Marketing science in a postmodern world: introduction to the special issueStephen Brown
doi: 10.1108/03090569710162308pmid: N/A
Provides an introduction to the Special Issue by discussing the nature of marketing science in a postmodern world. Argues that science needs marketing more than marketing needs science. (Look folks, I didn’t want to include a review of my own book, but the regular journal editor insisted ‐ honest! ‐ and, anyway, Thompson was desperate for the publication. I’m just too soft, that’s my problem. Please excuse my unacademic behaviour. Pretty please.)
Trading partners Everyday intercourse in words and thingsRobert Grafton Small
doi: 10.1108/03090569710162326pmid: N/A
Despite tempting parallels between contemporary theories of biological evolution and the commonplace adaptation of products in varying cultures and circumstances, any apparent support for notions of market‐based Social Darwinism is seen as misplaced. Closely observed examples from Japanese commerce show that exchanges of goods, ideas and people involve processes of “bricolage” whereby consumers’ individual and collective skills in trading words and things enable the retention and repair of their various social standings as well as their broader ethical and cultural assumptions. These multiplying interpretations are the bases of our everyday lives and the route by which inequalities in popular access to power, language and goods reflect and reinforce other imbalances evident in the workings of both market economies and consumer cultures.
Raiding the postmodern pantry Advertising intertextuality and the young adult audienceStephanie O’Donohoe
doi: 10.1108/03090569710162344pmid: N/A
While analysts of postmodernism have feasted on marketing practices, the marketing discipline has been slow to acquire a taste for postmodernism. Offers marketers a taste of what it has to offer by examining the concept of intertextuality and demonstrating its reliance to advertising texts and their production and consumption. Drawing on a qualitative study of young adults, shows how their descriptions and experiences of particular ads shaped and were shaped by their experiences of other texts. Considers the implications of intertextuality for consumers’ attitudes, involvement and literacy with respect to advertising, for the link between ad and brand consumption, and the relationship between marketing theory and practice.
Buy Brown’s book! A fully impartial commentary on Postmodern MarketingCraig J. Thompson
doi: 10.1108/03090569710162353pmid: N/A
Provides a fully impartial commentary on Stephen Brown’s Postmodern Marketing. Implores readers to ignore all rumours to the contrary. Notes that it is very difficult to summarize this commentary in 100 words or less and refuses to even try. Nonetheless, the author says he worked quite hard on this paper and that you really must read it, lest you will be overwhelmed with guilt and subject to a dreadful curse. Also pledges to get even with the author’s anonymous reviewers. Finally, reports that the author has been under a great deal of stress lately but that his therapy has been going well.
Beyond ethnography Towards writerly accounts of organizing in marketingDouglas Brownlie
doi: 10.1108/03090569710162362pmid: N/A
This paper is about marketing accounting. It is about reading marketing writing and writing marketing reading and what calls them into being. It is about our “ab‐outing” practices; those signifying practices by means of which we week to capture a piece of the world and show it off, wrapped in a suitable tale of discovery, in a cabinet in the museum of marketing knowledge. You may wonder why should we bother, since without those representation practices and textual conventions how could we be sure that the objects on display were real, not fakes; that our representations were true images of objects in the real world, not mere simulations of simulations? Do you find comfort in the view that marketing discourse organizes in such a way as to sustain the convention that objects in the marketing world “out there” are antecedent to our images of them? And does it discomfort you to recognize the ideas of Garfinkel (1967) being used to suggest that marketing accounts are constituent features of the settings we make observable? Whatever your answers, how textual organization persuades and makes real is a point worth considering. I think this is a timely project, as we warm to qualitative methods, especially ethnography, on the (mis)understanding that they can reveal truer, deeper, thicker insights into the real world. For it is not possible to avoid the problem of representation in this way, as Geertz (1973) reminds us in his invitation to reflexive ethnographic inquiry.
Existential consumption and irrational desireRichard Elliott
doi: 10.1108/03090569710162371pmid: N/A
In postmodernity, consumption is a prime site for the negotiation of conflicting themes of freedom and control. Explores the consumption of symbolic meaning through five consumption dialectics: the material versus the symbolic, the social versus the self, desire versus satisfaction, rationality versus irrationality, and creativity versus constraint. Argues that consumers are engaged in authentic choices in the construction and communication of self and social meanings, and that these consumption choices can be conceptualized as the exercise of existential freedom, even if constrained by inequalities in the economic system and by ideological hegemony.
Community and consumption Towards a definition of the “linking value” of product or servicesBernard Cova
doi: 10.1108/03090569710162380pmid: N/A
Encapsulates the debate on the topics of confusion in consumption and the return of community. Starting with an ethnosociological analysis structuring the passage from modernity to postmodernity around the metamorphosis of the social link, aims at clarifying and explaining the different levels of the postmodern confusion in consumption. Modernity entered history as a progressive force promising to liberate humankind from everyday obligations and traditional bonds. As a consequence, modern consumption emphasized essentially the utilitarian value (“use value”) of products and services. Postmodernity, on the contrary, can be said to crown not the triumph of individualism, but the beginning of its end with the emergence of a reverse movement of a desperate search for community. With the neo‐tribalism distinguishing postmodernity, everyday life seems to mark out the importance of a forgotten element: the social link. Consequently, postmodern consumption appears to emphasize the “linking value” of products and services. Concludes with an exploration of the implications of postmodernity for rethinking marketing with the integration of the linking value concept.