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Eric J Arnould
Aalto University School of Business, Marketing, Faculty Member
This research investigates how individuals connect with nature and how different perceptions of continuity or discontinuity with nonhuman entities influence their consumption habits. Drawing on Descola's critique of the traditional... more
This research investigates how individuals connect with nature and how different perceptions of continuity or discontinuity with nonhuman entities influence their consumption habits. Drawing on Descola's critique of the traditional distinction between nature and culture, this study empirically examines the concept of "ontological hybridity" introduced by the authors. Through qualitative data collected from 25 consumers, the analysis reveals the process by which non-naturalist ontologies infiltrate the dominant ontology, which serves as a critical backdrop for them. Amplified by triggering events, these infiltrations give rise to hybrid ontologies that drive changes in consumption practices. We discuss the opportunities presented by these ontological infiltrations for both the marketing field and society at large.
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What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whose satisfaction has become an organizational imperative? Our research draws from extended fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography.... more
What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whose satisfaction has become an organizational imperative? Our research draws from extended fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography. Our analysis shows how ethnography is implicated in the organizational fetishization of consumers, that is, how in the process of understanding and managing markets, a quasi-magical fascination with amalgams of consumer voices, images, and artefacts comes about. We offer several contributions. First, we demonstrate the pertinence of (primarily anthropological) theories of the fetish to organizational sensemaking. Second, we describe a distinctive process of organizational market sensemaking that is sensuous, magical, and analogical. Third, we offer a subtle critique of commercial ethnography, a popular research practice that aims to bring ‘real’ consumers to life inside the firm.
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Investigations of marketing relations across cultures have traditionally focused on culture as a background variable, a collection of essential character traits, habits, practices, categorizations, and so forth within a given domain that... more
Investigations of marketing relations across cultures have traditionally focused on culture as a background variable, a collection of essential character traits, habits, practices, categorizations, and so forth within a given domain that would explain the approach to and degree of acceptance of various marketing practices from abroad. Most often, such discussions are based in a Hofstedean tradition (for a review of the use of particular culture theories in literature and the dominance of Hofstede-based approaches, see Nakata and Izberk-Bilgin this volume). The role of cultural understanding in this perspective aims to predict the problems or potential misunderstandings arising from different cultural backgrounds in a marketing exchange relation or in cross-cultural managerial interactions (see, for example, Douglas and Craig’s work in this volume). Moreover, the basic question in the relation between marketing and culture is the standardization-adaptation debate, that is, the degree to which certain established marketing strategies or tactics would be applicable in a different cultural context. The unit of analysis is almost inevitably the nation-state, albeit with occasional references to subcultures, such as different ethnic groups. However, the inherent weaknesses of this approach, focusing on the comparison of cultural similarities and differences between nations, occasionally even turning to measuring the “cultural distances” between them, are becoming more and more evident in today’s globalizing environment—hence the need for a different look at relations between culture and marketing.
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A model for the explanation of socioeconomic change in West Africa is presented, and tested with data from Zinder province, Niger Republic. A Marxist social formation analysis provides a model of change and continuity in peripheral,... more
A model for the explanation of socioeconomic change in West Africa is presented, and tested with data from Zinder province, Niger Republic. A Marxist social formation analysis provides a model of change and continuity in peripheral, precapitalist modes of production, and of economic causality. A regional marketing systems analysis elaborates on the effects of exchange systems upon production systems and suggests quantitative data by which the Marxist model is tested. Marketing arrangements in Niger are discussed. An analysis of the Nigerien economy is presented. The way French, EEC, and Nigerien government policies have shaped the extraversion, mercantilism, and dependence of the economy is clarified. Then, the manipulation of exchange and production within Niger by state marketing agencies is explored. A regional systems analysis of marketing in Zinder province is carried out, including the system's history since precolonial times. The modern systems are described with price correlations, commodity flows, mobile trader circuits and strategies, and consumer behavior. Marketing and relations of production and reproduction in three communities, an agricultural village, a pottery-producing one, and a handicraft tannery were linked. Variations in household morphology and task performance, in gandu and master-apprentice workshop organization, in specialization in output, and in exchange and distribution of resources are related to the hierarchical position and functions of markets in which each community has participated historically. The key hypothesis was confirmed: local modes of production are now articulated with the modern world system. However, local modes have not been completely transformed from their antecedents. The structure of exchange makes it advantageous for foreign entrepreneurs and the Nigerien government to allow local modes to persist, while decapitalization, and tenacious political and reproductive relationships discourage transformation from below. By adding a regional systems perspective to a social formation analysis, a rich and testable description of the factors both facilitating and impeding changes in articulated modes of production was obtained
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... number of persons entertained on a major festive oc-casion, attendance at village moots, and sensitivity to gossip (see Exhibits 1 ... is not attempting to empirically decompose social linkage, but rather is examining its more molar... more
... number of persons entertained on a major festive oc-casion, attendance at village moots, and sensitivity to gossip (see Exhibits 1 ... is not attempting to empirically decompose social linkage, but rather is examining its more molar overall relation to favorite object attachment, factor ...
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... They emulate elites who have a secure and stable social status. This argument applies to the modern, emerging elites as well. Competing groups may even choose to emulate the consumption habits of different foreign elites: one group... more
... They emulate elites who have a secure and stable social status. This argument applies to the modern, emerging elites as well. Competing groups may even choose to emulate the consumption habits of different foreign elites: one group may choose Adidas, the other Nike. ...
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Abstract Purpose This paper reflects on the development of Consumer Culture Theory, both as a field of research and as an institutional classification, since the publication of Arnould and Thompson (2005). Methodology/approach This paper... more
Abstract Purpose This paper reflects on the development of Consumer Culture Theory, both as a field of research and as an institutional classification, since the publication of Arnould and Thompson (2005). Methodology/approach This paper takes a conceptual/historical orientation that is based upon the authors’ experiences over the course of the 10-year CCT initiative (including numerous conversations with fellow CCT colleagues). Findings The authors first discuss key benchmarks in the development of the CCT community as an organization. Next, the authors highlight key intellectual trends in CCT research that have arisen since the publication of their 2005 review and discuss their implications for the future trajectories of CCT research. Originality/value The paper by Arnould and Thompson (2005) has proven to be influential in terms of systematizing and placing a widely accepted disciplinary brand upon an extensive body of culturally oriented consumer research. The CCT designation has also provided an important impetus for institution building. The 10-year anniversary of this article (and not incidentally the CCT conference from which the papers in this volume hail) provides a unique opportunity for the authors to comment upon the broader ramifications of their original proposals.
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... "INHERITANCE RITUAL AND THE CREATION OF ORDER". Eric Arnould and Linda Price, University of Nebraska. In the service of the theme of the role of ritual in creating order, this presentation makes a few points about ritual in... more
... "INHERITANCE RITUAL AND THE CREATION OF ORDER". Eric Arnould and Linda Price, University of Nebraska. In the service of the theme of the role of ritual in creating order, this presentation makes a few points about ritual in American families. ...
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Research Interests: Business and Mobilization
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This article complements the concept of embedded security by proposing disembedded security to capture consumers’ energy practices when travelling across multiple domains of energy accessibility. Consumer mobility outside the home... more
This article complements the concept of embedded security by proposing disembedded security to capture consumers’ energy practices when travelling across multiple domains of energy accessibility. Consumer mobility outside the home produces misalignments between infrastructure and portable technology experienced as ‘hysteresis of the battery’. Hysteresis captures how respondents are subject to ‘unpleasant unpredictability’ about battery-based technology and infrastructure, which spurs hermeneutic reflection about energy, location and sociality. Multi-domain energy practices therefore bring energy consumers to ‘reembed’ or create a sense of psychological comfort on the move. Charge levels on battery icons not only structure daily patterns of consumer life through planning efforts but become interpretively entangled in issues of duration, distance and sociality as energy demands in portable technology push consumers to avoid disruption.
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This article focuses on the development of an irrigated perimeter in Foum Gleita, Mauritania and the responses of three ethnic groups and the national bureaucracy to the development. The perimeter is gravity fed from a lake created by... more
This article focuses on the development of an irrigated perimeter in Foum Gleita, Mauritania and the responses of three ethnic groups and the national bureaucracy to the development. The perimeter is gravity fed from a lake created by damming the Gorgol Noir river. The indigenous responses depend both on ethnic affiliation, historical patterns of land tenure, the egalitarian nature of the distribution scheme adopted for the perimeter, and the complexities of the local political situation. I place my article in the context of a critique of world systems theory.
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hj.se. Publications. ...
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Research Interests: Aesthetics and Consumer
We investigate the role of imagination in the consumption experience and we theorize the ways in which important collective narratives are (re)imagined at storyscapes – consumption spaces where narratives are the focal object of... more
We investigate the role of imagination in the consumption experience and we theorize the ways in which important collective narratives are (re)imagined at storyscapes – consumption spaces where narratives are the focal object of consumption. We ground our empirical investigation in the historical narrative of the American Civil War and we explore ethnographically the ways in which this historical episode
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... The author would like to acknowledge the cooperation and criticism of all the many people who contributed to data collection and analysis. The comments of Robert Netting, James McCullough, and three anonymous reviewers were... more
... The author would like to acknowledge the cooperation and criticism of all the many people who contributed to data collection and analysis. The comments of Robert Netting, James McCullough, and three anonymous reviewers were particularly insightful. Page 2. ...
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... patterns in the two cultures, special meanings linking certain types of consumer behaviour to one ... or the other, and expectations for the future development of a Greenlandic consumer society ... p> 4. Food... more
... patterns in the two cultures, special meanings linking certain types of consumer behaviour to one ... or the other, and expectations for the future development of a Greenlandic consumer society ... p> 4. Food consumption in Greenlandic food culture was organised around experience ...
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Rick and I are grateful to the editors of JBA, and a bit bemused to have been given the opportunity to publish this cabinet castaway of a paper. In his commentary and in good archaeological fashion, Rick resurrects more of the... more
Rick and I are grateful to the editors of JBA, and a bit bemused to have been given the opportunity to publish this cabinet castaway of a paper. In his commentary and in good archaeological fashion, Rick resurrects more of the institutional context in which this paper was embedded than I, although I have discussed these issues somewhat elsewhere (Arnould and Thomson 2014). But, like Rick, I think it is likely that our academic trajectories might have been different had some version of this essay been published in an anthropology journal when we wrote it, but in ways I cannot imagine now. Perhaps the most enduring effect is that the absence of an anthropology of consumption in the early 1980s thrust me into the arms of the most adventurous and in some ways most scholarly colleagues in the consumer research community in marketing. And in that university milieu, after working as a development anthropologist like Rick, and despite a brief sojourn in the anthropology department at Univer...
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In the global world, service cultures interact. The co-shaping interaction of local and global service cultures is a form of glocalization. In China, interaction between traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western medicine (WM) has... more
In the global world, service cultures interact. The co-shaping interaction of local and global service cultures is a form of glocalization. In China, interaction between traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western medicine (WM) has produced glocalized versions of both services. Through analysis of customers’ experience of healthcare service in southwestern China, this paper addresses two research questions: What distinctive cultural resources do informants associate with WM and TCM? And how do tensions emerge in the contrast between customers’ expected and experienced cultural resources in glocalized healthcare service? The resource integration construct provides theoretical language to analyze customers’ service experiences in glocalized service cultures. One theoretical contribution resulting from this analysis is showing that culturally specific resources embedded in service systems emerge phenomenologically through resource integration in customers’ experiences. A second theo...
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This chapter takes an open look at how researchers are using new topographies, technologies, and technocultural rituals and routines in order to reconceptualize what market actors are and do, and most especially, how they should be... more
This chapter takes an open look at how researchers are using new topographies, technologies, and technocultural rituals and routines in order to reconceptualize what market actors are and do, and most especially, how they should be studied. We are interested in the latest developments in consumer ethnography, as we have experienced and visualized them being practices in our native fields of anthropology, marketing and consumer research, and as it has touched upon industry market researchers and their workings.
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The study of the consumption of goods has never achieved the prominence in anthropology of either production or exchange. Yet the accelerating consumption of western goods in non-western societies is one of the most obtrusive cultural and... more
The study of the consumption of goods has never achieved the prominence in anthropology of either production or exchange. Yet the accelerating consumption of western goods in non-western societies is one of the most obtrusive cultural and economic trends of the last three centuries. This article addresses the general issue of why goods flow between cultural groups by re-examining the concept of consumption. It raises questions of importance to studies of development, material culture, ethnohistory, and symbolic anthropology.