ABSTRACT
Although there are a variety of frameworks for understanding what constitutes marketing knowledge, a central feature is its unproblematic allegiance to positivist methods within an empiricist epistemology. This allegiance can in part be understood by marketing's seemingly insatiable urge to achieve parity with ‘higher-order’ scientific disciplines. To achieve this, marketing phenomena within the social world must be amenable to causal analysis involving their reduction to a set of quantifiable variables similar to those of the natural sciences. The social world is assumed to exist independently of the observer, although made knowable only through sense perception of social action and events. It is axiomatic to this form of epistemology that ‘time’ and ‘space’ should be ascribed the characteristics of abstract, quantifiable, singular units. Consumption, as represented in marketing literature, is assumed to occur within a given tempo-spatial context (Davies 1994; Engel et al. 1995). Time’ and ‘space’ are conceptualised as existing externally to the individual, in fixed rationally co-ordinated spheres. Yet ‘time’ and ‘space’ are bound up with the socially constructed meanings that are a reflection of, and in turn reproduced by, the consumption event (Jackson and Thrift 1995). For we consume spaces, places and times the instant they are generated in and through the consumption event (Jackson and Thrift 1995: 213).
