ABSTRACT
Many would accept that market research learned many of its analytic and diagnostic techniques from other social sciences. What is less widely recognised is the extent to which notions of consumer behaviour that have arisen in the marketing field have diffused into social theory. The self-reflexive consumer has become a central actor in sociological debate. Lifestyle has emerged as an important mise-en-scène for sociological interpretations of social life, and is a key motif in the accounts of social change advanced by sociologists such as Giddens, Bauman, Featherstone, Beck, et al. But at the same time, there is considerable disagreement, though often unrecognised, about what the terms lifestyle, consumer culture, reflexivity and the consumer mean. If we also take into account the different notions apparent in other social science disciplines, in economics and psychology especially (see Fine and Leopold 1993), then we might conclude that there is little useful consensus about how consumers behave and what would be appropriate ways to understand, or to predict, consumer behaviour. Yet social science has, in some instances, uncritically accepted the knowledge generated in the advertising and marketing industries, without recognising that parallel disagreements exist among commercial practitioners about how consumers behave, and how their behaviour should be analysed. In this context it seems important to consider the nature of the relationship between social scientific and advertising and marketing knowledges. An important question for us in this chapter is thus the nature of the rather complicated dialectic between commercial and academic knowledge about the consumer and consumer culture.
