ABSTRACT
Methodological pluralism in consumer research is usually confined to post-positivist interpretive approaches. It is argued, however, that a positivistic stance, radical behaviorism, can enrich epistemological debate among researchers with the recognition of radical behaviorism’s ultimate reliance upon interpretation as well as science. Although radical behaviorist explanation was initially founded upon Machian positivism, its account of complex social behaviors such as purchase and consumption is necessarily interpretive, inviting comparison with the hermeneutical approaches currently emerging in consumer research. Radical behaviorist interpretation attributes meaning to behavior by identifying its environmental determinants, especially the learning history of the individual in relation to the consequences similar prior behavior has effected. The nature of such interpretation is demonstrated for purchase and consumption responses by means of a critique of radical behaviorism as applied to complex human activity. In the process, a framework for radical behaviorist interpretation of purchase and consumption is developed, and applied to four operant equifinality classes of consumer behavior: Accomplishment, Pleasure, Accumulation, and Maintenance. Some epistemological implications of this framework, the Behavioral Perspective Model of purchase and consumption (BPM), are discussed in the context of the relativity and incommensurability of research paradigms. Finally, the interpretive approach is evaluated, particularly in terms of its relevance to the nature and understanding of managerial marketing.
In a sense, of course, all philosophising is a perversion of reality: for, in a sense, no philosophic theory makes any difference to practice. It has no working by which we can test it. It is an attempt to organise the confused and contradictory world of common sense, and an attempt which invariably meets with partial failure – and with partial success. It invariably involves cramming both feet into one shoe: almost every philosophy seems to begin as a revolt of common sense against some other theory, and ends – as it becomes itself more developed and approaches completeness – by itself becoming equally preposterous – to everyone but its author. The theories are certainly, all of them, implicit in the inexact experience of every day, but once extracted they make the world appear as strange as Bottom in his ass’s head … Of course one cannot avoid metaphysics altogether, because nowhere can a sharp line be drawn – to draw a line between metaphysics and common sense would itself be metaphysics and not common sense. But relativism does I think suggest this recommendation: not to pursue any theory to a conclusion, and to avoid complete consistency. Now the world of natural science may be unsatisfying, but after all it is the most satisfactory that we know, so far as it goes. And it is the only one which we must all accept.
(T. S. Eliot to Norbert Wiener, 6 January 1915; in Eliot 1988: 80. Italics in original)