ACR 2009 Roundtable
Advancing the Production/Consumption Dialectic in Consumer Culture Theory
Co-chairs
Ahir Gopaldas, York University, Schulich School of Management
Sarah JS Wilner, York University, Schulich School of Management
Contact: swilner06@schulich.yorku.ca
Extended Abstract
The purpose of this roundtable is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary researchers to discuss
new concepts, frameworks, and theories that can reformulate and advance the study of the
production/consumption dialectic in consumer culture theory (CCT). Though the concepts of
production and consumption are defined diversely within and across the disciplines of
anthropology, consumer research, cultural studies, economics, marketing, sociology, and media
studies, they are widely understood in opposition to one another. However, the relative emphasis
on production, consumption, or hybrid conceptualizations has always been contingent on
sociohistoric conditions. For example, as capitalism and globalization matured through the 20th
century, both business practice and social theory gradually de-privileged production and divided
their attention between production and consumption in more equal measure. This trend roughly
coincided with shifts from modern ideologies and mass production to postmodern ideologies and
market segmentation (Cohen 2004; Firat and Venkatesh 1995; Zhou and Belk 2008).
CCT has a long history of considering production, in addition to consumption, in its analyses (for
a review, see Arnould and Thompson 2005). Within CCT, it is often argued that the
production/consumption dialectic structures intra-person (e.g. Tian and Belk 2005: work
self/home self); inter-person (e.g. Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007); and inter-group (e.g.
Giesler 2008) identities and activities. Long-standing questions about cultural construction,
reproduction, opposition, and transformation in the market sphere remain at the heart of
contemporary CCT research: How do dominant cultural producers transform the core ideologies
of a society (e.g. Zhao and Belk 2008)? How do marketers employ mass-mediated and microcultural discourses to craft compelling offerings and reformulate historical discourses in doing so
(e.g. Thompson and Tian 2008)? How do producers imagine and interpellate consumers and
consumption communities (e.g. Cayla and Eckhardt 2008; Kozinets 2008)? How do producers
and consumers negotiate the (dis)junctures of market and social logics (e.g. Giesler 2008;
Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007; Tian and Belk 2005)? The agenda of this roundtable may
be articulated accordingly:
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What underexplored and unexplored concepts, frameworks, and theories can help researchers
explicate the myriad intersections of production and consumption in practice?
Which contexts, informants, and phenomena are appropriate for investigating these
intersections?
What insights can be gleaned from production/consumption research not only for theory, but
also for consumer empowerment, political engagement, and social justice?
Exploring new theoretical directions to explicate this domain of research is perennially important
for a number of reasons. First, the production/consumption dialectic is at the core of CCT and its
sibling fields of interpretive consumer research (for a review, see Cova and Elliott 2008),
consumption anthropology (for a review, see Miller 1995), consumption sociology (for a review,
see Zukin and Smith Maguire 2004), and critical marketing studies (for a review, see Saren et al.
2007). What all these fields share is an interest in how market logics are produced, reproduced,
opposed, and transformed by cultural, economic, political, and social forces, both within and
beyond the marketplace. Accordingly, the production/consumption dialectic gives an extensive
network of scholars a node to link their sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory
trajectories of scholarship.
Second, the production/consumption dialectic links to numerous other dialectics that shape the
agenda of CCT. For example, the dialectic links to the supply/demand dialectic in economic
discourse, the management/marketing dialectic in business discourse, and the work/spend (Schor
1991) or work/life (Tian and Belk 2005) dialectics in social discourse. To advance the reach of
CCT, it would behoove consumer culture theorists to challenge such discursive divides and forge
links with compatible theorists in other areas of the business academy (e.g. critical management
studies [Alvesson and Willmott 1992]) with whom we share critical and interpretive research
agendas and domain boundaries.
Third, along with structure/agency theoretics and identity politics, the production/consumption
dialectic has inspired increasingly sophisticated understandings of production and consumption
and their multi-level (institutional and individual) and multi-sphere (cultural and economic) roles
in social reproduction and transformation (e.g. Bourdieu 1984; Giddens 1991; Ritzer 1993).
These interlinked understandings of production/consumption, structure/agency, and identity
politics are not universal but situated resolutions to theoretical debates. For example, while
marketing researchers have proposed that the service-dominant logic of co-creation/coproduction is a substantive merger of production and consumption logics (Vargo and Lusch
2004), consumer researchers have argued that these concepts are rhetoric bandages over a
sustained divide between the production of exchange-value (i.e., production) and the production
of use-value (i.e. consumption) (Humphreys and Grayson 2008). It is through a cycling of such
dialectic discussions, syncretic conceptualizations, and reformulated dialectics that business
practice and theory evolves in society and the marketplace (Giesler 2008).
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