurred to Marx. Indeed, Marx emphasizes the social relations that produce the object, yet are later invisible, but the social relations involved in its consumption are just as invisible throughout his analysis. This reflects the narrowness of the overall theory, which focuses on a very specific aspect of industrial labor, but does not, for instance, address reproductive work, something that feminists have pointed out repeatedly (Nelson and Ferber 2003). Forms of labor directly related to the object’s sale, but not its actual fabrication, are obviously not considered. Having left out any aspects of the object’s value that could be attributed to the quality, rather than the quantity of its materials, having removed any consideration of the artistry or invention that may have influenced its production, having turned a blind eye to the labor involved in bringing the object to market, having omitted any thought of how the setting in which the object was destined to be used – or the experience of using it – might influence its value, Marx then posits that any aspect of the object’s value that cannot be accommodated by its physical attributes, a very basic notion of its utility, or the man-hours it took to produce it, belongs to the realm of “magic” or “the religious.” The gap between the object’s brute physical facts and the social circumstances of its use thus constitutes the fearsome “commodity fetish.” The literature that draws on Marx to criticize advertising insists that what the object “really is” can be truthfully represented only as ingredients, price, or labor, without any reference to how the object is situated in culture, how it is brought to market, how it is used in social settings, how it is perceived by users, or how its consumption is subjectively experienced. That argument alone should be enough to toss this body of criticism out the CCT window, as it relies on a notion of goods page_45 Page 46 as being intrinsically devoid of meaning. The history of the interpretive movement within CB was as much

focused on fighting this narrow definition of objects – espoused by the scientific mainstream just as surely as by Marxists – as it was on expanding the scope of our methods. In the context of imagery, the argument that the object must be shown only materially and not in the setting of consumption, creates another, equally unacceptable condition. If we are dealing with only what can be shown in a conventionally realistic photograph of the object, then the only things that can be legitimately, truthfully represented about the objects are those attributes that can be seen. Thus, representations of how something smells or how it works or how it sounds or how it feels on the body are inherently untruthful, because such representations would necessarily have to use visual metaphor or graphics or stylization or a more advanced image technology – and all these means would diverge unacceptably from the preferred standard of truthfulness. The insistence that ads show the object to be sold as it “really is” – that is, in a conventionally realistic photograph – also inherently asserts that what the object is, whatever is important or legitimate about it, can be seen, rather than felt, smelled, heard, or otherwise experienced. Certainly there is no room for complex imagistic statements or tropes. In the case of the HSBC campaign, for instance, the advertiser would be bound to show images of cash, not carrots. An aspect of advertising that consistently draws fire from cultural critics is the way the pictures often show objects in social settings, thus allegedly imbuing them with social qualities that they, according to the principle of the fetish, do not and should not have. Yet such pictures are illegitimate only because Marx allowed just social relations of a narrowly defined productive labor to be legitimate aspects of an object’s value. If one merely were to acknowledge that the consumption circumstances were as important to value as production conditions – something that surely CCT would allow – then much of this critique would become moot. Reality is representing the social relations that went into the object’s production Interestingly, though the social relations of an object’s consumption are off-limits to a truthful advertisement, the explicit requirement demanded by many of these critics is that ads should show the social relations that go into making the product. In fact, there have been several ad campaigns in the past that focused on workers and production. In the early days of industrial production of foods, factories were often shown and lists of ingredients included in order to warrant freshness and safeness to a consumer who was not used to buying food that was pre-prepared (Scott 1991b). Campbell’s Soup, for instance, often ran such ads, which, given their focus on ingredients and factory labor, should have met the criteria set out by advertising criticism. The pictures in these campaigns were actually taken at the Campbell factories and the workers were employees. So, the photographs were actual exposures to reality. These pictures show light, clean, safe environments. The workers look happy. page_46 Page 47 Would this imagery suffice for a Marxist critique? Well, in a literal sense, it would, but in an ideological sense, it would not. What the critique really demands is something altogether more Dickensian. This critique wants ads that show not just the laborers who produce the products, but also the “social relations” that oppress them in their labor. Thus, this is not really a critique about realism and truthfulness, though it pretends to be – instead, the demand is for a particular ideological position to be expressed by the picturing. Notice also that the oppressive social relations to be pictured do not include those that are manifest at the consumption end. The hungry citizen of a poor country where a failure of agricultural production or disruption of civil war or the high-handedness of a colonial system has resulted in famine is not part of this critique. Nor certainly is the woman who has to go home from one job and then put in the second shift of making a meal for her own family – the constant double-barrel of reproductive labor under patriarchy was outside Marx’ scope (Nelson and Ferber 2003). Reality is a sign-referent relationship in which the sign is very clearly tied to an object A few of these books try to turn their criticism into a theory of signs. However, the foundational premise is consistently quite simplistic, at least as far as images are concerned. Basically, the argument is that pictures should represent through resemblance, based either on the structuralist notion of the icon or, later, on Baudrillard’s nostalgic, but uninformed charge that signs used to be connected to their referents but have now floated free from them (and, presumably, should be yanked back). Advertisements, of course, don’t hew to this law (nor do many other pictures), so the outcome is always assured from the outset: ads will be condemned as a false form because their images do not resemble objects. There are many, many problems with these texts (and here I would be including, for instance, Williamson 1978 and both Goldman 1992 and Goldman and Papson 1996). First, there are all the issues I have summarized here and dealt with in more detail elsewhere (Scott 1994; Scott and Vargas 1997) with building a theory of images on a foundation of copying. Pictures simply can and do – and always did – signify beyond resembling objects. Further, the notion that signs have ever been attached to their referents flies in the face of the history of writing of any kind, pictorial or alphabetic (Schmandt-Besserat 1992). Signs were invented in order to free people to be able to write (or talk or record) independent of the actual presence of the objects they wanted to talk/write/cipher about. The very first instance of writing we know of was a system for recording the ownership and transfer of objects – without having to actually pull out all the jars of oil out

of storage or bring the sheep into the house for counting. The invention of writing was a crucial step in human consciousness because the liberation from physical presence led to both abstract and critical thought (Ong 1982). To actually have a critical discourse aimed at wanting to return signs to objects is a foolish irony. This literature is also ethnocentric, and therefore exclusive, in that it is predicated on a distinctly Western dichotomy between words and pictures. Here is where the page_47 Page 48 entry of China into worldwide consumer culture stands poised to make a big difference in the way we approach images. Chinese writing and art are now and have always been more intertwined than we like to think alphabets and images are in the West. Not only is the writing rooted in picturing, but the practices of calligraphy and painting in Chinese history are practically impossible to tease apart (Rao 2007). Theories that begin with a separation between “cultural symbols” like words and “natural signs” like pictures simply do not travel well to China. I want to remind readers, however, that the point of this literature was never to explain images or language, nor even to explain advertisements, but to critique capitalism. Sign theory is imported into the critique with a rhetoric that belies this agenda. Though the critics often assert their intent to explain or “demystify” advertisements for (presumably naïve) readers, the arcana inherent in any theory of language or picturing is brought to the task in a way that only further confuses and mystifies. Not only is the prose in these works consistently both turbid and turgid, the authors use terms like “code” and “icon” in a way that foregrounds their magical connotations. Theories of language originally built to try to explain how all communication occurs, even at the simplest and most transparent level, are turned into a secret encryption system through which consumers are manipulated and capitalism goes about its dirty work unapprehended. The exegesis always implies a consumer who is utterly unaware of the dark manipulation going on under their own skin. And yet, as I remarked earlier, the complexity of these theories is actually testimony to the fact that, though ordinary humans communicate easily through signs, the processes that allow them to do so are still poorly understood by the academy. So, it is a cruel trick that the same theories are turned into a tool to convince ordinary people that they really don’t know how to read signs at all. All these definitions of reality present problems for actual picturing. No picture of an object can show all its visual aspects at once and no conventional photograph can show properties that are not visible. Picturing “social relations” of any kind, without resorting to selective or synedochic scenes, is a task that demands abstraction – or it would always be subject to the criticism that the “correct” representative was not chosen. And the idea of a sign that is not a sign at all, but the object itself, brings us back to preliterate silence. In the end, it seems to me, the standard for realism is really an “unpicturable” abstraction, a kind of pictorial zero or imagistic absolute number or visual. Thus, I have called this “theoretical realism,” to denote that what is being advocated in this literature is not the simple “reality” we sometimes think we all know, but a concept so highly constrained and artificial that it cannot be visualized. Subjective realities To show the difficulty of translating these critical demands to the level of “simple” material reality, I will now offer a home demonstration. I took pictures of three objects: a bottle of medicine, a bottle of perfume, and a rattle. I have, like the critics in these books, chosen the objects for the way they will help illustrate what page_48 Page 49 I want to say and not according to any notion of what might be typical in my house or any other. The first image (Figure 2.3) is a bottle of prescription medicine, with two of the pills sitting beside the bottle on the table. You can see the prescription information – the contents, size, and dosage – as well as what the pills look like. These tablets are antibiotics, provided for me on an emergency basis when I had a bad infection. They are powerful – they knocked out the infection entirely within 48 hours. Because the symptoms subsided so quickly, I could almost feel the healing power in my body. But the pills look like aspirin. Indeed, from a visual perspective, the tablets could be a placebo or a poison. So, this image, though it is a straightforward point-and-shoot that clearly shows the product, does not really tell us what is important about this medicine from a consumer perspective. In order to communicate the healing properties pictorially, you would have to resort to some kind of metaphor (perhaps a warrior, even a savior?) or use a new technology that might image the process through the body. In either case, one would then be open to charges of “mystification” because the property of healing, especially so thoroughly and so quickly, is akin to magic. (And, frankly, I was so desperate when I took this medicine that I experienced it as magical.) Further, from the viewpoint of traditional, homeopathic, or Eastern medicine, such a representation might seem untruthful since it relies on a faith in Western medicine that everyone does not share (I am reminded of the HSBC ad that compares capsules to herbs: useful, useless; useless, useful).

The perspective of social relations is also ambiguous. I’m sure out there somewhere is a factory where these pills are made. However, this production is mostly done by machine now, so I’m not even sure how relevant the kind of physical labor Marx was so concerned about is to this picture. And, in any case, the property that is most important to the product stems from a different kind of labor, the intellectual work that went into the antibiotic formula. For this, you would have to picture a whole stream of scientists, but you would still be in danger of being criticized because intellectual labor is explicitly excluded from Marx’s definition. Guys in white lab coats fall squarely into the commodity fetish column. The social relations of consumption are also relevant here. Though I was really grateful to the doctor who prescribed these for me, I had to engage with the British government’s National Health Service to get to him – and the power relations between male doctors and female patients have been widely remarked. Yet that would not be part of “reality” in the advertising literature of the 1980s. I chose a bottle of perfume (Figure 2.4) specifically because perfume comes up so often in the critique (see, for instance, Goldman 1992; Barthel 1988; and Williamson 1978). Scent, of course, has limited, if any, utility in such a worldview; it is merely “subjectivity in a bottle” (Goldman 1992:24). It’s a bit funny, really, but these authors consistently complain that perfume ads don’t offer “information,” specifically lists of ingredients and prices. This is funny because it is so far removed from the traditions and norms of fragrance making and use. What is important in a perfume is not the raw list of ingredients, but the particular combination of “notes” that are orchestrated into a final scent, which is often represented metaphorically page_49 Page 50

Figure 2.3

Figure 2.4 in ads. The production of a fine fragrance is an act of artistry, much like the production of medicine is an act of science. The listing of price flies against the luxury position that fragrance has always occupied in world culture (Morris 1984). I have been wearing Norell since it was first introduced in 1969. Indeed, this is the only scent I ever wear. Since the fragrance was discontinued long ago, I have to buy old bottles from second hand stores and online, but I do it because the perfume means a lot to me. I love the fragrance itself, but cannot divorce it from the memories it evokes. For years, my relatives gave me various forms of this scent (soap, lotion, and powder, in addition to perfume and eau de toilette) for Christmas and birthdays. We had many silly family jokes about my attachment to it. One Christmas I also received a suede jacket that subsequently absorbed the Norell scent so thoroughly that it was retained throughout the life of the garment. That jacket was one of those favorite items one wears for years, so that object memory is also tied up in the scent. In the 1970s, when I was trying very hard to be a serious MBA-woman, I wore Norell (because women wore scents even to the office back then) whenever I had to make a presentation or something – for confidence. To this day, I wear this fragrance when I want to inspire confidence in myself. That’s because, somehow, in all these memories, Norell’s concoction has page_50 Page 51 become a stable touchstone of identity for me. It reminds of who I am, the best parts of where and what I have been. So what kind of magical advertising produced this serious case of commodity fetishism? I honestly did not remember ever having seen an ad for this perfume, so I went back to the fashion magazines of 1969. Imagine my surprise (and glee) when I found that the ad campaign used an image that was very nearly the same as the picture I had taken myself. It is basically the bottle, the name, and the headline. The headline, though it seems like sheer puffery, is actually basically truthful: “Norman Norell introduces the first great perfume created in America.” Norell was, in fact, the first fragrance produced by a major American designer and is often referred to in fashion histories as the first great American fragrance (Wilson 1980). If one could concede that Norman Norell’s choice of ingredients for this scent was an act of labor, then the headline here is not a mystification, but reveals the conditions of production. But I’m sure that’s not what cultural critics have in mind. I bought the rattle in Figure 2.5 from a roadside vendor in South Africa, where I am now doing research on women and trade. This is an object of traditional craftsmanship; therefore, it is the result of exactly the kind of labor that Marx preferred. However, its traditional use – and the use for which I bought it – is as a ritual prop. Therefore, its utility lies precisely in the magical or religious realm that Marx sought to exclude from the proper value of objects. Further, though it is

Figure 2.5 page_51 Page 52 painted beautifully, the function of a rattle is to make sound. That sound could be pictured by metaphor (perhaps the tail of a rattlesnake?) or by an imaging technology that shows sound, but not by a simple photograph of the object. I purchased this rattle from a woman selling wares on the roadside in Limpopo province. Women traditionally sell things in Africa – this is their place in patriarchy, not an outcome of capitalism (see, for instance, Clark 1994). The hard, hot work of roadside selling would not be recognized by Marxism, since such work is not part of the production of the object itself and is, therefore, not legitimately part of its value. The impoverished circumstances of black women and their men in South Africa were created by a colonial occupation that goes back to the 1487 Bartholomeu Dias expedition, but reaches forward to the vicious racial and Christian hegemony of the Afrikaners of the late twentieth century (Thompson 2001). Under the rule of apartheid, black South Africans were deported to rural “homelands” – such as the area in Limpopo where I bought this rattle – where their growing populations depleted the ability of the earth to support them – a tragic outcome more Malthus than Marx. The combination of racism, religion, patriarchy, and colonialism that created this South African woman’s suffering can only be analyzed by Western Marxism if one is willing to accept that modern capitalism is the template for all oppression. This arrogant and blinkered view holds that the subjugation of white working class males is the historical reality, while the suffering of humans from other regimes of power since the beginning of time can be examined only through the lens of analogy. Conclusion The advertising criticism of the 1980s and 1990s insisted upon owning reality. The concept of “realism” pushed forward by this discourse was not only far more confused and fractured than critics pretended, it was constructed in the absence of a genuine intent to explain the working of imagery and without even a rudimentary review of the broader literature of human response to pictures. When considered in light of the real limitations imposed by Western rules of representation, and with regard to the larger scope of object properties and uses, the notion of realism propounded in this literature becomes a thoroughly theoretical construct, something closer to an imaginary number than a snapshot. The end result of this theoretical stance is to put forward a narrowly political viewpoint, one that insists on the primacy of one historical group’s experience over all others. Ironically these critics further insist on a method of representation that is irretrievably a technology of modern Western capitalism, “natural” only to the dominant societies of the imperial period, and thus utterly exclusionary of non-western systems. In so doing, the advertising critique expropriates “truth” from all the visual voices that could speak through other means and methods of translating the environment into symbols. Adding insult to injury, these critics use theories designed to explain ordinary language acts in the service of a rhetoric intended to convince readers that the most everyday, disposable texts of today’s culture – advertisements page_52

Page 53 – work upon them in mysterious ways. This body of criticism, while asserting the cause of liberation, instead establishes the critic’s view as the last, indeed the only, word on what is real. As such, this work is itself inherently arrogant and imperialistic. Over and above the chauvinistic political stance of this critique, the assumptions about what is legitimately valuable and truthful in a discourse about objects should be completely unacceptable to CCT scholars. The fundamental critique is based on a theory of material life that actively shuns the importance of consumption and ignores the circumstances of oppression that inhere in the distribution and use of goods, as opposed to their production. Methodologically, the lens of interpretation requires that the researcher put his or her own culture, ways of picturing, political agenda, and even sensory experiences ahead of those held by others. Finally, this critique is fabulously out of date. Nearly all of it was written before the Internet, before Photoshop, before many of the imaging technologies (micro-optics, nanophotonics) of our era, not to mention before the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of consumer China. There is nothing here that can accommodate the capitalism of the digital age – behemoths like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon can be nothing but mere magic in this naïve materialist view. In the end, the lesson here for CCT scholars should be one of healthy skepticism. Of late, there has been, in my opinion, a too-willing inclination to adopt theories from previous eras, especially those associated with Marx and coming from continental Europe, wholesale into our discourse. As we should all be quite aware, human thought, while it reaches toward transcendence, is always fundamentally rooted in the technologies, prejudices, practices, and agendas of the local and temporal. Thus, it should be incumbent on any researcher to be constantly on guard for the need to update, to review in light of new information, and, above all, to consider alternative viewpoints. References Appadurai, A. (1986) The Social Life of Things, New York: Cambridge. Barthel, D. (1988) Putting on Appearances, Philadelphia: Temple. Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. Baudrillard, J. (1988) Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, Stanford: Stanford. Belting, Hans (1994) Likeness and Presence, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter (1969) “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in Arendt, H. (ed.) Illuminations, New York: Schocken, 219–251. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin. Berger, J. (1980) About Looking, New York: Random House. Clark, G. (1994) Onions are my Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, R. C. and Schleifer, R. (1989) Contemporary Literary Criticism, New York: Longman. Debord, G. (1994) Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books. Ewen, S. (1976) Captains of Consciousness, New York: McGraw Hill. Ewen, S. (1988) All Consuming Images, New York: Basic. page_53 Page 54 Fish, S. (1990) “Rhetoric,” in Lentricchia, F. and McLaughlin, F. (eds.) Critical Terms for Literary Study, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 203–224. Freedburg, D. (1989) The Power of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldman, R. (1992) Reading Ads Socially, London: Routledge. Goldman, R. and Papson, S. (1996) Sign Wars, New York: Guilford. Gombrich, E. H. (1960) Art and Illusion, New York: Pantheon. Goodman, N. (1968) Languages of Art, New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Hagen, M. (1968) Varieties of Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jay, M. (1993) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press. Leiss, W., Kline, S. and Jhally, S. (1986) Social Communication in Advertising, New York: Metheun. Leiss, W., Kline, S., Jhally, S. and Botterill, J. (2005) Social Communication in Advertising, 3rd edition, London: Routledge. Marchand, R. (1985) Advertising the American Dream, Berkeley: University of California. Marx, K. (1999) Capital, D. McLellen, ed, Oxford: OUP. Messaris, P. (1997) Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising, London: Sage. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1986) Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago. Morris, E. T. (1984) Fragrance, New York: Scribners Nelson, J. and Ferber, M. (2003) Feminist Economics Today, Chicago, University of Chicago. Ong, W. J. (1982) Orality and Literacy, New York: Methuen. Presbrey, F. (1929) The History and Development of Advertising, Garden City: Doubleday. Rao, J. (2007) An Understanding of Advertising Images in a Cultural Context, Dissertation, University of

Oxford. Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992) Before Writing, Austin: University of Texas. Schudson, M. (1985) Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, New York: Basic Books. Scott, L. M. (1991a) “Playing with pictures: postmodernism, poststructuralism, and advertising visuals,” in Sherry, J. and Sternthal, B. (eds.) Advances in Consumer Research, 19: 596–612. Scott, L. M. (1991b) The Rhetoric of the Commercial Canon, Dissertation, University of Texas. Scott L. M. (1993) “Spectacular vernacular: literacy and commercial culture in the postmodern age,” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 10 (June): 251–275. Scott, L. (1994) “Images in advertising,” Journal of Consumer Research, September: 252–273. Scott, L. M. (2005) Fresh Lipstick, New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Scott, L. M. and Vargas, P. (2007) “Writing with pictures,” Journal of Consumer Research, October. Thompson, L. (2001) A History of South Africa, New Haven: Yale. Twitchell, J. (1996) Adcult USA, New York: Columbia. Wicke, J. (1988) Advertising Fictions, New York: Columbia University Press. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: OUP. Williams, R. (1989) “A defence of realism,” What I Came to Say, New South Wales: Hutchinson: 226–239. Williamson, J. (1978) Decoding Advertisements, London: Marion Boyars. Wilson, J. (1980) “The sociology of leisure,” Annual Review of Sociology 6, 21–40 page_54 Page 55 Part Two Time and space page_55 Page 56 This page intentionally left blank. page_56 Page 57 3 Rethinking marketing’s evolutionary paradigm and advertisers’ role as cultural intermediary Barbara Olsen Introduction This paper welcomes the call to explore the “neglected … social and cultural dimensions of consumption in context” to produce research “infused by a spirit of critical self-reflection and paradigmatic reinvention … (that transcends) intellectually stultifying orthodoxy” (Arnould and Thompson 2005:869, 870; see also Brown and Sherry 2003). The current context is the consumer in the ad. Author bell hooks notes an earlier age before advertising adopted the role of communicating the importance of status framing social class values: At one time wealth afforded prestige and power, but the wealthy alone did not determine our nation’s values. While greed has always been a part of American capitalism, it is only recently that it has set the standard for how we live and interact in everyday life. (hooks 2000: vii) The original goals of the Republic, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” shifted over centuries to equate happiness with being rich. Advertising as cultural intermediary helped communicate this re-evaluation of happiness. My goal in the following pages is to consider how values of a status minded executive elite from the modern period, 1920s–1930s and 1970s, percolated through advertising and established codes for class and social distinction that have become ubiquitous in the postmodern period. In this paper I use twentieth-century advertising campaign strategies from two different epochs to explore my contention that marketing evolution is not linear, but overlaps and blurs. Even our notions of historical periodization from pre to postmodern, while useful as temporal tool, are not necessarily the fixed categorizations we assume. I also reconsider the linear progression from production to sales to marketing orientations often presented in texts as consecutive occurrences. I extend further back to locate the historical appearance of consumers who have been consigned to the episodically occurring premodern, modern, and postmodern time zones we use to discuss our past. First, I will explain my research methodology using primary documents. Second, I will explore current work in Consumer Culture Theory regarding the role of advertising page_57 Page 58 agency practitioners as cultural intermediaries in the social construction of everyday life as well as consumers’ participation as co-creators in the co-constitution of advertising meaning. Third, I will discuss

current historical considerations to locate and probe the evolution of consumers, identified as female, from the premodern to postmodern contexts. Fourth, I will probe the advertising archives from the J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT) and Alan Wolsky & Friends (W&F), a small Madison Avenue boutique ad agency in the 1970s where I was a fledgling account executive, for insight on agency executive attitudes and cultural mediation relating to class and gender. Finally, I will conclude with discussion of power, control and meaning in advertising with consideration for future research. Methodology The methodology that informs the research in this paper is a critical analysis of primary documents obtained from two advertising archive collections and from my collection of early magazines. First, the early twentieth-century advertising strategies were retrieved from the J. Walter Thompson Archive collection held at the Special Collections Library at Duke University from three visits over two decades. Many pages of photocopies of the original documents were carried home and rearranged in files according to topic found in the J. Walter Thompson verbatim minutes of executive meetings held between 1927 and 1938, client histories, corporate planning and employee profiles. The documents were read and re-read to gain familiarity with the JWT Agency corporate culture, account maintenance and creative direction. The second archive collection was retrieved from W&F files that I retained since working at that agency in the 1970s. One campaign in particular resonated with the author’s life story at the time of its creation and in retrospection (Ellis and Bochner 2000; Gould 1995) was also reflective of the JWT copy appeal and creative direction during the earlier period. Finally, the W&F and JWT copy directives for gender positioning and snob appeal were parsed for relevant theoretical and paradigmatic potential (Holt 2004; Slater 1997; Sherry 1987; Yakhlef 1999) and to explore (with respect to Foucauldian notions of power) how and why gender stereotyping and celebrity/status emulation recur in advertising over the twentieth century. Reflexivity, an emerging postmodern ethnographic methodology, incorporates many tools. These include various aspects of autoethnography (Ellis and Bochner 2000), autobiography and introspection (Brown 1998; Gould 1991, 1995; Hirschman 1992; Holbrook 1986), narrative ethnography (Geertz 1973; Tedlock 1991) reflexive ethnography and retextualization (Cohen 1992; Thompson et al. 1998), retextualization and retrospection (Brown and Sherry 2003; Gould 1995), all of which utilize the researchers’ own experiences in the process of rediscovery. With the current research, reflexive ethnography is a particularly useful tool by which Ellis and Bochner (2000:740) note, “the researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study.” While subjectivity is a relevant concern (Wallendorf and Brucks 1993; Sherry 1996), the participant as observer being closest to an event can yield a unique interpretation for outsiders to continue the discussion (Olsen 1999, 2003a, 2003b, 2006). page_58 Page 59 Foucault divides history into earlier and later periods to which he applies archaeological and genealogical methods. Germane to this study, Foucault states that “the archaeology of the human sciences has to be established through studying the mechanisms of power which have invested human bodies, acts and forms of behavior” (Gordon 1980:61). Burrell (1988:223), interpreting Foucault’s archaeology says, “its key aim is to constitute discursive series and to see where they begin and end … to understand the ‘archive’ – the diversity of autonomous and sometimes amorphous discourses.” Burrell says Foucault used his “genealogy” to understand “reality … as it appears … enmeshed in a power field.… Thus, the issues of power, knowledge and the body are intertwined as the focus of the genealogist … locating traces of the present in the past” (Ibid. 225). “Power,” according to Foucault “means relations, a more-or-less organized, hierarchical, coordinated cluster of relations” (Gordon 1980:198). He refines this definition saying that “one needs to look rather at how the great strategies of power encrust themselves and depend for their conditions of exercise on the level of the micro-relations of power” (Ibid. 199). Writing on the normalization of behavior in the interest of the State, Foucault found a strong ally in the role of psychiatry. Significantly, the J. Walter Thompson agency employed the psychologist John Watson for several decades to help position advertised products using persuasion from relative positions of power. Throughout, I will consider various aspects of power and control especially as the “consumer” defined throughout historical periods is female. Advertisers as cultural intermediaries Considering advertising power and control with regard to the creative process, advertising practitioners, in multiple capacities, participate as cultural intermediaries in the production of meaning for consumers who are often co-creators in this process. A recent stream of research on marketing communicators as cultural intermediaries offers a refreshing perspective on authorial control in ad construction and the exercise of ideological power located at the interpretation of meaning in ads. Hackley considers the “panoptic effect” of the uses to which consumer research is utilized in advertising. “This knowledge is used to reproduce structures of ideological domination in the corporate interest … [where] fantasies of self are fulfilled and relations reproduced with each successive engagement with the advertising/marketing complex” (2002:218). Similarly, while the agency creatives act as “cultural workers [and] are thought to mediate between the needs of producers and the desires of consumers” the role of agency as educator has been overemphasized (Cronin 2004:350). Cronin pushes the mediation process forward to include other instrumental factors with

consideration to age, gender, social class, and race of agency personnel, including account planners, managers, media buyers, and clients. Creatives have historically been younger, male, upper middle class, and white. Another mediating effect is the occasional agency consideration and appropriation of elements from competitors’ ad strategies. All participants in ad construction and media selection are equally active cultural processors influenced page_59 Page 60 by their own personal demographic and psychographic identifiers, including artistic tastes and leisure proclivities. These personal characteristics filter into their work for clients. Cronin’s conclusion is that agencies today may not be the originators of trends because they appropriate what is already there (2004:353; see also Hackley 2002). On another level, Kover and Goldberg (1995) discover from their deep interviews with 20 copywriters in six agencies that there is significant battle for control of the copy that is said in the final ad. Edgy copy is obviously problematic, however they found that comprehension of nuance relates to the age of older management. Another problem was the conservative tendency where clients prefer “simplistic and safe” copy (see also Cronin 2004:359). Both Malefyt (2003) and Moeran (2003) write about the client-agency nexus and managing this delicate relationship. Kover and Goldberg report that agency presentations to clients require a “United Front” to avoid “business treason” or speaking anathema to the common goal. This “United Front” epitomizes the spirit of “antagonistic cooperation” by which all agency members “need each other to survive but in which reasons exist for participants to dislike and mistrust each other” (1995:55). This seems cut from a page of my own early agency experience where my superior at a client meeting did not appreciate my anthropological input (Olsen 2006). While interjecting anthropological analogy germane to research for a product I was ultimately reflecting and projecting my own experience into the discussion and into the product itself. Soar (2000) mentions, “It is argued that the first – and often the only – audience ad creatives and designers have in mind is themselves” (415). McFall, using primary documents from various agency archives in the UK and the US, found that creatives’ choice of art or writing as professions relates directly to often “unrequited” artistic or literary ambitions. Some, like Steichen (frequent photographer for JWT), were accomplished artists while others did become published authors. McFall also brings an historical critique to the debate regarding progression of the “reason why” rational approach to more emotional positioning later in time (2002:545). Emotional ads appear earlier than textbooks indicate (see also Olsen 2000). McFall also notes a class disparity between advertising practitioners and ad consumers since “cultural and economic elements were unavoidably combined in the work and lives of early advertising producers” (2002:538–39). Kover (1995) discovered the class issue as well during his advertising career and from interviews with other practitioners in his research. The cultural mediator role played by advertising personnel, agencies, and advertising in general, has been extended to a consideration of the role of consumers as co-creators, not just reactors in various marketing and geographical contexts. Before leaving the realm of the ad, per se, O’Donohoe (see also Scott 1994) maintains that “ads are the literature of consumption.” She continues that recognition is mounting that “advertising readers as the ‘final authors’ of texts, [are] actively involved in the construction and negotiation of advertising meanings” (O’Donohoe 2000:151). This includes the consumer as co-producer of meaning. Even without product adoption, consumers engage with ad messages and find useful metaphors they appropriate for social communication as Ritson and Elliott (1999) page_60 Page 61 discovered in research with adolescents. Thus, we find unintended consequences in alternate readings and uses of ads by consumers. Co-constitutive interaction and the elaboration of meaning between marketers and consumers represent the epitome of personalized cultural intermediation. Each person brings a unique social history and consumer memory, which interacts with messages to generate often-contrasting experiences. Hard as marketers may try to manipulate each communication outcome, the heterogeneous nature of the marketplace often persuades otherwise. In Norway, Lien (2003) found successful co-creation of meaning in the marketing of food for the Norwegian supermarket audience. Success related to marketer and consumers’ mutual understanding of intimately shared cultural knowledge. Lien’s observations during fieldwork with a Norwegian food producer found her primary contact trusted his instinct guided by intuition when formulating specific convenience foods to appear authentic. He knew that “when food products appear in the grocery store, their symbolic and social meaning is literally baked into them” (2003:181). The marketer’s instinct drew on understanding cultural palate preference and advertising product appeal subsumed in a particular Norwegian cultural aesthetic toward celebrity. It was known that TV commercial testimonials ensured easy identification, but the actor should represent a particular type of person characterizing “a careful balance of fame and ordinariness establishing what is cherished in Norway as a ‘natural style’” (Ibid. 180). Alternatively, Cayla and Eckhardt (working paper) conducted research in Asia’s biggest cities among new

populations of merged nationalities. They found that branding managers used the shared aspirational images of youthful cosmopolitans enjoying contemporary, affluent lifestyles to create a new “Asian imaginary” in brand communities. Cayla and Eckhardt say that the “deterritorialized” brands reflect “the lifestyles of the cosmopolitan managers we interviewed …” The new brand identities are upscale, urban multicultural blends that symbolically bond transnational Asian consumers in a new way of imagining themselves as positive, future oriented, and regional, rather than traditional and local (Cayla and Eckhardt working paper). This bonding strategy relates to JWT branding initiatives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marketing new products to a nation of new (often immigrant) consumers building new identities around new brands. In each era, modernizing consumers undergoing self-identity transitions incorporate a new imaginary. From a different geographical perspective, Peñaloza (2001) considers multiple commercial agents who influence the production of cultural meaning at a National Western Stock Show and Rodeo including ranchers, producers of consumer entertainment, and corporate meat processors displaying new meat conversion technologies. Regarding consumer information processing in construction of meaning: the reason western culture captures consumers’ imagination so artfully is that it is in contrast to their everyday lives. In making western cultural meanings and memories, consumers both draw from and reinterpret rural white page_61 Page 62 subculture via their projections of present and past hopes for what they do not have and want, and of fears of what they do have and do not like. (Peñaloza 2001:395) Thus, consumers’ social histories become part of the event experience. Working within the same paradigm as Cayla and Eckhardt, and Peñaloza, Thompson and Tian (2008) note that such “coconstitutive relationships” are framed by “commercial mythmaking” and consumer agency. They draw on postbellum Southerners’ identity crises and popular memory in creation of a “New South mythology” with consideration to its sociopolitical contests for hegemony over time. Their “genealogical analysis” of many commercial mythmakers reconstructing this “New South” reveals how mythmakers conveniently choose among and reconfigure historical memories and countermemories of various perspectives for distinctive consumption. Thus, there is competitive value gained from the repackaging of southern history. Agents’ preference or omission of particular memories is “also a means for dominant social groups to assert their hegemonic status” (Thompson and Tian 2008). While recent marketing campaigns are designed with consumers as co-creators in mind, historically, ad agency management and creatives perceived receivers as easily manipulated. “Seeing consumers as the object rather than ‘other’ to the one doing the calculating” (Slater 1997:58). We hear this distance mentioned by the creative director at W&F and from the ad executives at JWT who acknowledge their class distinction from audiences. Periodizing marketing history To locate the historical emergence of consumers I use Slater’s (1997) dates to determine premodern, modern, and postmodern historical periods for analysis. The premodern period in America extends from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It is characterized by a traditional society that was self-sufficient for domestic production and consumption before the early 1800s in America. The modern period extends especially from the 1850s to about 1980 and is characterized by a “liberal utilitarianism” concerned with social cohesion maintained by reciprocation between Fordist production and consumption. The postmodern period since 1980 involves the “blurring and flattening of modernist distinctions” including “high culture/mass culture” (Slater 1997:196) where people are preoccupied with self-definition and symbolic aggrandizement of the individual in an era of fragmented identities. However, Slater also notes that access to this postmodern “consumerist lifestyle” is predisposed by having the money to enter (Ibid. 201). Transformations from one period to another have long gestations before they appear full form capable of definition. For instance, the germ of the postmodern period is spawned after World War II during the 1950s when a plethora of new goods became available. This largess became possible by the conversion of wartime production to manufacturing for consumers. The sentiment of the postmodern page_62 Page 63 as a time period was cultivated by a new generation of young adults whose enculturation was quite different from their parents. Childhood intellects were piqued by a proliferation of new entertainment. As young adults in the 1960s, enlightened social redefinitions liberated the new generation from parental power and political control. For some, it was a new way of experiencing reality. Postmodernism is a way of looking at the world “concerned with lived experience and fragmented realities, spectacles and visualizations, non-linear contours in time and space” (Venkatesh et al. 1993:217). It is therefore also “A cultural condition and philosophical position that questions the fundamental assumptions of modernism … [and] critiques

modernism as an oppressive development in Western history …” (Ibid. 220). The following section will look behind at these periods and the successive measures of liberation experienced by women in the home, society and the marketplace. Any analysis of advertising should begin with a thickly described historical study of each culture’s values. This is particularly important for “understanding the role of material possessions” (Schudson 1984:129). When we look at the emergence of the American consumer, she is female. Segmenting exceptions exist for traditional male product categories and in the late twentieth century with more aggressive targeting of males for market development in nontraditional categories, which begins in the 1950s. However, we need to determine the emergence of female consumers with consideration of access to the marketplace. The premodern period: 1750–1880s During the premodern period from the colonial era to the industrial revolution American subsistence production and purchasing roles in the household transformed in response to increasing availability of products. During this time, women’s lives were characterized by patriarchal domination. One’s gender determined “access to education; legal rights; and a variety of religious, economic and social roles” (Witkowski 1999:105). Women were in the minority owing to greater male immigration and higher death rates. Almost every woman was expected to marry. “Spinsters were held in very low esteem.” Witkowski, however notes that spinsters and the widowed were identified as “legal individuals,” and both had access to legal and economic power, contrary to married women whose economic assets at marriage were transferred to the husband (Ibid.). Legally, there were very few rights for married women, but within marriage and the home (their domain) women had predominant say in house design and remodeling and decision making was more often a “joint” affair or theirs alone. A married woman generally could not appear alone in public and without assets was dependent on the husband for shopping. From store ledgers, legal records, and correspondence we get a glimpse of household decision making and purchasing abilities. Merchant accounts indicate that males were the predominant shoppers of the 1700s. Witkowski found correspondence that indicates “some women placed a higher priority on household luxuries than did their menfolk and that these women page_63 Page 64 were earlier adopters of the more prestigious store-bought items” (1999:109). It was such women with the resources and the will, who by their shopping stimulated the “consumer revolution of the late eighteenth century” (Ibid.). Perhaps a tendency toward profligacy when able to splurge contributed to an illuminating little guidebook published in 1833 by Mrs. Child entitled The American Frugal Housewife “dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy.” Economic conservation of time and scarce resources was the motivation for less fortunate early American families guided by foresight of frugal mothers and wives. This book decried excess and idleness afforded only by the rich. A reading from this guide “written for the poor” brings that life to light. Let women do their share towards reformation – Let their fathers and husbands see them happy without finery; and if their husbands and fathers have (as is often the case) a foolish pride in seeing them decorated, let them gently and gradually check this feeling, by showing that they have better and surer means of commanding respect – Let them prove, by the exertion of ingenuity and economy, that neatness, good taste, and gentility, are attainable without great expense. (Mrs. Child 1833:6) Women were not the powerless “victims” that legal history and frugal guidebooks imply. Families produced for their own needs or (in the absence of cash) for sale, barter, or trade. Lower class women socialized together while engaging in productive activities, like quilting, spinning, candle making. Upper class women met socially and also did sewing while one of their group read aloud from a popular novel. Time was never wasted (Witkowski 1999). Campbell’s contribution of the “Romantic Ethic” in evolving consumerism locates a new sentimentality at the end of the eighteenth century, which helped nurture “emotional indulgence of all kinds” (2005:174). This, coupled with political liberation in France and Europe in general, encouraged new culture industries like the Gothic novel and romantic literature still popular today. We can now see how consumption of these novels might have helped to bring about a critical change in attitudes toward the world, one characterized by the rejection of a traditional pattern of life on the grounds that it was too dull, and a consequent search for the kind of pleasure which would be experienced in imagination. (Campbell 2005:176) Early in the eighteenth century, a proliferation of printing presses encouraged local production of pamphlets and newsletters. After 1870, national publications were dispersed across the country by railroad along with products whose advertising echoed within the publications’ pages. Initially created for education and entertainment, the ads became an important anticipatory resource for women’s subsequent access to the marketplace. page_64

Page 65 Women’s appearance as shoppers of store bought goods emerges in the 1850s. We see this transition in oil paintings that visualize everyday life. Witkowski’s (2004) content analysis reveals women exercising consumption roles that demonstrate release from patriarchal control. American women by the mid-1850s could now shop alone, make their own purchase decisions from expanding product categories, and spend their own money earned outside the home. By the end of the nineteenth century and the “cult of domesticity” embraced in the Victorian era, women are encouraged to cultivate their taste in fashion which reflects on the status of their families (Ibid.). At this time, continuous flow technology – later called the assembly line – allows mass production of necessities, like cereal, crackers, condiments, and garments, which replace those made at home. The modern period established: 1890s-1950s From the 1880s to the 1910s, the typical US consumer was increasingly perceived to be the female “homemaker” who bought supplies made by men, advertised in print ads written by men, and procured from male merchants (Garvey 1996). For leisure entertainment women read ten cent monthly magazines like Cosmopolitan, The Delineator, The Ladies’ Home Journal, McClures, Munseys, among many others for what they could glean about becoming modern. Garvey says that women read the ads first as if they were “news” offering helpful information they could apply to “their trade as housewives.” Later, they read the articles. She continues, however, that ad writers “even for such items as scouring soap, often continued to assume that men might buy them. While others addressed both men and women, women increasingly became the proper target of advertisements” (1996:174). The ads that women read served a very anticipatory purpose, because, “A multitude of goods were produced to satisfy needs that no one knew they had” (Leach 1993:16). Fashionable goods became available at the dream emporiums conceived by John Wannamaker, A. T. Steward and Roland Macy, among many others, whose department stores fulfilled new desires fueled by ads. At the end of the nineteenth century the department store more than any other commercial entity pushed the boundaries of modern life forward along with its liberating transformation in consciousness. Yet, what might be perceived as emancipatory to one historian we hear tempered by another: It assumes that female autonomy is possible only in an urban setting, overlooking (for example) the independent cast of mind shown in Midwestern women’s farm diaries. It overlooks the possibility that the female consumer could simply be exchanging one set of male masters for another: rural patriarchs for urban tastemakers. (Lears 1994:73) It was difficult not to be seduced by the new marketplace that provided for every whim (see Leach 1993). Department stores expanded into offering services on par with those of the late twentieth century, from offering nurseries for baby sitting to page_65 Page 66 bands playing music and catering to every need of the female shopper. Some came to appreciate this public display of respect and demanded concomitant equality at home, believing “they ought to be served, not serve others [and] … that men ought to entertain and serve women” (Leach 1984:336). At the turn of the century, long before many women became “slaves to fashion,” living on extended credit by juggling multiple credit cards (debt being the true oppressor), department stores through ancillary support networks opened innumerable career opportunities to enterprising women. Leach says regarding work, as early as 1890 women were hired as illustrators and designers of clothing, as writers and editors in fashion and advertising, as owners or employers of cosmetic companies. Within department stores, ambitious women rose to “buyers” with greater independence, higher pay, travel and increasing responsibilities. “By 1916, almost one-third of department store buyers were women” (Leach 1984:332). No longer stigmatized by spinsterhood, some women even eschewed marriage for their careers. In the first half of the twentieth century most educated women found employment as teachers, or in some aspect of home economics and social work that required “the most human contact” (Scanlon 1995:173). In 1900, women constituted “35 percent of the professional workforce … and 45 percent … in 1930, but while their numbers grew quickly, their range of occupations did not” (Ibid.). By the 1930s images in magazines and movies of the super rich parodying European aristocrats created a psychic chasm between the fantasy and lower class reality. While the struggling classes and poor immigrants anticipated upward mobility as an exercise of their democratic right to the pursuit of happiness, the depression exacerbated the fiction of it ever occurring. For the comfortably employed, consumption became a way of life encouraged by both genders’ access to more leisure time (workweeks by 1926 were cut down to 50.6 hours) and more money to spend from higher earnings. The consequence was that “the salaries of well-paid skilled workers … often put them at the same lifestyle level as the presumably ‘higher’ class whitecollar workers.” This stimulated “a strong consumer consciousness built on individual aspiration” actualized through “access to status-enhancing goods” (Cross 2000:18–19). Even through economic depression and wartime conservation, the average American “held tight to old consuming habits and dreams” despite a

movement of progressive thinkers to redress the 1920s “glorification of greed” (Ibid. 67–68). Past luxuries had become necessities. The most effective advertising style during the first third of the twentieth century followed the model provided from fiction or editorial material telling stories. This genre followed “narratives of women’s struggles to live full and rewarding lives” (Scanlon 1995:170). Scanlon gives credit to the role of working women in the advertising industry, many employed at JWT primarily as copywriters for advancing women’s social position. These highly educated early female advertisers not only helped create and promote products in general, but they also helped advance the status of women in particular through engaging in many social philanthropic efforts. page_66 Page 67 Precursor to postmodern: 1950s on Post World War II, US couples began shopping together with the male becoming more engaged in the decision process. Cohen (2004) notes that by the mid-1950s, acting on marketing research that found men were buying groceries, A & P began directing some of its advertising to them. Various 1950s US Department of Labor publications also indicate increasing supermarket customers were couples. One 1959 study on middle class couples’ shopping habits calls the wife the “purchasing agent” with the husband the “architect of the family’s fiscal policy.” However, the wife is constrained with “her degree of authority over purchases … in an inverse ratio to the expense of the item” (Cohen 2004:148). The conundrum posed by this statement perhaps remains true into the second millennium. While traditional gender roles and buyer behavior might have relaxed by mid-century for middle-class relationships, they remained male dominant among the working class. This obtains at least until the 1970s when women of all classes gain permanent presence in the workforce, and contributes to more joint and gender-specific category decision making within relationships. Marketing evolution: past as prolog Yakhlef (1999:139) claims that the advertisers’ favorite stimuli for the postmodern period are “… desire for social prestige, approval, pride, ownership, guilt, anxiety, glamour, status, etc. These have come to be grist for the mill of advertisers.” However, research in the archives finds Yakhlef’s postmodern stimuli portrayed in 1920s and 1930s advertising spearheaded by JWT creative personnel (Davis 2000; Lears 1994; Marchand 1985; Scanlon 1995) in campaigns they designed. As Hollywood ascended and especially, since the 1920s, advertisers increasingly positioned brands in glamorous settings often with movie star testimonials, executives believed that the Joneses needed to relieve their dull existence by daydreaming about unattainable wealthy lifestyles and the celebrities who lived them. “The consciousness of the subject is shaped not by a real relationship but by an imaginary one, allowing the subject to be free to project one’s desires onto commodities” (Yakhlef 1999:138; see also Firat and Dholakia 2006). This becomes particularly germane when products are endorsed by famous social status figures. Hirschman and Thompson (1997) probe contemporary consumers’ relationships with media and find a significant “symbiotic” relationship involving advertising and media representations of celebrity that consumers find “inspirational” toward formation of an “ideal self.” Thus an ideological system evolves in which aspirational cultural meaning embedded in cultural codes of common understanding are honed over time through similarly repeated expressions and media representations. “‘Keeping up with the Joneses’”, a metaphor frequently found in minutes of JWT meetings, originated in a comic strip in 1910, but according to Cross “meant less emulation of the rich than not falling behind one’s own crowd” (2000:23). Today, as many consumers engage with brands idiosyncratically as co-producers of meaning, there are those who find the cult of Hollywood most captivating page_67 Page 68 for both advertisers’ brand identities and consumer ideal self-reconstruction (http://www.ymijeans.com) indicating robust potential for future research. Another call from the academy is to reconsider the linear trajectory of the three eras of marketing. “Clear and significant evidence suggests that ideas and practices characteristic of the sales and marketing eras existed during the time when a production orientation is commonly believed to have dominated business practice” (Jones and Richardson 2007:22). Slater also considers the illogic of linear marketing eras citing General Motors’ early product differentiation an indication of segmentation, which appears as early as the 1920s (1997:193). JWT 1920–1930s advertising broke away from “liberal utilitarianism” and the “economic man” derivative to act on women’s roles in consumption and especially connect their emotions to consumerism. Research comparing ads from the 1920s and 1930s with the 1970s reveals a blurring of historical distinctions. Earlier production and sales era ads used segmentation and emotional appeals characteristic of later marketing era strategies. The 1970s W&F modern era campaign employs relationship marketing characteristic of the postmodern period. Thus, from modern to postmodern we find snob appeal embedded in a wide range of product ads advocating brands for status access. Periodic popular good causes (Witkowski 2003) and the evolution of particularistic

marketplace cultures are noteworthy exceptions (Arnould and Thompson 2005). It is not that the historical periods exist separately or consecutively; they overlap and coincide. Advertising since the 1920s informed generations to transcend everyday reality through a subtle manipulation of our insecurities (Ewen and Ewen 1992; Fox and Lears 1983; Lears 1994; Schudson 1984; Stern 1988; Twitchel 1996; Williamson 1978). Perhaps we should understand the role that early advertising played in shaping the postmodern era defined by Yakhlef (1999:139) emanates from the 1920s. The hyperreal imaginary works easily on us today. The images advertising portrays, that Yaklef claims cast us into the vortex of a hyperreal artificial world, function so efficiently because they trigger a belief system that has become real because we believe it (see Sherry 1987). We consume the advertised dreams. As an account executive at W&F, I worked on two campaigns that in reflection straddle the modern – postmodern divide. The Warner’s bra campaign revolutionized sales at point of purchase for an entire industry (Olsen 2003b). The Franklin Society Federal Savings and Loan Association campaign reflects old fashioned gender stereotyping, where a woman’s bank deposits become the surrogate male – protector and provider, characteristic of premodern female dependency on dominant patriarchy. For nearly thirty years, this ad campaign has disturbed me. How this stereotype came to be is cultural, written in our advertising history. JWT modernizes A rich repository of our collective history exists in advertising archives at Duke University. Particularly insightful are the JWT corporate documents and verbatim minutes from executive and creative meetings between 1927 and 1938. Stanley Resor (1879–1962) hired by Thompson in 1908 purchased the agency in 1916 on page_68 Page 69 Thompson’s retirement. Resor shaped the culture of the agency by hiring Ivy League colleagues from upper class suburbs who were educationally suited (Ph.D. in economics) for his sociological, scientific advertising approach that used statistics to understand the modern consumer (see Kreshel 1990). Igo’s research concerning the results of such statistics (2007:46) clarifies that many from the working class responded negatively to sociological analysis objectifying them as “‘cheap’ or ‘dumb’” or living ordinary lives per statistician’s survey categorizations. Indeed, as JWT executives predicted, being typecast as average in ads, readers (particularly women) were then positively predisposed to status distinctions sold in their ads. Early advertising characteristically positioned women in need of fatherly advice. Glamorizing the patriarchal practice of treating women like children – in need of constant supervision – many of the messages aimed at “Mrs. Consumer” promised her the opportunity to hold on to perpetual girlhood. According to this formula, female success was defined by incessant, if presumably admiring, surveillance. (Ewen and Ewen 2006:465) Until the 1920s, JWT was mostly male, however, the hiring practices of Resor’s co-worker and wife, Helen Lansdowne, improved the gender balance by adding many female copywriters. Scanlon says that Lansdowne created the Women’s Editorial Department by hiring “… white, native-born, middle- or upper-middle class, college-educated women” (1995:174). Many were suffragettes with strong opinions on the social and political role of women. While the majority of these women writers were single several lived with their female companions (Ibid. 1995:181, 189) yet also, ironically, were responsible for the earliest ad copy objectifying women in advertising. What has turned into one of the major controversies in advertising – women as sex objects – was developed by a woman who most likely saw the recognition of women’s sexuality as a step forward in an advertising world that had primarily portrayed women as asexual wives and mothers. (Scanlon 1995:176) These female copywriters were reacting to the stereotypical role of women as homemakers destined to stay home or shop for the families as portrayed in the articles and ads they read in magazines. Copywriters used their own negative reaction to this typecasting to spice up ordinary lives in ads the agency produced. One female copywriter, Aminta Casseras, is heard in the archives voicing traditional gender values during a Talk on Copy for the Pond’s account agreeing with Resor that “the male is the gender of the species” from which women should take direction. Paternalism reigned supreme. The next section reviews JWT gender strategy followed by a retrospective probe of the bank campaign from the mid-1970s at the cusp of the postmodern, reflecting a modern period class and gender bias similar to the 1930s. page_69 Page 70 J. Walter Thompson gender and status strategies Resor previously worked at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati where he hired Helen Lansdowne. David Ogilvy says, “she had become one of the best copywriters in the country” (1983:193). In a disclosure of

insider information Ogilvy continues, “despite the fact that he was married to a copywriter, Resor had a tendency to regard copywriters as idiots. His agency was dominated by its (male) account executives, or ‘representatives’ as he called them” (Ibid.). Thus, in 1916, Resor instituted educational forums, first for the female staff and nine months later for male executives and clients. The forums presented weekly lectures by specialists on clients’ brands and ad execution (Stanley Resor, JWT, News Bulletin, No.15, 12 September 1916:5, JWT Archives, Duke University). William Esty, became part of this instructional team when he joined JWT in 1925. He left in 1932 to found his own agency. Esty, concerned about the depression eroding the family budget delivered five presentations in 1930 to stimulate a more sales oriented creative direction. Clients were pressuring the agency to show that money spent on magazine ads would increase sales. He called for “super-advertising” to generate consumer response. We find paternalistic innuendo embedded in his segmentation strategy. … women are more important than ever before and … they are studying and restudying values and haven’t come to any conclusions yet but are in a more or less chaotic condition of mind. When minds are unsettled it is a good era for politicians and for advertising people… (William Esty, General Talk on Copy, 30 September 1930:7, JWT Archives, Duke University) Esty speculated that some women had always been spenders of the family budget and through the 1920s had gained access to enormous cash reserves from jobs as well as inheritance when husbands died. He suggested that ads for these more comfortable women should emphasize an emotional topic connecting the brand to a source of happiness. For a broader more working-class appeal, he proposed several new copy formats to draw these audiences into the ads. Esty suggested the creative directors intensify ads with American themes based on maternity, success, social acceptability, and embarrassment (William Esty, General Talk on Copy, 30 September 1930:11, JWT Archives, Duke University). The focus should be “confined to cities and smaller communities … not the richest but (from) the great middle and lower classes who represent the great market for the kind of products which we advertise for the most part” (Ibid. 13). He proposed writing emotionally charged ads to women appealing to morals and marriage, suffrage and careers, and romance. More importantly, he instructed writers to offer those who live “menial” and “sordid” lives some “luxury,” and “love,” sprinkling “lackey’s” comments in ads like the great movie theater ushers pampered patrons with “yes sir, thank you sir.” Esty qualified his Hollywood remarks by distancing all agency personnel from its influence. “We say the Hollywood people are stupid, the pictures page_70 Page 71 are stupid,” and “the great bulk of the people are stupid” (William Esty, General Talk on Copy, 30 September 1930:12, JWT Archives, Duke University). He told writers to use the universal “love of gossip” similar to newspaper gossip columns and movie magazines (Ibid. 16) Esty concluded with a tone reflecting the paternal power of advertising: But the biggest thing of all, I believe, is this feeling on the part of women that they really don’t know very much about, or are uncertain about the romantic aspects of their life (sic). How to get a husband or how to hold them (sic), their relations with men and what to do, etc.: You take foods, I think that there is a wide open chance for somebody to come along and show how this one food saved the day in the Jones household, along romantic lines. Unless you have come into contact with it and seen the colossal interest there is in Dorothy Dix or anybody who writes about romantic problems you haven’t any conception of what a paramount issue that is in the minds of most women. (William Esty, General Talk on Copy, 30 September 1930:18, JWT Archives, Duke University) James Yates, an art director at JWT, was invited to speak from an art director’s point of view. Similarly, in the introduction to his presentation we hear the social distance of agency “us” verses “them.” He claimed that: Indifferent as we may be to many of the movies, to Mrs. Jones they are the fulfillment of her heart’s desires. Sitting in the movies, she visits the homes of the wealthy. Sitting in the movies, her children are all as beautiful as Jackie Coogan, and their mischief is as amusing. Her home is luxurious; her husband makes lots of money. Sitting in the movies, she wears the smart clothes of Gloria Swanson. She looks like Garbo and men like Gary Cooper fall in love with her. (James S. Yates, Staff Meeting, “Copy from an Art Director’s Standpoint,” 5 May 1931:6, JWT Archives, Duke University) Note the barrier Yates draws between his “indifferent” class and women seduced by the movies. There was no love lost either for the Jewish moviemakers. Yates said, if “by luck” they had not found movies, they “would still be manufacturing buttonholes on Seventh Avenue” (Ibid. 6), reflecting not just sexism but also anti-Semitism. Hollywood was used to captivate ad audiences two decades earlier. The advent of moving pictures coincided with World War I, so ad executives used film stars to divert the nation’s sadness to vicarious pleasures. An ad for Lux laundry soap in Modern Priscilla magazine, February 1929, catches attention with the headline “Hollywood’s Lovely Clothes” featuring a large photograph and testimonial by a famous actress of the time: page_71

Page 72 Beautiful Fay Wray, Paramount player, (who) wears this ethereal chiffon and lace ensemble, typical of dainty clothes shown in her pictures. “Lux is a perfect miracle,” she says – “the marvelous way it Re-News the beauty of even the most delicate garments.” Like the movies, women everywhere – 8 out of 10 in representative homes in cities from coast to coast, investigations show – use Lux! They find Lux Re-News! (Modern Priscilla Februrary 1929:25) Wealth and celebrity were identities that caught attention by offering a preferable imaginary. Another ad for Pond’s Creams in the September 1925 issue of THE DESIGNER and The Woman’s Magazine has the headline “As Mrs. Livingston Fairbank of Chicago Sees It” placed over a large photograph of her full figure in a fancy lace dress leaning on a wall covered in tapestry. The picture shows a library shelved with books against the far wall under a regal portrait painting adjacent to a candelabrum hung on the wall. A fireplace commands the attention of the room near which a couch and easy chair are placed for conversation or quiet contemplation. The ceiling seems to be inlaid wood with heavy decoration. Ad copy tells us that this is “the Gothic mantel in the music-room of her apartment at 999 Lake Shore Drive, which commands a superb view of Lake Michigan.” While the ad combines her testimonial: I just use Pond’s Two Creams … the very same two that I found so many of my friends were using and that are responsible for thousands of lovely complexions everywhere. A simple method – requiring only a few moments each day. The busiest women use it… (September 1925, THE DESIGNER and The Woman’s Magazine) The testimonial is accompanied by descriptions of her busy life as “social leader,” attending events at the Chicago Opera, social balls and even the possibility of having just returned from Palm Beach. The copy concludes, “The unfailing results which have commended this method to Mrs. Fairbank and the loveliest, most perfectly groomed Society leaders everywhere, will also endear these Creams to you.” While many JWT ads use high fashion and high society personalities set amidst lifestyle props, other JWT photographs required close-ups (Steichen 1963:9). Yates knew the power of the camera and learned from great directors to capture attention so the “less educated” would avoid misunderstanding an ad. He told art directors on the Jergen’s Lotion account to use “close-ups which narrow the vision down to the expressions on the … faces! This is enough to tell the story, and trap the audience gaze” using photography emotionally (James S. Yates, Staff Meeting, “Copy from an Art Director’s Standpoint,” 5 May 1931:8, JWT Archives, Duke University). Schroeder tells us that “By connecting images to the cultural context of consumption, researchers gain a more thorough (yet never complete) understanding of how images embody and express cultural values and contradictions” (2006:303, see also Schroeder 2002). Filming close-ups was a movie director’s technique to focus attention where they highlight emotion. Steichen valued this page_72 Page 73 technique which he mastered using the shadows and shading of black and white photography, his preference over color. Most importantly, JWT ads portraying elegant, aristocratic lifestyles of the rich and famous reflected executives’ own values. They believed that status, social climbing, and wealth acquisition equated with romance and happiness. They believed that while obtaining this dream was beyond reach of most of their audience, many of them had already arrived. JWT corporate executive, Wallace Boren speaking on this irony says: While 5% of all homes have servants, 66% of our writers are blessed with domestics. Only one in eight does his or her grocery shopping; half buy their own drug supplies and about 60% shop in department stores. The men writers are virtually unanimous in their agreement that shopping is something to avoid entirely. All this in an agency that depends on the retail sale of staple consumer goods to the masses for its principle income! (Wallace Boren, “Bad Taste in Advertising”, JWT Forum, Copy Trends Staff Meeting, 7 January1936:6, JWT Archives, Duke University) Boren’s boast of superiority reflects the conscious disassociation between executives and those for whom their ads were intended. Recall Esty’s own (1930) class consciousness describing the audience living “menial” and “sordid” lives. In the 1920s, Resor hired John B. Watson, the behavioral psychologist to add intellectual rigor to the agency, legitimize advertising, and educate the creative staff with his knowledge. He remained a consultant into the 1960s. In an address delivered during the 1935 exhibition of the Montreal Advertising Club, Watson suggests how advertising stimuli works. “The IDEA is what makes advertising go. It must be a single simple idea that touches both human need and human emotion. Everything else is secondary. Only EMOTIONAL IDEAS get under people’s skin and bring action!” (John B. Watson, “Influencing the Mind of Another”, 1935: np, Publications File, JWT Archives, Duke University). Emotional scare tactics were used for accounts like Scott’s Toilet Tissue to prevent surgery from “toilet tissue illness” or for Lux to prevent loss of affection with “dishpan hands.” However, when emotion is used for aspirational appeal, marketing textbooks primarily identify this strategy with the later marketing orientation. Evidence of “emotional ideas” in JWT’s advertising campaigns surface in 1920s and 1930s themes for social

class, status, and fear of not emulating the Joneses for Jergens, Johnson & Johnson campaigns, Pond’s, Lux and Simmons Bedding, among other accounts. The 1970s W&F campaign is poignant because its theme has a JWT tone, echoing financial insecurity with class mobility and female dependency on a man. Characteristically, it too, is flavored with value judgments of its Creative Director. W&F agency creative direction throughout the 1970s based strategy on consumer needs translated into simple ideas with emotional themes. Warner’s used romance and sexuality (Olsen 2003b). Franklin Society Federal Savings and Loan Association (Franklin Society Bank) appealed to women’s fear of a penniless page_73 Page 74 spinsterhood. Franklin Society Bank’s two ads used visuals of 1) a social security card and 2) a woman in a fur coat. The latter ad reflects a similar paternalistic executive attitude regarding women’s aspirations from 40 years earlier. Retrospection: The Franklin Society Federal Savings & Loan Association By mid-1970s, the Franklin Society Federal Savings & Loan Association was a growing local New York savings bank with several branches in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Pearl River. It was a time when interest rates were rising and especially in the suburbs, savings banks were no longer the only place to go for mortgages or home improvement loans. In the 1970s savings banks began competing with larger institutions like Chemical Bank and CitiBank and other commercial banks for loans, savings and checking accounts. One competitor, Irving Bank, had cleverly run ads that said, “Call me, I’m Irving,” but there was no real Irving the customer could speak to if they called. That campaign garnered consumer sneers because you can’t advertise what you don’t have. In fact, W&F’s research on competitive bank products found that banks had nothing new to sell. Their transformation to all-purpose financial centers had not yet occurred. As service people are considered the fifth P in the service marketing mix, another account executive and I were recruited to check out what was happening at the point of purchase. We discovered that savings and loan bank tellers and bank officers were paid lower salaries than those in commercial banks with brand name recognition were paid. The larger banks also did more advertising and got more activity from larger depositors. Part of the positioning logic, the W&F Creative Director claimed, was that while the “better people” went to work in bigger banks, the typical savings and loan customer was poorer, thus more in need of banking advice. Thus, the marketing decision was to target people who did not understand about money or know what to do with their money. The W&F agency segmentation program “For Franklin Bank” focused on small businesses in need of money, the retirement or pre-retirement individual, and economically insecure women scared about their finances. In January 2002 the author met with the W&F Creative Director to get his perspective of the 1970s Franklin campaign. The discussion confirmed how, at the time, I would have been a typical Franklin customer. I found my first job in advertising at this agency after leaving behind the life and home I designed and built when my ex-husband found a wealthier woman. I enrolled in graduate school and was determined to never again be dependent on a man for support. The Creative Director relayed that he used my predicament for the Franklin campaign. The Creative Director reminded me (conversation January 2002) that in the 1970s “Women were coming along who were scared to death about their futures, or whose husbands didn’t have enough money and wanted to be independent.” In reflection, altercations in personal history can have deep significance that shape life themes (Olsen 1999) and frame academics’ research topics. From a marketing perspective the campaign for Franklin Society Bank was a winner. The situation analysis demonstrated that the bank had no great story to tell page_74 Page 75 and employed uninspired workers, so the Creative Director decided to change the nature of the bank. We began with a training program where our account executives met with bank staff and taught the customercontact bank officer how to become more welcoming by greeting customers with a friendly “Hello, how can I help you.” It sounds like a simplistic notion today, but bank etiquette was less than desirable then. As part of the sales program using relationship marketing, the Franklin bank officer became “The Answer Man.” We created a series of booklets with customers’ most frequently asked questions and even had a question box where customers could submit their question and get back a written answer in the mail. We also created investment plans such as a pre-retirement fund for investors to earn money towards retirement and a school loan package for parents with future tuition needs. Two ads accompanied this campaign and ran in The Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Times and Newsday. The first ad visual was a photograph of a social security card with the headline, “If This is Your Retirement Fund You Better Read This Ad.” The second ad used a full-length photograph of a smiling woman with both hands crossed over her chest hugging her new long fur coat. The headline read, “If You Didn’t Marry a Rich Man, It’s Not Too Late.” In reflection, I resented this ad because the body copy assumes that a woman’s first choice is to marry a rich man, or enable the man you have to get rich, or finally have to ask an Answer Man for help. You can help him be ready when his chance comes along or you can do the same for yourself. The trick to

getting big money is having a little when you need it … Usually, the only people who can afford a real money expert are the ones who don’t have to think about saving. We’re changing that. Now all you have to do to have your own savings and become an expert is ask. Because Franklin Society has someone like me in every branch. An Answer Man … I’ll help you budget your income, set your goals and plan your savings … And I have dozens of booklets with real answers to real money questions – like how to buy and sell a home, how to be ready for college when your kids are or to eat well and pay less, even how to be a smarter shopper. They’re yours for the asking and so am I. (Franklin Society Federal Savings & Loan Association. W&F Archives) The copy concluded with the branch addresses and the name of each branch’s Answer Man. The tag line “Our Interest Doesn’t Stop With Your Money” reinforced an early relationship-marketing concept. While other banks were running ads about how much interest you would earn at their bank, Franklin’s campaign was designed to solve real problems with a customer-focused solution. The bank’s problem was that it did not have a large advertising budget. The Creative Director said he “learned from Charles Revson to find out what the richer competition was doing and plan a similar ad campaign to bounce off their greater exposure” (conversation January 2002). The Creative Director had colleagues who conveyed such information to make this job easier. When a bigger bank also with the name of Franklin ran their ads on television and in the papers, we would have our ads in the papers too. The page_75 Page 76 end of this story is that the campaign got the Franklin Society Federal Savings and Loan Association enough business to raise its market share and to eventually be acquired by a larger bank. Reflections It wasn’t the end of the story for me however. The photo of the model in a fur coat and the headline “If you didn’t marry a rich man …” resonated for decades until as an academic I was able to begin searching for the roots of gender and status attitudes in advertising. Text books stress how advertising works by gaining attention, stimulating interest, cultivating desire, and instigating action, while academics (Barthel 1988; Ewen 1976; Ewen and Ewen 1992, 2006; Goldman 1992; Myers 1986; Schudson 1984; Sherry 1987; Stern 1993; Twitchell 1996; Wernick 1991; Williamson 1978) situate gender and status issues within a sociological critique. Significantly, Shankar questions the efficacy of linear models like AIDA just mentioned. He says aside from the advertiser’s intended message, there may be many interpretations of a message based on the particular experiential circumstances of each of the receivers (1999:10). We find similar social conditions converging on gender identities in the 1930s and 1970s. Perhaps the depression in 1929 led William Esty to infer that some women were “in a chaotic state of mind.” Or, that those fortunate to acquire inheritance from male relatives, might be in need of authority (advertising) figures to provide direction to happiness. The mid-1970s, at the time of the Franklin Society Bank campaign, coincided with the recession. The sexual revolution of the 1960s (the birth control pill was approved for prescription use in the early 1960s) and increasing employment opportunities helped young women redefine a life independent of traditional roles (married with children). Also, women’s lib coincided with the sexual revolution of the early 1970s similar to the suffragettes’ movement for women’s rights in the early decades. When women were discarding and “burning” their bras, Warner’s Bra, with W& F’s help, revolutionized the industry. We introduced the self-service concept for upscale bra sales with a campaign that encouraged women to put “lace” bras back on again by giving them names like “Love Touch,” as a sure way to attract their man (Olsen 2003b). All copywriters in this agency were men. Kacen (2000) aptly reminds that at such moments when social altercation precipitates new identity construction, people are drawn back from the abyss of re-creation to secure social definitions in their past. Change is too threatening especially when it involves gender roles and behaviors. We are not comfortable with independent (more masculine?) women or dependent (feminized?) men. Marketers respond by portraying “gender nostalgia” (Kacen 2000) in ad symbolism and retailing strategy. Future research will continue to unravel how advertising executives embed their own attitudes in the ads that they write. Cross-cultural content analysis will prove illuminating for a contrast of cultural gender values or social class attitudes, especially regarding emulation. For instance, Arthur Kover (1995) considers implicit theories of communication held by American copywriters. His interviews page_76 Page 77 with contemporary copywriters reveal their own sense of difference from those who read their ads. One copywriter told him “‘Creative people are not generally mainstream people … We’re much trendier. We have higher incomes’” (1995:601). Shankar notes a timeless theme throughout advertising practice is that “the way we think advertising works affects (and has affected) the way we attempt to improve advertising’s effectiveness” (1999:8). Such was the struggle heard in the JWT meetings! Executives debated how to write to an audience of limited means and questionable intelligence. Foucault claims, power is a process exercised in a “cluster of relations” (Gordon 1980), not necessarily from

the top down, but multidirectional and it is “self-reproducing” (Foucault 1990:93). Advertising is one such power mechanism and it works because in the process we accept the authority and agree willingly to participate. Advertising power resides in the provenance of persuasion through subtle intimidation that involves destabilizing the social self. Shankar proposes an interesting question without actually articulating it as such: at what point in history did consumers attain an “advertising literacy”? (1999:6). He says Ritson established it for Generation X, but Shankar suggests it existed for the preceding generation as well. How is advertising literacy manifested? He answers, by “an aversion to advertising hype, a cynical and critical response to advertising, a rejection of segmentation and marketing techniques and a need for individualism” (1999:6). Considering advertising’s role as cultural conditioning agent per Ewen’s (1976) Captains of Consciousness model, this approach confirms how advertising works on some readers who are not ad-literate. Ad literacy is cultivated by a postmodernist consciousness where consumers interpret and appropriate meaning through idiosyncratic consumption events and resistance movements (Soper 2007). Ewen’s perspective does presuppose that these resisters and playful consumers are in fact responding to an authority embedded in branded products and the advertising that suggests predetermined contexts and usage. Advertising authorizes new attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed in brands wrapped in cultural codes of meaning (Sherry 2005). When new interpretations arise in contexts consuming personalized or community defined satisfactions these trends may also influence the cultural fabric of society (Twitchell 1996). The historical strength of the cult of celebrity and snob appeal into the 2000s is evidence of the processing of such power relations (Burrell 1988:227). The YMI® Jeanswear International Spring 2007 campaign is a case in point. CBS News (11 April 2007) presented a news feature titled “YMI Jeans Shows Off New Trends” in which they debuted their latest lines at a Hollywood fashion show (CBS2.com Video Library). The commentator mentions that YMI Jeans are a “hot new trend” that will be “showing up on some hot leading starlets.” The YMI web site is multifaceted (http://www.ymijeans.com) and includes many links. One is titled “Celebrity Fans” showing headshots of their many famous customers. Another link offers a behind-the-scenes music video of the photo shoot for the Spring 2007 campaign set to the tune of Caitlin Crosby singing “Hollywood” (Track & Field Records). A press release signals that their fall campaign continues the theme “Stemming from the Spring/Summer 2007 Hollywood-inspired campaign, Fall page_77 Page 78 2007 bears the theme of 1940s Hollywood glamour … “ (http://www.ymijeans. com/press-releases). Holt’s (2004) categorization of marketing into periods segregates brand building into periodic strategies; mind-share, emotional, viral and his own cultural branding strategy. We find that W&F, operating in an era dominated by mind-share positioning presaged an emotional branding appeal that bonded the bank’s consumers with an Answer Man in an early form of relationship management that became popular in the 1990s. If we consider Holt’s (2004:14) comparison of the “mind-share branding,” and “emotional branding” models, the JWT, W&F and YMI campaigns bear witness to both. Holt says that some brands gain “identity value” for consumers because they are the “brands that help them express who they want to be” (Ibid. 4). Those that succeed over time become “iconic brands.” Holt notes that “iconic brands” build a reservoir of “identity value” expressing the “desires and anxieties linked to identity … widely shared across a large fraction of a nation’s citizens. These similarities result because people are constructing their identities in response to the same historical changes that influence the entire nation” (2004:6). As Yakhlef (1999:142) says “modern advertising posed brands as ideal solutions to physical problems (such as bad breath, body odor, etc.) postmodern advertising emphasizes the importance of using the right brand, if the consumer is not to jeopardize his/her social position and self-esteem.” While the brands under discussion in this paper might have had potential to become “iconic brands” in their time, both JWT and W&F did tap into national anxieties of social self, ideal self-identity reconstruction if one used the “right brand.” During the depression, JWT executives and copywriters understood the power of social susceptibility to super rich and celebrity emulation. W&F also connected the economically disadvantaged middle class strivers with access to greater opportunities in the midst of a recession. Conclusion This paper conveys a continuum in advertising consciousness over the twentieth century by using archival data suggested by Linda Scott (1994) to situate a period of advertising in its cultural context and connect it to a later period. Scott says, “Interpretive efforts might seek to explain the use of particular images in ads as an articulation of previously learned images, cultural trends, and the practical situation being addressed by the advertiser” (1994:271). Advertisers as cultural intermediaries encode brands while promoting values and sentiments they deem important. If we read contemporary ads (and TV reality shows) correctly, happiness by the late twentieth century and the second millennium increasingly translates to being rich and famous. Many of the sentiments that appealed to earlier generations live on with the symbolic meanings we attach to them today. While the early status campaigns by JWT for Jergens, Lux, Pond’s, and Simmons Bedding are now relegated to archival history, these remain heritage brands with hefty equity (Olsen 2000). Status

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4 Home away from home Home-as-order and dwelling in mobility Fleura Bardhi and Søren Askegaard Introduction Recent research has found that time orientations or timestyles influence consumer behavior and consumption experiences (Cotte et al. 2004). In addition to the dimension of time, place is another fundamental aspect of consumer lifestyles that structures and organizes their identities, behaviors, and experiences (Cuba and Hummon 1993; Sherry 2000, 1998; Thrift 1997). We thus concur with Sherry that “place exhibits perception-shaping, behavioral inducing properties” (1998:4). While research on retailing atmospherics and servicescapes (Bitner 1991) shows how place structures consumer behavior and experience within the servicescape, research in consumers’ relationships with place and the influence of these relationships on consumer behavior has been scarce. Lack of research on the topic of place in consumer behavior is also reflected in recent calls for more attention to the ways that consumers’ relationships to place structure their consumption, especially their experience of servicescapes (Sherry 2000; Thompson and Tambyah 1999). In social sciences, the main concept used to characterize the emotional and meaningful relationship between people and places is the concept of home (Altman and Werner 1985). By focusing on one notion of home, this study presents a new perspective, home-as-order, to help understand how place influences consumption of certain dwelling servicescapes, such as hotels. Home is one of the central social concepts that consumers use to orient themselves in time and space. Home is an identity-anchoring symbol of high, sometimes sacred, importance. However, consumer research on home is scarce (Kleine and Baker 2004). Two notions of home are found in consumer research. First, marketing research typically defines home as the house or dwelling. As such, home has been studied mainly as a context for decision making and commercial exchange (Frenzen and Davis 1990; Grayson 1998). Nevertheless, the existing scattered work on the concept of home in consumer research argues that home constitutes an important place for self-development and family life (Claiborne and Ozanne 1990; Hill 1991; McCracken 1989). These studies allude to consumers’ use of possessions and consumption practices to transform place into home environments. However, in this literature home remains affixed to a particular place, a private space where salient kin relationships are embedded. page_83 Page 84 Second, consumer research has adopted a nationalistic notion of home as equal to the place of origin, the homeland. This is especially the case in acculturation research, which suggests that sojourners displaced because of immigration or geographical mobility experience a continuous sense of homelessness and engage in nostalgic consumption patterns to sustain the connection to the homeland (Askegaard et al. 2005; Bardhi 2001; Belk 1992; Joy and Dholakia 1991; Mehta and Belk 1991; Peñaloza 1994; Thompson and Tambyah 1999). A fundamental presumption of this conceptualization of home is that home is affixed to a place that provides us with a sense of identity and origin. Consequently, consumer behavior research most often employs a narrow conceptualization of home as affixed to place, typically identified with the house or the homeland, and in which the consumers display a permanent affective connection to a place. From this conceptualization of home, it can be further derived that home can only be experienced in salient and private, non-commercial places. However, globalization and postmodernity have increased the role of the marketplace in the social construction of home (Featherstone 1995; Miller 2001). For example, the development of mobile technologies and internet is generating a portable notion of home (Venkatesh 2001). The private and public boundaries of home have been blurred with consumers finding or making a home in public, commercial spaces as is illustrated by the study of Swedish families’ domestication of the McDonald’s restaurants (Brembeck 2005). This paper addresses these issues through the study of homemaking in mobility in dwelling servicescapes (such as hotels) among a group of globally mobile professionals. The paper argues that the consumers’ notions of home structure their consumption of dwelling servicescapes. We introduce an alternative portable notion of home that represents a cognitive relationship to place, that of order. The findings elaborate on the different dimensions of the concept of home-as-order and demonstrate the different homemaking practices and resources that these mobile consumers deploy during dwelling in hotels. Conceptual background From a review of the home literature across social sciences, it becomes apparent that there are numerous definitions of the concept of home. In this paper, we adopt a phenomenological categorization of these home concepts as being both cognitive and affective. The former is expressed through the notion of home-as-order concept, and the latter through the notion of home-as-identity (Dovery 1985; Norberg-Schulz 1985). Based on the existing literature, the notion of home-as-order defines home as a physical place where one feels oriented in space, time and socio-cultural order. The notion of home-as-identity defines home as a personal space of identification, where one belongs and with which one has a strong sense of affiliation (Dovery 1985; Olwig 1998).

The home-as-order concept focuses on the patterning of the environmental experience and behavior that orient us in the world (Dovery 1985:35). This includes orientation within three types of orders: spatial, temporal, and sociocultural. Home page_84 Page 85 is the place where one feels spatially oriented, a conceptual and meaningful spatial experience of what phenomenologists call being-in-the-world (Norberg-Schulz 1988). The underlying structure of home as spatial order lies in its role as a center of our spatial world by which we order our experience in space. In this sense, home is also infused with meanings that separate it from the surrounding world, such as the meanings of home as a sacred and secured place, a place of certainty and stability. To be at home in this sense is to know where you are, to inhabit a secure center, and to be oriented in space (Dovery 1985). A place becomes home also in the sense of temporal order through everyday habituation or long habituations in the past, which produces a sense of familiarity with the place. In this sense, home is the place of origin and the taken-for-granted environment that we inhabit everyday and/or have recurrent interactions with (Dovery 1985; Relph 1979). The last meaning of home-as-order refers to the sociocultural order where cultural beliefs and social practices represent the ordering system that selects the environmental forms where home is manifested (Dovery 1985). Home, in this order, is having command of the tacit norms inherent in a social setting, being able to skillfully and successfully apply one’s social and cultural capital to interact in daily settings. It is important to emphasize that the home-as-order notion is not embodied in any house or place. It is a way to relate to the environment that can be transported from place to place; it is a “portable” notion of home (Dovery 1985; Douglas 1991). As a result, once spatial, temporal and sociocultural patterns are recreated in a new environment, this environment is soon transformed into a home. Dovery (1985) illustrates this with reference to Marshall’s study of the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, and how they create a new home every night oriented towards a fire marking the center of a small windbreak, which they carry with them. This, combined with knowledge about indigenous foods in the different recurrent and well-known camp sites as well as their geographical constitution, is enough to evoke a schema of spatial, temporal, and sociocultural meanings of home. Rapport and Dawson (1998) in their review of anthropological studies of travelers conclude that the concept of home for travelers comes to be found usually in the routine of a set of practices, in a repetition of habitual, social interactions, and in the ritual of a regularly used personal name. For a traveler in a completely strange environment, the calling of his/her name maybe the “homeyest” thing that can happen. The phenomenon of home is more than the experience of being oriented within a familiar order; home represents also a process of identification through which we connect with our world – a relationship to place conceptualized under the notion of home-as-identity. “Rootedness,” “at-homeness,” “place identity,” and “home as symbol of the self” are some of the terms researchers have used to denote people’s experience of a deeply felt relatedness with their home environments (Cuba and Hummon 1993; Feldman 1990; Jones et al. 2000; Tuan 1980). Home is found in settings or particular environments towards which we are strongly attached and identify with to the extent that in our interpretations of the self, we use environmental meaning to symbolize or situate identity (Cuba and Hummon 1993:548). For example, we become “American,” “Albanian,” or “Danish” partially on page_85 Page 86 the bases of “place” identity. Consumers who orient themselves towards place in terms of the home-asidentity notion developed a sense of belonging to place through the significant affiliation of self with the place (Hayward 1982; McHugh and Ming 1996). Home-as-identity reflects the adage “home is where the heart is.” Even though marketing research has paid little attention to the concept of home and its influence in consumer behavior, existing research is underlined by an assumption of home-as-identity as a key way that consumers relate to place. For example, the acculturation research has continuously focused on the relationship of respondents to their home country defined in terms of home-as-identity. The acculturation studies have shown how a sojourner’s relationship to home has influenced its consumption abroad, partly in ways to maintain their national identity, such as displaying highly symbolic items in their homes abroad; membership of ethnic organizations abroad; attendance of ethnic media; continuing consumption of foods and brands from country’s origin etc. (Askegaard et al. 2005; Belk 1992; Ger and Østergaard 1998; Gilly 1995; Gilly et al. 1998; Joy and Dholakia 1991; Mehta and Belk 1991; Thompson and Tambyah 1999). In this study, we adopt the home-as-order perspective on the relationship of consumers to place. We examine first how consumers experience an environment as a home-as-order. Second, the ways that this concept of home structures consumers’ experiences of certain servicescapes, such as hotels, are studied. The hotel servicescape was deemed suitable for the study because hotel services are the most typical contexts where one’s notion of home will influence the consumption experience. This can also be supported by recent

advertising campaigns of hotel chains worldwide that try to position their services as a home for travelers (e.g., Four Seasons Hotels). Methodology The focus of the study was to identify the ways that consumers practice the home-as-order notion of home and the ways that this notion of home influences their hotel servicescape consumption and experiences. This study was conducted through 35 semi-structured interviews (Bernard 2002; McCracken 1988). The questions focused on identifying consumers’ notions of home and places they consider and/or make homes, as well as the ways that they relate to home during geographical mobility. The questions were based closely on the theoretical dimensions of the two notions of home identified above and focused on consumer practices and experiences. When designing the sample for the study, the focus was in selecting a group of informants for whom the issue of home was a constant concern because of their extensive geographical mobility. In this way, the influence of home concept into consumption of hotel services would be vivid. The global consumer segment of highly mobile global professionals was selected for the study. Thirty-five globally mobile professionals were interviewed with regard to their meanings of home and the ways that they related to home while being continuously mobile. Traveling extensively was defined in the study as being professionally mobile or working in page_86 Page 87 more than three countries a year; or having lived for professional reasons in three other countries in a decade. These informants were recruited primarily through snowball sampling (Hall-Arber 2007). Basically, each informant was asked at the end of the interview to identify another potential informant for the study. The researchers also gained access to several multinational companies and interviewed several of the global managers there. Overall, we sampled mobile professionals that spend annually at least 60 percent of the time on the road. The sample consists of what are typically called business travelers, expatriates, as well as roving professionals located in all parts of the world, with 24 American informants and 11 informants from other countries, such as the EU, South Africa, Latin America, Canada, and East Asia. Informants are 11 females and 24 males, 12 of whom are single and 23 are married. They range in age from 27 to 64 years old, where 12 informants are above fifty years old. At the time of the interview, 12 of the informants lived abroad, while the others resided in their country of origin. Although everyone did not report their income level, the average annual income for 26 of the informants is 104,000 US dollars. The interviews lasted from one to five hours and were conducted either at informants’ place of residency or workplace. Interviews were transcribed and read carefully to get a complete sense of the data. The N*Vivo software was used to code and analyze the data following a preliminary list of codes and the recommended techniques of qualitative data analysis (Miles and Huberman 1994; Spiggle 1994; Strauss and Corbin 1998). Findings Overall the study shows that home was a major concern for these highly mobile global professionals. This segment displays multiple notions of home (Rapport and Dawson 1998; Thompson and Tambyah 1999) and has multiple homes located in different parts of the world. Some respondents do not have a permanent home, but construct a new home in every new place they land. The first part of the findings identifies the different ways that respondents understand and practice a home-as-order notion of home. The second part of the findings identifies how these respondents construct a sense of home on the road. Home-as-order among globally mobile professionals To identify this meaning of home, we examined the ways informants talked about the experience of “being at home” or “feeling at home,” the physical characteristics of home places, and practices of constructing a home on the road. Home is found in places where one feels spatially, temporally, and socioculturally oriented. Informants described home as a structured and familiar place, where one has control over space and knows where things are. Home is the place where informants develop or experience spatial knowledge or awareness of the structure or patterning of the place (Belk 1988). In the following quote, Peter illustrates this point by emphasizing the familiarity with the spatial order of his house as one of the reasons that makes page_87 Page 88 this house a home for him. “Just things are familiar, I know where the bathroom is, I know where the kitchen is, the office is so well equipped that everything is at my fingertips …” (Peter, Consultant, American). Spatial and sociocultural orders are created through the temporal dimension. If the temporal order is absent, the other two orders are disrupted. In this sense, the experience of being at home is often placed in contrast to the experience of mobility, which is characterized as unstructured and disorienting. I changed let’s say seven apartments in the last three years. And this is a nightmare. You have bags with some stuff with it and you do not even have an idea of what is in it. So, you never have the feeling of being at home.

(Giorgio, Sales Manager, Italian) Data further show that informants find homes in places that they experience as welcoming, comfortable, and secure. In other words, informants experience the familiar order of home as welcoming, comfortable, and secure – what McCracken (1988) termed “homeyness.” We find that places where certain objects were present or where these objects were displayed and arranged in a particular order, became home because they made informants feel welcomed or comfortable or secure. For example, informants identified several objects that they typically associated with a sense of comfort and home, such as the television set, the dining table with chairs, the leather armchair, the bed, plants and flowers, personal collections of art work, library collections, fish tanks, etc. These possessions have come to symbolize the existence of a sense of home in a place and some informants find it difficult to feel at home without these “comforts” or “symbols” of home. As such, there are dwelling resources that activate home schemes. In that sense, our results echo Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) who underline the role of special possessions and their meanings to the individual identity formation and to the family community in creating a home. However, our findings suggest that familiar home orders can be found in different places and are thus not necessarily confined to one place in particular. In the following quote, Nelson emphasizes the role of the presence of certain “home objects” in making his temporary apartment in Poland a home. I: What made this apartment home for you? R: I had a small TV, I had my own kitchen, you know, and I had a little desk that I would work and grade papers and read. I had my own radio. You know, I mean it was very comfortable. I mean it was, as I say yes, it was like home. (Nelson, Academic, Canadian) A sense of familiarity and orientation in time and space is also gained through appropriation of the place. Informants define as home places they have made their own by acquisition, by decorating them in personal ways, by constructing and transforming the structure of the place, etc. By personalizing the place and space, page_88 Page 89 informants invest it with meaning creating a familiar and private environment as shown in these two quotes. I: What makes your apartment home for you? R: I guess it’s my own. I own it and I decorated it and have all the things, books, and foods, and music that I’m accustomed to … (Julie, Lawyer, American) I’ve decorated it with my own things. All my things in here … It’s my refuge and I feel comfortable in them, and I know that it’s my place. I know it’s mine and I can do what I want with it or in it, and just be at peace. (Sheila, Legal Advisor, American) Note how Sheila demonstrates references to both spatial and sociocultural orders of home, since the references to privacy and personalization are highly westernized conceptualizations of home space. We further find that home is the patterned environment where domestic and family activities take place. Informants often define home in terms of everyday personal and domestic functions and rituals that they carry on there, such as relaxing, eating, sleeping, cleaning, entertaining, family socializing, gardening, barbequing, having pets, etc. These domestic practices emerge as salient in creating a sense of home in that place. Home is also the place where family rituals, such as Thanksgiving, birthdays, or Christmas celebrations take place. In this sense, home among these mobile professionals is similar to the notion of home found among homeless women in the US where home became the shelter where they could carry out domestic functions and personal grooming rituals (Hill 1991). Home is the domestic space that is often portrayed in contrast to work or mobility. Home is the place where they “grow gardens and have the dogs” (Tom; Susan). Consequently, home becomes the place of banal but pleasurable “ordinary activities” in contrast to the domain of work that includes travel and adventuresome experiences. For example, what Carol misses when on the road is the ordinary, everyday things that she can do at home: cooking, gardening, going for walks and runs with her dog and her husband. These activities come to her mind when she thinks of home during mobility. On the other hand, most informants also expressed longing for the escape and freedom from the grinding mill of homey everyday life, experienced during periods of travel. Home away from home: dwelling in hotels Literature review suggests that the home-as-order notion is not a situated notion of home and can be reactivated at any place where particular spatial, temporal, or sociocultural patterns exist or are created. Hotels are one of the most common places where mobile professionals reside in mobility. We find that informants recreate “home-like” experiences in commercial hotel spaces by reconstructing a spatial, temporal, and cultural order similar to the home-order. Using available local and page_89 Page 90 marketplace resources in place (such as, elements of the servicescape) and personal resources they bring along (such as personal possessions), informants inventively re-create a sense of home-as-order in these

environments. Mobile professionals also purposefully select commercial spaces with spatial, temporal or cultural place orders similar to home orders. By imitating home orders, these commercial spaces activate the home-as-order schemas and produce the experience of “being at home” in mobility. Above, we have explicated different aspects of the home-as-order notion. We have specifically characterized the order of home as being familiar, welcoming, personal, and domestic across the spatial, temporal and sociocultural dimensions. Dwelling practices on the road are ways of recreating similar types of order in the midst of mobility. Interview narratives of traveling indicate that mobile professionals either recreate a familiar place in the hotel room or try to maintain familiarity across space. For example, mobile professionals try to stay in the same global hotel chain in each destination; or attempt to inhabit the same hotel in a particular destination; or request either the same room or a room facing the same corner of the world. These strategies enable mobile professionals to develop spatial knowledge of the place and maintain a sense of familiarity in mobility. Findings suggest that standardization of services among global hotel chains produces an important value for the mobile professional, that of creating a sense of home in mobility. Another way of maintaining familiarity in mobility is through selection of hotels that have a similar spatial order as back home. For example, informants choose to stay in hotels that have a similar architectural or decoration style as their homes. Emma, a journalist of foreign affairs for major news media corporations in the US, considers home her apartment in New York City. However, when traveling she chooses to stay in hotels with pre-colonial, antique style decorations, similar to the decoration style in her apartment. She emphasizes that the similarity of the architectural or decoration styles produces a home-like experience in the commercial spaces. The quote suggests that iconic representations of home orders enable activation of home-as-order schemas. I: What are your favorite hotels? R: There’s a great hotel in Guatemala. It’s not very luxurious, but it’s precolonial. There’s another one like that in, in Columbia, which is very beautiful. I: What do you like most about these two hotels that you mentioned? R: Actually the rooms. They have a nice feeling to them. They’re not, you know, they have old furniture. So they resemble, they remind me of home. (Emma, Journalist, American) Selecting hotels with similar spatial order as their house creates a sense of home also by reproducing the similar spatial arrangements in hotel rooms as in their homes. Thus, globally mobile professionals recreate the certain spatial order of home by reorganizing and redecorating the room. For example, informants move page_90 Page 91 furniture around to recreate a spatial pattern of the furniture similar to that in their house and request certain objects and furniture that they identify with home to be brought in the room as seen in Jennifer’s quote. Jennifer considers home her New York City apartment, especially her studio where her working desk faces the window with a “gorgeous view of the city.” While on the road, Jennifer is active in appropriating hotel rooms and transforming them into a home-like environment by recreating spatial orders similar to home. Jennifer strives to dwell in mobility regardless of the brevity of her stay. I also rearrange furniture a lot in hotel rooms. Oh, like I really have to have my desk face the window and face a view. I always try to get rooms with a view. And I turn the desk around so I have a view, so I can work at night or in the morning. Usually don’t change the bed, but change the accessories. I like to feel it’s home, I like to feel it’s comfortable, I like to do as I would do in my own living room at home. (Jennifer, American, UN consultant) Another technique to transform hotel spaces into home environments is through personalization of space. Informants engage in several personalizing practices to create a personal space that produces the experience of “being at home.” For example, informants de-commercialize the hotel spaces by removing any commercial materials or signs in their rooms and decorating the space with personal possessions, as well as gaining control of the space through practices described above. These transformation practices enable informants to appropriate the hotel spaces into personal spaces. I also take away all the hotel literature immediately and put it into a drawer, so I don’t have to see it in order to make it more home-looking. And then I always take along [during travel] a few photos that I display in my room. Like, I always put up a photo of my fiancée. I always put his photo up with the clock. That’s one thing I always travel with. And then always have lots of flowers, fresh fruits, and nuts … ’Cause I like to feel it’s home. ( Jennifer, American, UN consultant) The fourth aspect of the notion of home-as-order was that of home as the domestic and family space. We found that when mobile professionals attempt to transform the hotel space into a domestic space, as a way to reproduce an experience of “being at home.” they created a domestic space where certain domestic activities could be carried out in the hotel space, such as cooking, eating, gardening, etc. The presence of hotel space, (for example the availability of a cooking area) or appliances (for example plants or food in the room) that will enable these domestic activities, enabled informants to create a domestic space. In addition,

hotel rooms were transformed into domestic spaces through the presence of the members of salient relationships, such as family or pets, and the family activities that took place there. Along similar lines, being able to create and maintain social relationships in page_91 Page 92 the hotel space is another means of creating a domestic space in the hotel. In the following quote, Philip elaborates on the reasons behind his hotel choice when in Sao Paolo, Brazil. While location, convenience, and premium service did not play a role in his hotel selection, Philip emphasizes the importance of social elements and relationships created in the place as main influencers of his hotel selection. The presence of these social relationships created a sense of a family place for Philip. R: I have a favorite a hotel in most of my cities. It’s always about the people. Like Sao Paulo where I’ve traveled the most, there’s a fancy hotel in the area where our office is. But I don’t stay there. I stay at this little tiny place called the Blue Tree Towers and they all know me, my kids, and [my wife] talks to them. I was going there once a month for a couple of years, it was very intense. Now, over the last year they’ve all moved on and so … I: The people at the hotel? R: The people in that hotel. The managers and other employees, they were my buddies. They’ve all moved on so I’ve even gone to a better, nicer hotel. The hotel [Blue Tree Hotel] wasn’t that nice, but that was a family for me. I’ve moved on now. (Philip, American, Business traveler) Thus, the degree of intimacy of the personal interaction between guest and staff as well as the inclusion of the guest’s family in the circle of service interactions clearly created a feeling of both familiarity and domesticity. Furthermore, the interaction personalized the hotel environment for Philip, making him feel especially welcome and reassured that he was not just any other customer and (for him), the hotel not just any hotel. Conclusions The preceding pages represent an attempt to study the role that consumers’ relationships to place plays in their consumption. We have introduced to the consumer research literature two perspectives that describe the ways that consumers relate to place: home-as-order and home-as-identity. Currently, consumer research is underlined by an assumption of home as affixed to a private place towards which consumers experience enduring, strong attachment. We thus represent an alternative to the traditional notion of home by showing that consumers have developed also portable, nomadic notions of home, such as home-as-order. Through the study of an extreme case of nomadic consumers, we identify contemporary nomadic homemaking as remarkably similar to what Marshall (1973) described for the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari. Like the !Kung, our “modern nomads”, the globally mobile professionals, also construct home through the application of certain spatial arrangements, through temporally revisiting the same locations, and through building social and cultural capital that makes it easier to navigate in landscapes “away from home.” The notion of home-as-order thus represents a relationship page_92 Page 93 with a place where consumers feel oriented spatially, temporary, and socioculturally. Furthermore, we have described various dimensions of the home-as-order notion, containing characteristics of being a familiar, ordered, personalized, and domestic place. The concept of home-as-order may become an increasingly suitable perspective to adopt in studying consumers’ relationships to place because it can be more flexible in opening up “portable” notions of home. Postmodernity and globalization have put into question a home-as-identity notion of home (Beck 2000; Featherstone 1995; Hannerz 1990, 1992; Rapport and Dawson 1998). Consumers are increasingly living fragmented and decentered lives and home-as-order is a portable notion of home that can be carried along and reactivated in foreign spaces. We would like to stress, however, that we are not unconditionally supportive of a postmodern, decentered, and fragmented notion of home. Our findings clearly demonstrate that a lot of informants make a more or less tacit distinction between “home” and “like home.” What we are witnessing is thus less a non-distinguishable universe of equivalent places of home. It is rather a continuum of homey places, some of which (typically, but not exclusively, one place per informant) represent a more traditional home-as-identity, while others represent “homes” of a more malleable and makeshift character, predominantly based on home-as-order principles. We also show that consumers make home in a variety of ways. Homemaking can involve spatial transformation of foreign environments (commercial or not) through objects or practices. We further identify regularities in terms of spatial transformation practices and dwelling resources among globally mobile professionals. We find that mobile professionals engage in consistent spatial appropriation practices over time and space and carry a steady “traveling” arsenal of dwelling resources. Additionally, homemaking engages the successful application of local and cosmopolitan social and cultural capital development through

acculturation into foreign spaces whereby mobile professionals get to feel “at home.” We argue that it is the regularity of professional mobility produced by the development of global economic centers and the predominance of global ideoscapes that enables these mobile professionals to gain the flexible and idiosyncratic social and cultural capital needed to experience these foreign spaces as home. As such, the home partially already exists prior to the arrival of the traveler at the new location. These anticipatory preparations (McAlexander 1991; McAlexander et al. 1993) suggest for a rather planned nomadism of contemporary, globally mobile professionals. We thus produce a counter-argument to Featherstone’s (1995) suggestion that contemporary mobility renders notions of home and dwelling increasingly random and fragmented, due to a freedom of movement and a consequential lack of regularity in movement patterns. On the contrary, as we have tried to argue, we see the reproduction of a lot of regularities in the making of “home away from home.” Moreover, we have shown that the home-as-order notion structures the ways consumers dwell in mobility, and as such their consumption during dwelling processes. The study attempts to show that consumers’ notions of home influence page_93 Page 94 the way they experience certain dwelling servicescapes, such as hotels, airlines, airports, cars, etc. Consumers’ home-as-order schemas serve as interpretative frameworks that structure consumers’ hotel experiences (Holt 1995). The globally mobile professionals are active agents in transforming and selecting servicescapes to produce a sense of home while traveling. They engage in several homemaking practices, such as appropriation, imitation, and extension consumption practices. As such, consumers and marketers are co-constructors of the experience of home in mobility. Consequently, we argue that an understanding of the home-as-order schema concept has implications for marketing of dwelling services to the segment of mobile professionals. The study suggests that hotel management provides dwelling resources and place for consumers to engage in homemaking practices within the foreign environment of the hotel. Hotel management should also foster formation and maintenance of commercial friendships between service providers and mobile professionals (Price and Arnould 1999) as substitutes for enduring, home-like social connections. Further, findings suggest that hotel atmospherics should construct iconic authenticity (Grayson and Shulman 2000) to the home-as-order notion. The study also argues for the value of standardized services in the “dwelling industry” as substitutes for familiar home spaces. Overall, the study suggests that it is important for these service companies to understand the concept of home-as-order that their customers carry. 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provider involvement, with consumer-intensive services falling towards one end of that continuum. Examples of such service contexts range from weight loss clinics (cf. Dellande et al. 2004) to infertility treatment providers (cf. Fischer et al. 2007) and include personal training, the specific context in which the current study is grounded. At the same time interest in service co-production, particularly in consumer intensive contexts, has been growing, so too has increasing attention focused on how service providers can best deal with instances of consumer failure or incomplete success. In part, this is an outgrowth of the evolving relationship marketing paradigm which recognizes that because many service relationships are ongoing, customers will likely experience multiple failures over the course of a relationship (Maxham & Netemeyer 2002). But regardless of whether failure occurs during a transitory exchange, or as part as of an ongoing relationship, experiences of success versus failure may profoundly affect people’s goals, their goal striving (cf. Bagozzi page_101 Page 102 and Dholkia 1999) and their evaluations of service providers (e.g., Smith et al. 1999; Tax et al. 1998). At the intersection of research on co-production and on consumer failure and success in service encounters lie significant but as yet unanswered questions. One such question is how consumers themselves understand “failure” versus “success” in the course of their co-production experiences. A second is how the service provider’s interactions with the consumer may influence that failure or success experience: in particular, how does the consumer’s engagement with the service providers shape experiences of failure and success in consumer-intensive contexts? The answers to these questions are important both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, our understanding of co-production itself is likely to be conceptually impoverished unless we develop an understanding of success and failure that takes into account the case of consumerintensive services. Equally, our understanding of factors influencing successful co-production requires an understanding of how consumers’ engagements with service providers matter to the process. Practically, both consumers’ well-being and marketers’ interests may be served if the nature of, and relationship-based influences upon, success and failure in such contexts is better understood. This paper is organized as follows. A brief review of the literature relevant to the question of success versus failure in consumer-intensive co-production contexts is provided. The methodology utilized for the study is then described. Data analysis and interpretation follow and preliminary conclusions are thereafter outlined. Co-production success and failure in consumer intensive contexts The literature directly concerned with failure versus success in consumer-intensive service co-production is relatively limited, as most studies of service failure to date have focused on contexts where co-production is relatively limited. One exception is Bendapundi and Leone (2003), who studied satisfaction with outcomes when consumers were given a choice about whether or not to participate in production. Reasoning that consumers are less prone to self-serving bias (which refers to a person’s tendency to claim more responsibility than a partner for success and less responsibility for failure in a situation in which an outcome is produced jointly) they posited and found that when a customer is given a choice of whether to participate in production, if the outcome is better than expected, the customer who chooses to participate in co-production is less satisfied than a customer who chooses not to participate. However, if the outcome is worse than expected, a customer who chooses to participate in production is more satisfied than one who chooses not to participate. It appears that having the choice to participate reduces the tendency to blame failure on service providers. While interesting, this study is less relevant than research that addresses contexts which are of necessity customer intensive – those in which consumers must participate or co-production will not occur. Dellande et al. (2004) studied a context – weight-loss clinics – where customer input into co-production is extensive and unavoidable in that no amount of service page_102 Page 103 provider input can guarantee weight loss if the client does not participate in the process. These authors posited and found that provider expertise increased the chances of customer role clarity and that attitudinal homophily contributed to customers’ role clarity, which in turn increased customers’ ability and motivation. Role clarity, ability and motivation were all predictive of customer compliance with their weight loss regime, and compliance was associated with goal attainment and satisfaction. Significantly, these authors also found that compliance may lead to satisfaction directly, implying that customers who were not completely successful in achieving their goals in this service context could still experience satisfaction if they complied with their regime. While clearly relevant to an understanding of consumer success and failure in a consumer-intensive context, this study too falls short of answering questions we believe should be addressed. Specifically, in Dellande et al. (2004) “goal attainment” was equated with achieving or making progress toward goals set at the outset of the service engagement, but no consideration was given as to whether this definition accorded with consumers’ understandings or experiences of success. Indeed, the finding that consumers’ experiences of

satisfaction were not purely a function of whether their original goals were achieved suggests that a fuller understanding of success and failure in consumer-intensive co-production contexts will be provided by understanding how success and failure are construed by consumers who are co-producing. A further limitation of the Dellande et al. study was that it considered only perceived “homophily” between the service provider and client (defined as customers perceiving the service provider as having similar demographic characteristics and/or attitudes toward appropriate means of weight loss) as a feature of the co-productive relationship. And while perceived homophily seems relevant to client’s experiences in a co-production context, other research on the client/ service provider relationship in such extended types of services (e.g., Price and Arnould 1999; Price et al. 1995) suggest that characteristics of the relationship in addition to homophily are likely to shape experiences of failure and success. Thus, in the study we describe below, we address more fully the questions left partially answered in prior research on consumer intensive co-production contexts. Methodology This paper is part of a larger, ongoing research project on consumer success and failure (see Fischer et al. 2007; Parmentier and Fischer 2007). A grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin 1998) is being used for this research. Such an approach is appropriate to our purposes, which include refining our understanding of constructs that have been previously identified, and theory that has been developed in other contexts (Fischer and Otnes 2006). page_103 Page 104 Data For this paper, a data set was obtained from depth interviews with 11 individuals who had used or were using the services of a personal trainer, and with four experienced personal trainers. The client informants ranged in age from mid-twenties to late fifties. Trainers were between ages 30 and 45, and had from 12 to 20 years of experience. Separate interview guides were developed for the trainers and the trainees, and interviewees were recruited from the networks of the research team. Efforts were made to ensure that customerinterviewees had more than two or three service encounters with a trainer, as it was considered difficult to explore experiences of either success or failure if only one or two service encounters had occurred. At the same time, it was an objective of the sampling approach to include individuals who varied significantly in the length of time over which they had used trainers, in the numbers of trainers they had used, and in whether they had persisted in using a trainer’s services. Interviews ranged in length from slightly less than 30 to over 90 minutes. All interviews were audiotaped and transcribed, resulting in over 300 pages of double-spaced text. Data analysis A line by line analysis of each transcript was undertaken by members of the research team, focusing on features of the success and failure experiences of informants and on factors that appeared to be related to failure or success, particularly those that reflected some aspect of the trainer/trainee relationship. After within-case coding, cross-case comparisons were made by individual team members. After this process, analyses of team members were compared. The lead authors then proceeded to integrate and refine the analyses and to synthesize an interpretation of the data relevant to the research questions developed a priori. We deployed standard techniques in the grounded theory approach, including constant comparison, negative case analysis, and continuous refinement of a priori categories and conceptual linkages. The results of this process are reported below, after a brief description of the personal training context. Personal training: a growing industry Wikipedia suggests that a personal trainer might be defined as “a fitness professional involved in developing and implementing an individualized approach to exercise leadership in healthy populations and/or those individuals with medical clearance to exercise.” Wikipedia also cautions, however, that this definition may be in need of “enhancement,” as it “written like an advertisement” (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Personal_trainer). Wikipedia’s inability to offer unambiguous (and commercially untainted) assertions about personal trainers and personal training may reflect the evolving and somewhat uneven state of the personal training industry. Though the US Department of Labor declared personal training to be one of the fastest growing occupations, the training of service providers varies dramatically, page_104 Page 105 as do the types of service provided. More than 250 organizations in North America certify people for personal training, but the industry is unregulated (http://www. cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/health /trainers). Services provided by trainers range from strength training to conditioning to nutrition counseling and beyond. Moreover, the variability within the industry is enhanced by the fact that consumers engage personal trainers for many different reasons, of which a desire to become more physically fit or a wish to lose weight are only two. This context, then, is an interesting one in which to explore understandings of success and failure not only

because it is consumer-intensive from a co-production perspective. It is further interesting because of the inherent ambiguities about what service providers could do or might do, and what clients should expect. Like the service settings studied by Price, Arnould and Tierney (1995) “service scripts” in this context are weak, making the experience of success and failure in this context especially open to influence by service providers. We now turn to our findings in this context. Finding success and failure The literature reviewed for this study (e.g., Bendapundi and Leone 2003; Dellande et al. 2004) has typically assumed that success consists of meeting goals defined prior to the co-production process, while failure occurs when these goals are not met. It has further assumed that consumers would tend to allocate blame to service providers for their failure to meet a priori goals (Bendapundi and Leone 2003) and that service providers’ lack of expertise and lack of homophily would be critical barrier to success (Dellande et al. 2004). In support of the prior literature, our data yields examples that conform at least in part to this premise. For example, Hailey sought out personal training when her doctor told her she was losing bone density and at risk of osteoporosis. She explains, “I needed to do some weight-bearing exercises … So I thought I should get someone who knows me to stand with me and tell me what I need to do to build my bones.” Unfortunately, Hailey’s first trainer was “very inexperienced … I felt like I was teaching more than she was helping me.” Hailey explains: I was with her almost a few months and it was very boring. She was very nice, but her training sessions were very boring. I wasn’t getting the level of instruction I really wanted. She provided very little in terms of instruction. She stood with me as I began my exercise, completed my exercise. She didn’t know enough about the weights in comparison to my body. She didn’t know the exercises I needed to do to build the bones in the areas that I needed to build. I mean she was a very young girl, and I’m much older. I’ve been working out and living inside of a gym since I was probably 19 years old. So you learn a lot along the way. So I knew more than she knew … The realm of exercises I felt I should be doing she didn’t know enough about … There wasn’t enough interest to push her forward and to get in a way that she was going to learn more. page_105 Page 106 While this case does suggest that lack of trainer expertise and lack of demographic homophily are conducive to co-production failure and that a priori goals are a standard by which success is judged, it also hints at two additional findings that were widespread in our data. First, it indicates that goals emerge during the co-production process and that these goals influence experiences of success or failure just as do a priori goals. In Hailey’s case, her references to being bored by her trainer indicate she experienced failure not only because she was not learning weight bearing exercises appropriate to her own age and body type, but also because she was not being mentally stimulated by the experience. She also appears to experience frustration because she herself cannot motivate her trainer to learn more, suggesting that a goal that emerged was to stimulate the inexperienced trainer to improve herself. This leads to our second insight, which is that consumers’ emergent goals, and experiences of success or failure in co-production, are a product of their relationship with their trainer. Hailey’s sense that she was more knowledgeable than her inexperienced trainer appears to have been conducive to her setting a goal of “trainer improvement.” And her sense of failure in her co-production experience with this trainer was compounded by frustration in her failure to meet both a priori and emergent, trainer-specific goals. Our analysis suggests that in order to understand this complex co-production of success and failure between trainers and trainees, it is useful to consider distinct types of relationships that consumers perceived themselves as having with trainer, and to examine factors relevant to the co-production of success/failure within each relationship type. We discern and label three distinct types of relationships: “trainer as partner,” “trainer as priest,” and “trainer as tormenter.” We hasten to emphasize that these are relationships as seen through the eyes of the consumer-informants. Trainers we interviewed might well agree with the “partner” metaphor, but the “priest” and “tormentor” metaphors were not reflected in their data. As Price and Arnould (1999) found in their study of commercial friendships, we believe that customers’ views of their relationships will differ from those of their service providers. Yet given our interest is in consumers’ experience of success and failure, we examine the phenomenon through their lens. We now discuss each type of relationship in turn, focusing on factors influencing experiences of success and failure within each. In the exposition that follows, we have chosen one consumer/trainer relationship to highlight each type rather than providing shorter quotations from multiple consumers. Our goal in so doing was to illustrate our analysis parsimoniously, yet effectively. Trainer as partner This relationship type comes as close to a conventional consumer/service provider script as is possible in a consumer intensive co-production environment. Obviously, the conventions that prevail in a relationship where the supplier provides a nearly complete service to the consumer, cannot fully hold in a context where consumers must contribute so much to the production process. However, in cases of consumerpage_106

Page 107 intensive co-production, people may still consider that the relationship is only working if the service provider is responsive to their needs and demands. Delores’ relationship with her trainer Rosemary is a typical example of the trainer as partner. Delores states: Let me just put this in perspective: I’ve always been fairly active. I like sports and so on, and I’ve always been careful about my weight. So then I got some osteoarthritis about eight years ago, and I decided it was time to get a personal trainer to work out, to be serious about it. So that’s how it all started. I called over to the university, and someone recommended Rosemary. I waited many days for her to call back and when she finally called, I asked if she would train me and she said she was really busy and so forth. But I persevered and said, “I’ve heard you’re good. I want you. And I want this to be successful.” So we started and it was a great and still is a great experience. I don’t see her that much now because I’ve got a program and I work on it myself, but she was very good. She took into account all my medical problems and designed a program that suited my situation. Not surprisingly, like many others who had persisted over a long period in time in working with a specific trainer, Delores has respect for Rosemary. She also likes her personally. Their relationship would doubtless compare to the commercial friendships described by Price and Arnould (1999). Yet neither respect nor friendship leads to deference in this “provider as partner” type of relationship. A repeated theme in Delores’ description of the training experience is that her relationship with Rosemary is a partnership based on input from both trainer and trainee, rather than one wherein the trainee defers to the trainer’s expertise. She states: It wasn’t like she said, “here’s your program”, or wrote it out or cast it in stone. We would meet; we would get through a number of things. I would then go and do those things a few times and if I didn’t feel right about one or two of the exercises we would meet again and I would say, “look, I don’t feel comfortable doing this. I want to do something else”, or, “I don’t think its doing me any good”. … I was very, very upfront if I didn’t like doing something. So there was certainly direction from me on what I felt comfortable doing and what I didn’t feel comfortable doing. So she would say, “oh my gosh you know”, and I’d say, “come on”, and so then we would sit down and she would suggest I try it doing it this way. And if it felt better, then I would do it that way. As these remarks suggest, in the context of a partnership relationship, success is likely to be gauged in large measure by whether original goals are met. Delores is clear that “I’m not in there to become Charles Atlas. I’m simply there for my health.” Her sense of success or failure rests first and foremost on whether her health related goals are being met. At the same time, additional successes or failures are also a byproduct of the co-production process, as we explain next. page_107 Page 108 Goal availability enhancement when trainers are partners The judgment and decision making heuristics literature has highlighted the role of the relative “availability” of information about an option (or the ease with which it comes to mind) as being influential on choice of option (cf. Griffin et al. 2000). In the course of a co-production process, trainers in a partnership relationship with consumers may make certain specific goals more “available.” That is, they increase the consumer’s awareness of what specific goals might be worth striving for and thereby influence relative accessibility of the goal as one that the consumer considers. Success or failure with that new goal may come about as a result. Jane, for example, has had experiences with three trainers, all of which more or less worked as partners with her. Working with her first two trainers taught her that a “normal” part of the process was for trainers to identify ever-escalating goals for the trainee. In reaching the goals set her by her first two trainees, she experienced both success and satisfaction. Jane is dissatisfied with her third trainer, not because she has failed to meet goals he set for her, but because he has failed to suggest new goals: “It was a bit frustrating to not have him be the person to push me to a new weight. I had to kind of make the decision on my own to do that, and I think if he had motivated me to do that it would have been better.” We interpret our data as indicating that satisfaction, in the case of a co-production partnership relationship, is linked to new goal setting and goal striving as well as to successful achievement of original goals. These new goals emerge in the give-and-take between the trainer/client partners, contributing to the clients’ sense of receiving a valuable service from someone they regard as an equal. In the following section, we contrast this with the case of co-production in a “trainer as priest” relationship. Trainer as priest Unlike relationships where trainers are partners and co-equals, in trainer as priest relationships the service provider is placed on a pedestal by the consumer. Hailey’s current trainer, unlike her original one, she regards with deferential reverence. She notes with pride that he is, “a professional athlete – an elite athlete.” She also notes that, “He only looks after elite athletes, which I’m not, but I’m constant. So he looked after me and trained me the same way he trained himself. Which is really spectacular.” Hailey began her relationship with Howard after having been trained by four other female trainers over the

course of several years. She regards Howard as “the best” despite her initial reservation about being trained by a man rather than another woman. She states, “I was sure I was not going to be comfortable with this fellow. And he does not have his kinesiology degree, like my last trainer.” She notes that, “he trains in a very old style, which someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger trained,” and states, “the structure of the exercises that he was doing was so basic that I thought it needed to be a little more.” Yet her faith in his expert/elite athlete standing was such that she persisted long enough to believe that: page_108 Page 109 The execution of the movement is what he was trying to get through to me. If you do it this way, it might feel boring but you can get the best that you can get out of doing it his way. You know, you can push and push. But you need to think. So what you do is you use your head an awful lot more than you use your muscles. Hailey speaks of her trainer in terms that others might use for a spiritual guide or mentor. She explains: A lot of people believe one side of training, he believes the other side of training. I had to get myself psyched to believe that his way was going to be the positive way, the way that I was going to get what I was looking for, and he was very right. So he changed the way that I think. He was able to sort of crawl inside of my head and turn my brain around for me, to understand that everything in life comes from a base, and he just stayed with the base, and the base is very good. Our analysis of cases where customers formed acolyte/priest relationships with their trainers suggests that success may be experienced without the attainment of original goals in such cases. For example, Hailey had hoped to see her arm musculature become more obvious as a result of working with him. She notes that she cannot readily see her progress in terms of muscle development. However, she has substituted goals based on Howard’s suggestion that she should consider instead how much stronger she had become. “My husband said to me, ‘you are getting so strong!’ I can’t believe it! I’m always moving things. I’m just so strong from what I’ve been doing with Howard in the gym it’s great. He’s done a lot for me.” We do not suggest that attainment of original goals would necessarily result in dissatisfaction in the case of a trainer as priest relationship. We speculate, however, that the deference that a relationship of this type entails means customers are open to such goal substitution and may even experience as much or more satisfaction in achieving success in goals suggested by the trainer as in achieving goals set a priori. Relationship goal emergence when trainers are priests In the case of a trainer as priest relationship, our analysis also indicates that relationship related goals emerge in the course of training. Specifically, the goals of pleasing and winning the regard of the revered trainer appear to surface. Hailey states that her current trainer “wants someone who believes in ten out of ten and never says no.” She is proud he said “you don’t have a lazy bone in your body.” It is clear that proving to Howard that she is worthy of him has become a goal unto itself, and that success in achieving it affords her considerable satisfaction. In general, then, the trainer as priest is someone the trainee defers to based on respect and reverence. The final relationship type, and the success/failure dynamic within it, is notably different. page_109 Page 110 Trainer as tormentor In this relationship dynamic, the trainer is not a friend, not a mentor, and definitely not a passive player in the co-production process. In such a relationship, the consumer perceives the trainer as having considerable control and power. Ralph’s relationship with his third trainer falls within this category. While Ralph’s first two trainers were “nice” but “didn’t really motivate,” his third trainer provided ample motivation: He was a veteran trainer so he had worked there quite a few years … The first session, he told me to warm up on my own, exercise, and then we would just go and do the weights. His focus was less on the machines, and more on the free weights … [He] actually pushed me every week. He said, you’ve to do xyz every week or I’m just going to put you through a horrible fitness regime. So I ended up doing weights every week. He like freaked the hell out of me. So I would go the gym before work, after work, sometimes at lunch. I would watch what I was eating … he pushed me! What is strikingly silenced in this kind of a relationship is any discourse of customer authority. The fact that the customer is paying might in principle entitle them to determine what recommendations they will or will not follow. In a relationship dynamic such as the one captured in the excerpt above, however, the customer defers to the service provider and allows that individual to set the agenda and the rules of the encounter. Also absent is any hint of homophily. While Ralph characterizes his third trainer as “a nice guy” he does not give any indication that he relates to him personally, or considers himself to be similar. If he could afford to continue with the trainer, he believes he would do so, but not out of some sense of having found someone who understands and relates to him. In contrast to the other types of relationships, there is little satisfaction inherent in the service process. Perceived success or failure rest squarely on co-production outcomes. The benchmarking of these outcomes is addressed next. Goal anchoring and adjustment when trainers are tormentors

Ralph recalls his original goal as having been to “lose some weight, maybe increase my heart rate, you know, just get a little more healthy.” Ralph’s third trainer re-anchors goals, making them more concrete and more ambitious: We would start off each session by measuring my weight because one of his goals was for me to lose one pound every week … With this third trainer, I was going to the gym like sometimes twice a day, maybe three times a day just to make sure I would meet his measurement. I would also forego meals. I would set up his sessions early in the week one week and that late in the next week so I’d actually have more than seven days to work on it. page_110 Page 111 While Ralph’s relationship with trainer number three may represent an extreme, it is not unique. In such cases, the trainer essentially redefines original goals as inappropriate or inadequate, and the consumer, in deferring to the trainer, passively reconfigures what once might have been considered a successful outcome (losing some weight) as being a less successful outcome. With the bar made more tangible and raised higher, the potential for failure is also made more concrete, and more likely. Moreover, the goal of avoiding the negative reinforcements meted out by the trainer becomes an additional potential source of failure. Ralph recounts: “He told me to lose one pound a week or the exercises would be horrible … One week I did miss my weight goal and so it was a very punishing workout and I made sure not to miss it again.” Unlike in other relationships, the goals that tend to emerge in this relationship type are not interpersonal goals of making a mentor proud or taking pleasure in a partnership. Instead, goals, and experiences of success or failure, revolve around the outcomes of the co-production process. Discussion and conclusions The questions that guided this analysis were concerned with how consumers themselves understand “failure” versus “success” in the course of their co-production experiences, and how service providers’ interactions with the consumer may influence that failure or success experience. While preliminary, the insights generated in this paper suggest that experiences of success and failure in a consumer-intensive co-production context cannot be understood simply by considering a priori goals and examining whether a homophilous service provider with adequate expertise helps the consumer achieve these. Consistent with prior research on extended service encounters (Arnould and Price 1993; Price et al. 1995), we find that consumers’ expectations prior to engaging in co-production in this context are, if not poorly formed, then malleable. Despite the fact that no-one engages in personal training without some purpose in mind, original goals are almost inevitably supplemented, and not infrequently eclipsed, in the process of co-production. Experiences of success and failure are, moreover, unstable. What might have counted as success can be reframed as inadequate; what might have counted as failure can be reframed as irrelevant. Experiences of both success and failure appear to be fleeting and fragile, though they may be reinforced and prolonged depending on the type of interactions that take place and the types or relationships that prevail between consumers and their service providers. We do not believe it would be warranted to expect that the partner, priest, and tormenter relationship types found in this context are ubiquitous in other settings. A point to be explored in future research will be how culturally pervasive or field-specific discourses (cf. Fischer et al. 2007) inform relationship types within specific service contexts. We anticipate that in other consumer-intensive co-production page_111 Page 112 settings, there will be variation in relationships types, and we speculate that these may relate to such discourses. We also anticipate that the shaping of experiences of success and failure will be much related to the “fit” for consumers of the relationship type in which co-production occurs. Of course, the many limitations to this research mean that numerous questions remain unanswered. One concerns the connections or disconnects that may exist – at both the conceptual level, and the level of practice – between experiences of success/failure and those of satisfaction/dissatisfaction. Though preliminary, our study shows there can be satisfaction without success, and dissatisfaction without failure. If these are understood differently by consumers, are they also acted upon in different manners? Another question is how different types of relationship characteristics emerge and matter when service providers and clients are engaged in co-production. A particular question that surfaces in the context of personal training is whether the degree of professional training or the perceived expertise of the service provider factors into consumer-intensive co-production. Does training or perceived expertise narrow the range of relationship types or the tendency of clients to believe that they are likely to be successful – or that they have been successful? As expertise has proven such a contested concept for some consumers in some contexts (e.g., Thompson 2004), but has been suggested as critical to consumer success in other contexts (Dellande et al. 2004), it seems especially important to investigate further how it figures into experiences of

success and failure. One other important area for future research will be to understand the role a “consumerist” mindset or perspective plays in consumer-intensive co-production. That is, we need to understand more fully when and why consumers blame themselves, rather than service providers, for failures or disappointments they experience. When marketers are unable to guarantee success because it ultimately depends on the consumer, is the service provider ever at fault? References Arnould, E. and Price, L. (1993) “River magic: extraordinary experience and extended service encounters,” Journal of Consumer Research, 20 (June): 24–45. Bagozzi, R. P. and Dholakia, U. (1999) “Goal setting and goal striving in consumer behavior,” Journal of Marketing, 63 (Special Issue): 19–32. Bendapudi, N. and Leone, R. P. (2003) “Psychological implications of customer participation in coproduction,” Journal of Marketing, 67 (February): 14–28. Dabholkar, P. A. (1990) “How to improve perceived service quality by increasing customer participation,” in Dunlap, B. J. (ed.) Developments in Marketing Science XIII, New Orleans: Academy of Marketing Science, 483–487. Dellande, S., Gilly, M. C. and Graham, J. L. (2004) “Gaining compliance and losing weight: the role of the service provider in health care services,” Journal of Marketing, 68 (July): 78–91. Fischer, E. and Otnes, C. (2006) “Breaking new ground: developing grounded theories in marketing and consumer behavior,” in Belk, R. W. (ed.) Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 19–30. page_112 Page 113 Fischer, E., Otnes, C. and Tuncay, L. (2007) “Pursuing parenthood: integrating cultural and cognitive perspectives on persistent goal striving,” Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (3): 425–440. Griffin, D., Gonzalez, R. and Varey, C. (2000) “The heuristics and biases approach to judgment under uncertainty,” in Fletcher, G. and Clark M. (eds.) Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. http://en.wikpedia.org/wiki/Personal-trainer. http://www.cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/health/trainers. Lengnick-Hall, C. A. (1996) “Customer contributions to quality: a different view of the customer-oriented firm,” The Academy of Management Review, 21 (3): 791–824. Maxham III, J. G. and Netemeyer, R. G. (2002) “A longitudinal study of complaining customers’ evaluations of multiple service failures and recovery efforts,” Journal of Marketing, 66 (October). Meuter, M. L., Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. and Brown, S. (2005) “Choosing among alternative service delivery modes: an investigation of customer trial of self-service technologies,” Journal of Marketing, 69 (April): 61–83. Parmentier, M. and Fischer, E. (2007) “Working to consume the model life: consumer agency under scarcity,” in Belk, R. and Sherry, J. (eds.) Consumer Culture Theory: Research in Consumer Behavior, 11: 23–40. Prahalad, C. K. and Ramaswamy, V. (2000) “Co-opting customer competence,” Harvard Business Review, 78 (January-February): 79–87. Price, L. and Arnould, E. J. (1999) “Commercial friendships: service provider-client relationships in context,” Journal of Marketing, 63, 4 (October): 38–56. Price, L., Arnould, E. J. and Tierney, P. (1995) “Going to extremes: managing service encounters and assessing provider performance,” Journal of Marketing, 59, 2 (April): 83–97. Smith, A. K., Bolton, R. N. and Wagner, J. (1999) “A model of customer satisfaction with service encounters involving failure and recovery,” Journal of Marketing Research, 36 (August): 356–73. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. (1998) Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, Thousand Oaks: Sage, CA. Tax, S. S., Brown, S. W. and Chandrashekaran, M. (1998) “Customer evaluations of service complaint experiences: implications for relationship marketing,” Journal of Marketing, 62 (April): 60–76 Thompson, C. (2004) “Consumer risk perceptions in a community of reflexive doubt,” Journal of Consumer Research, 32 (September): 235–48. Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F. (2004) “Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing,” Journal of Marketing, 68 (January): 1–17. page_113 Page 114 6 Designer genes DNA testing services and consumer identity

Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Donald Panther-Yates Though people like to think of culture, language and religion as barriers between groups; history is full of religious conversions, intermarriages, illegitimate births and adoptions across those lines. One ancestral link to another cultural group among your millions of forebears, and you share ancestors with everyone in that group. So, as long as they had children, everyone who reproduced with somebody who was born far from their own natal home helped weave the tight web of brotherhood we all share. Stephen, DNA-list@Rootsweb Introduction At a molecular level all consumers are composed of DNA – tiny filaments of protein woven into intricate patterns that direct physical development and are passed from generation to generation. Attached to this molecular bequest is a host of cultural, ethnic, familial and personal meanings that can affect consumer identity on both a micro and macro level. There is a booming market for obtaining this type of identity information and several companies are offering various types of testing to consumers. Each puts forward the promise of providing scientifically valid knowledge about an aspect of self-identity that was previously invisible. As Brodwin (2002, p. 323) observes, “New genetic knowledge adds the cachet of objective science to the notion that one’s identity is an inborn, natural and unalterable quality … Emerging genetic knowledge has the potential to transform contemporary notions of social coherence and group identity.” The new DNA technologies, by seeming to anchor consumers to a specific biological ancestry, may present an intellectual challenge to the field of consumer research, as well as the social sciences generally. The commercial availability of personal DNA tests both enhances the ability of consumers to reconstruct self-identity in novel and unforeseen ways, while concurrently acting to historically embed consumer self perceptions and link consumers within a present-day network of empirically tangible relationships (Hall and du Gay 1996). Indeed, it is the paradox of DNA testing that it may act to disrupt and solidify consumer self-identity simultaneously. page_114 Page 115 Contemporary theorization about consumer self-identity probably reached its apogee with the publication of Russell Belk’s l988 article “Possessions and the Extended Self.” In that article, Belk drew concepts from a cross-section of social science disciplines and brought them to focus upon the construction of identity as a consumption phenomenon. By so doing he raised researchers’ conceptualizations of both consumption and self to a metaphoric level previously unexplored. As a result, a much broader domain of consumption issues could be identified, resulting in a redirection of research attention across novel contextual domains. Ahuvia (2005, p. 172) summarizes the key elements of this novel perspective as follows: “Belk uses the terms ‘self’, ‘sense of self’ and ‘identity’ as synonyms for how a person subjectively perceives who he or she is … Belk sees consumers as possessing a core self that is expanded to include items that then become part of the extended self … Body, internal processes, ideas, and experiences are likely to be part of the core self, whereas persons, places, and things to which one feels attached are more likely to be seen as part of the extended self … The self also includes various levels of affiliation, specifically … family, community, and group (Ahuvia 2005, p. 172, and in part paraphrasing Belk 1988). In the two decades since the Belk (1988) article, consumer identity research has advanced on several fronts which we apply to a novel consumption area – commercial DNA testing. We show how the availability of low-cost DNA testing has raised issues of self-identity never previously addressed in the field and which present consumer research with novel theoretical and ethical challenges. Sociological and anthropological perspectives on consumer identity Applications of sociological and anthropological perspectives in consumer research since 1988 propose that much of one’s identity may be constructed within and through the reference groups, subcultures, microcultures and ethnic groups to which one belongs (e.g., Belk and Costa 1998; Fox 1987; Kates 1998, 2002; Kozinets 1997; Schouten and McAlexander 1995). Cognitive priming of consumers’ awareness of these cultural groupings can further enhance the influence that such groups have on consumption choices (Aaker and Lee 2001; Briley and Wyer 2002). Often research in this tradition is directed toward contextualizing consumers’ experiences and personal narratives within a subculture of interest (Ahuvia 2005; Kates 2002; Kozinets 1997, 2001). For example, Thompson and Troester (2002, p. 551) investigated “how individuals use these microcultural frames of reference to interpret their consumption experiences …”, while focusing their study on the Natural Health microculture. As consumers told stories about different incidents in their natural health consumption efforts, these researchers were able to parse the core values underlying their behaviors and link them to sought outcomes, such as achieving self-natural world balance. Another way in which consumer self-identity may be constructed and enacted is through ethnic group membership (Deshpande et al. 1986; Peñaloza 1994). Especially in contexts where the assimilationacculturation model is assumed to page_115

Page 116 be inoperative, embracing or adapting ethnic patterns of consumption may provide a shared anchor for self-identity (see Askegaard et al. 2005). As these authors note in consonance with Firat (1995), “Ethnicity becomes a consumer’s choice, albeit not a free and unconstrained one … an ongoing conciliation involving existential desires for distinctive roots …” (p. 165). Although some researchers have lauded the postmodern model of fragmented and transient self-identities (Firat and Venkatesh 1995), empirical support for such a view of consumer identity has not been forthcoming (see e.g., Murray 2002). As Holt and Thompson (2004, p. 439) conclude, “ Just because people in advanced capitalist societies have become industriously creative in their consumption does not lead to the conclusion that social categories are no longer influential.” One of the ways, we propose, in which consumers are becoming creative in identity construction is by purchasing personal DNA tests. There are multiple motives for taking such tests; among the most common appear to be a desire to express one’s uniqueness and personal creativity (Simonson and Nowlis 2000), informational innovativeness (Wood and Swait 2002), the desire to gain cultural capital by linking oneself to illustrious and socially significant persons (Bourdieu 1984; Holt 1998), and the desire to confirm a link with a particular ethnic or ancestral group (Askegaard et al. 2005). As we shall show, several of these desires may be met or frustrated by the actual experience of DNA test consumption. And additional, unanticipated effects may occur, as well. Among these are the re-construction of one’s self-identity narrative to include previously unknown genetic ancestries and the severing of ties with groups found to not be genetically related. Method To investigate consumer self-identity within the DNA testing context, we gathered data from several types of internet posting venues. Because commercial DNA testing presently is a radical innovation (Rogers 1995), there is little information available to consumers on a local retail level. There are some popular culture books, which discuss DNA haplotypes in general (Wells 2003), but currently there are no published guides that a consumer can purchase to make sense of his/her DNA results. Further, DNA testing results are highly technical forms of information, consisting of measurements of specific alleles given in the form of Short Tandem Repeat (STR) data. Even consumers with educational or professional credentials in biochemistry, statistics or medicine can experience difficulty in interpreting their meaning. For these reasons, many consumers have joined, or even organized, web sites and internet bulletin boards to discuss and interpret their results. Here they typically post their results, describe their reaction to the results, and often request feedback from others regarding their meaning. We gathered postings (usually as ongoing conversations) from the following publicly accessible web-boards: Rootsweb-DNA-Genealogy, Kerchner’s DNAPrint Test Results Blog, Kerchner’s DNA Tribes Test Results Blog, and the African American DNA Research Forum. We chose these venues because they are not affiliated with any DNA testing company, are consumer-driven (and in the page_116 Page 117 case of the Kerchner Blogs, consumer-created) and have a high number of monthly subscribers/visitors, often numbering in the thousands. Each is briefly described below. Rootsweb-DNA-Genealogy site Since its inception in October 2000, the Rootsweb-DNA-Genealogy web site has generated over 25,000 message postings and has a membership of 750 subscribers, making it the largest electronic forum for discussing DNA among consumers in the world. Subscribers are drawn from Europe, Central Asia, India, Scandinavia, Russia, Central and South America, the Caribbean, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, as well as the United States. Important for our present purposes are the discussions pertaining to the interpretation of the results received from various types of DNA testing and how these interpretations are used to affirm or alter self-identity. For example, a given set of Y-chromosome scores may indicate that the individual belongs to Haplogroup R1b or J2. This empirical finding is then usually coupled with the person’s pre-existing knowledge of having, say, Scottish or Ashkenazic Jewish ancestors, who frequently carry these particular haplotypes. However, interpretive disruptions often occur: another consumer may then report his/her R1b scores, which are identical or nearly identical to those posted earlier as “being” Scottish, but which this individual prefers to interpret as indicating Spanish or Basque heritage; or a J2 set of scores will be reported by a consumer who has no knowledge of Jewish ancestors. Discussion will then ensue about the origins of, say, Scots and Basques, the migrations of Ashkenazi Jews, and whether these specific haplotype scores date from the Paleolithic or Neolithic time periods. Whatever the resolution (or lack of) concerning the issue, the discussion itself provides a rich, emotion-laden archive of how personal identities are both stabilized and destabilized as a result of commercially-obtained genetic information. To provide primary data for the present inquiry, a set of key-worded messages from October 2000 to August 2006 was downloaded from the publicly accessible Rootsweb DNA-List Archives. The key words used to

select messages were: European, Scandinavian, African, Celt, Basque, Scottish, Irish, Jewish, Native American, Viking, Danish, Swedish, Korean, Norwegian, France, England, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, Siberia, Central Asia, Haplotypes R1b, J, J2, R1a, I, I1a, I1b, E3a, E3b, X, U, C, B, A, and DNAPrint. These were the primary topics under discussion on the Board during this time period. Kerchner’s DNAPrint Test Results Log and DNA Tribes Test Results Log Two secondary data sources were the web sites established by consumer Charles Kerchner. Kerchner had grown frustrated with the lack of documentation available from the DNA testing companies and decided to “empower consumers” by giving them a place to post and discuss specific types of results. The DNA Tribes Web page_117 Page 118 Log was created by Kerchner on February 5, 2006, and thus far 45 persons (including Charles) have posted their results in narrative form; over 10,000 visitors have logged onto the site in this short time period. We downloaded ten consumer posted narratives from this site. The DNAPrint Test Results Website was created on May 5, 2003 by Kerchner in order “to allow those tested via the DNAPrint test to share their results and experiences so we all may learn…” (http://www.Kerchner.com). At present, over 72,000 consumers have visited the site. We downloaded the 31 consumer result postings made thus far during 2006; each is in the form of a narrative telling the consumer’s expected results, actual results and personal commentary interpreting the results. African American DNA Research Forum The African American DNA Forum was created in 1999 by Mississippi State University (see http://afrigeneas.com). Its purpose is to offer consumers of African American heritage an electronic community board to discuss the results they have received from DNA testing. At present, over 1,800 messages have been posted to the forum and over 153,000 visitors have logged on to the site. We downloaded 25 publicly accessible message threads from the forum; these discussed a variety of issues, among which were having racially mixed ancestry, searching for a tribal homeland in Africa, and conversations about prominent African Americans who had reported the results of their own DNA testing, e.g., Henry Louis Gates Jr., Oprah Winfrey. Following standard practice within consumer research on the use of internet bulletin board material, all identifying references to specific consumers were removed from the quotes used in the present paper (Kozinets 1997, 2001, 2002; Muñiz and Schau 2005). Additional textual material was collected from the publicly-accessible web sites for the major DNA testing companies: Family Tree DNA, Sorensen Genomics, Ancestry by DNA, DNA Tribes, Inc., and Oxford Ancestors, as well as current popular culture media presentations on DNA testing. Analysis It is clear that the consumers whose DNA test postings we monitored are innovators and early adopters, in this case of a novel informational-technical service (see e.g., Rogers 1995). Perhaps because of this, the majority (60%) of the posters were male; however, women were also active on each of the web-boards we monitored. And on the Rootsweb-DNA board, several women now play key informational roles, for example, advising others on the origins of specific haplogroups and population groups. Due to the vacuum of published information in this marketplace, the DNA-testing consumer community has spawned its own opinion leaders and interpretive advisors. Some, such as Charles Kerchner, have constructed “public service” web facilities open to all consumers. In this way, the DNA marketplace resembles the Apple Newton web community studied by Muñiz and Schau (2005). page_118 Page 119 DNA testing among the consumers we monitored has played a paradoxical role regarding self-identity. For some it has confirmed a priori expectations and permitted them to build upon their prior ancestral knowledge, resulting in the construction of a much more elaborate and mythologized identity narrative. For others, however, long-held beliefs about ancestral heritage have been disconfirmed, creating major disruptions in self-identity. We explore both of these phenomena below. European ethnic narratives Consumer researchers are familiar with ethnic identity narratives, having examined Latino (Deshpande et al. 1986; Peñaloza 1994), Haitian (Oswald 1999) and Jewish (Hirschman 1981) consumption experiences and styles of life, especially in the United States. Left relatively unexamined have been those narratives pertaining to a “white” European ethnic past. European Americans are often positioned as the standard or reference category, yet in an age when exploring one’s “roots” appears to be increasingly appealing to non-minority consumers, being framed merely as “white” may no longer be a desirable identity to some. What is now desired is ethnic differentiation (Bourdieu 1984), which fractures whiteness into more finite and culturally resonant categories. One of these is an emerging DNA-driven Celtic consumption subculture. The rise of Irish, Scottish, and

Welsh nationalism, beginning in the 1800s and gaining additional momentum toward the end of the twentieth century (see e.g., Maclean 1995), created consumer demand for products and services tangibilizing one’s connection to Celtic culture. The advent of DNA testing opened an additional avenue to documenting and displaying one’s Celtic heritage. Within weeks of their becoming available on the market, multiple surname and clan studies had been organized to trace Scottish and Irish ancestry (http://www.familytreedna.com). At present there are over 100 such consumer-organized and managed DNA projects underway, ranging in size from 10 to 2000 participants (http://www.familytreedna.com). Several Scottish clans are working toward identifying a specific set of genetic “markers” or “signatures” that certify one as a clan member and even, in some cases, the descendant of a given historic clan chief. Consider the posting below. My surname is Curry and my information is that my ancestors came from Ireland, but had Scotch ancestry. O’Hart indicates that O’Curry was one of several offshoots from O’Brien in western Ireland, so if I am of that Curry line, I should be able to duplicate O’Brien and other Curry DNA from Ireland. On the other hand, there is a second O’Curry [sept] of the Mac Unais line that could be related to the Currie surname of Scotland. If my ancestors are of this line, the Y-line haplotype [scores] should help to sort it out. (Rootsweb) A rebuttal to this message was then posted by a non-Celtic subscriber: You are assuming that there is, in fact, such a thing as “the Celtic people” with some sort of common genetic heritage. A study of Gaelic-surnamed Irish page_119 Page 120 men in the west of Ireland shows a 90% preponderance of haplogroup [R1b], just as there is a 90% preponderance among Welsh men. However, haplogroup [R1b] is also very common throughout Europe, even in areas where Celtic-speaking peoples did not go. Above all, the Basques show the same 90% preponderance of [R1b]. The Basques are unquestionably NOT Celtic. (Rootsweb) This led to a more general discussion of what, exactly, was a Celt? One subscriber proposed: “The Celts, I was told by my ancient history profs, evolved from Central Europe and later spread to Anatolia, Spain, Poland, and other Gaelic speaking areas, such as Breton in France.” (Rootsweb) In the passage above, a consumer who believes himself to be of Celtic descent is drawing upon recollected college courses and perhaps his own preferences in placing the Celts’ origins in central Europe. Following this, another Celt-descended consumer stated that the Celts were highly successful warriors, thereby enhancing their attractiveness as a source of masculine ancestry for other posters. Keep in mind that the Celts held sway over most of Europe until approximately the time of Julius Caesar (44BC) and had for nearly a thousand years … The Celtic control of Europe in the first millennium BC is also interesting when considering the question of red hair. If red hair is an Irish trait, and the Irish are Celts, and the Celts controlled most everything from Donegal to the Don for many hundreds of years, could not that red hair be a parting gift from those Celts? (Rootsweb) Through this reasoning, possessing red hair becomes a potential physical marker of Celtic ancestry and to claiming a warrior past. However, the same non-Celtic subscriber as before then posted the media article excerpted below: I found an interesting article in one of the London papers (the Daily Telegraph) which might interest you: Basques are brothers of the Celts Roger Highfield, Science Editor Welsh and Irishmen are genetic blood-brothers of the Basque people, according to a study published today. The findings provide the first direct evidence of a close relationship between the people thought of as Celts and the Basques … The evidence of a link is in a study by Professor James Wilson and Professor David Goldstein of University College London with colleagues at Oxford University and the University of California, Davis … The Celts carry the same early Y chromosome [as the Basques], said the study, which provides the first clear evidence of a close relationship in the paternal heritage of Basque and Celticspeaking populations. “They were statistically indistinguishable,” said Prof Goldstein. (Rootsweb) page_120 Page 121 The posting of this article was not greeted with enthusiasm by many of the Celtic-descended consumers subscribing to the List, as it seemed to detract from the exclusivity and purity of their genetic ancestry. “Who are these Basques, anyway?!” wrote one frustrated Celtic descendant. To get the desired mythology back on track, another newspaper article was posted on the list; in this media story the Celts were cast as genetic survivors, holding out courageously against an onslaught of Anglo-Saxons: Y Chromosomes Sketch New Outline of British History May 27, 2003

Nicholas Wade, New York Times History books favor stories of conquest, … so it is perhaps not surprising that many Englishmen grow up believing they are a fighting mixture of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans who invaded Britain … A new genetic survey of Y chromosomes throughout the British Isles has revealed a very different story. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain were real survivors. Nowhere were they entirely replaced by the invaders, and they survive in high proportions, often 50 percent or more, throughout the British Isles, according to a study by Dr. Cristian Capelli, Dr. David B. Goldstein and others at University College London … “One tends to think of England as Anglo-Saxon,” Dr. Goldstein said. “But we show quite clearly there was not complete replacement of existing populations by either Anglo-Saxons or Danes. It looks like the Celts did hold out …” (Rootsweb) Celtic-descended list members, having successfully resurrected Celtic pride and genetic legacy in Britain, next turned their attention to reassessing the Celtic presence in Europe. One asserted that all persons carrying the R1b haplotype – including even the Spanish Basques – were indeed Celtic descendants: I am wondering whether I need to change my adamant position that all Celtic = R1b, but not all R1b = Celtic. The distribution of R1b today is hauntingly similar to that portrayed in the [haplotype] map pertaining to the 5th Century BC. Is it possible that the large and robust Celtic groupings were all of the same haplogroup …? The bottom line is, are all R1b of original Celtic stock? The importance of this question is underscored by the fact that there are so many of us out there (a majority in Europe) with this [R1b] haplogroup. (Rootsweb) To which the national historian of Celtic Clan Donald (Scotland), a list subscriber, replied: Of course they could be … I am Clan Donald’s national historian. We held the Hebrides under the kings of Norway until 1266 and our mainland territory page_121 Page 122 under the King of Scotland … King Magnus Barelegs of Norway who pillaged the Hebrides and Ireland in the great attacks between 1093 and 1103 wore the kilt because he spent so much time in the west … (Rootsweb) The Clan Donald historian is also organizer of the Clan Donald DNA Project which, thus far, has obtained hundreds of DNA samples from clan descendants – enough in fact to develop a Clan Donald R1b set of markers and a “Somerled” R1a set of markers, as posted below: The Clan Donald USA Genetic Project has established a 25-marker signature for identifying descendants of Somerled, ancestor to the MacDonalds, MacDougalls and MacAlisters. Somerled was an important figure in the history of the western Highlands of Scotland … His descendants controlled most of the west coast of Scotland and the Hebrides for more than 500 years. The MacDonalds are currently searching for the paternal ancestors of Somerled … Any persons of known pure paternal descent from Harald Fairhaired, Eric Bloodaxe, Rognvald of More, Thorfinn the Mighty, St. Olaf, Harald Hardrada, Jarl Hacon, the Arnesons of Giske, or the Viking Kings of Man are of special interest … In response to this offer, over a thousand persons enlisted in the Clan Donald DNA Project. They believe that a positive result will link them to the likes of Thorfinn the Mighty and Eric Bloodaxe – surely a potent set of male ancestral icons (see Hirschman 2003; Holt and Thompson 2004). Descriptions and requests such as these posted by Mr. McDonald can ignite consumers’ ethnic imaginations. They invite one to participate in a resplendent, spectacular and, paradoxically, purer and simpler past. Consumers are not unfamiliar with such nostalgic appeals, but never before have they had the opportunity to publicly establish a blood-to-blood physical linkage with persons around whom history has been constructed. While genealogical “paper trails” are viewed as just that – weak paper, mere writing, easily manipulated, falsified, lost, misplaced – DNA is seen as solid, certain and undeniable. Consider the use of the term “DNA signature” in the earlier posting above; the implications are that Somerled’s existence and deeds are inevitably “written on the flesh” of his descendants. They are “marked” men. More profound than merely touching greatness (see O’Guinn 1991), descendants may view themselves as carrying greatness. Surely a potent pull of DNA testing is to link oneself to a prominent historical figure (or figures) to whom one’s present existence is owed. Further, to the extent that such figures are publicly viewed as sacred, glorified or exalted, the bearer, himself, may be seen in this same light. In this sense, DNA may serve as a status possession. Posting one’s genetic matches to famous figures on various web-boards may be viewed as theoretically equivalent to wearing “designer” apparel or driving a high prestige automobile. Public DNA forums can serve as genetic status boulevards on which desirable haplotypes can be displayed. page_122

Page 123 Disrupting identity However DNA testing can serve to disrupt these ancestral mythic structures, as well. Consider the case below of James Elliott, a Scot who has had multiple types of DNA testing conducted and even developed a web site to discuss the results: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~gallgaedhil /elliot_border_reivers_dna.htm My expected results were (from prior knowledge): my paternal ancestors were Border Scots, and my maternal ancestors were (mostly) from England. My mtDNA haplogroup is T2, which is most common in the circum-Baltic region. My yDNA haplogroup is R1b. My yDNA haplotype scores its highest match frequencies in areas like the Ukraine, Romania, Macedonia, Greece, Syria and Anatolia. In the FTDNA haplogroup database, my closest matches are in Siberia, Hungary, Iceland, Scotland and Northern Ireland. My EuroPrint DNA 1.0 test assessed my autosomal DNA as 62% Northern European, 22% Eastern Mediterranean and 16% Middle Eastern. My actual DNA Tribes analysis results – “Excellent” matches were Iranian and Turkish. “Good” matches were Northern Greek. “Fair” matches were Southeast Poland, Russian and (yay!) Scottish. In my particular case, the DNA Tribes results are remarkably consistent with the geographical range of my R1b Y-DNA haplotype – and certainly with the known range of R1b ht35 in general. They also accord well with my Euro DNA results, which are nearly 40% Middle Eastern or Eastern Mediterranean – more than twice the level of those admixtures in AncestryByDNA’s Irish and Northern European control samples. The Russian and Polish matches are consistent with my T2 mtDNA as well. Even the inclusion of the Scottish “fair” match had a normalizing effect on my results which made them seem all the more convincing. As one who has theorized, perhaps to the point of embarrassment, about the possible contribution of Roman auxiliaries of Sarmatian, Thracian, Dacian, Danubian, Mesopotamian and Syrian origin to the gene pool of the Border Scots, I am delighted with these results. They may not exactly vindicate my wild theories, but they are certainly not going to hurt them either. (Posted on Kerchner DNA Blog) James has developed his own ancestral narrative, which features his results in a “starring” role. As with many of the Celtic-descended male consumers on the List, he sees his (atypical DNA) Scottish ancestors as warriors serving in important, historic conquests – in this case the Roman Empire’s domination of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. He is not intimidated by what some would see as counter-intuitive Scottish results, i.e., Middle Eastern and Mediterranean ancestry, rather he constructs a historically-based story that “reads” them as authentically Scottish. In this way, DNA testing seems to be enabling some consumers to author their past heritage, bypassing existing, traditional, historical accounts. The discussion below addresses what occurs when these new ancestral narratives re-construct racial boundaries, as well. page_123 Page 124 Resurrecting race or reaching roots? In 1998, a cultural upheaval occurred when Y-chromosome DNA testing indicated that US President Thomas Jefferson had likely fathered children with a mulatto slave woman, Sally Hemmings (Foster et al. 1998; Lander and Ellis 1998). The Thomas Jefferson Foundation had for centuries carefully documented white lineages from the former president, taking care to record marriages and births in order to track Jefferson’s genetic flow and grooming his public image as well (see e.g., http://www.monticello.org). Now here were these troubling DNA data signaling not only infidelity, but also miscegenation. The reverse also has occurred more recently. For example, the 2006 PBS documentary, “African American Lives,” reported that although comedian Whoopi Goldberg could trace her maternal lineage to the Pepal and Bayote peoples of Africa, African Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was found to descend from European paternal and maternal DNA haplotypes . Gates next took an autosomal DNA test, which measures one’s proportions of different geographic ancestries, e.g., Sub-Saharan African, European, East Asian. Gates now believes he is around 50% European (i.e., “white”) and 50% African, genetically. Gates responded to his newfound ancestry by stating, “I’ll never see my family in quite the same way again. I have the blues … Can I still have the blues?” The commercial availability of the newer autosomal DNA testing has opened several previously unexplored ethical and identity issues for consumers (see e.g., Brodwin 2002; Carmill 1998). For example, how might presumed European-descent consumers respond upon learning that they have a large (e.g., 10%+) proportion of African, East Asian, or Native American ancestry? Further, as already observed for Professor Gates, “black” consumers may be taken aback when they learn they have a large proportion of European, Native or East Asian ancestry. We explore these issues below using material from the Rootsweb discussion board. I look bi-racial: half IndoEuropean (Caucasian) and half Asian or Native American as did my mother, her brothers, their father, and his father. I don’t know from which line or which parent my epicanthic eyefold came. The obvious guess is my mother. I’m her virtual clone. I’ve been asked all my life (and I’ll be 52 on Sunday) if I’m “half Chinese” or half anything remotely Asian, and I decided I want to know before I die. So, that’s my birthday present.

This consumer’s paper genealogy states that she is of English descent, yet her mirror and others’ comments suggested something else. For many consumers there has been a similar disconnect between what they were told about their ancestry and their physical appearance. They hope that autosomal DNA testing can help resolve these uncertainties and assist them in recovering lost or hidden ancestors. However, other consumers are not so sanguine when receiving unanticipated, non-European, results: I am still pursuing the surprising 21% East Asian result for my DNAPrint test. In talking to a person at the DNA Print lab, he informed me that he knows page_124 Page 125 of at least one other PA [Pennsylvania Dutch] German, who tested with a high teen/low 20s percentage of East Asian. We discussed Asian hordes, Huns and other invasions of Europe as a possibility… So they [my ancestors] could have brought the East Asian content with them in the early 1700’s and preserved it to this day by marrying within there [sic] own kind … That lab person thought it could be possible … I have been trying to do more reading about these Asian horde invasions … (Rootsweb) This man was surprised when his autosomal test calculated that he had 21% East Asian ancestry; East Asia includes the populations of Korea, Tibet, China, Japan, and eastern Siberia. Believing himself to be “100% European” (German), this customer must now sort through a series of possibilities: 1) the DNAPrint test may be inaccurate, 2) he may have “hidden” Native ancestry due to infidelity among his Colonial American ancestors, or 3) the East Asian match is due to the presence of early Asian “invaders” in the European gene pool. His use of the term “Asian hordes” to describe this third possibility suggests he may not be happy, if this turns out to be the case. He becomes even more disturbed with a second non-white result in the surname project he administers: The DNAPrint test result I received today for a male in my surname project had a surprising 2% Sub-Saharan African result. He had 95% Indo-European, 3% Native American, and 2% Sub-Saharan African, and none of those minority contents were expected … He expected 100% European …Why all of a sudden the minority African results in one new batch of results? (Rootsweb) Although consumers having Colonial American roots often view them as a source of ancestral pride, most are likely unaware that the colonial population of North America was a highly exogamous one, with Africans and Native Americans intermixing with European colonists at relatively high rates (Bell 2005; Shriver et al. 1997). As time passed and racial segregation and repression became more marked, many of these earlier “mixed” persons claimed all-white, European status. After a generation or two, the lineage would be seen socially as completely “white.” Persons of previously unknown mixed ancestry who grew up with specific culturally constituted identities must, upon receiving discrepant autosomal DNA results, consider the possibility that they are carrying the Other within themselves. In the case of European-descended consumers who learn they are part African or Native, they must revise any earlier implicit feelings of racial superiority – they are no longer purely of the elite caste. For consumers who viewed themselves as African or Native, they must now deal with the knowledge that they carry genetic material from the “enemy,” the “oppressor,” within their own bodies. Consider the case of the African-American woman who posted the following message on Afrigeneasis: page_125 Page 126 I am completely perplexed. I just received my results from DNA Tribes and I have no clue what they mean … I scored excellent for Ladakh ( India), Catalan (Spain), Chueta (Spain), Portuguese, Sicilian, Swiss, Bavarian, and South Poland. To look at me in the mirror, neither you nor I would ever guess that! There is no indication of any ancestral roots to Africa at all. I was actually wondering if they got my swabs mixed up with someone else’s. Does any one know how to interpret these results? The first match listed on my Global match as excellent was Caucasian!!! Then Ladakh, India again, then all the others listed above … Have I been had??? Having lived her life thus far as a Black woman in the United States – with all the socio-cultural implications that status carries – this consumer now is told by a DNA test she had hoped would link her to specific tribes/regions in Africa that she is “classifiable” genetically as a Caucasian. Notably she has posted her distressed response on the African-American DNA web-board and not the Rootsweb DNA board to which she also subscribes, suggesting that she is seeking support from those she believed are her ethnic peers. By the next day, a supportive reply from an African-American man has been posted: I’m sure it is still a shock, but keep in mind appearance, facial features, etc. can still not be enough to detect lineage when compared to matching against DNA’s multiple possibilities. The interesting thing about DNA [testing] is that it shows how people still categorize by appearance while there are many possible origins. Your features will still identify you as of AA lineage. These tend to trump other features. What is interesting and exciting is that you uncovered more about your background. You may (and probably do) have multiple

tribes in Africa associated with you. But the more tribes you have, the less likely it would bubble up as the top 10. I suggest you take the Continent analysis. So if you have multiple [African] tribes, that [African] Continent would be high and your [African] features would be high … Your research is only beginning … Exciting! This man’s response brings to the fore several consumer-identity issues, especially as regards non-European ancestry. First, he acknowledges the woman’s concern (shock, dismay) as legitimate, but leavens it with a cogent observation on not judging people by overt appearances (i.e., the “don’t judge a book by its cover” adage). For a minority consumer, this reasoning likely has resonance. He then, somewhat contradictorily, reassures her (whom he has never seen) that she still “looks” African. In other words, if others in the Black community have always seen you as African, they will still view you as such, regardless of the DNA test results. The woman does not have to alter her public ethnic identity, if she chooses not to. Two alternative courses of action are then suggested, which can be pursued simultaneously. First, the African connection can be further investigated by taking page_126 Page 127 a Continent-level test, which will measure overall “Africanness” versus matching her DNA to specific African subpopulations. He also suggests that she view her other matches as “interesting and exciting.” This expresses the “my ancestry is an adventure, a quest, a puzzle to be solved” motive we witnessed with other consumers. From this perspective, unexpected results are an intriguing identity challenge, rather than disturbing inconsistencies. They are an opportunity to further explore the self’s past, rather than an attack on one’s current identity. The woman, following his advice, paid an additional $50 for the Continent test and received the results she had hoped for: Well I got my results … The results for Continent Match were first European, second and third sub-Saharan African and East Asian … The Sub-Saharan African was what I was looking for, so this helped a lot … I have so many questions now; it’s crazy but also pretty exciting … Thanks so much for commenting … It was extremely helpful and nice to know I wasn’t alone and that others would have been just as unnerved … She reports two days later that she has decided to try to persuade her parents to take the same DNA test, a response that is relatively common for those whose results are not what was anticipated. (The undercurrent detected in these cases is often an effort to isolate or identify the “source” of the discrepant ancestry. Parents and grandparents are unwittingly placed in the role of potential contaminants to the lineage). I spoke with my father about taking the Y-DNA test, and he was very much against it . . . That said, I won’t be getting him to take the test. Mom is on board, but I can get what I need from the tests without her direct help. So, it looks like this is a journey I walk alone. This woman has now recast her DNA consumption experience as a quest – something that is viewed as ongoing and may never be completed. Consumer identity is perhaps best viewed as a continuing quest; a project that is never finished, but that provides ample fodder for self-examination as it evolves. Consumer haplotype tribes and molecular microcultures Consumer identity research has recently embraced the paradigm of tribes, communities and microcultures constructed around consumption (see Muñiz and Schau 2005; Kozinets 1997, 2001, 2002; Thompson and Troester 2002; Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001; Schouten and McAlexander 1995). Almost always these have been discussed within the context of items purchased (e.g., the Apple Newton; Star Trek memorabilia; Harley Davidson motorcycles), often with an accompanying lifestyle (e.g., the Natural Health movement). DNA testing extends this paradigm in some novel ways: first, by spawning communities constructed upon actual genetic kinship, as opposed to metaphoric “relatedness”; and second, by being based upon the acquisition of information, as opposed to a branded product. page_127 Page 128 The earliest forms of commercial DNA testing identified consumers’ paternal and/or maternal haplotypes (see e.g., Sykes 1998; Sykes and Irven 2000). This meant that for the first five or so years of test availability, consumers learned to identify themselves by their Y chromosome and mtDNA haplotypes. They began thinking of themselves as “being,” say, R1b’s, E3b’s, H3’s or I1b’s. Because there was inadequate information available to explain what these various haplotypes meant, consumers learned to band together into discussion groups based upon their haplotypes. Underlying the sharing of mutually useful information was the deeper comprehension that they shared, as well, a common genetic kinship based on maternal or paternal origins. These origins encompassed a lineage that could traverse not only millennia, but also religion, country, and even continents, as their ancient forebears migrated in pre-history. Thus, haplotype communities were born which were not based upon any standard sociological or anthropological classification system, but yet are perceived by consumers as “real” and “meaningful.” Consider the posting below: The yDNA R1b Haplogroup and Subclades Project now has over 500 participants. See the web site for more

details: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/r1b. If you have been yDNA tested by FamilyTreeDNA.com directly (or indirectly via the National Geographic Genographic Project) and your yDNA paternal line haplogroup has been determined to be R1b or a subclade of R1b, you can join. (Rootsweb) In the excerpt above, a DNA testing company, Family Tree DNA, has established a public access web-board for all persons carrying an R1b haplotype. Because R1b is the most common male European haplogroup, this community could ultimately include millions of consumers. Because of its size, the R1b community is currently sorting itself into subgroups (called “clades”) based upon specific genetic descent markers. This is viewed as desirable by consumers, because it creates a closer sense of kinship for those in each subclade. Genetic kinship, like ethnic kinship, may be conceptualized as a series of nesting concentric circles, with smaller circles representing closer relatedness. Other consumers, however, have less populous haptotypes. This can lead to a sense of abandonment, if others having the same, rare haplotype are not responsive to queries. The posting below was labeled “Where have all the J2’s gone”? Where have all the J2’s gone? I’m not hearing any input, discoveries, research, personal problems or stories about J2 research. I’m still looking for a 12 marker match. But now back to my question, where have all the J2’s gone? What are they doing? Is there a secret forum/list I should know about where J2’s meet and discuss their research? Even the I’s and the Q’s surface occasionally on this [Rootsweb] list. Where have all the J2’s gone? Hello out there… (Rootsweb) page_128 Page 129 But if one is in a rare haplotype community, it can also offer the cachet of distinctiveness and exclusivity (e.g., Bourdieu 1984), as described below. I have no exact matches at the FTDNA [y-chromosome] database with my 12 markers, but on Y-search I do have an exact match with a man whose surname is Courson. This may mean something, because my 12 marker haplotype is quite unique and rare, it seems. I am anxiously awaiting my upgrade to 25 markers to see if we still match, because then that would probably solidify our genetic relationship and that would really be something. If we do turn out to be related, then imagine the possibilities of how it happened … Possibly a Roman soldier from Italy who was a brother or cousin of my ancestor went up to France and fathered some children with a local woman. To me that would be an exciting possibility! (Rootsweb) By possessing an uncommon set of paternal genetic markers, this male consumer hopes to connect himself to another contemporary man, living in a different country, whom he has never met. His genetic uniqueness also permits him to create an exciting story (fantasy), which explains how their common ancestor perhaps came to “father” both of them in such geographically disparate places. Thus the information received from DNA testing can be employed by consumers to fantasize about the possible pasts their ancestors lived. It can open a door to musing about “who” one is and “how” one got here; consumer identity formation can be projected backward, as well as forward. Discussion Genetic differences based upon commercially available tests may become seen in the near future as significant – or even primary – sources of personal and group identity (Bamshad et al. 2004). Already they are being used to establish boundaries in terms of group membership, e.g., specific clan “signatures” and haplotype subcultures, and simultaneously to remake conceptions of self as having specific ethnic and racial affiliations. Commercial genetic tests are being used by their purchasers not only to locate ancestral origins, but also to weave contemporary fabrics of relatedness to others. Viewed in this way, genetic ancestry tests would seem to be consistent with what has been known in consumer research from the earliest days of marketing segmentation, i.e., consumers will devise ways to differentiate themselves from one another and, concurrently, find means to announce group identity and belonging. As Belk (1988) cogently discussed, that is why consumers purchase certain brands and not others, take care to cultivate their selfhood through possessions, and expend financial, time, and emotional resources developing affiliative linkages. Genetic ancestry, as revealed by DNA testing, both separates us from and binds us to specific groups of people, and these groups may be constituted as tightly as our immediate family or extend up to the level of a continent or a human page_129 Page 130 haplotype. Not one, but several, levels and types of kinship may be experienced. We may soon witness a paradigmatic shift in how cross-personal identity ties are viewed and measured. Knowledge of one’s genetic legacy is always interpreted within a socially constructed framework of

meaning. Humans likely began making personal and tribal identity attributions around 70,000 to 30,000 years ago (Mithen 1999). Since that time, an enormous accretion of intertextual narrative has evolved concerning peoples and regions that inevitably is read into the meaning of modern biogenetic markers. Genetic testing results are therefore inevitably and always socially interpreted. A second issue concerns genetic ancestry information feeding forward into other consumption related discourses. The web-based discussion concerning some male consumers’ eagerness to append Celtic ancestry to their identities via genetic testing illustrates the multi-sourced nature of postmodern consumer identity. In this instance, genetic testing provides a linkage between popular culture images of historical warriors and culturally conditioned preferences among male consumers for identities which exhibit courage, daring, physical power, and material success (Hirschman 2003; Holt and Thompson 2004). 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Introduction A portfolio of experiential products from dolls of historic and contemporary vintage to self-care manuals for tweenagers, the American Girl brand has become a fixture in the US toy market by facilitating the intergenerational negotiation of female life course transitions. As a premium entertainment brand riding the crest of the masstige trend (Silverstein et al. 2004), the brand has become an iconic presence in consumer culture. The brand has evolved from an era of catalog sales through a period of flagship brand store efflorescence, and now stands on the threshold of expansion via upscale boutiques. Purchased by Mattel in 1998 for $700 million, American Girl generated over $436 million in sales ($106.2 million in profits) for its parent, to account for 8.5% of the toy giant’s total sales in 2005 (Jones 2007). The staging ground for the brand’s performance and enactment, American Girl Place, has become a commercial Mecca, a secular pilgrimage site to which female believers throng. This flagship operates in three cities: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. We plumb the appeal of the American Girl brand – sites, stuff and selves – in a metro Chicago context, in this paper. American Girl Place is a temple of memory, both authentic and spurious. Memories are created, revised, recovered and recycled at the site. Trophy photos and video are vehicles of memory creation to which the boulevard outside American Girl Place is devoted. In front of the store, girls pose with bags. Girls pose with dolls. Dolls are posed with bags. Intergenerational photos are perhaps most page_137 Page 138 commonly snapped. Daughters pose with mothers and dolls. Granddaughters pose with mothers, grandmothers and dolls. On occasion, these sororal units are dressed identically in period clothing matching the outfit worn by the doll. Inside the store, abutting the bookshop, is a photographer’s studio, where the images of consumers and their dolls are rendered as portraits and framed as the cover page of American Girl magazine. Becoming a cover girl further imbricates the consumer with the brand, whatever aspirations for celebrity it may enkindle in the child (and her matrilineal kin), and documents the doll’s membership in the family. At the very portal of the temple, males are reminded (perhaps relieved, perhaps aggrieved) that they can never be initiates. Fathers and brothers, husbands and sons, and other assorted male relatives and friends, perch precariously on windowsills, hunker down alongside the storefront as if on stoops, and sit on the curb, each attendant on his female counterpart inside the store. Men check their watches, resynchronizing with their women as needed, and their wallets, redistributing wealth as contingencies demand, negotiating sometimes in good humor, and sometimes in frustration, in periodic tête-à-têtes. Boys battle boredom by wheedling their fathers into sorties on the nearby Computerland, extracting promises to visit ESPN Zone next, or fantasizing about the quid pro quo male bonding outing that will offset their wait (often a Cubs game). In colonizing the boulevard, men and boys establish ad hoc male space (the only intentionally built male space being a small bathroom on the store’s third floor) as a bulwark against the ostensibly inscrutable allure of this temple of domesticity. Male informants admire the business model and marketing of the enterprise, all the while expressing bewilderment over its appeal. What is memorialized and celebrated in the flagship store, and by the American Girl brand in general, is the generativity of women that contributes to the cultural reproduction of domesticity. Light (2006:74) has described American Girl as “an amazing Brand Design learning experience” whose brand “idea” is that “family, friends and feelings” remain relevant throughout time. Brand managers are extremely attentive to the concerns of mothers, not just girls, and a recent panel of moms advised the brand to drop a firm-favored “emotional theme” (a leaving-home-to-follow-a-dream storyline) in the development of the most recent American Girl doll. Their plaintive plea was summarized by managers as, “Please don’t take my girl away from me” (Binkley 2006). The “multidimensional experience” that Light (2006:75) ascribes to the brand is accurate in broad strokes, but our ethnographic study allows us to specify it more precisely in light both of managerial responsiveness and consumer appropriation. The brand is a conservative commemoration of the generative power of women in reproducing domestic culture, driven chiefly not by end users’ delight so much as female stakeholders’ commitment to preserving tradition. There is a palpable female buzz animating the brand, and it is modulated as carefully by consumers as it is by brand managers. In this essay, we explore the lived experience of this buzz as the playful transmission of domestic values across generations. In particular, we use the concept of allomothering – the diffusion of the mother’s role(s) to other social actors – to interpret the essence of the brand. page_138 Page 139 This social surrogacy is at once a characteristic of the brand and a strategic use of the brand by consumers. Methodology We investigated the American Girl phenomenon with a multi-ethnic/multi-cultural research team. The team was evenly split along gender lines and included members of diverse ages, marital status, family status, and life-stage. Data collection included observation, participant observation, and interview methods and

occurred at multiple sites, including retail locations and informants’ homes. Members of the team also immersed themselves in popular press articles about the AG brand and the historical narratives accompanying the dolls so as to ensure maximum familiarity with the brand. The American Girl Place in Chicago was the primary retail field site, although members of the team did visit the American Girl store in New York. The Chicago location was a rich source of data. All members of the team visited the store on numerous occasions over a three-year period. Visits typically lasted one to two hours, though longer periods of immersion were not uncommon. Often, members of the team reported being so caught up in the experience that they lost track of time. Several members of the team saw the Broadwaystyled show at the American Girl Place, frequently in the company of informants. Researcher field notes were completed following each visit. Each member of the team made trips to the store with every other member of the team; triads comprised the largest feasible working unit. Interpretive discussions typically followed these visits, oftentimes in a nearby coffee shop. All members of the team were in frequent contact to share ideas, emerging interpretations and ideas emerging from literature searches. In addition, full-team meetings took place throughout the course of the project. Our team composition and data collection approach was designed to limit potential biases and ensure that all voices on the team got an adequate chance to be heard. Much of our data came from interviews with patrons of American Girl Place. Informants were recruited in multiple ways. Initially, a snowball sampling scheme was used, with friends, colleagues, and family members supplying initial points of contact to American Girl consumers and their families. Incidental/random contacts were also used. Store intercepts proved invaluable opportunities for immersion in consumers’ lived experience of shopping. Members of the research team would frequently enlist families that were either heading to or returning from a visit to the American Girl Place in Chicago (identification was greatly facilitated by the vivid red bags from the store or the dolls themselves). These recruits in turn led us to additional informants. Interviews were conducted with an eye toward understanding the multi-generational aspect of the brand. Girls who own American Girl dolls and their mothers and grandmothers were interviewed. Interviews were typically video- or tape-recorded and subsequently transcribed. Most lasted between forty-five minutes and two hours and were conducted in a variety of settings, including local page_139 Page 140 restaurants and coffee shops, as well as in informants’ homes. Home interviews typically included a tour of the girl’s American Girl collection, as well as descriptions and demonstrations of how they played with the dolls. Interviews were conducted by a variety of combinations of the research team (single member, dyads and triads). Female energy Scott and Peñaloza (2006) have propounded a matriarchal view of marketing that limns the feminine essence of material experience, wherein spirit, matter, and energy are fully integrated, dualities in cognition are avoided, a communal orientation obtains, and ecological sensitivity pervades practice. This perspective resonates with our empirical findings, which are shot through with the “female energy” our informant Janice so eloquently describes: The first time that I went I did enjoy the atmosphere of the feminine connection across the generations … That’s true. It’s the same energy of it. It ignites something inside you could say … You … actually explore the connection to the heart that’s involved in these things. That’s my spiritual soul talking, but I think it’s true … There’s a heart connection. Across the generations there’s a heart connection of the kids to their dolls. In a lot of this there’s heart connection … That the noise for the American Girl store is the buzz for the girls and their families. It’s human buzz. It’s not noise attacking you. It’s the buzz of human excitement. That’s a very different feel … For a little girl or a girl of development age, it’s the source, it’s the mother lode. It’s the source of things that are dear to her. It’s set up to receive her and welcome her … So, like I said, then if people think it’s a pilgrimage to them, then it is … There’s a certain energy. It’s energetic. That’s very interesting if you talk about the energy and the vibration of it. A lot a people say that if you eat something prepared with love that it’s a totally different experience than something done mechanically all together … The American Girl brand harnesses this energy in the service of cultural reproduction, in particular the articulation and transmission of a template for the perpetuation of domesticity. The feminization of the home began in seventeenth-century Holland, and peaked in nineteenth-century America; it remains the prevailing (if ambivalent) orientation toward domesticity in the US. The home exhibits a dialectical tension between a “woman’s workhouse” and a “setting for the domestic arts” (Porteous and Smith 2001:48–49). Among its “complex, multiple and interrelated” meanings, home has two dominant connotations: an outward-looking home as “center” meaning, that assimilates “refuge, freedom, possession, shelter and security,” and an inward-looking home as “identity” meaning, comprising “family, friends, community, attachment, rootedness, memory and nostalgia” (Porteous and Smith 2001:48–49). These meanings are central to the American Girl brand essence.

page_140 Page 141 The management of this tension is primarily a female undertaking. The female experience of this management has resulted in another distinctive historical stress: the tension between the “yearning to create a home” and the “urge to get out of it” (Collins 2003: xiii). Collins’ (2003: xiv, xvii) account of over four centuries of the history of female experience in the US – a nonfiction analogue of the American Girl narratives – chronicles less the battle against male oppression than the “struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders”; in short, American women have always been “more complicated than they let on.” Their emancipation consists in claiming the right to “combine the rewards of domestic and public life,” and, paralleling again the narrative strategy of the American Girl brand, Collins (2003:445, 450) exalts the everyday feminist Everywoman, noting women “stand on their shoulders and tell our children their stories.” The model of heroic femininity at work in the American Girl narratives emphasizes this hestial mission of transcending domesticity while achieving its apotheosis. In the mid-nineteenth century, consumer agency in America was re-gendered to become largely a female “prerogative and responsibility,” the reversal driven by such factors as females gaining access to public places and organizing for political rights, an ideology of domesticity assigning females greater household responsibilities (the division of labor itself driven by the expansion of market consumerism), and the eroticizing of the world of goods by women (Witkowski 2006:262–264, 280). This hestial-hermetic dialectic that assigns responsibility for maintaining the domestic economy to women even as they colonize political economy is visible among our informants. The interior world-making project the American Girl brand encourages is by ascription and achievement, by acclaim and default, and by disposition and intention, a feminine one. The retro aura of the American Girl brand vibrates with this historical reversal. Twitchell’s (Twitchell and Ross 2006) assertion of the disappearance of gendered space occasioned by the spread of consumer culture in his eloquently declaimed elegy for manscapes is belied by this brand, which encourages the public celebration of female bonding in a temple of domesticity (Diamond et al., forthcoming). A fascinating inquiry into the lives of empty-nester women demonstrates that the intergenerational transmission of domesticity is of critical importance in contemporary society. Hogg et al. (2006:252–253) show that, when challenged to “create family life” after children have left home, and to engage in “mothering at a distance,” women change their focus from productive household tasks to maintaining “symbolic family”; they perform “emotional” rather than “physical” labor when identity shifts from the household to “dispersed sites.” Hogg et al. (2004:254–255) demonstrate that goods become transitional objects when “family and household” are understood as multi-sited phenomena. This change in focus from production to consumption in the maintenance of domesticity is evocative of the behavior of some of the principal stakeholders in the American Girl franchise: grandmothers. We found grandmothers to be absolutely indispensable to the brand’s appeal. page_141 Page 142 Allomothering The “grandmother hypothesis” or the “grandmother’s clock hypothesis” has engaged biocultural anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists for a number of years. Briefly recounted, the hypothesis maintains that the long period of human childhood dependency and female post-reproductivity co-evolved in an interdependent manner, such that maternal grandmothers became beneficial for the survival of their grandchildren (Hrdy 1999). Matrilineal priority presupposes female philopatry, according to this hypothesis (Knight and Power 2005). That is, female relatives tend to live amongst one another for this survival value to be realized. Extrapolating to our data, grandmothers are in regular emotional contact with their granddaughters, whatever their physical proximity might be, and use the American Girl brand not only as an intergenerational bonding mechanism, but also as a vessel or conduit of family-making in the transmission of a template for domesticity. To a lesser extent, aunts engage in this transmission with their nieces. As more grandmothers are around now than in the previous history of the planet, longevity carries with it not merely increased risk of social isolation, but “extended scope for relationships across the lifespan”; conversation as a vehicle of shared experience between grandmothers and granddaughters (Robertson 2004:141, 229) is evocatively facilitated through the American Girl brand, which caters as well to grandma’s “nostalgic yearning” for a utopian girlhood. This yearning is detectable in the remarks of our informants. One seven-year-old girl observes: Minnie: Well, I like this one [cloth] a whole lot because my grandma in Detroit made it for me. That’s where I go for Christmas, for tea parties… And my grandma got this for me for my birthday with the little veil. […] Minnie: When I play with my grandma we play, and she has a different one. She has – I think it’s Felicity. Author: Your grandma has a doll?

Minnie: An American Girl Doll. So we like to play with our American Girl Dolls. Bespoke clothing and linen, rituals of domestic civility, sentimental gifts, maternal mirroring and joyous co-recreation reinforce traditional principles of domestic engineering. Further, our informant recognizes that this is no mere exercise in role-play, as Grandma also has a teaching objective in mind: Author: So it was something that your grandma bought or made for you? Minnie: Made … It was just a surprise. [My grandma] She’s teaching me how to sew, so someday I’m going do this… Whenever I do a recital my grandma in Detroit always makes me a costume [for my doll] that sort of looks like my costume for my recital. This [costume] is for Samantha… It was a surprise. So she does it every time I do a recital. page_142 Page 143 And here’s the top that goes underneath this, sort of like a one-piece thing. […] Minnie: And my grandma, when I had my little brother, she gave me this thing so I can make clothes for Samantha. My Grandma Wilmott. And here’s her little travel bag. I also have her little school bag to go to school in. [My Grandma comes] from Detroit. She comes over here sometimes. She came over and taught me to do a little bit of sewing, and I think we just did a little bit of playing. Whenever I go to her house my cousin Gerald always says, “Why do you always listen to her and you don’t want to play?” ’Cause we’re a boy and girl, and we’re one-year age difference, so it’s hard to think of something that we want to play. Here we are presented, in the first instance, with a tableau of instruction in the domestic arts, couched in terms of gift ritual that commemorates personal milestones and personified as the ceremonial second skin of the symbolic self. Grandma remakes the doll over as her granddaughter, and the granddaughter as the doll, a powerful generative transformation that inspires imitation. It is an empowering procreative modeling. We are then treated to an allegorical passing of the starter dough, as Minnie receives both a commemoration of her new status as elder sister and a distraction from her inevitable displacement as the baby. Finally, we see that a studious attending to Grandma’s conversation and craft-ways trumps the challenge of finding genderneutral pastimes, the perceived age gulf between genders apparently magnified far beyond dog years, but, within genders, negligible. Another grandmother describes her teaching of sewing in these terms: Marie (Grandma): … I work at a fabric store, and we’ve got classes there, and we’re starting a doll club … an eighteen-inch doll club. Of course, we’re not calling it American Girl, but we are calling it the “eighteen-inch Doll Club.” […] They don’t have to be American Girl. They have to be 18 inches tall so we can make clothes for it and things, so we’re going to have a little craft each meeting and have a play or write a story or something about the clothes that we made or the skirts that we made so we’re going to start … they’re going to learn some things … And I know that some customers came in and they had a doll club that they had been doing with their girls, and their girls are age 11–13 … they went … Wow, they really had a neat club going. ’Cause these girls…even that old, you know, cause they can start them sewing themselves for the doll and they like to create … We get together and they bring their dolls, and do things with their dolls, but we’re going to start with … like, at seven years old, and probably need to divide our group up. I didn’t realize that the older girls were going to want to do it too. […] The first thing we’re going to do is make little poodle skirts for the girls and for the dolls. It’ll be a little circular, soft skirt … it’ll be already made, and then when they come, they’ll decorate it … put all the sparkles on it, and (string them about?). So, that’ll be our first meeting. page_143 Page 144 […] That’s our girl … I Know, I’m like, “We’re going to have so much fun!” and she’s like (Angela, the mother), “We know, mom.” Angela (Marie’s daughter): “We know, mom.” That’s our girl … Marie: Well, you know, I just tell the mothers what to kind of do for the girls. Angela: It’s hard to hold back. Marie: Yes. When they started, it was in Girl Scouts, and they were making little squares, and sew together to make a big quilt of their art. And I was helping that day, and I was like, “Let me help you do that!” (laugh) Finish it on off … you know, it’s hard to hold back. I don’t know why! (laugh) Marie: (to the mother) We’ll have a special day for the moms to come and we’ll show you what we’ve done! Marie’s comments begin with a savvy sidestepping of trademark infringement, an acknowledgement, perhaps, of the propriety of consumer appropriation. She describes a pursuit reminiscent of an old fashioned quilting circle, replete with folk narratives, that infuses the learning of domestic skills with feminine wisdom and feeds the impulse to generativity. The retro-coolness of sewing retro-fashion is a source of particular delight. Grandma’s giddiness at the prospect of enchanting the newest generation, her vicarious thrill, and her own daughter’s amused, patronizing yet endearing infantilization of Marie suggests the tenderness with which this

enterprise is suffused. The irresistible joy of teaching mothers to nurture daughters is evident in Marie’s demeanor. We feel the female worth ethic at work in her comments. And yet, regression may sometimes be a grandmother’s principal pursuit, as one young informant believes: Author: And when you went to the store, did you see also the play? Jill: Oh, yeah, I’ve seen the play. Not the new one with Kit, but the old one. Author: And how old? Because I saw the last one, so I don’t know how the play was years ago. Jill: The old one? Well, it was the one with Josefina, so. Okay. Author: Who was there with you? Your grandmother? Jill: Yeah, my grandma’s the one who takes me there. Author: She likes to go there? Jill: Yeah. I think it makes her feel younger or something. Playing with granddaughter while modeling the (occasionally timeless) values of another era confers upon grandma a kind of heterotopic passport. Cultural conservation is an ethos that must be instilled in succeeding generations, as yet another grandma proclaims: … And … we were talking about the doll’s clothes … here … and the clothes are expensive, but when you see … we’re going to preserve the doll … and page_144 Page 145 the doll’s clothes … because there will come a time when she starts not being interested … and so, now they can rest … from her to her [next] generations … […] I love dolls, I love dolls…it’s what I …[…] Because I have a doll that is a china porcelain doll which was given to me by good friends that is probably 115 years old and she’s not in her original dress, or anything … but she’s still an original china doll, you know, so … yeah!!! This kind of material cultural stewardship is essential to the intergenerational transmission of values. Family-making under the aegis of the American Girl brand can be characterized as “matriotic” (Rey 2001:199), reminding us as it does that “sensuous feeling and remembrances of local flavors, light and smells are important building blocks of cultural intimacy, while art, language, history, and literature are lived as inner landscapes … [encouraging] … intercultural flexibility.” So also can identity projects (Rey 2001:199) be described as ambivalent territory where cultural norms and aesthetics are either applied or hybridized, generating mechanisms of intersubjective validity that lead to the sharing of sentiments, representations, and ideals for cementing an imagined community. The matriotic ethos of the American Girl brand – heroic feminism in the service of reproducing domesticity across generations – resonates across the generations of consumers. Just as the identities of individual girls are forged in the crucible of domestic deep play, so also are the identities of families (embodied in the solidarity of sororal units) annealed in the supervision of such play. Doll play Let’s ground this literal allomothering in the ritualistic allomothering of doll play, since the cultural template being reproduced is embodied most evocatively in the American Girl dolls themselves. Surprisingly little scholarly attention has been devoted to doll play, even by developmental psychologists (Robertson 2004:4). Replica play begins as basic representations of actual events, and evolves eventually into elaborate narratives, which, by pre-school age, become fantastic storyworlds with autonomous characters. The realistic play of toddlers becomes the fantastic play of five year olds, as children cross the developmental divide that permits them to distinguish between reality and fantasy (Scarlett et al. 2005:61–62). While dolls have existed for millennia, and have been mass-manufactured since the fifteenth century, play dolls designed to be used by actual children were not mass-produced until the seventeenth century; such production escalated between 1850 and 1950, with the cultural invention of childhood (Robertson 2004:22). The American Girl brand has extensions designed to span the developmental divide, and to situate girlhood in a complex psycho-cultural matrix that reifies and preserves it, while channeling its diverse options into a common set of themes. The surface structure of female doll play is all about allomothering. The deep structure is more talismanic. page_145 Page 146 In her nuanced and insightful interpretation of a classic folktale especially relevant to our study (“Vasalisa the Wise”), Estes (1992:91–94) celebrates dolls as one of the “symbolic treasures of the instinctual nature,” whose qualities as a fetish inspire belief that they “emanate both a holiness and a mana”; they exert an “awesome and compelling presence that acts upon persons, changing them spiritually.” Animated by their makers, dolls have been used in rites and rituals for millennia. Estes understands the doll as a symbol of the numinous in humans, and, for women in particular, the “inner spirit,” “the voice of inner reason,” “inner knowing,” and “inner consciousness.” For Estes, the doll represents intuition, “truly the soul-voice speaking”; it is the female’s sense of deep judgment. Feeding the doll is a symbolic act of listening to intuition. Intergenerational gifting of dolls functions as a “matrilineal blessing” on intuition, a form of

empathic magic that preserves heroic femininity. Insofar as the doll is a “little psychopomp” (Estes 1992:462), it can be understood to conduct or guide soul from one generation to the next. This is an apt characterization of deep doll play among our informants. It poignantly captures the sentiment that impels the intergenerational transmission of the American Girl brand. American Girl paraphernalia prompts the enactment of family and personal narrative, a literal telling that deepens the figurative dwelling of extended households. Heroic femininity is a leitmotif, if not the central moral, of most of these tales. The brand also provides a template for the harnessing of the child’s personal creativity. American Girl artifacts often define a child’s room, encompassing it and rendering it a challenge (and obligation) to negotiate. Play is about socialization, but not simply mimicry of the adult world; it involves as well the cognitive restructuring and augmentation of that world in terms of children’s social relationships themselves (James 1993:170, 175). The literature on toys, and especially on doll play, makes clear the creativity that children exert over and against the persuasion of marketers and other authority figures. Cultural capital is mobilized through dolls and accessories in distinctive ways. It may be enacted through the artifacts, with the child performing the canon in doll play. It may simply be amassed, its very abundance a mute testament to the status of the household. Status is also signaled through the frequency of American Girl parties. In fact, we have heard other informants (mothers as well as girls) engage in one-upwomanship as they describe to one another the number of times they have been to the American Girl Place Café or musical revue. Aspirational ownership among girls ranges from modest to insatiable, as appetitive acquisition and premium pricing contend in American culture. Ethnicity, in particular, is a cultural capital commodity efficiently mobilized in households. The brand is used to display ethnic affiliation, reinforce ethnic heritage, and memorialize participation in a subculture. Insofar as the future is interpreted through the lens of stereotypical gender roles at play, girls are faced with a greater number of futures than boys (James 1993:188). In his unpacking of Bruner’s (1990) narrative mode of thought, McAdams (1993:230, 277) identifies the psychological desires of agency (power and achievement) and communion (love and intimacy) as the two central themes of personal myth, the bases for which are laid in infancy and childhood, when we are page_146 Page 147 not consciously seeing meaning and purpose in life, and realized during teen and adult years. The American Girl brand activates both of these themes, and provides girls a template for negotiating multiple futures. The leitmotif of heroic femininity reverberating through the brand comforts and motivates all three generations of women co-animating the brand. Conclusion The American Girl brand acts as a host, issuing an invitation for women and girls to convene, and providing the wherewithal for them to enact and perform the rights and responsibilities of gender. The brand mediates the cultural reconstruction of social roles, in a way that empowers the feminine and banishes the masculine to the margins. The brand has an allomaternal cast to its essence. American Girl Place resembles the brandfests and sportsmediascapes of ethnographic record, which are overwhelmingly masculine in character, but differs from them by virtue of the degree of constructive consumer creativity added to the offering. American Girl Place resembles the fan communities of ethnographic record, which are overwhelmingly feminine in character, but is strikingly different from them in terms of the retro-realist fantasy it engenders. Flagship brand stores like ESPN Zone essentially provide fantastic toys for boys, encouraging males to play more in projective “fantasy.” Our current study suggests that girls are encouraged to play in introjective “reality.” The attraction of the American Girl brand to girls and women lies in its concreteness and repetition both of history and the domestic. Even in 2007, girls are socialized to be keepers of the home and hearth. They still play “house,” more than “astronaut” or “war.” The material culture that shapes a female child’s play will most likely shape female adult lives as well. This may not be a politically correct discovery, but it is pervasive in our field notes. The intergenerational attraction exerted by the brand allows each female family member to “play dolls” with the younger members. The reproduction of behaviors across generations is reminiscent of Russian nesting dolls. Girls care for and dress their dolls. Girls don’t merely “dress like their dolls”; rather, mothers dress their daughters, who are their own dolls, in the clothing of the brand. Girls learn to fold and organize all these accessories; each girl becomes the mistress of a small, closeted domain. Mothers are guiding them to this process and these products, as they organize their daughter’s lives. Simultaneously, mothers yearn for control and for a simpler life and times when everything was so clearly bounded and tractable. Grandmothers exert a similar, perhaps more masterful control. They calmly organize their charges’ time and priorities. They supervise this reproduction of history and domestic culture. This heroic management of effort is each generation’s form of “play.” As our opening epigraph suggests, the kinetics of cultural reproduction seems a quintessentially feminine enterprise. Retail theatre dramatizes the template for family-building that is especially entrusted to Grandma. The doll

becomes a memento vivere – an object of contemplation reminding the girl that she must live, as she is the wellspring of page_147 Page 148 culture. The mise-en-scene at American Girl Place conveys a powerful sense of déjà vu for the young, and après vu for the old: this is a mythic re-enactment that everyone is seeing with new eyes. Getting in touch with the inner grandma (the eternal wisdom-bearing initiator into the mystery/my-story and history/her-story of family perpetuation) is largely what American Girl Place is all about. The co-creation or co-production of experience has become both a commercial imperative and a consumer expectation. We hope our exploration of this brand’s animation contributes to the accelerated unpacking of the production of consumption at work in the contemporary marketplace. References Binkley, C. (2006) “The selling of Nicki: overscheduled skier with a cute dog,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, A1; A8. Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collins, G. (2003) “America’s women,” Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines, 400 New York: William Morrow. Diamond, N., Sherry, J. F. Jr., Muñiz, A., McGrath, M. A., Kozinets R. and Borghini S. (forthcoming), “American Girl and the brand gestalt: closing the loop on socio-cultural branding research,” Journal of Marketing. Estes, C. P. (1992) Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stones of the Wild Woman Archetype, New York: Random House. Hogg, M., Curasi C. and Maclaran, P. (2004) “The (re-)configuration in empty nest households/families,” Consumption, Markets and Culture, 7 (3): 239–259. Hrdy, S. (1999) Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, New York: Pantheon Books. James, A. (1993) Childhood Identities: Self and Social Relationships in the Experience of the Child, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jones, S. (2007) “American Girl to expand,” Chicago Tribune, January 16, Section 3, pp. 1; 3. Knight, C. and Power, C. (2005) “Grandmothers, politics and getting back to science,” in Voland, E., Chasiotis, A. and Schiefenhovel, W. (eds.) Grandmotherhood: The Evolutionary Significance of the Second Half of Female Life, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 81–98. Kozinets, R., Sherry, J. F. Jr., DeBerry-Spence, B., Duhachek, A., Nuttavuthisit, K. and Storm, D. (2002) “Themed flagship brand stores in the new millennium: theory, practice, prospects,” Journal of Retailing, 78 (1): 17–29. Light, L. (2006) “Brand design takes more than style,” Advertising Age, November 6, 74–75. McAdams, D. (1993) Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, New York: William Morrow. n. a. (2003) “A challenge to Barbie,” The Economist, April 19, 54. Porteous, J. D. and Smith, S. (2001) Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rey, M. J. B. (2001) “A walk through identity in the gardens of Catalonia,” in Resina, J. R. (ed.) Iberian Cities, New York: Routledge, 199–217. Robertson, A. F. (2004) Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them, New York: Rutledge. Rogers, M. (1999) Barbie Culture, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. page_148 Page 149 Scarlett, W. G., Naudeau, S., Salonius-Pasternak, D. and Ponte, I. (2005) Children’s Play, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scott, L. and Peñaloza, L. (2006) “Matriarchal marketing: a manifesto,” Journal of Strategic Marketing, 14 (1): 57–67. Silverstein, M., Fiske, N. and Butman, J. (2004) Trading Up: The New American Luxury, New York: Penguin. Twitchell, J. and Ross. K. (2006) Where Men Hide, New York: Columbia University Press. Witkowski, T. (2006) “Re-gendering consumer agency in mid-nineteenth-century America: a visual understanding,” Consumption, Markets and Culture, 7 (3): 261–283. page_149 Page 150 8

Engineering a mainstream market for sustainability Insights from Wal-Mart’s perfect storm Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten The symptoms are clear: global climate change, global poverty, toxic chemicals in mothers’ milk, vanishing fish stocks, mass desertification, rampant deforestation, unprecedented species annihilation, disappearing aquifers, and the list goes on. It is a grim litany of indicators of a human species on a collision course with disasters that could make the worst plagues and horrors in history seem trifling. The underlying causes are equally clear. The world’s economic engine, industry, in order to satisfy the increasing lifestyle demands of a rapidly growing population, is systematically, and at a breathtaking pace, outstripping the very systems upon which it and we depend for our survival. Humans are liberating hydrocarbons and toxic metals from the earth’s crust, more or less permanently, and concentrating them in an overtaxed ecosystem that is defenseless against them. We are creating and mass-producing substances the earth is incapable of assimilating, and that instead accumulate in toxic and burgeoning landfills. We are systematically fouling the earth’s natural filters and leveling the forests that fix carbon dioxide and breathe oxygen into our atmosphere. Finally, at the margins of this economic juggernaut, the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people are starving and brutalized. In industrializing nations, people submit to virtual slavery or, worse, they sell their children into it. Pushed from homelands that are ravaged and barren, others migrate into the paths of hostility, conflict, and even genocide. And while it would be tempting to point out that the relatively affluent people of the world simultaneously revel in a surfeit of cheap products and wasteful consumption, it would be both counterproductive and self-deceivingly shortsighted. None of us knows what might replace a collapsing status quo, but we can be sure of one thing: it will collapse unless its trajectory is changed dramatically and very, very soon. In theory, the solution is also clear. The one-word answer is sustainability. Regardless of how we define it, the principle of sustainability requires us to meet the environmental, social, and economic needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In practical and scientific terms, outlined elegantly in a program called The Natural Step, it means that we, as a global society, must at a minimum stop, and ideally reverse the following trends: page_150 Page 151 • the systematic movement of material from the earth’s crust into the ecosystem; • the systematic production of toxic compounds; • the systematic degradation of natural ecosystems; • the systematic undermining of people’s (any people’s) ability to meet their own needs. Operationally, the implications are many. We must derive our power from renewable sources. We must find or create non-toxic solutions to all our product and production needs. We must confine synthetic materials to technical production loops such that all waste becomes new resources. We must keep water and air clean and forests intact. And we must do all of it in ways that grow, rather than diminish, the abilities of all people to enjoy productive and satisfying lives. Less clear are the identities of the actors that might accomplish these goals and thereby avert looming global catastrophes. Government must play a central role. The world’s governments appear to be moving in the right direction, but realistically, neither quickly nor effectively enough. They convene, quarrel, and move forward in fits and starts with their limited tools of diplomacy and regulation, constrained by nationalistic self-interest, bureaucracy, and corruption. Ultimately, governments are hobbled by their borders. Two additional forces, both essentially borderless, may offer greater hope and potential. One is business, and the other is global consumer culture. It is within the realm of business and markets that this paper explores a possible path to sustainability. There is no denying the mounting evidence that more businesses are now taking sustainability seriously. Evidence from academic, practitioner, and popular media offers ubiquitous support for this claim (Esty and Winston 2006; Kaveski 2004; Stigson 2007). While some caution that sustainability could be just another buzzword or management fashion, (e.g., Zorn and Collins 2007) we offer compelling arguments and evidence that environmental and social sustainability are more than just a passing fad. Kaveski (2004) notes that a survey of 1000 CEOs found that 79% of the CEOs felt that sustainability is vital to their firm’s financial success. The numbers and the resolve behind them are undoubtedly higher in 2007. Kaveski argues that sustainable models are a serious trend in industry. Our own authorial position is somewhat stronger. We believe they constitute a true paradigm shift. Business consultants are addressing sustainability. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Environmental Solutions division, for example, markets sustainability consulting to major global corporations (Global Environmental Solutions, 2007). Manufacturing has taken up the call to be more environmentally proactive. For example, in 2004, Subaru’s plant in Lafayette, IN became the first auto assembly plant in the US to achieve “zero landfill” status. Nothing from its manufacturing efforts finds its way to a landfill … “Talking trash” is part of the daily routine of the employees at SIA … new ways to recycle are discussed in staff and department

meetings. Every item that enters the plant exits as a reusable product (The Oregonian, January 20, 2007, DT2). page_151 Page 152 Naturally, this path leads farther down the supply chain to retailers and ultimately to consumers. In consumption, however, lies the rub. In our own discussions of sustainability and marketing with consultants, students, friends, and acquaintances, we consistently confront the same criticism: that marketing and sustainability are fundamentally incompatible. Paradoxical. At loggerheads. Their argument goes like this. Marketing must stimulate desire for mass consumption, and mass consumption is inherently wasteful and destructive. Therefore, marketing is the enemy of sustainability. One flaw in the argument is, of course, the possibility of sustainable consumption. Consumption that relied completely on renewable (and renewed) energy and material resources, generated no toxins or waste to landfills, and was accessible to all people, would not only be sustainable, it would go a long way toward creating global prosperity and social justice. Getting from here to there would be no small feat. It is not, however, impossible to imagine. It would require massive technological innovation supported by major shifts at the atomic level in both global business and global consumer cultures. To the extent that consumer demand, inertia, and ignorance present barriers to change, two important tools deserve our attention: Consumer Culture Theory and service-dominant logic. For many years scholars have looked beyond enacted consumer behavior and developed a deeper understanding of the relationships between consumers and culture. Recently, Arnould and Thompson (2005) synthesized twenty years of this research into related theories and perspectives, providing a grounding for the investigation of the multiplicities of effects among consumers, culture, and marketing into what they call Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), “a family of theoretical perspectives that address the dynamic relationships between consumer actions, the marketplace, and cultural meanings” (p. 869). Because sustainability must ultimately take root as a prime cultural value, we embrace the perspectives and methods of CCT. Like business culture, consumer culture is evolving toward a priority on sustainability. Environmental concerns have finally ascended to the forefront of social commentary. For years scientists have been sounding the global warming alarm, which is now being echoed by popular media, rational politicians, and the marketplace. Throughout the value chain, intermediaries are developing more sustainable practices and policies. In many cases, consumers are responding. Value chain members at the retail level occupy the nexus where business and consumer cultures intersect. In stores both physical and virtual, consumer choices and purchase decisions reinforce and challenge business practices. In that same plane, business practices and choices limit, inspire, and influence consumer decisions (Arnould and Faulkner 2005). The retail context offers consumers a combination of goods and services, cultural meanings, and educational opportunities. The understanding of retail resources has long focused primarily on goods-dominant logic. Yet, the competitive advantage of superior service is widely known (Lusch et al. 2007). Noting a disconnect between the desire to offer superior service and normative theory to assist businesses page_152 Page 153 in its execution, Vargo and Lusch (2004) developed a theory of service-dominant logic (SDL) as a foundational business philosophy. SDL identifies a commitment to collaborative processes among customers, partners and employees, in order to serve all stakeholders, through the co-creation of value through reciprocal service provision (Lusch et al. 2007). Service-dominant logic provides a cultural-resource view of the firm that distinguishes operant resources (including values and ideologies) from operand resources (include material resources). Arnould and Faulkner (2005) propose that retailers can be “better conceptualized as operant and operand resource purveyors that compete for shares of consumer operant resources” (p. 90). These cultural resources have a specific purpose in consumer experience. A collection of retailer-produced operand cultural resources (i.e., habitat, appliance, product assortment, personnel policy, pricing strategy, communication campaigns and/or other aspects of the retail mix) acts as a set of “culturally constrained signs that represent the potential connection between the firm’s operant resources and those operant resources that remain under consumers’ control” (p. 90). Successful retailers are those whose operant resources are both desirable and somehow limited in everyday life (Arnould and Faulkner 2005). The operand resources, or material cues, are “the means by which consumers detect the operant cultural resources of an offer” (Arnould and Faulkner 2005, p. 90). From the perspectives of CCT and SDL, we would assert the following: for the principles of environmental and social sustainability to gain real traction will require cultural and behavioral changes among both businesses and consumers at fundamental levels. The most important services the human race can perform are, first, its survival, and second, the wellbeing of its members in perpetuity. A key point of enactment for those services is where the necessary operant and operand resources are exchanged and negotiated, namely the retail sector.

Innovation by definition, suggests radical change in process, strategy, or intention from an unexpected source. Social values of sustainability, organic production, and waste reduction are operant resources available to consumers who access them through the operand resources offered by innovative retailers among other sources. Arnould and Faulkner (2005) argue that research is needed to explore how motivations to deploy cultural resources change over time and how these changes might relate to value creation. This work frames our investigation of the sustainability efforts of the world’s largest and most influential retailer: Wal-Mart. This chapter continues first with a description of our methods. Next we describe the combination of forces that brought sustainability to the forefront of Wal-Mart’s corporate strategy. Then we address the business case for sustainability at the world’s largest retailer, a description of the process, and areas resistant to it. Finally, and throughout the chapter, we discuss the implications of Wal-Mart’s turn to sustainability in terms of global consumer culture, a service-dominant logic for marketing and supply-chain management, and, perhaps, the long-term wellbeing of people and Planet Earth. page_153 Page 154 Method: storm chasing Based on a claim that Wal-Mart was engineering nothing less than a major maelstrom in the area of sustainability and retail practice, and driven by our skepticism of that claim, we elected to travel to the eye of the storm. The site for this ethnographic research is the Wal-Mart World Headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, USA. To date our data collection has consisted of: • Participant observation at four quarterly sustainability milestone meetings providing prolonged engagement with key players and access to supplier fairs and demonstrations; • Archival sources including planning documents and documents of discovery from areas such as Corporate Strategic Planning, Transportation and Logistics, and Buildings and Facilities; • Multiple interviews with key Wal-Mart associates (including executives, buyers, managers, and merchandisers), with Wal-Mart suppliers in a broad variety of industries, and with NGO leaders from organizations such as World Wildlife Federation and Sierra Club; • Participant observation at two Wal-Mart Supercenters (in Arkansas and Oregon); • Multiple informal interviews with consumers, including Wal-Mart shoppers and Wal-Mart detractors. We have subjected our data to constant comparative analysis (Glaser and Strauss 1967) with frequent member checks for accuracy. Sampling has been purposive and driven by emerging information needs. Calibrating the hygrometer: the back story Early in 2006 when the opportunity first presented itself for author Schouten to observe a sustainability milestone meeting at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, he jumped at the chance. It was the first he had heard of any such sustainability initiative at Wal-Mart, and he was predisposed to believe that this was a clear case of greenwashing in the service of public relations. He relished the idea of going into the belly of the beast and documenting the kinds of speech and action that would help to debunk the sustainability claims of the world’s largest and most notorious retailer. Wal-Mart seemed an unlikely site for true progress on environmental (let alone social) sustainability. The company’s success over the years, indeed its near domination in the retail space, has been due largely to its ability to control costs, not only through efficiencies in distribution but also through its well-reported employment policies and its use of channel power to negotiate cost reductions with its myriad vendors. The author’s reasoning went like this: sustainable practices are expensive, and increased costs are antithetical to Wal-Mart’s business model; therefore, Wal-Mart cannot be serious about sustainability. page_154 Page 155 Upon arrival at the milestone meeting it quickly became obvious that Schouten was not alone as an outside visitor. He was surprised to find members of several environmental organizations present. Nor was he alone in his skepticism about Wal-Mart’s intentions. However, after a full day of meetings that included a keynote presentation from sustainable business practices pioneer Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, Inc., brainstorming and workshop sessions with various groups, and interviews with certain key players in the sustainability initiative, Schouten concluded that a) Wal-Mart’s leadership was dead serious about sustainability, b) they really believed that sustainable practices could be achieved simultaneously with continued cost reductions, c) they were willing to risk bringing chaos to their successful corporate culture to achieve it, and d) if they were successful it would have global repercussions for business practice. When Schouten reported his experience to author Martin, Martin rolled her eyes and said, “You drank the Kool-Aid.” She determined to see things for herself at the next milestone meeting, where the featured guest was Al Gore with an advance screening of his movie An Inconvenient Truth. In conjunction with that meeting the authors interviewed Tyler Elm, Wal-Mart’s Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Business Sustainability and one of the chief architects of the sustainability initiative. Elm agreed to collaborate in and support the research process. The authors conducted all interviews and engaged in participant observation.

Elm provided access to associates and archival data throughout the Wal-Mart organization. The brewing storm: forces that brought Wal-Mart to the decision to launch its sustainability strategy Even before the announcement of a formal sustainability initiative (which has since evolved into a full-on strategy), Wal-Mart’s commitment to “saving people money so they can live better lives” had serendipitously created some environmentally friendly outcomes from low-cost practices. In the early 1990’s Wal-Mart spearheaded the effort to eliminate waste in the form of cardboard boxes around antiperspirant tubes. The boxes cost money to produce, took up extra shelf space, and added to transportation costs. The nickel cost savings from eliminating each box was split between Wal-Mart and the manufacturers and “entire forests have not fallen in part because of the decision made in the Wal-Mart home office at the intersection of Walton Boulevard and SW 8th street in Bentonville, Arkansas” (Fishman 2006a, p. 6). From being one of the first to insist on “unboxing” antiperspirants in 1994 to the recent championing of the energy saving compact fluorescent light bulb in 2006, protective environmental practices have been a largely unacknowledged part of Wal-Mart’s business practices for some time. In 1990, Wal-Mart developed an environmental education program for children called “Animal Tracks.” Each month new posters were delivered to the stores as promotional and educational tools for children. Soon grade school teachers were laminating the posters to preserve them for long-term use in their classrooms (University of Arkansas 2007). Appreciation of, if not protection for, the page_155 Page 156 environment was not antithetical to founder Sam Walton’s ethos of everyday low prices and keeping the customer number one. A whirlwind world tour and bringing the lessons home Rob Walton, Chairman of the Board and son of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, spent ten days in February 2004 scuba diving off the coast of Costa Rica in the company of his son Ben, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, and Conservation International co-founder and CEO Peter Seligmann (Gunther et al. 2006). Seligmann used this opportunity and other international adventures with Walton to convince the billionaire to extend the family’s concern for environment beyond contributions from the family foundation, and to consider the possibilities of what the Wal-Mart Corporation could do for environmental sustainability (Gunther et al. 2006). As the biggest private user of electricity in the United States, owner of 2,074 Supercenters, employer of 1.8 million workers, most influential customer of 60,000 suppliers, and retailer of choice to 176 million customers, Wal-Mart was potentially poised to make a monumental difference up and down the supply chain by influencing the consumption practices of millions of people around the world. Walton agreed to introduce Seligmann to Wal-Mart’s CEO Lee Scott. Ramparts against the storm of criticism Wal-Mart’s famously insular stance toward requests for company information (Fishman 2006b) has traditionally helped to fuel detractors’ attacks on the mega-retailer. As the nineteenth largest economy in the world, the company had been the target of negative press for years. Proclaiming labor issues (e.g., Rosen 2004), health care issues (e.g., D’Innocenzio and Kabel 2005), and accusations of EEOC violations (e.g., St. Louis Business Journal 2004), among other concerns, detractors helped to galvanize many consumers against the company. A highly visible detractor, walmartwatch.com noted that 8% of shoppers had stopped shopping at Wal-Mart because of its reputation (Gunther et al. 2006). Scott’s visit with Seligmann offered a solution to his concerns about the company’s negative press. What started “as a means to shore up our defenses against possible attacks from organized self-interest groups – essentially, an exercise in risk management” (Wal-Mart 2006a) grew into the first winds of real change. Tyler Elm retrospectively describes the context of corporate concern about public perceptions: Twenty months ago, (CEO) Lee Scott said to himself, how can or where would we be attacked next? If we could be ten years in the future and looking back, if we only knew now what we’d be willing to do then, how would we change our actions? What should we be thinking of? The environment popped out. (Interview, 7/13/06) page_156 Page 157 Such discussions led to the beginnings of development of the company’s formal sustainability initiative. The scope, reach, and ambition of the initiative were far greater than most Wal-Mart associates could have imagined. Moreover, detractors doubted the seriousness of Scott’s commitment to sustainability and the wherewithal it would take to get the company’s 1.8 million associates on board. How could Wal-Mart get their managers to embrace a new initiative of sustainability? Part of the answer blew in on August 29, 2005 with Katrina, the costliest and one of the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States. As one of the world’s logistical efficiency leaders, Wal-Mart was uniquely positioned to mobilize its vast network of trucks and supplies to help the hurricane victims at a time when all levels of government failed to do so. The response of Wal-Mart employees to the disaster demonstrated to many their ability to move with speed and determination in the face of tremendous challenge. A senior manager reflects:

Everybody kinda rallied together and did their individual things very well. It all came together. It was, if I dare to be a little bold, pretty impressive to see what really happened. What Katrina really did was force all those people to come together and to be able to make things happen … If I was on the phone with Red Cross or a store manager or whoever it might have been in New Orleans, I literally could just tell them, “I need to see if you have two truckloads of water that you can get there,” and they can look it up and “Yes, we did. No, we didn’t” and they would turn to the person next to them, “I need you to find a trailer and a driver …” The thing that is good about this company is that people are empowered to make decisions. (Interview, 7/13/06) Within Wal-Mart, the disaster of Katrina became a touchstone of inspiration for innovation and for embracing chaos and difficulties: What enabled Wal-Mart to innovate, act and execute – to be at its best – during a time of crisis? How do we tap that unparalleled concentration of human energy, creativity and organizational systems to be at its best, all the time? Why was Wal-Mart at its best during the chaos of a hurricane? Why did Jessica Lewis, the co-manager of our Waveland, Mississippi store, feel so empowered that she jumped onto a bulldozer and used it to clear a path into and through a store so that she could do the right thing and give basic necessities to those in need? The answers to these questions lie in the fact that people are at their best while on the edge of chaos, where the need to adapt and learn is complemented with just enough order to enable action. Jessica was in the middle of a hurricane, the organizational reality of daily life as she knew it no longer existed, and if she was to serve her community, she would have to break through Wal-Mart’s walls – but quick. Waiting for approval from home office wouldn’t cut it. There were many similar Katrina stories, where nature served page_157 Page 158 up the chaos, the impetus for change, while Wal-Mart’s culture, values, systems and logistics provided order. The combination produced fantastic results; our associates adapted and flourished during the time of crisis, emerging on a new performance path. (Wal-Mart 2006a) The combined executive awareness of the massive problems associated with climate change and of Wal-Mart’s unique position as a global mobilizing agent of goods and services led to the previously improbable shift at Wal-Mart toward a quest for environmental sustainability. Perhaps the most poignant metaphor for this confluence of forces came from Lee Scott’s realization that global warming is tantamount to a Hurricane Katrina moving in slow motion over the entire planet. An immovable object: the profit imperative As Fortune (Gunther et al. 2006) so aptly stated, “Lee Scott is no tree hugger.” Wal-Mart executives and workers are perfectly clear on one thing: Wal-Mart is a business, not a charity. It makes no sense for the company to pursue environmental sustainability if it means forfeiting its competitive advantage as a global cost leader. On the contrary, Wal-Mart leadership decreed that sustainable solutions must save money in the short term and create lasting competitive advantage in the longer term. At the sustainability milestone meeting in March 2006, the company’s CFO made it publicly clear that every network must include someone from Finance, and that every sustainability project must be vetted for its value creation. The view that sustainability and profits are not conflicting interests is not without precedent. The World Business Council on Sustainable Development has actively sought a convincing business case for corporate social responsibility through best-practices research. Bjorn Stigson (2002) summarizes some of that research. Kaveski (2004) argues that sustainability can be a profitable venture for all stakeholders. Wal-Mart has turned that same discovery into a strategy and a passion that, if successful, would remain true to Sam Walton’s philosophy of doing well by doing right by the customer. Today’s customers would continue to enjoy the benefits of everyday low prices without compromising the ability of tomorrow’s customers to enjoy a healthy planet. As crucial added benefits, a successful sustainability initiative might stem the flow of public criticism. It might even open new market segments to Wal-Mart. Most importantly, perhaps, figuring out sustainability might drive the company’s leadership and culture toward patterns of innovation and the creation of important networks throughout the value chain. For Wal-Mart, the key is to derive value from relationships, expertise, and perspectives from those broader networks. Fundamental cost changes are just one outcome. Says Andy Ruben, “Today, everyone in this room is engaged in the pursuit of innovation – creating value for the customer while generating improved environmental outcomes” (Wal-Mart 2006). Ruben was talking about wholesale change in Wal-Mart’s corporate culture. Tyler Elm elaborates: page_158 Page 159 As a profit-seeking company, we must create and capture value from the work that we do. And, to be a source of long-term strategic value, of competitive advantage, we not only have to: 1) create value for our stakeholders, and 2) capture that value in the marketplace (for shareholders), but 3) it must also be hard for our competitors to imitate. Sustainability provides us this opportunity. There is tremendous opportunity to derive economic benefits from improved environmental outcomes. And because it requires us to look at the

world in a different way, and to learn our way into a new way of working, it is very hard to imitate. Learning a new way of working is very hard to do. And really, that is the challenge. Our strategy is to derive economic benefits from improved environmental outcomes. To do this, we must to collaborate with our stakeholders to grow the pie; and compete in the marketplace to eat a bigger piece.” (Interview, 11/1/06) Engineering the perfect storm: Wal-Mart’s strategy to become sustainable With CEO Lee Scott leading the way in 2005, the company developed some ambitious goals: 100% renewable energy, zero waste to landfills, and safe, sustainable products on the shelves. The next step organizationally was to identify Corporate Champions for the initiative, people with sufficient commitment to the concept of environmental sustainability and enough power in the organization to keep the issue not only alive but moving forward unimpeded. Chief among those champions is Andy Ruben, VP of Corporate Strategy, the passionate and inexhaustible leader hired to spearhead the initiative. Of the strategy and the first steps Ruben says, “We developed Sustainability Front Teams to engage, explore and confirm sustainability as a gateway for Wal-Mart to become the most competitive and innovative company in the world” (Andy Ruben, Milestone Meeting, 11/02/06). Ruben immediately recognized two things – first, that Wal-Mart had the potential to make a global impact in the realm of the environment; and second, that Wal-Mart had virtually no expertise in the area of sustainability. For some of that expertise he hired Tyler Elm, a conservation biologist who had left the activist world of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) for the private sector. Says Elm, I got fed up working as a conservation biologist because I wasn’t having enough effect on outcomes. For the most part, I was managing to the spirit of legislation as opposed to addressing systems issues. With every political cycle, environmental regulations would be withdrawn a little. So I went to business school and learned entrepreneurship and strategy. I came out of the business school with this idea that: if I could combine ecological principles into business strategy, that’s how I could affect change. I did consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers on environmental strategy, and then with IBM Business Consulting. Then I was plucked from IBM to go execute page_159 Page 160 environmental strategy for Office Depot. Again, there it was initially risk management; there was campaign against the company. But then the leadership started to seek potential benefits, as a result of the actions … That experience proved to me that you can get economic benefit from environmental and social change. (Interview, 7/13/06) The next step, from Elm’s perspective, was to begin to leverage knowledge resources from both inside and outside the company. Says Elm, I have a very good understanding of the value chain up to the retailer … When I went to the retailer, it was like, ok, well, I have no solutions designed for a retailer; they’re all designed from a risk management perspective for the forest and paper company. So I just decided to develop a coalition that was focused on solutions for retailers. “A coalition of who?” Of NGOs: Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, NatureServe … Other NGO’s and suppliers got engaged as stakeholders later on. (Wal-Mart 2006b) Corporations including British Petroleum, Nike, and General Electric have also found that working collaboratively with non-profits in “cross-sector partnerships” proves to be a positive social responsibility strategy (Kramer, 2006). Just as Wal-Mart had no expertise in the environment and such areas as certifications and transparent chains of possession, the NGOs had little understanding of the realities of the retail world, and even less understanding of the core Wal-Mart customer. The next step in the sustainability initiative was to crossfertilize and harness various types of expertise through the creation of Sustainable Value Networks, another brainchild of Elm. Says Elm, We want to collaborate with our stakeholders to create value from our relationships. To do that, we must incorporate these stakeholders into our networks – essentially extending our organization into the outside world and incorporating the diversity of perspectives, skills, experience and values”. (Wal-Mart 2006b) Organized around the primary foci of energy, waste, and sustainable products, the networks are specific to areas of operation such as transportation and logistics, packaging, and product categories such as seafood, jewelry, and textiles. Comprised of Wal-Mart associates (e.g., buyers and managers), key suppliers, and outside experts such as environmental NGOs and academics, the networks are tasked with creating new business models that are both environmentally sustainable and profitable for every member of the value chain. The Sustainable Value Networks all work with the same basic three-stage implementation strategy. First, in order to sustain short-term profits they identify and implement “quick wins,” changes that create significant short-term savings and efficiencies. Quick wins that added millions of dollars to the company’s bottom page_160

Page 161 line in the first year alone included massive energy savings in stores and fleet, dramatic decreases in packaging materials, and the conversion of waste streams to revenue streams through recycling. According to a representative of Unarco Industries, a supplier of shopping carts to Wal-Mart, Unarco recently developed methods for refurbishing old shopping carts to like-new condition. The savings to Wal-Mart last year? Over eight million dollars on about a quarter million carts that would otherwise have been destined for landfills (Interview at Wal-Mart Sustainable Products Fair, 11/03/06) Second, they look for “transitional technologies,” systems with longer-term impact on the business model. Transitional technologies include closing resource loops such that waste streams, such as spent car tires, become resource streams for suppliers, such as manufacturers of mulch and rubber paving stones. The final stage of the strategy is the identification of “game changers.” The real source of paradigm shift in the business model, game changers are actions after which nothing stays the same. They tend to focus on the very structure of the value chain. Driving the majority of world cotton farming to the use of organic methods may be one such revolutionary change. Perhaps the most significant, game-changing development to come out of Wal-Mart’s sustainability initiative so far is the beginning of a complete paradigm shift in the retail industry, otherwise known as “the big middle” of the value chain (e.g., Arnould and Faulkner 2005). By taking a macro approach to sustainability Wal-Mart is moving rapidly from their old business model as a brutally efficient manager of transactions to a new model of value chain management. Where buyers once merely negotiated with suppliers for the lowest possible prices, now they work with NGOs, with suppliers, and with suppliers’ suppliers to achieve more transparent and sustainable practices in the service of greater efficiencies, reduced waste and emissions, and better and safer products. Accountability for sustainability is being tracked and guided by environmental scorecards developed collaboratively within the Sustainable Value Networks. Stigson (2002) notes that along with setting limits, meeting the public’s demands for transparency and reporting is one of the key aspects of a successful sustainability program. The result is a win for the environment, a win for suppliers, a win for Wal-Mart, and a win for customers. For example, one of the more compelling sustainability concerns lies in the ocean food supply. The rate of global fish stock decimation and ecological problems caused by farmed seafood are of the utmost concern to the members of Wal-Mart’s Seafood Network. In partial response to the first concern, Wal-Mart “announced that it would, over the next three to five years, purchase all of its wild-caught seafood from fisheries that have been certified as sustainable by an independent nonprofit called the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)” (Gunther 2006). The Network addresses consumer education and the promotion of MSC-certified seafood as a brand, the “good” fish, the one to buy. Competitors are sure to follow Wal-Mart’s lead. As a membership warehouse store competing directly with Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Clubs, Costco has engaged in some sustainability efforts, for example, the installation of solar-powered energy systems in their warehouses (Environmental Leader 2007), an article soliciting page_161 Page 162 member’s views on banning plastic bags (Costco 2007a), and showcasing an organic food vendor (Costco 2007b). Target is often fingered as Wal-Mart’s primary “Big Box” competitor in most product categories. Target is “using the LEED rating system as a guide for some new Target stores” (Target 2007). While Wal-Mart competitors’ efforts don’t go unnoticed or unappreciated, they still lack the depth and breadth of the strategies being developed by Wal-Mart’s Sustainable Value Networks. Surges and levees: overcoming worker and customer resistance to create cultural change The overall success of Wal-Mart’s sustainability strategy relies not only on the company’s ability to manage and influence the supply chain. True value chain management must also respect and influence the culture of a company’s workers and that of its customers. As Tyler Elm is fond of quoting, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The rigorous systems approach at the heart of Wal-Mart’s sustainability initiative is a significant departure from its longstanding transaction and implementation orientation (known internally as “get ’er done”). Along with this change in the business model comes a change in the expression of operant resources (Arnould and Faulkner 2005) or values exemplified in the three parts of the sustainability initiative, i.e., renewable energy, zero waste, and sustainable products. The ethos remains one of serving the customer by lowering prices, but it adds environmental (and, increasingly, social) sustainability as both a desired outcome and a means of achieving innovation in the service of that goal. An enormous challenge currently facing Wal-Mart is determining how to carry the message of sustainability throughout the home office and downstream to store-level associates and customers (who often are the very same people). At the milestone meeting of November 2006, in addition to celebrating successes among certain SV networks, Lee Scott also chided others for being slow and dysfunctional. Furthermore, he made it clear that sustainability goals would henceforth be integral parts of employee performance evaluations. At the March 2007 meeting (Wal-Mart 2007), awards were given for outstanding network performance in sustainability and savings, but Scott also warned that too few associates were shouldering the load of

progress. More rapid and complete organizational culture change was needed. In addition, Scott emphasized the importance of improvement from both marketing and merchandising in carrying the operant resources (e.g., sustainability is good for everybody; sustainability is how we approach our jobs) and operand resources (e.g., sustainability-oriented sales staff; the products and displays offered to consumers; and the look, fit, feel, and messaging of new and retrofitted stores) through to store associates and customers. Network leaders who can document results in line with the sustainability strategy are rewarded with promotions. page_162 Page 163 Tempest in a teapot or seeds of a new storm? The Personal Sustainability Project While senior and executive-level managers in Bentonville and other international headquarters are ticking off “quick wins” and strategizing “game changers,” efforts to bring the winds of sustainability to the store level associates have also begun. Wal-Mart executives once again turned to a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist, former Sierra Club Executive Director Adam Werbach, to bring their message to the rank and file. Werbach and his team beta tested a program called Personal Sustainability Projects with store level associates in Indiana and Colorado in 2006. The underlying premise of the program is that personal transformational behavior in support of sustainability provides a daily, embedded reinforcement, through operand resources, of the operant resources at the heart of the Bentonville plan. As “PSP Captains” in their stores, Wal-Mart associates who have voluntarily embraced the sustainability initiative are encouraged to publicly (at least in their workplace and with their families and friends) adopt and proclaim personal sustainability projects, such as smoking cessation and weight loss, consumption of organic food, wetlands cleanup, and neighborhood recycling programs, as their commitment to sustainability. Publicity of these goals is currently limited to Wal-Mart associates, who are encouraged to provide social support for colleagues who are trying to kick the smokes or chips-and-soda habit. Whether long time smokers or overweight adults can make significant and sustainable personal progress based on a single, employersponsored day of inspirational meetings is debatable. Inspirational, short-term success stories, however, abound. As many of Wal-Mart’s hourly associates are also Wal-Mart’s customers, the first breezes of change have reached the end of the supply chain. On the winds of ambiguity: detoxifying Wal-Mart’s public image During our year-plus of fieldwork, one phenomenon has emerged time and again as we have discussed Wal-Mart’s sustainability strategy with friends, colleagues, students, and even strangers. People who have been ardent critics of Wal-Mart suddenly find themselves not knowing how to feel about the corporate giant. Many express begrudging, skeptical, and/or qualified admiration. Unwittingly, they witness Wal-Mart changing from an enemy to an enigma. Renee G., a volunteer helper with Blu Skye Sustainability Consulting at the July 2007 milestone meeting, had this to say in an interview, “Basically I told Andy (Ruben), I live in a town where there are peace loving families who are telling their children that it’s okay to make fake machine guns and shoot at Wal-Mart trucks on the highway. It’s that kind of evil.” “So how would you characterize your relationship to Wal-Mart now?” “I still don’t think I want to shop at Wal-Mart. But I’d do anything to support them in what they’re trying to do.” This kind of consumer ambiguity is a major coup for the company that so many people have loved to hate. Consumers struggle to mitigate their own cognitive dissonance brought on by conflicting meanings of Wal-Mart. In an interview, one Wal-Mart Global page_163 Page 164 Acquisitions Manager related a tale of a neighbor who has always had a strongly negative view of the company: “He’s not sure what to do with Wal-Mart now.” Such ambivalence about the meaning of Wal-Mart among consumers, who have formally self-identified as Wal-Mart critics, may signal a major shift in the company’s public image. The dissemination of information about Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts has been deliberately relaxed, in an old-fashioned, mostly word-of-mouth manner. Rather than issuing press releases and public corporate statements, Wal-Mart has simply invited observers from the press and elsewhere to see for themselves and report what they will. Resulting source credibility contributes to consumers’ confusion about how to feel and act toward Wal-Mart. It is easier to create a positive public image from amorphous clay than from a negative image carved in stone. Wal-Mart’s size and power clearly puts the company in a class of its own (Fishman 2006b), and years of widely publicized reports of unethical labor practices, health benefits issues, and hard-nosed negotiation strategies are now coupled with stories of sustainability success. Wal-Mart is now offering consumers an unexpected value: the operant cultural resources of sustainable consumption. Lighthouse products: teaching customers the value of sustainability Another surge of storm water, buffeting levees of resistance at the customer end of the value chain, is being realized through the aggressive merchandising of products that are both environmentally friendly and customer budget-friendly. One such “lighthouse product,” chosen to guide consumers toward an ethos of environmental awareness, is the compact fluorescent light bulb. “Change a Light – Change the World” is the

slogan, and operant resource, with which Wal-Mart encourages its customers to save money while reducing carbon emissions. As complementary operand resources, Wal-Mart has given CFLs preferential shelf space and position over traditional incandescent bulbs; they have given CFL suppliers prominent floor space, including end caps, for consumer-educational displays; and they have educated store associates as to the value of CFLs. During a participant-observation foray into a Supercenter, the authors asked a store employee (a diminutive, white-haired, elderly woman) where we could find light bulbs. Her face lit up, and she insisted on escorting us to the appropriate aisle, where she promptly announced that she was excited about the “new, squiggly, neon kind.” Another merchandising effort has introduced Wal-Mart shoppers to a new environmentally- and householdfriendly development in laundry detergent. Manufacturer Unilever’s (2007) web site tells the story: Unilever’s traditional strength has been in developing brands that consumers want to buy. Today we have to be first choice for major retailers too, as around a third of our worldwide sales now come through 25 major retail chains … After more than a decade working on sustainability initiatives, we believe we can help retailers who are responding to consumers’ growing expectations page_164 Page 165 about social and environmental issues too… In 2005 in the US, we launched “all” Small & Mighty, a new concentrated laundry detergent in reduced-size packaging. Wal-Mart gave it prominent on-shelf placement and highlighted its consumer benefits (easier to carry, pour, and store) and environmental benefits (less water, cardboard and energy used in production, packaging and transport). In another Supercenter visit, the authors ventured into the detergent aisle to inspect the operand resources on display. There we were met by a young woman (a supplier representative, not a Wal-Mart employee), who handed us a promotional coupon for triple-concentrated Wisk (also a Unilever product) and proceeded to expound the household and environmental virtues of the product. If such “lighthouse” products are successful at the retail level at changing customers’ awareness, attitudes, and behaviors, they will support lower costs and greater profits for Wal-Mart and its suppliers. At the same time they will effectively reduce carbon emissions throughout the value chain. Wal-Mart’s hope, and it seems to us like a noble one, is that their connections to working- and middle-class customers will actually help usher in a global culture of environmental sustainability. Conclusion: aftermath of the storm Continued engagement with Wal-Mart reinforces our conclusion that the company remains true to its change of course. As they have always done, they continue to take the lumps of criticism; they continue to seek innovative ways to contain costs, reduce prices, and maintain their competitive advantage among workingand middle-class consumers; and they insist on doing things in their own ways, which are rooted in founder Sam Walton’s homey, provincial, and uniquely small-town-American ethos. However, they have also set their sights on creating more sustainable ways to do their business. In doing so, they are using the mandate of sustainability to drive innovation, not only in their own operations, but also throughout their entire supply chain. Although they have not seized on the buzzwords of service-dominant logic, Wal-Mart has in many ways exemplified the principles. The engines of innovation in sustainability and profitability are the company’s Sustainable Value Networks. Therein, a commitment to collaboration joins employees, suppliers, NGOs, and academics in creative problem solving for the mutual benefit of all stakeholders. Partly as a result of systems thinking, partly as a result of a strong “customer first” philosophy, and partly from the recognition that its store-level associates are one in the same with its customer base, Wal-Mart’s vision of the supply chain, or value chain, rightfully includes customers as well as upstream partners. As vital partners in lasting change, customers must also learn to value sustainability and support it through their purchase choices and post-purchase behaviors. That learning can perhaps best occur in retail space, the nexus where consumer culture meets business culture, where the operant and operand resources that create culture are exchanged and negotiated on a daily basis. page_165 Page 166 A comprehensive vision of the value chain, which includes consumers, may eventually help forge the necessary links to close a “value circle” in which consumer waste can more efficiently backflow to manufacturer/suppliers as valuable raw materials. The closure of resource loops is a critical step toward an ideal of sustainable consumption. We have not prepared this chapter as a blanket endorsement of Wal-Mart. We do, however, offer it as prima facie evidence of a paradigm shift in business toward sustainability as a core value and a compelling, even critical, goal. Consistent with Consumer Culture Theory and service-dominant logic, real societal change will and must occur in the marketplace, where goods, services, and ideas are forged and exchanged by communities of people, who, above all, are concerned with their own well being and that of others, both present and future.

References Arnould, E. J. and Faulkner, E. J. (2005) “Animating the big middle,” Journal of Retailing, 81 (2) 89–96. Arnould, E. J. and Thompson, C. (2005) “Consumer culture theory (CCT): twenty years of research,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31(March, 4) 868–882. Costco (2007a) “Should the US ban plastic grocery bags?,” The Costco Connection, July 2007, 22–7. Costco (2007b) “Garden of earthbound delights,” The Costco Connection, July 2007, 22–7. D’Innocenzio, A. and Kabel, M. (2005) “Some not buying Wal-Mart’s proposals to clean up image,” The Detroit News, Business section retrieved from: http://www.detnews. com/2005/business/0510/30 /A07–365341.htm. Environmental Leader (2007) “Costco Expands Solar Energy System,” retrieved from: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2007/02/06/costco-expands-solar-system/ Esty, D. C. and Winston, A. S. (2006) Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fishman, C. (2006a) “The Wal-Mart effect and a decent society: who knew shopping was so important?,” Academy of Management Perspectives, Aug, pp. 6–25. Fishman, C. (2006b) The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works – and How It’s Transforming the American Economy, New York: The Penguin Press. Glaser, B. G. and Strauss, A. L. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company Global Environmental Solutions, “Sustainability: a Global Business Driver,” 9 Feb. 2007. http://www.pwc.com/extweb/service.nsf/ded5e6fd896f4384802571480057ae90cc5ccd 7a9c84c98e78525690400039daf/$FILE/sustainability.pdf Gunther, M. (2006) “Saving seafood: Wal-Mart has unsentimental business reasons for promoting sustainable fishing practices,” retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2006/ 07/25/news/companies /pluggedin_gunther_fish.fortune/index.htm Gunther, M., Burke, D. and Yang, J. (2006) “The Green Machine,” (Cover Story) Fortune, (07385587), 154 (3), 34–42. Kaveski, J. G. (2004) “Long-term sustainability of sustainable practice: from green fad to green facts” Johnson Controls, p. 1–9. Johnson Controls, Inc. Retrieved Feb. 20, 2007 http://www.johnsoncontrols.com /cg-pressroom/ page_166 Page 167 Kramer, M. (2006) “Changing the game: leading corporations switch from defense to offense in solving global problems,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 29, retrieved Feb. 20, 2007 from http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/features/feature_ template.cfm?ID=1318&page=1 Lusch, R. F., Vargo, S. L. and O’Brien, M. (2007) “Competing through service: insights from servicedominant logic,” Journal of Retailing, 83(1): 5–18. Rosen, E. I. (2004) “The quality of work at Wal-Mart,” presented at the Conference on Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, April 12, 2004. http://www.brandeis.edu/centers/wsrc/scholars/Scholars/ E_Rosen/NewLaborForumPaper.pdf St. Louis Business Journal (2004) EEOC files disability discrimination suit against Wal-Mart, January 20, 2004, retrieved from http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/ 2004/01/19/daily29.html Stigson, B. (2002) “Corporate social responsibility: a new business paradigm,” isuma: Canadian Journal of Policy Research, 3(2) 21 Aug. 2002: 32–6. isuma. Retrieved Feb 20, 2007, http://www.isuma.net/v03n02 /index_e.shtml. Stigson, Bjorn (2007) “Are companies lobbying for sustainable development?” on Businesses Cannot Survive in Societies that Fail, http://president.wbcsd.org/2007/06/index.html Target (2007) Retrieved from: http://sites.target.com/site/en/corporate/page.jsp?content Id=PRD03–002348. The Oregonian, January 20, 2007, DT2. Unilever (2007) http://www.unilever.com/ourvalues/environmentandsociety/env_social_ report/customers.asp University of Arkansas (2007) Sustainability Speaker Series, Presented by the University of Arkansas Center for Applied Sustainability, Reynolds Center Auditorium, University of Arkansas, March 14. Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F. (2004) Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing Journal of Marketing, 68 (June), 1–17. Wal-Mart (2006a) Andy Ruben, Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Wal-Mart, 11/2/06 Sustainability Milestone Meeting, Bentonville, AK. Wal-Mart (2006b) Tyler Elm, Sustainability Milestone Meeting, Bentonville, AK, July 13. Wal-Mart (2007) Sustainability Milestone Meeting, Bentonville, AK. March 15. Zorn, T. E. and Collins E. (forthcoming) “Green is the new black: are CSR and sustainable business just fads?” Sustainable Business Network, 2007: 1–22. University of Waikato. http://www.sustainable.org.nz /resource.asp?id=80 Retrieved Feb. 9, 2007.

page_167 Page 168 This page intentionally left blank. page_168 Page 169 Part Five Rites and games page_169 Page 170 This page intentionally left blank. page_170 Page 171 9 Tinsel, trimmings, and tensions Consumer negotiations of a focal Christmas artifact Cele C. Otnes, Elizabeth Crosby, Robert Kreuzbauer, and Jennifer Ho Ritualistic consumption has been defined as the use of goods, services, and experiences in expressive, dramatic, symbolic, formal, and intense ways, in contexts that are often repeated over time (Rook 1985). Popular consumer rituals include holidays, special occasions, and pilgrimages to what consumers perceive to be sacred sites or events (e.g., heritage locales such as Althorp, the birthplace of Princess Diana, or visits to the Burning Man Festival; Kozinets 2002; Otnes and Maclaran 2007). Scholars consistently demonstrate that consumers find both idiosyncratic and more culturally valorized rituals to be financially, socially, and emotionally significant (Belk 1989; Otnes and Lowrey 2004; Sherry 1983; Wallendorf and Arnould 1991). Participation in some consumption rituals often involves coordinating and planning among both nuclear and extended families, and such planning may require weeks, months or even a year or longer. For example, Otnes and Pleck (2003) observe that in the 1990s, Bride’s magazine was publishing a twelve-month planning calendar with 44 wedding-related tasks, compared to a two-month calendar with less than half this number of tasks in its first issues in 1959 (e.g., weddings). Yet even as ritual planning has increased in complexity in consumer culture, little is known about how family members negotiate as they co-create the aesthetic aspects of ritualistic experiences. This topic is important because aesthetically laden artifacts (such as wedding gowns and Christmas decorations) are often at the forefront of consumers’ ritual experiences (Friese 1997), and fulfill important functions such as expressing creativity and identity, and signaling the possession of taste to one’s social group. A promising context in which to explore this topic is the celebration of Christmas. By far the most popular of all holidays in the US, 96% of Americans celebrate Christmas in some form, even though less than 80% claim to be Christian (“Demography of the US”). Sales of Christmas-related goods and services were projected to top $450 billion in 2006 (“Counting on Christmas Statistics” 2007). In addition to providing fertile ground for examining consumers’ negotiation strategies, focusing on how consumers co-create Christmas celebrations supplements extant studies of Christmas shopping and gift giving (Lowrey et al. 2004; page_171 Page 172 Sherry and McGrath 1989), by providing a more holistic understanding of consumers’ Christmas experiences. Our specific purpose in this paper is to explore an emergent topic: how family members negotiate as they co-create a key artifact of the holiday – the Christmas tree. An estimated 36 million real Christmas trees were sold in 2006, with an additional 46 million artificial ones used in American households. Furthermore, Americans spent $15.8 billion on decorations in 2005, with a significant share allocated to tree decorations (“Counting on Christmas Statistics” 2007). During the holiday, Christmas trees are the most relatively permanent reminder of the festivities; in many homes, trees remain displayed for weeks before and after Christmas Day. In addition to the intuitive importance of the Christmas tree in family celebrations, our research reveals other salient reasons to explore how families negotiate as they select, prepare, and interact with this artifact. First, the tree is the key ritual artifact during the holiday season, and acts as a hub from which salient and sensory-laden sub-rituals emanate (See Figure 9.1). These include selecting the tree, using the tree as a repository for gifts, using it as a repository for emerging family traditions (e.g., a special ornament selected by family members), housing souvenir collections, chronicling family history (e.g., Baby’s First Christmas),

decorating, and signaling the start and end of the Christmas holiday, since many consumers regard decorating the tree as the event that “kicks off” Christmas. Second, relationships between household members are fluid and are constantly renegotiated, and a natural result of this fact is that their co-creation of Christmas tree traditions is fluid as well. Third, exploring the ways Christmas trees are co-created provides us with an interesting perspective from which to view ritual participation both from a synchronic (same-year) and a diachronic (multiple-year) perspective, because we can tap into both how consumers decorate for the holidays during a particular season, but also explore what aspects of rituals are reproduced as families change and grow. Given the integral role of the tree in celebrations of Christmas, we explore these questions: 1) what tensions pervade consumers’ co-creation of the Christmas tree? and 2) what negotiation strategies do consumers employ when trying to resolve these tensions? By focusing on consumers’ negotiation of this focal artifact, we recognize that some artifacts are more important than others in a ritual celebration, and that contested meanings surrounding such artifacts can reveal interesting dynamics with regard to power, control, and compromise within a social group. Thus, our paper contributes both to our understanding of focal artifacts in consumers’ ritual experiences, and to the revitalization of interest on household negotiation strategies (e.g., Cotte and Wood 2004) in consumer research. Because we center our paper on understanding the importance of the contemporary Christmas tree in American consumer culture, it is appropriate to begin by understanding how this artifact achieved its current stature in the holiday. page_172 Page 173

Figure 9.1 Background history of the Christmas tree Most scholars agree the tradition of a decorated tree has its origins in the German celebration of Christmas. Restad (1995) offers a diary entry from 1605 where fir trees were set up in a German parlor, then decorated with paper, fruit, and gold foil. It is believed Prince Albert of Germany accelerated adoption of the tradition in Europe and the US when he made Christmas trees a visible part of the celebration in the British Royal Family in the 1840s (Gillis 1996; Kuper 1993). However, Nissenbaum (1997) presents evidence that Christmas trees were already prevalent in the US by the mid-1830s, and Restad (1995) argues that by the 1840s, Christmas trees were considered de rigueur in Northeastern upper-class homes in the US. A key factor in the trickling-down of the Christmas tree tradition to the middle class was its increasing presence in the emerging national media, most notably Godey’s Ladies Book. Restad (1995, 63) writes:

page_173 Page 174 In 1850, [Godey’s] published in its December issue the first widely circulated picture of a decorated evergreen, placed atop a table and surrounded by family. The picture had appeared two years earlier … but with a twist … the English engraving showed Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their family standing next to a tree. Godey’s copied it exactly, except that it removed the Queen’s crown and other royal symbols, remaking the engraving into a very American Christmas scene. The popularity of the Christmas tree spread to consumers who did not celebrate the holiday. Pleck (2000) notes that as early as the 1880s, Jewish families began adopting the tradition; this practice was seen as a symbol of acculturation (see also Belk 1989). By the end of the nineteenth century, two key artifacts associated with the Christmas tree – ornaments and gifts – had become unabashedly commercialized. Restad notes, “as quickly as [Americans] adopted the tree custom, they abandoned the tradition of homemade ornaments … and went shopping for them” (1995, 106). Germany began exporting intricate glass ornaments and icicles to the US in the 1860s, and just a few years later, such kitschy ornaments as “clowns, Bismarck leaping upon Napoleon’s shoulders, and strange-looking old women with heads larger than their bodies” were available (Restad 1995, 112). Merchants such as Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia bolstered the lavish Christmas tree tradition not only by selling ornate ornaments, but also by displaying brightly lit, visually pleasing trees in their stores (Schmidt 1997). By 1890, the tradition of the Christmas tree had become so entrenched in America that it was considered “old fashioned” (Santino 1995, 181). However, the term was meant to convey nostalgia and respect rather than scorn. Given that Caplow (1984) finds individuals typically adhere to the unspoken “Tree Rule,” which states that “Married couples with children of any age should put up trees in their homes,” (1984, 1308), it appears the Christmas tree has retained its vitality as a focal ritual element. Recently, the Christmas tree tradition has spread to other countries where the holiday is not celebrated as a Christian rite. As is typically the case with cultural assimilation, in those countries the tree has taken on new variants and meanings. For example, the Japanese incorporate their love of “cute” popular-culture icons into the Christmas tree tradition (Kimura and Belk 2005). The multiplicity of options, meanings, and forms of the Christmas tree also means it is now the focus of debate in some households (e.g., whether it should be aesthetically pleasing or gravitate more toward a kitschy style; Löfgren 1993). Meaning of the Christmas tree The original meanings of the Christmas tree – e.g., that it was a reminder of nature in “the death-sleep of winter,” and that it was a symbol of new beginnings – seem to have been subsumed by more personal and commercial meanings in contemporary culture (Santino 1995, 182). Nissenbaum (1997) argues the reason the tree was so integral to the American celebration is that it fulfills key objectives for page_174 Page 175 the adults who were creating the Victorian Christmas as a child-centered holiday. The tree served as a focal point of surprise and wonder (see also Schmidt 1997), allowing the adults to root themselves in “folk authenticity,” (p. 177) and reinforcing parental socialization that children should be selfless participants in Christmas. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss (1993) observes the Christmas tree represents an aggregate symbol of the supernatural aspects of the holiday: “it focuses on one object previously scattered attributes of others: magic tree, fire, long-lasting night, enduring greenness” (p. 42). Hirschman and LaBarbera (1989) observe the tree is a vehicle through which consumers experience the sensuality and hedonism of the holiday, and note the heightened sensory experiences associated with the tree and other artifacts “correspond to the heightened sense of communal bonding, spiritual commitment … [and] a festival of excess” (p. 142, italics in original). Even with the negative connotations of that term, the authors associate the sensory aspects of the tree with the secular-positive aspects of Christmas. Finally, most historians discuss the importance of the tree as a symbolic gathering place for family (e.g., Nissenbaum 1997). We explore the salience of these and other themes when interpreting our findings. Method As part of a larger study on consumers’ Christmas experiences, we conducted depth interviews with 26 consumers from December 2006 to February 2007, four of whom were from the same extended family. This method enabled us to tap into the social and cultural worldviews of informants. We employed snowball sampling, recruiting informants from among family and acquaintance networks. We interviewed 20 women and six men. Informants ranged in age from 22 to 64, and resided in either the Midwest or the Northeast US. We followed McCracken’s (1988) interview recommendations, leading with several “grand tour” questions to elicit holistic descriptions of our informants’ Christmas experiences, and to identify the Christmas-related activities important to them. Interviews ranged from 45 to 75 minutes, were audiotaped and transcribed, and yielded 334 double-spaced pages of text. In analyzing the text, we sought out emergent themes while also engaging in dialectical tacking (Strauss and Corbin 1998), immersing ourselves in the interdisciplinary literature on Christmas and ritual celebrations, to

seek out consistencies and/or inconsistencies with our text. In our initial readings, we narrowed the findings such that patterns of association and assumption emerged and became clear (McCracken 1988). Although we did not initially intend to focus on how consumers negotiate the Christmas tree, the sheer quantity and intriguing quality of text devoted to the artifact spurred us to narrow our focus. We then narrowed it even more to unpacking the specific tensions that emerge as consumers select, decorate, and display the tree, and to understanding the strategies consumers develop when they negotiate both internally and with others to resolve these tensions. page_175 Page 176 Interpretation We find that five distinct pairs of tensions can shape consumers’ co-creation of the Christmas tree. These are: aesthetics vs. sentimentality, inclusiveness vs. risk, family fantasy vs. family reality, authenticity vs. convenience, and taste1 vs. taste2. We identify a set of negotiation strategies that emerge as informants attempt to resolve these tensions, although informants sometimes apply the same strategy to more than one type of tension. Table 1 summarizes these tensions and strategies, and provides additional excerpts from our text that illuminate each strategy. Aesthetics vs. sentimentality Gillis (1996, 102) notes one function of the modern Christmas is to enable people to feel connected to holiday celebrations in past years, to experience “what Mircea Eliade would call a ‘succession of eternities.’” One clear way consumers connect to past Christmases is by retaining and reusing the same ritual artifacts every time they celebrate. In the case of the tree, consumers typically retain boxes of ornaments laden with nostalgia and sentimentality to be placed on the tree every year. But one difficulty with this behavior is that these sentimental ornaments may not meet consumers’ individual, often evolving, standards of beauty. Likewise, these individual standards are embedded in a consumer culture that increasingly embraces aesthetics as a cultural imperative (Postrel 2003). In some ritual contexts, sentimental but not necessarily aesthetically pleasing elements may be excused because they are ritually required but are used in a limited fashion (e.g., cheap whistles that guests blow once or twice at a birthday party). In the case of the Christmas tree, however, decorations may be on display for weeks, and may be displayed to a ritual audience extending beyond the household. As such, innocuous items such as lopsided reindeer made out of popsicle sticks or other mementos of early childhood craft classes may continually grate on consumers and become regarded as personal aesthetic affronts. Granted, some informants clearly opt for a sentimental over an aesthetic approach to decorating their trees, plying their branches with childhood ornaments and those they describe as “ugly” but that are nevertheless important to them. Yet somewhat surprisingly, given the overt sentimentality and family-oriented nature of the holiday, many express ambivalence toward marrying sentimental and aesthetic approaches, and a few adamantly refuse to do so even when others wish it. Those informants who must resolve family tensions between aesthetics and sentimentality when co-creating the Christmas tree employ three strategies: dictate, segregate (same-site), or segregate (multiple site). When using dictate, the (typically female) individual in charge of the Christmas tree ritual will simply decorate the tree herself, thus controlling all decisions with regard to the ornament mix, and typically favoring the aesthetic over the sentimental. Julie remarks: J: One of the nice things about doing it all yourself is, I get to choose which decorations go on … I like a particular look or color and mainly I like page_176 Page 177 Table 9.1 Tensions and resolution strategies pertaining to co- creation of a focal ritual artifact Tension Strategies for Description of Strategy Excerpts from Text Resolution Tradition vs. Dictate Artifact creator does not invite With anybody helping me decorate Aesthetics others to help and takes total the tree is I get really cranky. Very control of ritual artifact creation. cranky … Because it’s got to be just so. The kids’ ornaments, you know the Segregate Allocate a particular spot or (same-site) amount of the ritual artifact to the ones that they made in elementary school, they might go to the side of meaning that is more the tree … But they’re on. contested/potentially offensive. Segregate Create distinct variants of the same More than one tree (multiple-site) ritual artifact in order to fulfill different functions that were at odds.

Inclusiveness Scale back vs. Risk

Eliminate some aspects of the ritual The tree was tied to the curtains so in order to minimize risk while the cat wouldn’t knock it over and being inclusive no ornaments were down low. So the whole Christmas revolved around that stupid cat. Socialization Teach vulnerable household But they’ve been taught from the members how to participate to time they were little to watch for minimize risk colors and don’t put like ornaments all close together and shapes and that. I think we’ve had a good time all growing up and learning. Family Fantasy Adhere to Minimal Select ritual variant that is scaled I just cannot bear to have her vs. Family Acceptable down but would still be recognized [92-year old mother] not to have a Reality Standards as a variant of the ritual artifact tree… or more years ago, I got her a little…four foot or five foot tree. And so we decorate that, and that’s about as much, but it’s still a tree. (emphasis added) Reserving the Save some aspect of ritual Sacred celebration for person who cannot fully participate in order to support the fantasy that they are engaged in the ritual. Eliminate the RitualLose some aspect of Christmas tree [Daughter] couldn’t get under the ritual because key members no tree so the boys would hand [gifts] longer involved to her and she would put them in piles. Now the boys are gone, we’ve done [different things]. Authenticity Adhere to See above See above vs. Minimally Convenience Acceptable Standards; Eliminate the Ritual page_177 Page 178 more of a straw wooden kind of thing, so I don’t like balls and I don’t like any of that stuff … So since it was just me I chose all those things based on what I felt in the mood for that day … I: Do your kids have ornaments that, that they made in like grade school? J: Some … actually some of those I didn’t put up ’cause they’re so, so tacky. And I wasn’t into tacky. In the case of dictate, the primary orchestrator of the Christmas tree takes the position that the best compromise is no compromise. This strategy supports assertions that because married women are responsible for activities such as rituals that foster kin keeping and social relations within the family, they often wield much more “family power” in these contexts (c.f., Burns 1992; Zipp et al. 2004). This strategy is similar to the unilateral strategy of “enforce” that Humphreys and Grayson (2007) identify among participants in the Wikipedia community. For other reasons as well – e.g., their own strong personalities, their now teenage children’s lack of interest in participating in the ritual – dictators often encounter little resistance to the use of their strategy. In contrast to that situation, however, same-site segregation arises when family members resist the monopolization of taste by a primary ritual creator. As a result, this strategy represents a compromise with family members who wish to opt for a more sentimental over aesthetically pleasing (e.g., more uniform, simple, or contemporary) tree. While one person (again, typically the female head of household) typically oversees the Christmas decoration, she may also devise a rule regarding the maximum amount – and more importantly, the precise location – of ornaments at odds with her aesthetic sensibilities. Thus, same-site segregation implies that while such items may be permitted, the offending ornaments are typically allocated to the back or side of the tree. Martha permits her son Ryan to maintain his own shrine of childhood ornaments on the “main” Christmas tree, as long he abides by certain rules regarding size and location. Yet even with this heuristic, Martha acknowledges how the presence of a ritual audience would shift her priorities toward her own aesthetic interpretation and away his more sentimental definition: I think that I am in charge of like 90% (of the tree decorations) and nobody infringes on the 90%. And there’s 10% that I just let go, like the “Ryan shrine.” No big deal … I just let the 10% go and I say fine. If I was going to entertain I might spread these out a bit because there’s a huge concentration of ornaments all in this one spot. When it’s just all of us [no guests], I don’t care.

Likewise, in order to accommodate the sheer abundance of ornaments and decorations that families accumulate over the years, several informants now have more than one tree in their homes. The presence of more than one tree often emerges as families practice the strategy of multiple-site segregation, which means different trees serve different aesthetic functions in the household. For example, even though Ryan has a shrine on the “main” tree in the house, he describes a second tree: page_178 Page 179 in the kitchen which has all the child’s artwork and heavy ornaments and ugly ones. So my mom tries to put those on that tree … We do them at the same time because my mom knows which ugly ones go on the small tree. In addition, the family resolves the potential conflict over which ornaments deserve to be on which tree by engaging in teasing and games (e.g., hide the icicle ornaments Ryan’s mom loves, but that everyone else thinks are ugly). By engaging in these activities, the family essentially embeds these contentious ornaments in their own cherished possession rituals (Belk et al. 1989). Thus, rather than engaging in negotiation strategies such as bargaining and whining (Palan and Wilkes 1997), the family incorporates the contested artifacts into a tradition that reflects shared, deep meaning for the family. Such teasing strategies not only become traditions in and of themselves, but also seem to be regarded as successful ways to defuse any tension between family members who have diverse opinions regarding the appropriate aesthetics of the Christmas tree. Inclusiveness vs. risk The family oriented nature of the Christmas holiday means most people try to be inclusive in their holiday celebrations, and find ways to accommodate participants who are important to them, but who may not yet (or ever) understand ritual norms or roles accompanying the holiday (Rook 1985). Two specific groups are very young children and pets – whom Hirschman (1994) observes are typically regarded as cherished family members. However important it may be to include these parties, they also pose a threat to the Christmas tree, which is an especially tantalizing, fragile, and unstable object. Rhonda describes how she and her husband opted to be inclusive rather than risk-averse with their daughter, when she was experiencing Christmas at a young age: “We were really dumb. We let her handle glass … ornaments that we shouldn’t have done … didn’t put them on securely so they would fall off and break.” For those consumers who wish to manage the tensions between inclusiveness and risk in a more proactive manner, consumers may use one or more of three strategies: scale back, renegotiate the spatial aspects of Christmas, or engage in ritual socialization. With scale back, household members find ways to adapt ritual traditions in order to accommodate family members who may physically threaten the tree. Barbara’s family prefers a sentimental tree, but this year their new dog forced them to modify these desires: I bought a smaller tree and we did not put any personal ornaments on it this year so I didn’t have the enjoyment of pulling the box out and looking at the “Oh, this is the one [daughter] made in kindergarten,” or “Here’s [son’s] baby picture from his first Christmas …” So that kind of detracted … [The dog might] knock ornaments over, he’d bite them off or … just … mess them up, irreplaceable things … the tree’s beautiful, it’s just not as personal. page_179 Page 180 Likewise, animals and young children cause consumers to renegotiate the spatial aspects of the Christmas tree, affecting both how and where it is placed in the home, and the ornaments placed upon it. Barbara’s narrative illustrates this point: I had … the little new tree, set up … ready to decorate in one area and when [husband] came home, he’s like, “Whoa, that’s right in our walkway.” I said, “Well, no you just need to walk around it a little … “ So he [tried] to live with it … and then it was too bright … next to the TV … And I’m like, “Okay, we’ll move it. Where do we move it?” He said, “Let’s put it right there in front of the piano.” I said, “Well, then, you know, no, because there’s a cabinet back there … and you can’t get to the CDs and we need that.” And then, “Well, let’s put it next to the window.” Well, that’s where the dog likes to look out, we can’t do that … definitely not. “Well, let’s put it in the corner of the dining room.” [But] by the window I wouldn’t be able to see it either. And it’s important for me to be able to see it. And so we said, “Well … we can move that over in front of the piano.” Which is more doable ’cause it’s got the tiny trunk. I said, “Okay, we’ll try it.” So, I could see … thirds of it above the dining room table. It worked out all right. Thus, for Barbara, including the dog in Christmas entails two compromises. First, she must compromise with herself by not having the size of tree and array of sentimental ornaments desired, in order to include her new puppy in the holiday. Second, she must compromise with her husband over the spatial placement of the tree in their home, so she is able to accommodate both the dog’s activity and her desire to enjoy the aesthetics of the tree from different vantage points. Some consumers strive to resolve the tension between inclusiveness and risk by practicing ritual

socialization, teaching younger children about the fragile nature of Christmas decorations as early as possible, while still including them in the decoration rituals. Given that Christmas was conceptualized as child-centered during the Victorian era (Belk 1989; Nissenbaum 1997), it is not surprising some families choose this form of negotiation. But in both cases below, allowing children to be included does not mean their aesthetic choices will be retained if these choices are at odds with those of others in the family. When asked how she felt when her son chose ornaments that she did not consider to be “nice,” Marjorie replies: R: Oh well, that’s totally fine. I want them on there and … I want him to have fun with them. I did do a little bit of rearranging because he had a notion that he wanted like these clusters of like five things right on top of each other, literally on the same branch and so I tried to, you know, talk him into spreading those out so they could be seen a little better. So we wouldn’t have these bare spots on other parts of the tree. Thus, as is the case with other rituals such as birthday parties (Otnes and McGrath 1994), consumers often use rituals as “teaching times” with young children. But in the case of Christmas, doing so enables them to resolve the tensions between page_180 Page 181 inclusiveness and the risk involved in having young children interact with fragile artifacts. Furthermore, ritual socialization also enables adults to rationalize including children even though they might not be “ready” to participate in holiday decorating without posing some level of risk by being included. Ritual fantasy vs. ritual reality Many informants possess an idealized image of how they want their Christmas tree selection and decoration to proceed. However, the realities of everyday life – including time pressures and changes as family members move through the life cycle – mean that oftentimes, their fantasies of co-creating the Christmas tree cannot always be fulfilled. Julie describes her “ritual longing” (Arnould, Price and Curasi 2004) for the way she and her family have selected their Christmas tree in the recent past: It’s very, very fresh in my mind the notion of all four of us walking out in this Christmas tree farm area looking for a tree and dragging it back and … going in this little place and having hot chocolate … I think I’m still willing to hold onto that in a little more permanent way. When consumers cannot enact their ritual fantasies, they often employ three strategies to help them negotiate the tension between ritual fantasy and ritual reality: adhere to an acceptable minimal standard, reserve the sacred, and eliminate some traditions. With adhere to an acceptable minimum standard, consumers often seek a way to participate in their Christmas tree traditions that somehow retains key elements of their fantasies. While this standard falls short of their desires, it enables them to feel they have preserved at least some acceptable level of ritual participation, and that the ritual has not disappeared entirely. For the first time since they began the tradition, in 2006 not all of Julie’s family members were able to traipse through a tree farm, cut down the tree, drag it to the car, and then drink hot chocolate at a local café. As the family attempted to negotiate how this tree-selection ritual would be enacted, Julie resolves the tension between her fantasy and the emerging disappointing reality by setting a rule that at least one of their two teenage children must participate, noting “I was unwilling for it just to be [husband] and me. And I consented to at least one of the kids … because I think of Christmas preparation as being a family thing … “ Thus, rather than just selecting the tree with her husband, which would have been the easiest configuration of family members to orchestrate, Julie requires the presence of at least one child so that she can reassure herself that in fact, selecting the tree is still a “family” ritual. With regard to reserving the sacred, Marjorie finds a way to keep the fantasy alive that her husband participated in the tree decoration in some small way: He and I do the lights together … But this year he was just too busy, so [her son] and I did it … So I saved … five or six … ornaments … that are special page_181 Page 182 to [her husband] … that he always wants to put on a certain way. So we set those aside and we set the star aside. He put those on, then we put the star on, then we lit it, then we took him to the airport, basically. By reserving the ornaments that were sacred to her husband for him to place on the tree, Marjorie is able to maintain her husband’s ritual performance role (Rook 1985) to some degree, even if it is scaled down from previous years, and satisfy the aspect of her fantasy that revolves around both of them decorating the tree together. Finally, some consumers simply do not choose to find ways to renegotiate the tension between family fantasy and family reality, and eliminate ritual aspects because key players or artifacts involved in the ritual have disappeared. However, when this action occurs, consumers are often very forthcoming about how they mourn the loss of this ritual. When asked what she likes most about Christmas, Allison says: My favorite is the Christmas tree, I think that’s the thing I miss the most. I used to put that up every year. I’d get the girls to help, I’d get [husband] to help me pick it out and I’d insist on a real live tree. But nobody was

helping me the last six years, so I just stopped putting a Christmas tree up, so I really miss that. Maybe at some point we’ll get back to doing that. What is telling about Allison’s interview is that she then devotes almost her entire conversation not to describing her current Christmas celebrations, but to reliving the ways she used to decorate her Christmas tree, and describing how much she misses being involved in the tradition. This fact demonstrates that the decision to abandon a tradition is not necessarily without ritual longing (Arnould et al. 2004), and that for many consumers, mourning the passing of a ritual within the larger holiday context is a real and meaningful activity that can tinge their experiences with feelings of loss. Authenticity vs. convenience For many of our informants, the meaning of an authentic Christmas tree tradition stems from the adherence to two rules. The first – that each household with young children must have a Christmas tree, was initially observed by Caplow (1984), in his study of Middletown families. The second rule, which emerges from this study, is that live Christmas trees are preferable to artificial variants. Our informants describe three ways they acquire trees. From least to most authentic, these are: acquiring an artificial tree; acquiring a natural tree from a tree farm that has already been chopped down; and finally, seeking out a tree that is growing in the woods, and choping it down. One reason for the emphasis on a fresh Christmas tree is that the added aesthetic component of the smell of a real Christmas tree seems to enhance the authenticity of many of our informants’ Christmas experiences. But as Arnould and Price (2000) observe, consuming authenticity often requires individuals to page_182 Page 183 engage in authenticating acts and authoritative performances that can be quite demanding. In the case of acquiring a real Christmas tree, consumers must retrieve, haul, care for, and clean up after the object. Such demands lead many informants to opt (often with regret) for an artificial tree. When informants try and negotiate the tensions arising from the decision to opt for authenticity over convenience, they follow two strategies we have already identified – adhere to the minimally acceptable standard or eliminate the tradition (while again mourning the loss). Carrie and her husband enact this first strategy the year they were moving: “We didn’t really want to have a big real tree, because we would have had to move it. So, we negotiated down to the fake three-foot Christmas tree. And then we at least had something for Christmas.” Likewise, Joan describes how the sheer physical labor required to put up a tree means she now opts to use one she and her husband actually have in their living room every day of the year. Adding the appropriate decorations nevertheless enables her to reconceptualize it as a Christmas tree when the calendar dictates: J: It just seems so tedious, you know what I mean, get it [the tree] to look right … I mean, when I was a kid I was always in charge of decorating the tree. I: So you think you’re bored with it? J: I’m getting too old for this. Anyway, we have one of those trees that you stick in the corner all year round, one of those permanent ones you know, that just kind of fills in the space, so he [husband] decorates that. I: So it’s up all the time? J: Yeah. I: Does it look like a Christmas tree? Is it “evergreeny”? J: No. No, but it looks kind of cute after he’s [husband] thrown red decorations all over it. Several issues therefore emerge with respect to consumers’ decision to strive (or not to strive) for authenticity. First, there are individual or collective differences, sometimes within the same family, to try and achieve as much authenticity as possible in acquiring a tree, in order to enhance the magic of both the focal artifact and the holiday (Levi-Strauss 1993). Second, there are also issues that ritual boredom or apathy, or even their energy levels, might be a determining factor in whether consumers make the effort to create an authentic holiday, or opt for a more convenient solution. Taste1vs. taste2 The final tension that emerges when household members decorate their trees can stem purely from different established tastes in tree fashions. Not surprisingly, the central role of the Christmas tree means some consumers develop very specific ideas as to how they want their trees to appear. Sometimes these preferences are the result of new market offerings – and innovations in trees can result in clashes of aesthetic page_183 Page 184 preferences within a household. Joan describes how her husband “wanted one of those fiber-optic trees. My only problem is that you can’t fill it with decorations.” Likewise, differences in the definition of a “natural” tree can also stymie the ability of household members to select a variant of this focal ritual artifact that can please everyone. Peter observes about the tree selection in his family: It’s a compromise every year. The going down to find a Christmas tree. We make a big joke of it, but we all look for that perfect tree that’s naturally grown. Whenever we’ve been in [Northeast], at home, we don’t

buy a Christmas tree. We just go out in the woods and find one that’s naturally grown. So it’s difficult to find that perfect, naturally-grown tree. When it’s naturally grown it has its own little idiosyncrasies and it’s a joke that we have to compromise with [his wife] to find one that’s acceptable … some of us are more tolerant of the naturally grown, and we don’t have to look as far … I mean, it’s wearing us out. You know, we’ve already looked at two dozen … I don’t have a problem with going out in the woods and harvesting any naturally grown tree even if the branches are a little sparse or a branch seems to be missing. To me that’s nature’s way of doing it, and I can bring it in and accept it and not be bothered. [His wife] likes it to be a little fuller. You know, the branches just so. Nice shape and all that … To some extent it’s [a] positive [experience] because it always gives us something to, you know, tease her on as far as her … you know, we make jokes and make fun of it. To some extent we’ve established a little bit of a tradition there of having to go out and search for the perfect, naturally grown tree, which doesn’t exist. Peter’s experience reveals that he and his wife adhere to two different understandings of beauty – aesthetic appeal vs. authenticity. The first adds in the elements of aesthetics often studied in cognitive psychology (e.g., Reber et al. 2004) such as symmetry, balance and lushness. The second refers to consumers’ sociocognitive prototypes about certain objects and events that function as standards for the “real tree” or “tree-discovering event.” And while Peter’s wife might not really find the naturally grown tree as aesthetically pleasing, for him the whole set of events that surround finding the tree, which includes joking about the always-imperfect acquisition, adds to the beauty and authenticity of the event. In addition, however, some consumers whose tastes are at such odds find they have no way to resolve them amicably, and the resulting conflict could cause interpersonal strife. In those cases, some informants resort to using a third-party mediator when selecting or decorating a tree. Lowrey et al. (2004) demonstrate that third parties are often key players in helping Christmas shoppers complete their gift-buying tasks, and for some households, third parties are also essential for completing tasks related to the Christmas tree as well. Barbara observes that when she and her husband went to the tree farm this year: I like the short, fat trees and [husband] likes the taller, less plump trees. And so … I kept on pointing out short, fat ones and he kept pointing out taller, page_184 Page 185 skinny ones. And finally a girlfriend of mine who was there too said, “What about this tree?” And it was perfect, and we just couldn’t have picked it out ourselves because I kept pointing out the ones I liked and he kept pointing out the ones he liked. If the definition of compromise is that no party is successful in getting his or her way, then the use of a third-party mediator in this case enables both Barbara and her husband to “win” by not having to bend to the wishes of the other party, but also to lose gracefully by both letting go of their desired standards for the tree. Limitations Although we do interview multiple members of one extended family, we did not secure all perspectives from participants in the Christmas ritual from within the same household. To truly understand how negotiations proceed within a family, and whether and how these are perceived as successful by all parties, we believe it is paramount to interview couples, parents and other family members – and in fact, all observers and participants in a ritual within a particular household, and not just the primary orchestrators of the ritual. Other limitations of this study stem from our use of only one method (depth interviews) in data collection. Future research could employ a multi-method approach, integrating techniques such as projective techniques or collages that could feature both actual and idealized images of Christmas in a household. Finally, our sample only consists of European Americans, and we acknowledge their perspective is highly engrained in their cultural heritage. Future research In expanding the focus of our research, we suggest that there are several avenues worthy of pursuit on the topic of understanding how consumers co-create ritual aesthetics that emerge in our text. These include exploring the role of class and taste in creating rituals, extending this research to other ritual contexts, evaluating how successful consumers perceive the different co-creation strategies to be and how they shape ritual satisfaction, exploring the issue of ritual death, and focusing on naturalistic perspectives of consumer aesthetics. The role(s) of class and taste in ritual co-creation Some of the tensions that emerge in our study seem to point to the possession and enactment of differences in cultural capital among members of the same family. For example, Bourdieu (1984) finds that sentimentality is more common among those with low cultural capital, while a focus on aesthetics and taste is typically associated with those who have higher cultural capital. One interesting extension of this research would be to explore whether different family members who may have different aspirations with regard to social class clash with regard to this or page_185 Page 186

other tensions when co-creating rituals. Although Bourdieu (1984) suggests that habitus or a system of dispositions is indoctrinated by the family unit, our study suggests that perhaps differences in cultural capital occur within the family unit as well, and these differences may manifest themselves in terms of aesthetic conflicts. Furthermore, even if habitus is shared by one family unit, family-expansion factors such as marriage, the inclusion of long-term partners and the incorporation of close friends as family may mean that different understandings of habitus may be operating. Expanding to other ritual contexts Clearly, it would be interesting to see how our five tensions and negotiation strategies pertain to consumers’ co-creation of other consumption rituals, both less and more elaborate (e.g., graduation; weddings). In so doing, we can gain an understanding of the theoretical relevance of these tensions and negotiation strategies across consumers’ ritual celebrations. Furthermore, the fact that different ritual contexts may have more or less stable sets of participants within particular social groups could obviously affect the types of tensions that arise, and coping strategies that consumers employ, when they attempt to negotiate the aesthetic aspects of various rituals. For example, some families may follow a plan of rotating to different sets of relatives in order to celebrate holidays, and the types of aesthetic issues and solutions that may arise clearly could differ, depending on the location and cast of characters involved in staging the rituals. Evaluation of strategies Because we did not anticipate that the Christmas tree would be such a focal center for negotiation, and because the strategies for dealing with this situation emerged, we were unable to probe our informants as to their assessment of whether particular emergent strategies were, in their eyes, successful or unsuccessful in helping them co-create the Christmas ritual. Certainly, future research could employ a variety of methods – from ethnographic to experimental – to determine whether consumers regard some of these strategies to be more successful at guiding co-creation, and at shaping their emotional experiences of rituals. Ritual death Our interviews were consistent in revealing that consumers were often quite sad and resentful when experiencing the death of a ritual as they knew it. Even having one less meaningful person choose to participate in a ritual could result in an informant experiencing these negative emotions. More dramatically, losing a ritual that had always been integral to the celebration of Christmas – such as choosing or being forced to abandon the idea of having a tree – can also prove disheartening and disappointing. Our interviews reveal that people often develop very specific strategies to cope with the death of some ritual aspect, in their attempt to retain the page_186 Page 187 sentimentality and nostalgia of Christmas. Likewise, ritual death can also occur on a more macro, cultural level. For example, after Macy’s bought the iconic Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago, many consumers mourned the loss of the traditions they experienced while Christmas shopping (“Marshall Field’s Last Christmas,” 2005). Future research could unpack how consumers cope with ritual death, and reconfigure their ritual experiences on both the micro and macro levels. Toward a grounded understanding of aesthetics The dominant research on aesthetics and consumption is based in cognitive psychology, which empirically studies questions pertaining to which type of visual stimuli please the senses in ways that produce an aesthetic impression. Findings in that area reveal that certain structures of visual stimuli (e.g., strong figureground contrasts or symmetry; see Reber et al. 2004, for a review) lead to aesthetic appreciation of the object. Further studies show that the repeated exposure of a visual stimulus creates an increased liking of a particular stimulus (Zajonc 1969; Bornstein 1989). Reber et al.’s (2004) theory of processing fluency is also based in cognitive psychology. The theory proposes that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver’s processing dynamics: that is, the more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. They show how variables known for creating aesthetic appeal such as figural goodness, figure-ground contrast, stimulus repetition, symmetry and prototypicality trace back to changes in processing fluency. Future research can build on these findings from cognitive psychology. In particular, we would like to extend our research about aesthetics towards a more social cognitive and sociological approach. Since negotiations about consumer ritualistic objects lead to a very intense involvement with that particular object, such interactions are likely also to shape a consumer’s perception of the aesthetic appeal of the object. In this sense, consumers’ lived experiences with a ritualistic object through negotiations about it could affect processing fluency and its perception of beauty. Furthermore, the way the aesthetic preferences of others shape consumers’ own tastes is a topic that is certainly worthy of study. In conclusion, we explore the ways in which consumers negotiate the aesthetics of the focal ritual artifact of the Christmas tree. We hope our paper serves to encourage scholars to revisit consumers’ understanding of aesthetics as these understandings are negotiated and reconceptualized within their social networks, both during ritual occasions and beyond. References

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the consumer without recourse to institutions as explanatory or mediating factors. Research in organizational theory, on the other hand, has relied heavily on page_190 Page 191 mediating institutions – regulatory, normative, or cognitive – to explain the legitimation of organizations, practices, or ideas (Scott 1995). These theories tend to emphasize the role of key stakeholders and organizations at the expense of groups of individuals such as the general public or a particular consumer base. The present research on the legitimation of gambling as a consumption practice contributes to the literature in consumer behavior in two ways. First, although the direct company-to-consumer link has been theorized, the institutional role in this process has yet to be explored. One would expect institutions to play an important mediating role in the relationship between company and consumers, making some legitimization strategies available and precluding others. Only occasionally do we see companies achieve legitimacy more-or-less “directly” with consumers through brands. Instead, legitimacy is more often facilitated or inhibited by institutions such as retail structure, legal frameworks, cultural representations, or social networks. Here, I will examine the ways in which cultural representation of casino gambling in film facilitates, inhibits, or reflects the legitimation process. Do cultural representations merely reflect the practices of the social world or do they direct and orient consumption practices toward (or away from) legitimacy? The second way in which this research contributes to existing research on legitimacy in consumer behavior is through its treatment of legitimation as a historical process. Although previous empirical studies have made reference to historical context (e.g., Kates 2004, Holt 2002), none have explicitly evaluated the mechanisms of this historical process using archived, historical materials (for exception, see Deighton and Grayson 1995). By empirically broadening the temporal scope of data, we can better understand the dimensions and processes of legitimation. For example, previous work has suggested that habituation and affective relationships play a role in the legitimation process (Fournier 1998), but this theorizing tends to neglect the existing cultural frameworks, discourses, and institutions. Analyzing historical materials explicitly will provide evidence of these frameworks that can help us understand the process of legitimation. This approach supplements previous work which outlines the ways in which discourse structures consumption practice (Holt and Thompson 2004; Thompson 2004). Legitimacy Legitimation is the process of making a practice or institution socially, culturally, and politically acceptable within a particular context. Legitimacy has been defined as “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate, within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions,” (Suchman 1995, p. 574). Legitimacy, for sociologist Max Weber (1922/1978), is a mechanism for explaining why people regularly and voluntarily submit to authority. For him, it is a key concept for distinguishing between domination and legitimate authority. Weber writes, “so far as it [social action] is not derived merely from fear or from motives of expediency, a willingness to submit to an order imposed by one man or a small group, always implies a belief in the legitimate authority” (p. 37). For Weber, a legitimate social action is more page_191 Page 192 than blind “obedience.” Rather, it is one that includes the complicity or approval of action on the part of the subject (p. 215). Theories of legitimacy, then, center on how this approval is constructed and sustained for a particular practice, entity, or idea. Recent research in institutional theory has divided the concept of legitimacy into three dimensions, each corresponding to regulative, normative, and cognitive institutional frameworks. Regulative legitimacy is the degree to which an organization adheres to “explicit regulative processes: rule-setting, monitoring, and sanctioning activities” (Scott 1995, p. 42). These rules tend to be associated with government or regulatory agencies and other supraordinant institutions. Normative legitimacy is the degree to which an organization is congruent with the dominant norms and values of the environment (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). Lastly, cognitive legitimacy is the degree to which an organization is known and understood by social actors. Cognitive legitimacy can be explicitly articulated, but more often is “taken-for-granted.” Gambling would be cognitively legitimate, for example, if it were as common, well known, and easy to categorize as fast food restaurants (National Gambling Impact Study Commission 1999, p. 2). There can also be interactions between various types of legitimacy. Full legitimacy could be achieved by complete regulatory compliance, normative acceptance of social actors, and eventual “taken-for-grantedness” of the institution. On the other hand, organizations can have varying degrees of legitimacy of different types. An organization like the casino may have regulatory legitimacy but still lack normative legitimacy in the community. Further, it may never gain cognitive legitimacy as a common, taken-for-granted consumption practice. A bank, on the other hand, may have complete normative and cognitive legitimacy, but may lapse in complying with regulations,

thus losing regulatory legitimacy. Certainly, the process of legitimation is complex and takes place on several levels. To understand how consumption practices become legitimized requires that the problem be broken down into the analytical “slices” common to institutional analysis in sociology (Figure 10.1): the individual level, the social level, the level of cultural representation, and the political level (Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Here, I will compare these “slices” across two different time frames: a time 1, when gambling is an illegitimate consumption practice, and a time 2, when gambling is a legitimate consumption practice. In doing so, I aim to explore the interaction between the cultural level and the social and political levels by drawing generalizations from cultural representations of gambling in movies and comparing these representations with the evolution of gambling practice in the social and political world. As I will show, cultural representations of consumption practices tend to work between levels, translating legitimacy from the normative domain to the cognitive realm, for example, or from the regulative to the normative domain (Douglas 1986). The relations existing between each of these dimensions can be used in turn to understand the process of legitimation at its broadest possible scope, revealing how interactions between institutional levels facilitate or inhibit the legitimization of consumption practices. page_192 Page 193

Figure 10.1 The role of culture When studying cultural representations of consumption, it is important to recognize two methodological issues. First, it is important to note that culture is a term often used to elide the distinction between two components, the evaluative and the semantic (Jepperson and Swidler 1994). “Culture” can equally refer to a set of values and norms that prescribe action as well as a set of “sense-making” materials that simply facilitate description of the world. As Clifford Geertz says, “culture is both a model for and a model of behavior” (Geertz 1973). The recursive nature of culture poses several problems of analysis that I will later address. The elision between normative and semantic in the study of culture is at the crux of definitional issues, but it also illuminates how culture may actually function in the process of legitimation (Foucault 1977). Secondly, it is important to note the separation between the social world of consumer behavior and cultural representation of consumer behavior. Of this separation, the critical theorist Fredric Jameson (2005) has written, … it is the very separation of art and culture from the social – a separation that inaugurates culture as a realm in its own right and defines it as such – which is the source of art’s incorrigible ambiguity. For that very distance of culture from its social context which allows it to function as a critique and indictment of the latter also dooms its interventions to ineffectuality and page_193 Page 194 relegates art and culture to a frivolous, trivialized space in which such intersections are neutralized in

advance. (2005, p. xv) Jameson poses the question of the relationship between the social world and culture in dialectical terms. For him, cultural representations such as narrative are made meaningful by virtue of their separation from the social world. Rather than simply representing the world, movies, novels, and plays provide the space for reflecting on, critiquing, and transforming the existing circumstances. By virtue of this critical distance, however, cultural representations also stand at a remove from the process of political change, and are thus to some extent neutralized in advance by dominant institutions. For Jameson, this does not mean that cultural representations are free from politics; rather, it means that by studying cultural representations, we learn about the frameworks under which social action is directed and constrained. Given the heavily mediated relationship between the social and the cultural, a word of caution is in order when applying the study of film to consumer research. As I will show here, claims and conclusions drawn from the study of cultural representations do not necessarily extend directly to conclusions about actual consumer behavior. Rather, they enable consumer researchers to trace the relationship between the various levels at which institutional legitimacy is achieved. Data The dataset for this article was composed of 14 movies produced from 1951 to 2006 (Figure 10.2). A two-stage clustered sample was taken of all gambling movies, as listed by the keyword “gambling” in the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.org). First, all gambling movies were grouped according to key dates in the regulatory history of gambling (Figure 10.3). Then, the top grossing movies were selected from each time period in order to represent the most popular cultural representation of gambling in movies for the time period. In the second stage of sampling, the number of movies selected from each time period was weighted according to the number of total movies from group, as would be done with a stratified sample (i.e., fewer movies from smaller time periods were selected so that no one time period was over-represented in the sample). One movie, Bob Le Flambeur (1955), fell outside these criteria, but was included because of its direct comparison with The Good Thief (2003). Many other primary and secondary sources provided the historical and social context to which these movies were compared. Primary amongst these sources are two congressional sub-committee reports, the National Commission on Gambling of 1976 and the National Gaming Commission of 1999. The number and type of casinos in operation was taken from the archives of the American Gaming Association (Figure 10.4). page_194 Page 195

Figure 10.2

Figure 10.3 page_195 Page 196

Figure 10.4 Methodology Based on examples from previous work (Sherry 1995, Hirschman 1986), a hermeneutic analysis of the films was conducted. Specifically, movies were first broken down by scenes, as listed on the DVD version of each movie. Movies had on average 26 scenes, with a range from 12 to 40 scenes. Descriptive notes were taken on each scene of every movie. These notes were then entered into a database, coded, and compared with other scenes both within the same movie and across movies. Generalizations were made by categorizing some scenes together according to theme and then distinguishing those groups from other groups, as one might do in a cluster analysis. Abstractions of themes were formed over both the entire data set and by time period. Finally, the progression of themes over the time period was compared against historical data from

newspapers and government documents. I will first discuss generalizations from the entire dataset before breaking down the generalizations by historical period. page_196 Page 197 Findings Overall, cultural representations of gambling in the films depict images of utopian escape from market structures of work and consumption. These representations operate as a negative imprint to dominant ideologies by reflecting practices that resist everyday structures of work and consumption. In the domain of work, the ideas of the nine-to-five work day, the equity between work and pay, and company-organized work are regularly violated. In the domain of consumption, representations of a potlatch of free goods and services within the casino as well as the unreciprocated exchange of expensive gifts constitute representations of practices that are contrary to common practices and constraints of lived consumption. Welcome to the working week The protagonists of many films in the dataset are men who do not hold nine-to-five company jobs. They gamble all night and sleep or relax during the day. The main character, Bob, in Bob le Flambeur and similarly Bob in the movie’s 2003 remake, The Good Thief, sardonically claim that they support themselves through distant investments in agriculture. Bob’s lifestyle as a man of leisure is funded both by previous heists and by family wealth. Similarly, John Robie, the protagonist in To Catch a Thief, is independently wealthy from money obtained as a resistance fighter from Germans at the end of World War II. Some of these characters are poor, but maintain a lifestyle contrary to the spirit of a nine-to-five job. Charley, the protagonist in California Split, is a down-and-out guy who barely makes ends meet by betting on horse racing and playing poker. The crew of Ocean’s Eleven (1960) earn money by doing odd jobs, relying on family wealth, or by drawing military pensions. Even James Bond of Casino Royale (1967, 2006) has a job that requires him to work a very unconventional workday. The only exception to this generalization is Jack of Honeymoon in Vegas, whose life quickly spins out of control after he takes a vacation from work. These men represent alternatives to the nine-to-five organization men prevalent in the 1950s (Marcuse 1966). These men are not bound by the constraints of a family or a regular job, and their daily activity is organized around their own desires. As independent “men of action” (Holt and Thompson 2004), they provide an alternative way to imagine the organization of economic and personal life. Because each of them achieves this lifestyle through gambling in some form, the practice is implicitly depicted as a way to escape the constraints of contemporary market structures. In addition to the protagonists’ identities, the utopian representation of non-marketized work is depicted in specific scenes that recur in several movies. Very commonly, movies open with scenes of early morning daybreak and place the protagonist, having gambled all night, moving through the transition from night to day. These scenes occur in Bob Le Flambeur, The Gambler, California Split, Cincinnati Kid, and Casino Royale (2006). Not only do the protagonists “walk the walk” of men independent of regular work, but they also “talk the talk” by staying up for many hours, carousing with women, and sleeping during the day. Scene by scene, this structure is recurrent in the films of the sample. page_197 Page 198 Money for nothing (and the chicks for free) Characters in the films studied rarely gamble to make money, and often refer to the goals of gambling as “action,” “excitement,” and “play.” Very rarely, if ever, do they frame gambling as work, and the winnings and losses they endure are always at odds with the labor they put into gambling. In California Split, Charley, the protagonist exclaims, “$100 chips. They give us real money for this?!” Although his gambling technically involves “real money,” it is in abstracted form, represented only in chips, and gained with little effort. In a few hours, the two main characters, Charley and Bill, make $82,000 by playing craps, blackjack, and poker. To Charley and Bill, this is clearly out of keeping with the labor they would normally expend to earn that amount of money. The winnings are gained in the blink of an eye, and they are sent reeling at the disconnect between work and pay. Conversely, in Cincinnati Kid, long work hours at the poker table do not result in a net profit for the main character, a gambler from New Orleans called the Kid. In the main poker match-up, the Kid goes up against a legendary older gambler, Lancy Howard. Despite a continuous 24 hours of poker play represented by a montage of “normal” people sleeping during the night while the two play on, the Kid walks away defeated with no money to show for his labor. But no matter; as Lancy advises the Kid, “money is never an end in itself, but simply a tool, as language is to thought.” Every gambler in the sample, even professional gamblers, gambles with reference to action or excitement, and no gambler in the sample saved or invested his winnings, as one would do with earned money. Instead, the winnings were immediately spent on gifts or luxury consumption or they were stolen by someone else. Although some characters worked long hours and some characters didn’t work at all, there was no correlation between work and pay. The boys are back in town

In addition to the theme of an inequality between work and pay, characters in the movies tend to create organizations of production that are alternatives to the traditional company structure. Most often, this organization is represented in the “heist” plot where a group of men are led by a single person, or two people, into a venture that will produce windfall gains. This is the case in Ocean’s 11 (1960), Bob Le Flambeur, and To Catch a Thief. These organizations involve many traits of a company including planning, capital investment, a work force, and a division of labor, but all are exist outside of the law and without a conventional company structure. The two partners in California Split similarly form a scheme to make money together instead of working for a company. In Casino, where the main character, Sam Rothstein, actually works for a casino company, he is grouped with men who form alternative modes of production, such as mafia organizations, instead of “puppets,” or organization men, who are installed to be the face of the casino. Indeed, Sam Rothstein exists between these two organizations, such that he is a part of neither of them. page_198 Page 199 As with the previous two themes, gambling and all of the things associated with gambling provide opportunities for men to organize outside of the conventional market sphere of activity. They do not have to work for a regular boss. They do not have to keep company hours. They are free to direct their activity, and, perhaps most importantly, they have a vested interest in the products of their labor. In these three ways – the individual identity of the gambler, the structure of daily practices and in organized relationships with others – alternatives to the structured work are represented in each movie, forming a cultural imaginary of the non-marketized work available through gambling. As both the setting and structure of these movies, gambling represents a “way out” of the dominant ideology of work that organizes real daily life. Can’t buy me love Films in the dataset depict images of utopian escape from market structures in the domain of consumption as well. Non-reciprocated gifting between characters in the movie and representations of the “free stuff” offered by casinos, constitute images of consumption without sacrifice, something for nothing. In 12 of the 14 movies, gifts in the form of jewelry, lavish dinners, or trips, were given from men to women after a big win. Very often, gambling was undertaken to finance gifting. In some cases, giving gifts had negative results. In Showboat, for example, the excess of gifts financed through gambling result in financial ruin. In Casino, lavish gifts cause personal turmoil because they encourage deception. In Bob Le Flambeur, participation in crime in order to give gifts to a woman results in the death of the giver, a naïve kid trying to impress a girl. In other cases, gifts were mere tokens given to impress women or for conspicuous consumption, as in Honeymoon in Vegas, Casino Royale, or California Split. In all cases, gifts from gambling proceeds were not visibly reciprocated, breaking with this near-universal norm (Mauss 1901/1990; Sherry 1983). This breach in gifting norms tellingly represents a utopian space outside of exchange systems, where gifts do not entail repayment. Without repayment the gifting cycle is disrupted. The representation of free goods and services, or “comps,” was also common in the films. Most often represented as gifts from the casino to the player, these comps depict a potlatch where the consumer is granted anything he or she wishes for. Lavish hotel suites in Honeymoon in Vegas and “high roller” perks in Casino Royale (2006) create the image of a space in the casino outside of the normal give-and-take of the market. These cultural representations constitute what Karl Mannheim calls a utopian orientation (1936/1966). “A state of mind is utopian,” he says, “when it is incongruous with the state of reality in which it occurs” but “only those orientations that when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time” (p. 193). An idea is utopian when it contradicts existing circumstances and the common order. Utopian cultural representations must be translatable into conduct, but some utopian ideas can be constrained by prevailing ideologies constituting a partial utopia. In this sense, page_199 Page 200 representations of gambling in film are partial utopias because they break with the dominant ideology of the work and consumption structures, but at the same time, they reinforce terminal ideological goals of the market such as conspicuous consumption and leisure. As representations that transcend empirical reality, utopia and ideology exist in important relation to one another. Mannheim says, Ideologies are situationally transcendent ideas which never succeed de facto in the realization of their projected contents … Utopias too transcend the social situation … but are not ideologies in that they succeed in counter activity … transform[ing] existing historical reality into accord with their own conceptions. (p. 198) As ideal structures, utopia and ideology orient action in the social sphere. Utopian orientations inspire action

against dominant ideology and dominant ideology in turns constrains social action. In the space of cultural representation, these two orientations operate to drive historical change. How can the concept of utopia help us understand the process of legitimation? As drivers of historical change, the dialectic between the ideological and utopian representation can facilitate legitimation. A marginal practice like gambling can be represented as utopian possibility, become less marginalized as it is adopted, and eventually can become integrated to be congruent with the dominant ideology of market systems. Representations of utopia inspire “counter activity” against situations constructed by the prevailing ideological structures. This social action then becomes part of the prevailing ideological structure and may again be transformed through further counter activity. Illustrating this, Mannheim says, “the existing order gives birth to utopias which in turn break the bonds of the existing order, leaving it free to develop in the direction of the next order of existence” (p. 199). As an illustration of this, cultural representations of casino gambling illustrate how gambling can constitute utopia and be used against the dominant structures of the nine-to-five work day, a life constrained by company organization, and rigid class structure. As non-market representations, viewers imbibe these meanings and act in the social world. These changes, however, occur through dynamics over time, and it is the nature of this dynamism that will now be explored. Historical trends and connecting cultural representation to the social world Although themes of utopian consumption can be generalized over the entire set, generalizations from the movies according to time period also emerge. From 1951 until the late 1960s, gambling movies were based around honorable male characters that form bonds of trust. In the 1970s this theme shifted to disillusionment with gambling. Finally, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, gambling is depicted page_200 Page 201 in a vérité style, where most protagonists are in the process of losing control of their lives. We can read the social history of gambling alongside these generalizations by time period in order to understand correlations between the social and political world and trends in cultural representations of gambling. The set can be divided into three periods roughly corresponding to key events in the status of gambling practice in the social world (see Figure 10.3). The relationship between key legal events and corresponding thematic shifts in film demonstrate that, although gambling may be legalized as a consumption practice, its legality does necessarily confer social or cultural legitimacy. A change in regulatory legitimacy (i.e., legality) does, however, change the frameworks within which cultural representations are constructed. Before discussing the trends in cultural representation of gambling, it is necessary to briefly review the history of gambling in the United States in order to understand the shift of cultural representations in film. In 1951, a US Federal Commission, the Kefauver Commission, publicized links between gambling and organized crime, most notably the link between Bugsy Segal and the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas (Kefauver 1951). In the 1950s and early 1960s, casino gambling was illegal in most states and was practiced by about one in nine people (United States Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling 1976). In 1964, New Hampshire legalized state-run lotteries, and ten other states in the Northeast soon followed. In 1976, the US Congress convened a commission to study the potential effects of legalized gambling. The focus of this commission, tellingly composed primarily of law enforcement, legal experts, and clergymen, recommended that, despite contrary moral opinion, gambling should be legalized because it would decrease illegal gambling run by organized crime. Gambling expansion incrementally spread as off-track betting, electronic gaming, and lotteries became legal on a state-by-state basis. Still, full-fledged casino gambling was legal in only two states. In 1988, a Supreme Court decision granted sovereign land rights to Native American tribes. This escalated casino expansion in the early 1990s as a result of competition among states and between states and Native American tribes (National Gambling Impact and Policy Commission 1999; Von Herrmann 2002). After a combination of state referendums and state legislation, riverboat or dockside casinos sprung up in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Mississippi, and Louisiana (see timeline, Figure 10.3). Land-based tribal casinos were built primarily in the northeast and southwest, with some encroachment in the Midwest (e.g., Wisconsin) and south (e.g., Cherokee, North Carolina and Seminole, Florida). By 2006, 455 commercial casinos were in operation in 21 states (American Gaming Association 2006), often strategically built along state borders (National Gambling Impact and Policy Commission 1999). In 1999, a second US Congressional commission was convened to study the effects of the legalization of gambling from 1976 to 1999. The recommendation of the commission was to halt the expansion of casinos until more research could be conducted. With this periodiziation of the history of casino gambling in mind, we can now examine historical trends in the cultural representation of gambling. page_201 Page 202 1951–1964: honor, trust, camaraderie Between 1951 and 1967, gambling movies tended to be based around themes of honor, trust, and camaraderie among groups of two or more men. In To Catch a Thief, ex-jewel thief John Robie works with

an upstanding London insurance agent, H. H. Hughston, to catch a jewel thief who is impersonating Robie’s style of robbery. To set up a sting that will trap the impersonator, the two men must form a bond of trust that will escape the watchful attention of the police, who explicitly do not trust John Robie. The insurance agent must trust John Robie, an ex-thief, without the backing of any official or legal organization. He says to Robie, HH Hughston: We’re both taking a big chance here. John Robie: Really? What happens to you if I’m caught? HH: Why I might be embarrassed, maybe even censured officially. JR: They’d put me away for good. HH: You’ve made a bad choice of professions. JR: Well then let’s come to an understanding. I’m doing you a favor. I take all the risks; you get all the jewelry back. HH: Mr. Robie, it strikes me that only an honest man could be so foolish. The theme of “taking a big chance,” the risk of trusting another man in order to accomplish a task, is present in many gambling movies from the 1950s and 1960s including Ocean’s 11 (1960), Bob Le Flambeur, and Cincinnati Kid. In Ocean’s 11 (1960), a group of ex-army men form a coalition to rob four casinos of their cash holdings. Based on their previous deployment together in World War II, they form bonds of trust in order to accomplish the “liberation” of millions of dollars. When planning the operation, two planners, Sam Houston played by Dean Martin and Danny Ocean, played by Frank Sinatra, try to convince a “backer,” Vince, to trust them. Sam Houston: Vince, the plan is foolproof, take my word for it. You know I only lie to girls. Vince: If it’s so foolproof, why hasn’t somebody done it yet? Danny Ocean: Same reason nobody’s gone to the moon yet. No equipment. And we’re equipped. SH: It’s going to be a military operation executed by trained men. DO: Why waste all of those cute little tricks that the army taught us just because it’s sort of peaceful now? The group of men is pulled together out of mutual trust and a spirit of camaraderie under the eyes of “official” bureaucracies such as law enforcement and casino owners. This trust in both instances here, and over the entire 1951–1960 time period, is notably gendered. Men trust other men and “only lie to girls.” page_202 Page 203 1974: disillusionment In the two movies coded from 1974, California Split and The Gambler, the main characters develop lasting disillusionment with gambling, even after big wins. In California Split, the main characters, Charley and Bill, go on a “run” in Reno Nevada that nets them $82,000. After the win, an excited Charley, played by Elliott Gould, says to Bill: Charley: Those people out there, they wanna take pictures. The Reno Gazette, they want to do a whole story on us, but I told them, “no, no, we’re gonna be restin’ until we come back, right?” Bill:… C: Do you always take a win this hard? B: Charley, there was no special feeling, I just said there was. C: Yeah, I know that. Everybody knows that. But check this out, we’re heroes here… B:… C: (sigh) It don’t mean a fucking thing, does it? B: Charley, I have to go home. Although Charley wants to celebrate the big win, Bill has become disillusioned by their run of luck. Winning money doesn’t transition into a change in lifestyle, only more wandering and hoping for the next big win. Bill can say nothing of the win; he simply shrugs and goes home. Unlike Charley, he doesn’t value the attention or the money. For Bill, there is no class advancement through gambling. He realizes that the “ride,” the search for excitement and the corresponding despair, is a hopeless cycle that he only wants to escape. Similarly in The Gambler, the main character, Axel, played by James Caan, finds disillusionment after betting on a basketball game in the last scene of the movie. As a compulsive gambler, Axel tries to pay off a $40,000 gambling debt throughout the movie. His fortunes wax and wane to his alternating excitement and despair until he persuades a player to fix a college basketball game that he bets on and wins, alleviating himself completely of debt. After the win, Axel sits on the bleachers alone, disillusioned with the practice of gambling, a lifestyle of extreme highs and extreme lows, a practice that he formerly found existentially fulfilling. In these films, winning precedes an existential crisis in the main characters. 1992–2006: loss of control Lastly, in the period from 1992 to 2006, gambling is tied to a loss of control in the lives of the main characters. Films generally begin with the protagonist’s stable life and the plot is then driven by the protagonist’s loss of control over their life due to deception, addiction, or violence, all attributable directly or indirectly to gambling. In Honeymoon in Vegas, the main character, Jack, loses control of his romantic life after gambling against

Tommy Korman, a professional gambler and his page_203 Page 204 romantic rival. The plot of the movie centers on Jack’s loss of control and his attempts to regain it by winning back his girl. As Tommy whisks Jack’s girlfriend off to Hawaii, treats her to volcano explosions, romantic boat rides, and beachfront property, Jack struggles to regain control of his life through a series of frustrated attempts to travel. Throughout the film, he’s hindered by conspiratorial taxi drivers, a labyrinth of flight delays, and third-class transportation. This episodic plot device reinforces the feeling of despair and frustration as we empathize with Jack’s loss of control. In Casino, the main character, Sam Rothstein or “Ace,” loses control of his professional and personal life when his best friend and mobster, Nicky, exerts an insidious and violent influence over Ace’s casino organization through mafia connections. Ace: Listen, Nick, you gotta understand my situation. I’m responsible for thousands of people. I got a hundred million a year goin’ through the place. It’s all over, I’m gonna tell you, it’s all over, if I don’t get that license. And believe me, if it goes bad for me, it’s gonna go bad for a lot of people, you understand?… I just wanna run a square joint. That’s it. I just want my license. I want everything nice and quiet. That’s it. Nicky (Holding up the magazine): You mean, quiet like this: “I’m the boss.” That’s quiet? A: That’s all taken out of context. Okay. N: Yeah, that’s out of context. Okay. A: I have no control over that. Ronnie and Billy were right there. They’ll tell you exactly what happened. … N: What the fuck happened to you? Will you tell me? A: What happened to me? What happened to you? N: Yeah. A: You lost your control. N: I lost control? A: Yes, you lost your control. N: Look at you. You’re fuckin’ walkin’ around like John Barrymore. N: A fuckin’ pink robe and a fuckin’… A: All right. N:…uh, uh, cigarette holder. I’m – I lost control?! Ace feels the loss of control over his casino empire and upstanding reputation because Nick’s reputation rubs off on his own and draws the attention of the Nevada Gambling Commission. The loss of control becomes visceral, as Ace fears not only the loss of his career and wife, but also his life. Double-crossing, tricks, lying, and swindling result in a loss of control for the main character, Bob, in The Good Thief, for James Bond in Casino Royale (2006), and for the villain in Ocean’s Eleven (2001). In The Good Thief and Casino Royale (2006), the main characters find that someone they trusted betrays them and derails page_204 Page 205 their life. In Ocean’s Eleven (2001), the villain and casino owner Terry Benedict is depicted explicitly as someone who has complete control, who sees and knows everything. Then, due to the antics of the Ocean’s Eleven crew, Benedict loses control of his girlfriend and the cash holdings of his casino. Over the three time periods, representations of gambling and the protagonists involved move from honor, to disillusionment, to loss of control. Discussion These trends in the cultural representation of casino gambling can be related to gambling’s transition from illegitimate to legitimate. When gambling is illegitimate, trust, and camaraderie are important in informal networks because the practice is not buttressed by institutional assurances or highly regulated organizations. When gambling becomes legitimate, however, the loss of control and distrust follow because gambling is now run by relatively anonymous, corporate and government bureaucracies. The individual is alone within these structures, and without personalized network of trusted associates, he or she feels powerless and out of control. Again, the cultural representations of gambling form the inverse of the “official” or normative position on gambling practices and, perhaps more importantly, demonstrate the way in which the cultural legitimacy of a consumption practice can be decoupled from its regulatory legitimacy. What do these findings say back to Consumer Culture Theory of legitimation? The correspondence of these themes in film alongside social and legal history suggests that, contrary to expectations, cultural representation does not directly reflect nor influence action in the social world. In fact, the correspondence between cultural representation in film and legitimation is negatively related. Instead of preaching dominant ideas of the market relations such as steady work and equal pay, these movies instead operate by

representing an escape from those ideas. They depict practices of resistance to the dominant structures of work and consumption, but in doing so they reinforce more fundamental ideas about economic life. For example, the end goals of having “stuff,” of getting rich, and of being continually entertained, are not called into question but instead are reinforced. The depictions of gambling in the dataset provide a way of thinking through ways to achieve these goals through alternative modes of social and economic organization. This “negative” image extends to the historical trends of cultural representation. Just as gambling was becoming legalized in the mid-1970s, it was being represented as a source of disappointment and disillusionment. In the 1990s when casino gambling was at its most rapid adoption in the US, gaining both regulatory and normative legitimacy, it was being represented in movies as a source of chaos, downfall, and loss of control. The gap between the legal status and the cultural depiction of gambling suggests that legitimation occurs piecemeal. Although casino gambling may have gained regulatory legitimacy, it lags in gaining cultural legitimacy, as represented in film. The unevenness of legitimation over regulatory, normative, and cultural spheres is accounted for by the known disjunctions between these institutional domains page_205 Page 206 (Scott 1995). Further, one might suggest that the very disjunction serves as fodder for cultural production and dramatic framing. When gambling is illegal, filmmakers safely exploit the archetypes of the “good sinner” for dramatic effect. When it gains legality and even some modicum of normative legitimacy, however, this new context creates fresh discursive frameworks for dramatic exploration and novel archetypes like the out-of-control gambler. Further, this suggests that when times are “unsettled” and the status of a consumption practice are unclear, cultural production often works to express and organize underlying normative tensions (Swidler 2001). Do cultural representations reflect legitimation in the social world or do they orient practices that legitimate gambling? The answer cannot be straightforward because there is no clear correlation in time between the legitimacy of gambling in film and the legitimacy of gambling in regulatory and normative domains. Instead of correlation or temporal priority, one observes that cultural representations of gambling project a refracted image of the social world: noble representations of gambling when it is illegitimate in the normative domain and ignoble representations of gambling when it is relatively more legitimate. These representations amount to a “negative” reflection of existing social conditions. Thus it’s possible to claim from this evidence that the legitimation process does not proceed straightforwardly by indoctrinating viewers through direct rhetoric but rather through a more complicated process whereby some ideological components are negated while other, more fundamental, background ideologies are reinforced. There are, however, several limitations to the claims we can make based on the films and historical fact alone. The data used for this study cannot tell us directly about the consumer behavior of gambling practices, nor of what rhetorical frames consumers find compelling. Another qualification to this research is that sampling of cultural representation is extremely limited. Because of media and genre constraints, gambling movies could be very different from gambling TV shows, novels, and plays. Conclusion Casino gambling is a morally and politically complex topic. Should the government restrict people’s right to engage in an activity they enjoy? Should gambling be illegalized to prevent pernicious social, cultural, and economic decay? Is gambling wrong, or, even worse in the Western imagination, illogical? Casino gambling is also ontologically complex. Gambling practitioners, proponents, and opponents fight over what gambling “is,” and use these definitions to recommend action. Is gambling a leisure or work activity? Is it a vice or simply entertainment? Each definition places the practice in a certain frame of reference that can then be used to argue for its legitimation or de-legitimation. These debates over definition in turn motivate the epistemological and moral issues. We can look toward cultural representation to understand how consumers navigate these complex moral, economic, and political issues. The goal of my study is to learn how and why casino gambling, and consumption practices more page_206 Page 207 generally, become legitimate. In this article I have focused on the role of culture as a facilitator, inhibitor, and reflector of this process. By looking at the ways in which gambling is represented in film, we can conclude that cultural products that represent gambling often use gambling as a space of fantasy and possibility that works in opposition to the real world. When the real world changes, the utopian possibilities that are refracted in cultural representation also change. We also learn that legitimation of consumption practices comes piecemeal in regulatory, normative, and cultural domains. Although gambling, as a consumption practice, may be legal and even practiced by many, it can remain culturally stigmatized. This cultural separation allows us to understand more broadly how consumption practices are legitimated through cultural representation. As a marginal

activity, the practice can be safely romanticized from the distance of fictionalization. When the consumption practice becomes relatively mainstream, more vérité depictions predominate, presenting balanced or even negative perspectives of the consumption practice. Paradoxically, this has the effect of making the cultural representation the inverse of contemporary social norms and practices. We can read cultural representations, in this context at least, as the negative image of prevailing ideologies. Because the cultural product is separated in important ways from the social world, it can operate as a space where practices of resistance are projected. Importantly, however, we still find more primary “background” ideologies such as the aspiration toward a modern, luxurious lifestyle present in the cultural product. In depictions of gambling, there is an element of ideology and an element of utopia. References American Gaming Association (2006) “Gaming Revenue: 10-Year Trends,” http://www. americangaming.org/Industry/factsheets/statistics_detail.cfv?id=8. Deighton, J. and Grayson, K. (1995) “Marketing and seduction: building exchange relationships by managing social consensus,” Journal of Consumer Research, 21 (4): 660. DiMaggio, P. (1997) “Culture and cognition,” Annual Review of Sociology, 23 (1): 263. Douglas, M. (1986) How Institutions Think (1st ed.), Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. Dowling, J. and Pfeffer, J. (1975) “Organizational legitimacy,” Pacific Sociological Review, 18: (122–136). Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1st American ed.), New York: Pantheon Books. Fournier, S. (1998) “Consumers and their brands: developing relationship theory in consumer research,” Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (4): 343. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures : Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books. Harrah’s (1999) “Annual Report to Shareholders,” Las Vegas, NV. Hirschman, Elizabeth C. (1986) “Humanistic inquiry in marketing research: philosophy, method, and criteria,” Journal of Marketing Research, 23 (3) (Aug.), 237–249 Hirschman, E. C. (1988) “The ideology of consumption: a structural-syntactical analysis of ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’,” Journal of Consumer Research, 15 (3): 344. Holt, D. B. (2002) “Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding,” Journal of Consumer Research, 29 (1): 70. page_207 Page 208 Holt, D. B. and Thompson, C. (2004) “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (2): 425. Jameson, F. (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, New York: Verso. Jepperson, R. L. and Swidler A. (1994) “What properties of culture should we measure?” Poetics, 22: 359–71. Kates, S. M. (2004) “The dynamics of brand legitimacy: an interpretive study in the gay men’s community,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (2): 455. Kefauver, E. (1951) Crime in America (1st ed.). Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Kozinets, R. V. (2001) “Utopian enterprise: articulating the meanings of Star Trek’s culture of consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (1): 67. Mannheim, K. (1966) Ideology and Utopia; an Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, New York: Harcourt Brace and World. Marcuse, H. (1966) One-Dimensional Man : Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston: Beacon Press. Mauss, M. (1901[1990]) The Gift : The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London: Routledge. National Gambling Impact and Policy Commission (US) (1999) The National Gambling Impact Study Commission: Final Report. [Washington, D.C.]: The Commission: Supt. of Docs. US G.P.O. distributor. Pfeffer, J. and Salancik, G. R. (1978) The External Control of Organizations : A Resource Dependence Perspective, New York: Harper & Row. Powell W. W. and DiMaggio, P. (eds.) (1991) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, W. R. (1995) Institutions and Organizations, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Sherry, J. F. (1983) “Gift giving in anthropological perspective,” Journal of Consumer Research, 10 (2): 157. Sherry, J. F. (1995) “Bottomless cup, plug in drug: a telethnography of coffee,” Visual Anthropology, 7 (4): 355–74. Suchman, M. C. (1995) “Managing legitimacy: strategic and institutional approaches,” Academy of Management Review, 20 (3): 571. Swidler, A. (2001) Talk of Love: How Culture Matters, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The National Opinion Research Center, NORC (1999) Gambling Impact and Behavior Study, New York, NY: Christianson/Cummings Associates. Thompson, C. (2004) “Marketplace mythology and discourses of power,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (1): 162. Von Herrmann, D. (2002) The Big Gamble: The Politics of Lottery and Casino Expansion, Westport, Conn.: Praeger. United States Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling (1976) “Gambling in America: Final Report of the Commission on the Review of the National Policy toward Gambling,” xv, 192. University of Michigan Survey Research Center. Weber, M. (1922/1978) Economy and Society : An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley: University of California Press. page_208 Page 209 Part Six Poetry page_209 Page 210 This page intentionally left blank. page_210 Page 211 11 Poetry Living Things i. The Praying Mantis Pious, impeccably clothed, it waits among blackberry leaves, patient, still. It’s entire being bends to a single purpose, a passion for devouring. Others I have observed, six feet tall in razor pleats, nails meticulously groomed, shirts Armani white, poised in the shade of reflective glass, phones ready, fax ready, electricity tingling up their spines. They are mantis cool on the outside. Inside they burn with a hunger that feeds on itself. ii. Snowy Egret There’s a woman I know. A beauty. She walks with the nervous grace of an egret. To one side of her lies a vanishing farm, page_211 Page 212 an empty house, a fallow field; to the other, a river cloudy with memories: steel doors, cold tile,

hospital corners. She keeps to the river’s edge, always alert to ripples in the water, to rustling in the grass. As she wades along the muddy shore she keeps her dignity, but mostly she keeps her distance. iii. Old Cat The muse takes many forms. This morning your dusty orange cat rubs his forehead against my dangling foot and reminds me that he is here and you are not. I scratch his head and he returns to the window to watch a spot on the fence where a blue jay routinely dances with a squirrel for peanuts from a wooden box. iv. Crow The crow exults in hawklike wings, takes to the sky on thermals as if borne by the hand of God, yet not like the hawk to hunt; it prefers to take its meals from gutters or fresh-seeded fields. Only to play does it take to wing, and if it sees upon the ground some bauble or some glint of light it spirals down and with talons and beak wrests pleasure from its find. John Schouten University of Portland page_212 Page 213 Small Things i. The Tire Swing From high in the maple, forgotten against the darkening snow, it hangs, a black, sleeping marsupial. ii. Matchbook Matchbook said to the beautiful woman, I would cut off a finger to light your cigarette. To light your way through a darkened house or out of a moonless night I would spend my life, flame by feeble flame, until used up and worthless I was yours to throw away. iii. Still Life The mahogany frame of your mirror frames your rising breasts, a deep breath, caught, held, prelude to a sigh. Perhaps, if a painter,

I could remake that moment shattered by a footfall, a floorboard creak, and answer questions that remain these years: The dusty half-light, a perfume bottle, a brush. And outside the window the sparrows of winter, fat with dark berries and songless. page_213 Page 214 iv. June Rain The June rain is so warm it invites participation. It cries out to be walked in. Shout! it says, Run with me down the mountain! John Schouten University of Portland Heading Home Parked here in Goshen on the shoulder, Some thirty yards beyond a country crossroads, Field notebook wedged in the struts of the steering wheel, Makeshift prop desk Rav4 option now not unavailable (Same Toyota stranded weeks on end At trailheads in the Yoop, inviting the rude inscription of righteous vandals Cast into a flat world that somehow never comes) While, fidgeting in sweat, demotic jotting, pollen and blown earth Call for raised glasses and the rubbing of parched eyes, Occluding the glance that caroms off the rearview In ecliptic revelation, I bear witness, a Hummer hurtles westward page_214 Page 215 as an eastbound buggy bounces at an easy Amish canter, Their silhouettes so similar as they coincide, My lapsed Leica and

antique Nokia miss the moment I must etch in pencil. John F. Sherry, Jr. University of Notre Dame Consumption Kaddish in Four Koans Commodity zen: To every hungry ghost we Pledge, a winding sheet Commercial mecca: Feast to famine ratio No pilgrim reckons Shopper’s paradise: Prey to used gods the old ways – Beg borrow or steal Postmodern potlatch: The Burn at Black Rock City, Counter cargo cult John F. Sherry, Jr. University of Notre Dame Haiku for EATNIKS Eat food without thought Grow fat until you explode: Lifeless; meaningless Eugene Halton University of Notre Dame Imagined (Musical) Experiences: Across Four Centuries I. “eighteenth century: concert halls” “musical Chill” the long sobs of autumn violins pierce my heart with languor, page_215 Page 216 both monotonous & renewing – calling up chilled memories of so many autumnal seasons from the past, marching on & on with no apparent destination… “tangential explosions” wrapped in red satin shoulders bare faceted garnets, distinctly deep, mark the hollow of her throat Lips full/Earth red two virtuosos appear below – one on Steinway the other with bow the hall is silent, tense strings begin to vibrate/keys explode! the composer’s vision appears, echoing the hall is electric bright cello sings of love, deep and low courting; long piano responds in kind eyes close slowly with sweet surrender II. “nineteenth century cocoon” the colorful history of the Jefferson hotel – high-living Dutch founder, Presidential suites & antiques, the sweet-scented Palm court, ancient charm of the old South – starts my head swirling,

my body swooning. on the fifth floor, in a small guest room with soaring ceiling & brightly colored birds, flapping their wings, the essence of luxury pours all over me, warming me & stimulating me to a high point of exhilarating exhaustion. I hear music! III. “twentieth century: life & death” “ape to man” some chimps will murder others, page_216 Page 217 and then eat their flesh; the horror, the horror: exterminate the brutes king kong cried; you just couldn’t see the tears, because of the fur: the tenderness, the bittersweet tenderness of life and death… “dragon sounds” in life, the cicada is noisy and dark green, with yellow lines dashing across its sides to hide a pure white belly; certainly, there are the legs of a roach and the wings of a dragon! after just a few days of flying and singing, the cicada carcass lies lifeless as the august air, decaying under the cruel sun; idle boys poke at it with a stick. in death, his two giant eyes seem too black and stare off at odd angles, as if glued on by some careless and warped celestial Designer. IV. “21stCentury Sounds” “sub-Categorical imperative” A band is performing tonight, at the 40-Watt Club. You might want to check them out. They’re kind of a distorted retro folk-punk rockabilly outfit with a bleak outlook. Oh, and Scottish. They’re good.” In so many ways, this group is superior to goth rock or or retro soul or death metal or retro swing or hyphe hubba roc or mob heata or any fusion thereof that you might have heard recently… When you consider that “rockabilly” itself has its origins in the American South and represents a strict fusion of blues, hillbilly boogie, bluegrass music and country music, it’s no easy feat to foresee how the Scottish element might work as any kind of reasonable or effective catalyst. Come hear the band. They’re good. Come hear the music. It speaks for itself. “punk rock diva” she wore the tallest platform heels page_217 Page 218 with stripes of pink and yellow: voodoo mouth!

she painted up her eyes with aquas and gewgaws in a way that made you wonder (?) her hair was piled high – tortured into an outlandish beehive or a rodent’s nest or an alien space helmet at her day job, she was the worst waitress… ever George M. Zinkhan University of Georgia page_218 Page 219 Conclusion Reflections and revanche John F. Sherry, Jr. and Eileen Fischer As its conceptualization moves from theory through theoretics to epistemic community and beyond, it seems the demesne of CCT will be defined by boundary stones more than walls. Ineluctably interdisciplinary, it is a confederacy of enclaves, a sort of acephalous segmentary lineage system that has been mobilized on occasion to tell stories around a campfire. Banking that fire, running embers back and forth from disparate gatherings, and seeking to shed light along with heat, the contributors to this volume represent the diversity of interests fueling the annual conference from which this book arises. That the sociocultural impact of consumption – its relevance for citizens and consumers, policy makers and managers – is of interest to scholars in business schools, or that the practical utility of comprehending consumption to influence behavior is of interest to scholars of mainstream social science, many of whom are increasingly employed by default or design in the private sector, may be something of a revelation to many academic readers. We trust the conference will become a staging ground for an autonomous professional society devoted to inquiry into CCT, and hope this volume will accelerate the growth of the field. While our authors have ranged widely across topics and disciplines, there are a few thematic elements that course through the sections of this book. We summarize them here collectively as materiel and materiality, wayfaring and wayfinding, experience and emergence, conservation and consumption, mediation and meditation, and representation and reality. These themes reflect some of the field’s current preoccupations, and we recap them briefly in these concluding remarks. Materiel and materiality The authors of Part One explore deep structurally similar subject matter – epistemic community and imagistic perception – in mutually enlightening ways. Scholarly consensus and dissensus are historically and contextually situated. A genealogy of community is a useful tool for understanding precisely how our analytic lenses have come to be ground, and how our interpretive acuity has been strengthened or weakened in the bargain. Cultural discourse, whether clinical (as embodied in the limning of a discipline) or practical (as embodied in a craft such as advertising), is both an artifact and a meme. The materiel of cultural construction projects, page_219 Page 220 whether literal (“stuff”) or virtual (“ideas”), is animated by a host of evocative meanings supplied by all the stakeholders of these projects. The sounding of materiality has been a principal pursuit of CCT scholars for decades, and shows no signs of abating. Wayfinding and wayfaring The genealogical thread wends its way into Part Two, where our authors take up the issue of anchoring as a central feature of context. The cultural geography of the corporate group (firm or family) is usefully probed historically, whether ethnographers employ archival or interview methods to explore change over time. Ethnohistorical research reveals the illusion of progress in our quest for personal transformation, and multi-sited inquiry reveals that lifestyle shifts from sedentism to nomadism are governed today as much by temporal as spatial considerations. Both situations arise largely as a function of the place-making proclivities of facile entrepreneurs. Experience and emergence While embodiment is the focal concern of Part Three (a concern that many CCT researchers have enshrined in their regimes), intimations of the earlier themes of genealogy and history are clearly resonant. Consumption as a vehicle of identity construction, long a staple of cognitive inquiry, is given a visceral dimension by our authors. Here, the body is the site of identity (re-)construction, and consumers are co-producers of both the product and the consumption experience. Further, their co-creative effort is harnessed to an outcome whose nature is emergent at best, and fraught with unanticipated and unintended

consequences. The remaking of the psychological and carnal self is a powerful illustration of the ways in which uncertainty can be modulated in the marketplace. The exercise of agency in the face of the countervailing forces of structure and chance emphasizes a view of consumers as risk takers and variety seekers rather than as calculating maximizers or satisficers. Conservation and consumption The role of marketing and consumption in society is examined by the authors of Part Four. The harnessing of female energy in the service of the reproduction of domestic culture – the productive capacity of intergenerational sororal solidarity – made possible through the vehicle of a brand illuminates the relationship between market and polity on an intimate level. The effort to effect a corporate identity change through a process of ecosystem engineering in pursuit of the grail of sustainability illustrates the tension inherent in entrusting consumer salvation (material and spiritual) to commercial enterprise. Increasingly, consumption and marketing have acquired and been ascribed a stewardship role with respect to biocultural survival. Consumers and marketers are taxed to become more conservative even as they are page_220 Page 221 encouraged to become more insatiable. As brands become more imbricated in the web of life, more sophisticated and highly nuanced research will be required to synchronize the common goals of market and polity. Mediation and meditation While it serves as a leitmotif in every chapter, the notion that material culture and ideology are interpenetrating is foregrounded by the authors of Part Five. The ritual efficacy of the polysemous artifact in motivating behavior is uncontested, and much of the work in CCT is devoted to unpacking (and, in commercial practice, harnessing) this potency. How and what we think (and feel) is mediated by the artifact. In our increasingly mass-mediated experience, that artifact is virtual (ranging for our present purpose from televisual to telematic). That films and firs can have similarly syncretic polysemous and resonant qualities, and that they inform the fantasies and realities of our communal lives, are each readily apparent when we meditate deeply upon media. Representation and reality The original poetry included in Part Six is richly thematic, and both underscores and extends the content treated by the other contributors. Critique and celebration of consumption, introspection and reflexivity, surface and deep structure, embodiment and emplacement, progress and devolution and many other pairings are explored through the close observation of material culture. However, it is the evocative, visceral impact of the poems that provides the principal contrast with the other sections of the book. From precise sensual renderings through synaesthetic effulgence, our poets help readers achieve suspension in the lyric moment, and grasp the sense of immediacy and presence that attends the careful apprehension of consumer behavior. That our understanding of a phenomenon is intimately bound up with our representation of it, and that reality is constructed in the writing (or filming, or…), is a prospect with which the field of CCT is just beginning to grapple. Pulling it together: a parting comment This volume faithfully reflects the collage of agendas at work in this emerging discipline of CCT. Collectively, our authors strive to capture the immaterial soul of stuff, co-deployed by stakeholders engaged in the creating, consuming and coping practices that support their cultural projects, at once utopian and dystopian. We expect that collage to grow more kaleidoscopic for awhile, as the depth and breadth of the field is explored, and then for the image to sharpen periodically (as it has recently with the positioning of the CCT “brand”) as researchers discover patterns, linkages and middle range theories in their work. We hope the research exemplars presented in this book inspire additional inquiry, and encourage readers in far-flung disciplines to participate in one of the upcoming CCT conferences that will continue to explore boundaries. page_221 Page 222 Index acculturation research 84, 86 advertising 2, 57, 67–8, 78–9; criticism 39–41, 52; cultural intermediaries 59–62, 78; executives 76–7; HSBC 34–5, 36–9, 46, 49; reality 41–8; women 64–5, 66, 67, 69, 70–4, 75, 76; YMI Jeanswear 77–8 aesthetics 176–9, 183–4, 185, 187

African American DNA Research Forum 118, 126 African Americans 118, 124, 125–7 Alan Wolsky & Friends (W&F) 58, 68, 73–5, 76, 78 allomothering 2–3, 138, 142–5, 147 American Girl brand 2–3, 137–49; doll play 145–7; female energy 140–1; grandmothers 142–5, 147, 148 Anderson, Paul 10, 11, 13 Arnould, E.J. 1, 7–9, 13, 14, 106, 153, 182–3 art 43, 44 assimilationist work 14, 19, 22 authenticity 175, 177, 182–3 Basques 120, 121 Belk, Russell 10, 13, 14, 15, 18–19, 24, 115, 129 Bourdieu, Pierre 185–6 branding 78, 220–1; American Girl 2–3, 137–49 ìbricolageî 17, 38 businesses 151–2, 153, 160 Campbells Soup 46 capitalism 39–40, 41, 48, 52, 53 casino gambling see gambling celebrity 67, 71–2, 77, 78 Celtic identity 119–22, 130 China 48 Christmas trees 3, 171–89; aesthetics vs. sentimentality 176–9; authenticity vs. convenience 177, 182–3; background history 173–5; fantasy vs. reality 177, 181–2; inclusiveness vs. risk 177, 179–81; taste 183–5 class 2, 22, 66; advertising 57, 59, 60, 73; cultural capital 185–6; women 64, 67 cognitive psychology 184, 187 commodity fetishism 44, 49, 51 competitive advantage 158, 159, 165 constructionism 19 Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) 1–2, 7–33, 166, 219, 221; consumption politics 21–5; as epistemic community 9–10; historical development 10–13; interpretation 18–21; materiality 220; sustainability 152, 153; units of analysis 15–18 consumption 14, 15, 16–17, 22, 219; acculturation research 86; advertising criticism 53; American Girl brand 148; casino gambling 190–1, 192, 196, 198–9, 205, 206; DNA testing 130; domesticity 141; home 83; identity 115–16, 220; Marx 45; multiple meanings 19, 20, 25; ritualistic 171; social relations 23, 24, 25, 49;

sustainable 152, 166; women 63–7, 68 consumption politics 15, 22–5 co-production 220; American Girl brand 148; Christmas celebrations 172, 185–6; of meaning 60–1, 67; service 101–13 corporate culture 158, 162, 165 Costco 161–2 critical ethnography 23–4 page_222 Page 223 critical theory 21–2, 23, 25 cultural capital 92, 93, 116, 146, 185–6 cultural reproduction 138, 140, 147, 220 cultural resources 153, 162, 164 culture 40, 193–4, 206–7 customer participation 101, 102–3 deconstruction 37–8 department stores 65–6 DNA Print Test Results Website 118 DNA testing 2, 114–33; consumer haplotype tribes 127–9; European ethnic narratives 119–22; racial identity 124–7; websites 116–18 DNA Tribes Test Results Log 117–18, 123 doll play 145–7 domesticity 138, 140, 141, 145 elicitation materials 17 empowerment 24 environmental degradation 150–1, 152 epistemic community 7, 9–10, 25 ethnic minorities 8, 14, 25; see also minority groups ethnicity: American Girl brand 146; self-identity 115–16, 119–22, 124–7; see also race family 17, 92, 141; Christmas trees 175, 177, 178, 179, 181–2, 185–6; home 83, 89 Faulkner, E.J. 153 feminism 45, 141, 145 film 3, 194–200, 201–4 Foucault, Michel 59, 77 Frankfurt School 40 Franklin Society Federal Savings and Loan Association 68, 73–6 gambling 3, 190–208; film representations 194–200, 201–4; history of 200–1; legitimation 192, 205–7 Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 124 Geertz, Clifford 193 gender 2, 22; advertising 58, 59, 69, 70–4, 75, 76; stereotyping 68, 69, 146;

see also women global warming 152, 158 globalization 84, 93 goals 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110–11 Goldberg, Whoopi 124 grandmothers 141, 142–5, 147, 148 group identity 114, 115, 129–30 Hirschman, Beth 10, 11, 13, 24, 67, 175 Holbrook, Maurice 10, 11 home 2, 83–97; feminization 140; as identity 84, 85–6, 93; as order 84–5, 87–9, 90, 91, 92–3, 94; see also domesticity hotels 86, 89–92, 94 HSBC 34–5, 36–9, 46, 49 identity 61, 76, 78, 115–16, 220; American Girl brand 145; DNA testing 2, 114–15, 117, 119, 123, 126–7, 129–30; home 84, 85–6, 93 ideology 40, 59, 199–200, 206, 207, 221 images 34–6, 38–9, 40, 41–8, 72 inclusiveness 177, 179–81 institutional theory 192 interpretivism 8–9, 10, 20, 24–5, 26, 46; critical 23; differences within 14, 15; historical development of CCT 11, 12, 13; refutation of 36; units of analysis 16 J. Walter Thompson (JWT) 58, 59, 61, 66, 67, 68–73, 78 Jameson, Fredric 193–4 Jefferson, Thomas 124 Journal of Consumer Research 7, 12 Kerchner, Charles 117–18 Kuhn, Thomas 11, 13 labor 22, 24, 44–5, 49, 51 legitimacy 190, 191–2, 200, 205–7 Levy, Sidney 10 literary research 14 Lux 71–2, 73, 78 Mannheim, Karl 199, 200 marketing 26, 62, 67–8, 220–1; dwelling services 94; home 83, 86; matriarchal view 140; sustainability 152 Marx, Karl 39–40, 44–5, 46, 49, 51, 53 Marxism 39, 40, 41, 47, 52 materiality 219–20 meaning 19–20, 21; co-production of 60–1, 67; social construction of 130; structuralism 37–8 methodology 9–10, 13, 17, 18 minority groups 22–3; see also ethnic minorities

Native Americans 201 naturalistic inquiry 14, 18–19, 21 page_223