A pluralistic seduction? Post‐modern consumer research at the crossroads

Abstract

This paper suggests that the trend towards the conceptualisation of ‘post‐modern’ forms of consumption threatens the very basis of research into consumption and consumers. Arguing that although a fascination with the symbolic aspects of consumption has much to offer, the suggestion here is that the future of consumer research is potentially undermined by a preoccupation with post‐modern rhetoric which has in turn tended to divert consumer researchers away from their object of study. Examples of post‐modern consumer research are therefore critically discussed. In this context, the continued influence of modernist guises of consumption and the need for a datadriven prioritisation of consumer meanings is emphasised. The danger inherent in being seduced by the superficial attractions of a post‐modern mind‐set is therefore said to lay in the fact that post‐modernism operates as a disabling intellectual orientation which can only fulfil its potential if used in a more flexible and imaginative fashion than is currently the case.

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