Research

1. DE-ROMANTICISING THE MARKET:
ADVANCES IN CONSUMER CULTURE
THEORY
James Fitchett & James Cronin (2022) De-romanticising the market: advances in Consumer
CultureTheory, Journal of Marketing Management, 38:1-2, 1-16, DOI:
10.1080/0267257X.2022.2045126 To link to this article:
https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2045126

2. THREE ISSUES/PROBLEMS POSED BYTHE
AUTHOR (WHYTHE RESEARCHWAS
CONDUCTED)
 The study is conducted to reflect on whether the lexicon, frameworks, and conceptual
blueprints of CCT remain relevant for thinking beyond the marketplace and appreciating
social life “as it is” without interjecting it with market-centric language and assumptions.
 The research De-Romanticising the market: Advances in Consumer Culture Theory was
conducted to re evaluate, retool and re imagine the concept of CCT and to depart from anti-
consumption and anti-branding micro-practices within small-scale cultural milieu and
consider instead more systemic forms of resistance and how multi-actor, anti-conformist
market logics can emerge through mass, enduring collective protest.
 The study denaturalises and departs from an exclusive focus on consumption alone to reveal
the important dialectic interactions between constructs such as occupation and commerce.

3. METHODOLOGY USED
 The research used qualitative methodologies such as interviews, case
studies, ethnographic, as well as 'netnographic' methodswhich are well adapted
to study the experiential, sociological and cultural aspects of consumption,

4. CONCLUSIONS
 Marketplace can be integrated with and presented as a collective political force to:
challenge economic determinism, protest regressive infringements on civic liberty, and
foster localized, informal more-than-market networks.
 The origins of CCT as a multidisciplinary project – and one that should be willing to
question and even reject some of the apparently natural assumptions of the marketing
department and the business school – continues to produce schisms within the field.
 To put consumption, consumer culture, and capitalism in their appropriate cultural
context, and from there we might be able to imagine alternative cultural fantasies.
 Needs, desires, the consumer subject, commodities, exchange or whatever are ‘relative’
misses the point that they are nevertheless culturally coherent, and therefore any visions
for the future of consumer culture(s) must also work within this coherence.
 Consumer culture(s) have the capacity to be endlessly and frustratingly mesmerising in
their insatiable ability to occupy and colonise any and all aspects of lived experience for
the purposes of accumulation.

5. RECOMMENDATIONS
 Understanding those interactions necessitates thinking not just of the consumer
subject but of other intersecting subjectivities and stakeholders including citizens,
metropolitans, business owners, tourists, government decision-makers, and state
authorities (police enforcement).