ABSTRACT
The vast majority of the marketing and consumer behavior literature emanating from American business schools is about one quasi-dyadic relationship: marketer and individual consumer. In this literature, the why of consumption is typically explained in terms of attitudes, attribute bundles, affect, judgment biases and decision heuristics – all at the individual level. While these factors are no doubt important, the truly social aspects of consumption have been relatively overlooked and undervalued. To be sure, social psychologists attempt (more or less) to account for the influence of others on individual consumers’ thoughts and judgments. But this is hardly the same as studying social behavior as social behavior in its social context: consumer behavior formed and enacted within and by aggregations, themselves shaped, sanctioned, and grounded in relationships, institutions and other collectives.
