Suchergebnisse

This essay gives closer historical consideration to the unprecedented disciplinary impact of Belk's (1988) conceptualization of the extended self. This canonical article initially appeared to be another flashpoint in the paradigmatic conflict between positivist and interpretivist consumer researchers. However, Belk's portrayal of consumers as agentic actors who produce their own identities through a network of possessions and symbolic artefacts proved to be highly compatible with interdisciplinary trends toward a more holistic and socio-culturally situated understanding of consumer behavior. Accordingly, Belk's "extended self" created an ontological bridge between interpretivist studies of consumers' co-constituting relations to the socio-material world and consumer psychologists' quest to expand their research interests beyond the study of rational decision making processes. While some marketing historians have suggested that the extended self's seminal influence derives from its generative "vagueness," I propose that its transformational effects on the broader field of consumer research trace to a genius of mythopoesis and a genius of timing. I then discuss how the logic of ontological reconfiguration, manifest in Belk's conceptualization, can foster more synergistic and innovative inter-paradigmatic dialogues between consumer culture theory (CCT) and consumer psychology.

This special issue of the Journal of Consumer Culture addresses the complex intersections and interrelationships that exist among everyday consumption practices, broader ideological structures, and moralistically infused citizenship ideals. The politicized marketplace relationships (and recursive effects) that emanate from these intersections are not reducible to conventional dichotomies between the marketplace and the body politic or between consumption and civic engagement. Building upon this insight, the articles in this special issue cast new theoretical light on how political ideologies and moralistic narratives — often reproducing entrenched class, gender, and racial hierarchies — are institutionalized and contested through consumption practices.

Politics of consumption analyses often evince a moralistic subtext that traces to the nineteenth-century fusion of Calvinism and patriarchal sexual politics. This spermatic legacy has channeled these critical discourses in a therapeutic direction that attenuates their realpolitik relevance. Drawing from Bakhtin's account of the carnivalesque, the author argues for an analytics of the excretory economy that eschews therapeutic goals in favor of muckraking scholarship that critically analyzes specific market systems and their constitutive networks of power relationships and material consequences. The author concludes by discussing some ways in which muckraking scholarship can mobilize citizen-consumers to the activist cause of transforming structural conditions that render specific facets of commercial culture problematic.