November 3, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

In the last few blog entries,  I related some of the interesting events surrounding ACR 2008 in San Francisco and relating some of the sessions and Plenary speeches of the Doctoral Symposium. I also detailed in my last blog John Deighton’s very thought-provoking speech, which really captured the zeitgeist of the American moment for me. Today, I just want to highlight just a scant few of the other interesting sessions and presentations this year.

Of course, the afternoon of the Symposium was also very interesting. We had groups broken out then by theoretical  interest, which has in past years also been the way that things are done. I enjoyed sitting in on several of the sessions, where mainly people were presenting their own research projects and interests.

In the CCT session, a heated, spirited debate broke out, which probably alarmed the students. Academics, fighting and arguing amongst themselves? What could be more natural…and more healthy for the development of good research. It also gave some grist for the mill that I hope to be able to follow up on in a future session, possibly at the upcoming CCT conference in Detroit in Summer 2009.

The conference itself was jam-packed with interesting, informed sessions, more than ever before. I believe we had twelve tracks going at once, which means that there are twelve rooms full of presenters (usually four in each), each presenting research. As an attendee, you had to choose among these twelve sessions-often a very tough choice.

On Friday morning, I caught the session on Witchcraft. Yes, you read it right. Cloaked in the title “Roll You Own Religion,” there were three terrific presentations by extraordinary consumers researchers who were studying the consumption of paganism, magic, the occult and witchcraft.

I’ve always been interested in the links between spirituality and consumer culture. You’ll find me babbling about it in everything from my earliest work Star Trek to my exploration of Burning Man to my latest work on technology ideologies. It’s a core thread running through this blog which is, of course, named as an homage to Rudolf Steiner, one of the great mystics and spiritual philosophers of our time. I’m reading a lot more about those great Mystery School traditions now, and even visiting some of the great sites, and I’ll have a lot more to say about these topics in future postings.

I think that it is incredibly relevant, meaningful, and practical to investigate the role of the mystical and magical in consumers’ everyday lives and consumption. This set of ethnographic research projects, presented by Darach Turley of Dublin City University, Pauline Maclaran of the Royal Holloway Business School at the University of London, Linda Scott of the Said Busienss School at Oxford, and Diego Rinallo of Bocconi Universirty in Milan, is, in my opinion, the most exciting and highest-potential ethnographic work  being done in the field of consumer research today.

That’s saying something. I missed the Odyssey, but have had the pleasure of hearing some of the war tales from the front lines by those most involved in its inception and execution.  I had the privilege to see John Schouten and Jim McAlexander present their Harley work in the mid- 1990s. That certainly had the feeling of something massive and substantial. So too did Al Muniz and Tom O’Guinn’s work on brand communities. I’m looking forward to following this Witchy Consumer Research and seeing it develop and grow and have massive impact in our field and beyond.

Closer to home, Jay Handelman presented some new and updated research on consumer activism that we’ve been working on an percolating for over a decade-follow-on research and new theory development based on and extending into new terrain our prior work on consumer activism. And Professor Ashlee Humphreys, recently graduated  from the Kellogg School and in her first ACR as an assistant professor from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University , presented some work we have been doing together that looks at the communal acts and dynamic co-creation modalities of YouTube viewers  and participants.  I’m very excited about both of these pieces of research and am looking forward to developing them further with my co-authors.

That’s all I’m going to say about ACR this year. It was a large event, but for me it was awesome. Even though it is big, diverse, and growing more diverse all of the time, there is a real family feeling, a genuine feeling that we are a community. We have common interests and goals. For the most part, we understand and respect each other. It was a great year for ACR, a great location, and a great time, and I’m looking forward to next year’s conference, where Jeff Inman will lead us in Pittsburgh.

I’m back a’blogging. It feels good. Next, I’ll post the poetry hypotheses. Please have a glance at that stuff and if you feel moved, leave a comment or two.

Adios for now, amigos.

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October 31, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I left off the last blog entry where John Deighton was coming to speak at the Doctoral Symposium at ACR this year in San Francisco, on Thursday October 23rd at the lunchtime Plenary Session. He had no PowerPoint’s and was reading the presentation off of his laptop, which was an experiment that he predicted would likely end in failure.

It was anything but a failure. What I gathered from John’s presentation truly clarified and captured what I was just beginning to detect in the zeitgeist of the American spirit, as I wrote about just a little while ago in this blog.

John’s presentation took a historical view. He took us back to the changes in business schools in the 1950s, after the Carnegie and Ford Foundations examined the state of business schools in America and found them lacking. They were places operated mainly by ex-business people, and were teaching business based on anecdote. The foundations called for a more scientific approach. Almost overnight these schools transformed themselves into scientific institutions. They hired Ph.D.s in basic fields. They built applied fields for themselves in a matter of years.

According to John, the two crowning achievements of these years were both in the field of Finance, both were derived from Economics, and both had much of their origins in the university of Chicago and its Economics department  and approach.  First, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that asserted that the market always knows best, and can adjust itself accurately to demand without the need for heavy-handed regulation. Next was the Markets and Hierarchies and agency theory approaches drawn from the Transaction Costs approach of Oliver Williamson, which provided a rationale for deregulating economic actions and allowing self-governance and self-regulation.

According to John, these two theories had an impact akin to that of a religion. They provided the ideological underpinning for a half-century of Milton Friedmanesque deregulation of one market after another.

And again, according to John, we had just seen the ultimate defeat of this perspective. The death knell of this Chicago economics ideology was ringing in the air all around us.
I must say that, ever since I became a business school professor in 1997, finance was always the major that attracted  many of the best students. This has always, for me, been just “the way it is.” Investment banking, merchant banking, financial positions-these were the ones where  people could make the most money the fastest, and this suited many MBAs just fine. Marketing was for those with a bit more of a creative,  expressive, curious,  streak, those who put some sort of job satisfaction above the goal of simply making massive incomes (although massive incomes would, of course, be sort of nice).

What was going to happen now that banks and finance companies were failing?

This wasn’t just an oncoming recession. This was the End of The Era of Unregulated and Self-Governing Finance. The end of the endless trough, the Big Feeding Frenzy Party. Could it be the end of Big Business and Big Finance regulating themselves? This could, conceivably, be the beginning of something like the post-Depression Era, the Roosevelt New Deal Projects-the age of bigger government, of (gasp-don’t-say-it-in-front-of-the-children)-a more Socially adept (don’t say it), socially aware (don’t say it), yes, Socialist-style government in American (damn! I said it). Yikes. Or, Whoah. Or Wow.

This is real Sea Change stuff.

John tied his talk up by bringing in the connection to the field of consumer research. In this new era where Finance’s EMH had been discredited, where  finance no longer held its position on the high point of the b-school and business pyramid, where regulation, negotiation,  and understanding public policy were coming into positions of prominence, in this new era where would business need to turn for the answers that vexed it.

According to John, there was no one better suited to formulate and answer these questions than the scholars who were in the building for ACR, for the following reasons.

• We are already deeply involved in understanding the mechanisms of consumer choice and consumers’ actual behaviors.
• We are already concerned with the effects of marketplace behaviors, and formulating recommendations to ameliorate and improve unintended consequences and ill side effects.
• We have achieved  impressive levels of scientific understanding, from fieldwork to Bayesian models to lab experiments, about the ways that markets and consumption really work, as opposed to the ways that they were supposed to work and that had been assumed, reified, then deified in the halls of Finance Departments around the world.
• We have many active,  important ties to industry, and to the parts of industry that actually interface with the world, with regulators, with public relations people, with advertising and media, and with consumers themselves.
• And we are beginning to flex our muscles in the field of social policy.

This was heady, amazing, call-to-arms stuff. Powerful stuff. For me, John’s speech was one of the major highlights of ACR 2008. I’ll tell you more about some of the other highlights tomorrow.

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October 30, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

There are only a couple more posts until I add my interpretation to the poetry
-hypothesis generation entry. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please scroll down and do so. Check out the three amazing interpretations in the comment section by some very bright and talented blog readers. And please feel free to add your own comments/interpretations…

Okay.

Last year, I was asked by Punam Anand Keller, the duly elected President of the Association for Consumer Research, to co-chair this year’s Doctoral Symposium. It was a huge honor to be asked to do this for ACR and of course I immediately said that I would be happy to do it. My co-chair was the wonderful, organized, thoughtful and easy-going researcher Meg Campbell from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Of course, having Meg involved that sweetened the deal even more. The funny thing is that I first met Meg in 2001, during the very first ACR Doctoral Symposium when we sat on the very same panel. There’s another synchronistic moment of solicitious synchronicitous synchronicity-for those of you (like me) who are keeping track.

The Doctoral Symposium is a forum for Ph.D. students interested or involved in the field of consumer research to learn about the field and theories of consumer research, and also to meet and hear from some of the most prominent and upcoming of consumer research professors. Choosing people wasn’t difficult-we have a wealth of wonderful people in our field who are both prominent and high-status and kind enough to come a day early and volunteer their time to share insights with students. We invited many of the top people in our field-of course, there were also many high-fliers and big thinkers who we couldn’t have at the Symposium for one reason or another.

I’m going to reflect mainly on the Doctoral Symposium, since that was the focus of my attention this year. I’ll talk a bit about the overall conference, which I thought was remarkably well-organized,and put together in a spirit of bridge-building and cross-disciplinary/interdisciplinary  exchange.  I hear that conference registration was at an all-time high and that it was expected to crack one thousand for the first time in history. That’s a major accomplishment.

This year we tried to structure the Symposium in a different way that we hoped might help better meet students’ needs. Meg and I figured that students at different stages of the Ph.D. program had different needs, and wanted to get different things from their participation at the Symposium. We had three groups: (1) about to enter, just entered, or pre-examination Ph.D. students, (2) post-exam or early dissertation students, and (3) late exam or “job market candidate” students.

Moving from a scary, slow start, the enrollment response was gratifying. We had the largest Symposium registration in recent years: 130 students. Last year I believe that the registration was just over 100 students.

The Symposium started with sessions that helped students to plan for and organize their burgeoning careers. I was very happy to see that the discussions in these three rooms were radically different. In the rooms with the new students, there were some deep discussion about how to choose a thesis chair, how to study for exams, what the role of political power wan in chairing a thesis, In the post-exam phase there was a lot about what constitutes a good thesis topic, how to conduct an efficient literature review, how to improve one’s thesis writing, how many studies to include in a thesis, what the risks were in choosing a currently-fashionable topic. Finally, in the job market groups there were presentation and discussions about publishing in the two top journals in the field-JCR and JM, represented by Managing Editor Mary Ann Twist and Editor Ajay Kohli, respectively–giving students’ detailed, helpful concrete suggestions for successful publication.

The next session synthesized current theory across four broad domains, and made it targeted and accessible to the appropriate student group. We split the field of consumer research into four groups:

• Affect, Motivation, Intention and Goals
• Attitude and Persuasion
• Behavioral Decision Models and Choice
• Consumer Culture Theoretics

In each session, there was interesting overlap and synthesis showing how we are looking at some major problems in the world of consumption and consumer behavior through a number of sophisticated theoretical lenses, and how these views both contrast with and complement each other. I would have loved to have seen even more coordination and complementarity, to enhance what was already there. That might be something to think about and consider working on for future years.

After lunch, we had a plenary session where five top luminaries in the field presented on the open theme of “Inside/Outside”-an invitation to reflect on how consumer research insights were drawing on and also affecting academic,  interest group, journalistic, social, and other constituencies outside of our small but growing field of consumer research.

Russ Belk opened up with a stirring, stimulating, inspiring presentation that encouraged students to stretch themselves, take risks, and dare to investigate the questions that interested them. Punam Keller followed with a fascinating case study that revealed high-profile research she had with the US Government to try to help single mothers to better manage their financial affairs. Her approach was both practical and scientific, and has resulted in her research gaining wide use among public agencies, and her further appointment to important advisory positions within government committees-also meaningful, inspiring stuff.

John Sherry then presented an erudite, well thought out, imaginative presentation charting the course of consumer research and the problems it could answer. Some of the problem areas that John recommended nascent researchers investigate was the interface of economic, social, and ecological consumption interests, and he proposed that we would need new ways of understanding moral communities and the notions of obligation. One of John’s slides showed a first person view of a shopping cart, headed down a diverging road with a sign that indicated the rider would be forced to choose a path. John indicated that this was the situation that many thesis students had been told they were forced to choose from, but that this wasn’t true.

The words of Led Zeppelin echoed in my head:

“Yes there are two paths you can go by,
but in the long run,
there’s still time to change
the road you’re on.”

Is it true? One of the students later asked about this, and it seemed to me that the assembled professors could not offer very much in the way of enthusiastic encouragement for students to try to honestly cover every angle of consumer research in their academic careers.

The next talk, by John Lynch was also pragmatic and applied. He presented research he had conducted to help understand how to work with a sophisticated consumer group-young professionals-to save more effectively for retirement. Like Punam Keller’s presentation, John’s focus was on combining rigorous research with important real-world questions and coming up with actual policy implications that can be readily used and adopted by government agencies. I found this fascinating and inspiring stuff.

The final of the three Johns-and no, we didn’t plan it that way-was John Deighton, the current editor of the field’s top journal, the Journal of Consumer Research. Oddly, John had no PowerPoint slides. He said he’d been working the speech on the airplane and it was last minute. He read his speech off of his laptop, which he apologized for, and predicted as he started that his talk would end in “failure.”

I’ll tell you more, lots more, about John Deighton’s presentation to the Symposium in my next blog entry. You’ll have wait until then to see if his predictions of failure and embarrassment were realized.

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