ABSTRACT
Narratives representing the “voice” of the consumer-prose passages in which the consumers’ own words are reported-first appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research less than a decade ago and are in large part responsible for the changed look of the journal. The new look is signaled by articles in which indented passages of consumer-generated prose are interspersed with blocks of researcher-generated prose. Indentation is a printing convention signifying polyvocality, for it separates the researcher’s narrative voice from those of consumers. Articles with indents exemplify the postmodern spirit of eclecticism, drawing from traditions of ethnographic, existential-phenomenological, and introspective research. Verbal rather than numerical data are the raw material, and researchers engage in the collection, analysis, and presentation of individual “narratives” or “stories.” Their mission is to identify, describe, and comment on consumption themes in the data set (see White 1973, 1987; Gossman 1978). Several alternative methods of collecting and analyzing verbal data have been set forth (see Belk et al. 1988; Heisley and Levy 1991; Thompson et al. 1989), and disciplinary debate centers on those processes (see Gould 1991, 1995; Wallendorf and Brucks 1993).
