Towards an epistemology of consumer culture theory

Abstract

This paper argues for an epistemological positioning of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) research beyond the lived experience of consumers. CCT, it is argued, brought sociocultural context to consumer research, not least through the introduction of existential phenomenology as a paradigm for CCT studies. However, it is time to expand the contextualization of lived consumer experiences with another contextualization, this time the one of systemic and structuring influences of market and social systems that is not necessarily felt or experienced by consumers in their daily lives, and therefore not necessarily discursively expressed. There is a need to take into consideration the context of context. We therefore suggest an epistemology for CCT that explicitly connects the structuring of macro-social explanatory frameworks with the phenomenology of lived experiences, thereby inscribing the micro-social context accounted for by the consumer in a larger socio-historical context based on the researcher’s theoretical insights.