ABSTRACT
Project
With a hermeneutic social theory of practices assembled in earlier chapters, the present chapter considers marketing and organisation studies of human behaviour from this viewpoint. If consumer behaviour involves fundamentally habituated generic understanding-in-use, occasioning second-order reflective attention only when prompted by malfunction, moments of celebration or research, what does this imply for interpretive marketing analysis discussing interviewee reports? Here, in the context of evaluating marketing and organisation theory’s engaging hermeneutics, we view consumers’ reflective interpretation of everyday practices in a mall. Understanding-in-use is equipped, evades attention (with momentary reflection-in-practice) and, epistemologically generic, incorporates roles (e.g. gendered) with associated rules and horizons of evaluative understanding. Articulated in practices, consumer agency is thereby both enabled and encircled by social structure: ‘We are carried by the meanings of the past before we find ourselves in a position to judge them’ (Kearney, 1991: 60), whether materially or mentally embedded to advance critically and creatively. In this chapter, we address the ‘need for an interpretive perspective in consumer research’ (Holbrook and O’Shaughnessy, 1988: 400) with a discussion of consumer hermeneutic practices, asking how does consumer research accommodate accumulated mundane meaning in behaviour—the ‘always-already givenness of the world at hand’ (Seamon, 2013: 144)?
