ABSTRACT
This paper began at the 2005 European Association for Consumer Research (EACR) conference in Goteborg as a conversation, one of many spurred by Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) work on Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). We applauded the many theoretical contributions these authors recognized in their review and shared their intentions of uniting us under an umbrella acronym and putting to rest continued derogatory labels of interpretive consumer research as weird science. Even so, we wondered what sorts of hegemonic inclusions and exclusions might be brought about by this academic brand in research conventions, in university jobs and promotions, and in topics and geographic areas. Further, we pondered why pockets of interpretive work have flourished in particular places and not in others, and why so little of the work of European scholars has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), observations even more surprising since so many of the theoretical foundations of CCT have come from Europe, for example, Karl Marx, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu, and the list goes on. Above all, we were concerned about the implications of the CCT paper for the quest for pluralism that has been a central epistemic value throughout the history of interpretive consumer research. We thus take a self-reflective, genealogical perspective (Foucault 1970) on the project of building CCT in order to lay further groundwork for the evolution of expanded forms of consumer culture community (CCC). In doing so, we participate in the litany of conversations among interpretive consumer researchers strategizing to increase our numbers in the pages of journals and in university positions, firms, and graduate programs.1
