Outsider's insights and (mis)understanding Fuat Fırat

Today the journal Consumption, Markets & Culture published an interview that myself and Nikhilesh Dholakia conducted with Fuat Fırat. Myself and Nik wanted to champion a scholar that we both think very highly of and have been encouraged and inspired by throughout our careers (Nik's career, I should hasten to add, has been going on for a lot longer than mine). In 1987 Fuat, together with Nik and Richard Bogazzi, edited the seminal Philosophical & Radical Thought in Marketing which re-imagined the subject of marketing and contained submissions by such high and mighty scholars as Philip Kotler, Morris Holbrook and included Russell Belk's wonderful re-working of Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal that suggested that consumers be fitted with micro-chips so that they could function according to the marketing models that scholars had developed for them.

Eventually Fuat, Nikhilesh  and Alladi Venkatesh created the journal Consumption, Markets & Culture; a journal committed to radical scholarship that calls into question all assumptions about marketing and consumption. To this day the journal remains one of the few marketing journals in which every submission is interesting and worth reading. The journal has created space for alternative scholars such as myself to find an outlet and in many ways, I see my career as that of a settler occupying space that was previously fought for and won by people like Fuat and Nik.

In 1995 Fuat and Alladi played no small role in introducing postmodernism to the field of consumer research in their paper that contributed to a seismic shift in the marketing imagination and helped bring to life the subject of marketing in an explosion of new ideas and colours.

As the interview attests, Fuat remains a vibrant personality and inspiring colleague and I hope our article will succeed in our aim of championing the Turkish scholar. Over the course of the interview, Fuat addresses a series of issues that range from recalling his radical student days in Istanbul in 1968 then moving to the Northwestern Marketing Department in Chicago and also discusses his various research interests including consumption patterns, postmodernity, theatre, new literacy and beyond. I am sure many marketing scholars will feel assured that Fuat is in Texas thinking such thoughts, much like the narrator in the Big Lebowski is assured that the Dude is out there keeping it real for the rest of us sinners.

Careers Service at Royal Holloway

This is a reminder to students that Royal Holloway operates an excellent Careers Service for students which is located in the Horton Building. 


Careers Advisers provide a range of workshops addressing various topics including CVs, application forms, finding jobs, interviews and career choice. 

You can make appointments with an Application Adviser to discuss CVs, application forms and personal statements, and appointments with a Career Adviser to discuss further study and career options.

Take a look at their website here.

A Student Describes Her Dissertation - Christina Demertsidou

My Quest for Perfection – MA DISSERTATION by Christina Demertsidou

As a student I used to belong to the category of perfectionists. Defining whether that was good or bad or even both is a long story. In short I would state that perfectionism along with my passion for Marketing; lead to the fulfilment of the prime aim I set before applying for a Masters degree. My aim was a distinction. It’s been a year since graduation and I can admit that had I not held myself to a high standard at the very beginning, I wouldn’t have been so enthusiastic about my degree. I didn’t study Marketing in order to later just add it to my CV. I studied Marketing to make me a better person as it helps me balance the obsessive part of my personality. A brand, an advert, and/or a slogan do not have to be perfect in order to be considered successful. A well known example Google is a misspelling and yet “this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not.” My point is, each time my quest for perfectionism goes gaga, I ask to myself ‘does it really matter?’

Sharing the enthusiasm of writing my dissertation is one such gaga topic. I want to write about each and every piece as I loved my dissertation from the very veryyyy beginning; long before I held the final printed copy in my hands. Me being gaga, I had chosen the topic for my master’s dissertation during my undergraduate degree. Oh yeah! From the very first moment I discvoered service encounter theory I became addicted. Believe it or not, I had to study for other exams but yet I couldn’t just stop reading the various journals I got for the Services Marketing unit. I had exams to worry about and yet I was actually enjoying reading extensive academic literature on intercultural service encounter theory. A year later, during my first day at the Services Marketing seminar of my master’s degree I knew who my dissertation supervisor would be. My tutor was as enthusiastic about the unit as I was and so I knew that that would have been a ‘golden match’. Unfortunately though later I came to know that due to the Work Load Model my tutor was already at the limit of his allowance and therefore wouldn’t be supervising. Obviously I was disappointed; nevertheless I had two names in my ‘prospective supervisor’ list and I liked the second tutor equally. After our first meeting, I knew she was my rightful supervisor. She found my topic interesting and she provided me with helpful and constructive advice during the formulation of the research idea as well as during the actual development of the dissertation.

The title of my dissertation was “An investigation of customers’ dissatisfaction arising from intercultural face-to-face service encounters: A Case Study on SUBWAY®”. I sought to investigate international students’ experience of intercultural service encounters in order to identify ways of maximising customer satisfaction. The rationale for focusing on international students was based on my personal experiences and a five year observation of intercultural service failures that arise mainly through accent barriers and the fact that there are international students who are not familiar with the terminology (i.e. footlong and6-inch) and the service process at SUBWAY®. Through personal experience I know that international students feel sometimes embarrassed when their accent is not understood by service employees and that often ultimately leads to dissatisfaction with a service.  Moreover, SUBWAY® belongs to the high-contact services since for its service, process communication skills are particularly important for an effective service delivery. SUBWAY®’s service employees follow a standardised service process by processing customers’ instructions, and therefore any difficulties (such as cultural barriers) that might arise in processing customers instruction might lead to service failure and customers’ dissatisfaction. Such difficulties were the focal point of my dissertation and as a result based on the research findings, I developed a new theoretical framework. The ‘Spectacles of Intercultural Service Encounters’, which illustrates key findings of the study and I honestly believe that my dissertation has provided valuable insights into the intercultural service encounter theory.

Last but not least, besides of being a perfectionist I also like being creative so here goes a prose I want to share with you:

An MA Graduate

I feel so proud and happy for this exceptional accomplishment. The distinction I’m awarded is more than just a recognition of all the effort and time I put into my degree. “You get out of it what you put into it”... I put my heart and soul into this degree and so this award is for ME and I justly deserved IT.

The journey to this began somehow like this...

One day 7 years ago, my parents gave me wings and opened the gates for me to fly and explore the world of wisdom... Soon after that, my English tutor planted the seed of enthusiasm into my heart that blossomed into the hard working and determined self I am since then. So I left for England with wings and a whole lot of enthusiasm. However, that was not the end of the recipe as one should always remember and not miss out another important piece... That piece was my best friend. Without his support and motivation I do not know if I would have achieved this distinction. Therefore, through my experience I can conclude that the recipe for academic success consists of four key parts: family, tutors, determined self and good friends.

As you can see the recipe is simple... Go for it and trust me at the end of your journey success is guaranteed. But remember, not all parents give wings, not all tutors plan seeds, not all friends are supportive and not all are determined selves. You should be innovative and should adjust the recipe accordingly. A well written recipe simplifies the process; however your personal strategy is the one that will lead you closer to success. 

I am an MA Graduate and I take pride in it.

Consumer Culture Theory Workshop on Methodology

Update on CCT Workshop  June 18-22

We have a number of updates. The course will be hosted in Bloomsbury, right in the very heart of London city centre. In addition to Cele Otnes and Giana Eckhardt, we are delighted to announce that Avi Shankar from University of Bath will join the faculty. 

The cost of the week long course has been set at £500. This will include costs of tuition and also lunch and coffee provisions throughout the course. Attendants will be expected to source their own accommodation (for a list of available local accommodation please see here - with thanks to Birkbeck Institute for Humanities for sharing their list).

Application – please send a one page description of your doctoral research and motivation for joining the programme to Alan.bradshaw@rhul.ac.uk

Finally the course will be worth 6 ECTS points.

Morris Holbrook and Business Interest in Education

A defining aspect of much of the teaching in the MA Marketing at Royal Holloway is a commitment to studying marketing critically. As Chris Hackley writes (see his post here) this approach means studying marketing "as a university subject with implied values of scholarship and critical thinking and not simply as a list of management axioms to be learned by rote and applied without discrimination." This entails taking an intellectually rich approach to the subject that transcends managerial positions and instead views marketing from the perspective of society, culture, economy and politics. Hence this programme may frustrate people who wish to be "tooled" (as Terry Eagleton euphemistically puts it) for an imminent professional practice but hopefully will delight students who want to spend a year developing their critcal and analytic abilities.

To that end, Morris Holbrook's - a highly influential consumer researcher - vigorous defence (which you can read here) of a study of consumer culture uncontaminated by managerialist agenda is worth further exploration. Holbrook remains marketing's master of metaphor and presents wonderful anaologies with his tale of the Three Bears serving as a great case in point. Morris's writing regularly presents us with a host of animals from gorillas to cats and dogs and beyond to make his points and rhetorical gestures. I here return to two of my very favourite Holbrookian examples which nicely articulate the value of a critical and non-vocational approach to the subject of marketing and consumers.

First Morris considers the contrast between the ichtyologist and the fisherman - both are concerned with studying fish but the ichtyologist studies fish simply to understand them and contribute to knowledge. The fisherman, on the other hand, wants to understand fish so to better catch them. Consumer researchers, he argues, must approach consumers as the ichtyologist approaches fishes - as a research site to study and understand because understanding is an excercise worthwhile in its own right. By contrast the marketing practicioner approaches consumers so to catch them, that is to sell them products that they don't want and this is a dubious learning excercise that corrupts the historic mandate of the university and limits the ability for wider and reflexive thinking. A further concern of Morris attends the increasingly prevalent spectacle of business interests determining what should be thought in masters programmes. For example see the rise of various accrediting bodies and agencies that endorse and regulate university programmes (usually at a hefty fee) leading some schools to pursue the heady but dubious goal of "triple accreditation". Morris comments as follows:

An ichthyologist studies fish, but we don't find it acceptable for her to be swallowed by a whale. Why, then, should we who teach in business schools cheerfully agree to submerge ourselves in business interests to the point where we lose our own identities and disappear?

Another comparison he uses is that between Edmund Hillary and Willie Sutton. Edmund Hillary was a New Zealand mountaineer who, in 1953, became the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Willie Sutton was an infamous careerist bank robber who staged several high profile robberies. Morris's comparison beautifully makes the point:

In directing attention away from consumption phenomena and toward buying behavior, managerialism rejects Sir Edmund Hillary's reason for climbing a mountain ("because it's there") in favor of Willie Sutton's rationale for robbing banks ("because that's where the money is"). This observation reminds us that, whereas the Greek Hermes or Roman Mercury served as the god of commerce, he was also the patron of thieves. 

Morris presented these ideas at a session at the Advances of Consumer Research conference in 1985 and by all accounts the event was a very much heated affair with major scholars of the field arguing passionately and vociferously. Marketing scholars took sides between those who strongly believed that marketing's study of consumers should be even more industrially relevant and those, lead by Morris Holbrook, who called for a subject divested of managerial relevancy and a-relevant to commercial interest. Almost thirty years later the need still remains to insist upon and passionately defend space in universities for an orientation of marketing scholarship that pursues knowledge for its own sake. We ask our students to respect and support this orientation and parcipate with us in what we believe to be the richest and most intellectually rewarding and fulfililng way of approaching the fascinating brand culture and consumer society in which we find ourselves.

X-Factor's cultural contribution: Community music

X-Factor’s cultural contribution: Community music

Simon Cowell’s inspired television production X-Factor has made a significant impact on UK culture, demonstrated most poignantly by five of the seven Christmas number one UK singles since 2005. When not leading the chart, the X-Factor acts ran in second place, with a number of losing acts going on to achieve commercial success. The Yuletide number one has often been the biggest selling single of its year, historically dominated by charity and novelty acts, until the arrival of Syco (Simon Cowell) produced X-Factor. Cowell’s role as lead judge in a weekend prime time show, that innovatively put emphasis on the celebrity panel, combined with tie in contractual agreements for successful acts, symbiotically helped push the music producer towards the centre of the industry spotlight. Might the X-Factor become recognised as one of the defining movements in the history of music, along with Sony Walkman (individual, mobility) and Apple iPod (accessibility) ?

The shows reality TV format offers wanna be stars the chance to be plucked from mundane, obscure lives and dropped into a media cauldron, until voted off the show in dramatic style by the public. The dream of a prize of a guaranteed recording contract with marketing support has proven to be enduringly successful as a lure to engage willing participants at relatively low cost. This genre of reality talent show format has been popularised worldwide, the innovation a more democratic selection of acts using weekly audience voting, engagement which appears to be a critical success factor.

The music industry benefits from this talent development offering a peak television audience slot for established acts to promote their product and show casing live music performance to the masses.

However, digitisation has required significant re-engineering of the music business model, which had relied upon heavily promoted singles to drive more profitable volume album sales, discs sold through retail distribution, a function of fragile vinyl data storage. A failure to control internet based intellectual property right piracy saw iTunes and 89 pence single downloads emerge, with technology companies such as Apple taking a powerful role and significant revenue slice of the sales and distribution channel.

The cart-and-horse single promotes album model significantly weakened as albums were made available on a pay per track basis on line, where clips can be listened to free, prior to purchase. Other music streaming and file sharing services such as Napster and YouTube made music product widely available at no and low cost to consumers, with an impact on legal music spending. The record labels, who historically had a powerful role in identifying and nurturing commercialisable talent, have experienced dramatic changes to the nature of their industry.

Music labels thus became more reliant on other artist based revenue streams and particularly live performances, with opportunities sought to further commercialise the concert tours and any other valuable intellectual property that remained within their control.

Shows like X-Factor have helped put live music further towards the front of public consciousness, by making TV content out of talent selection. They have also offered opportunities for squeezed record labels to take near finalist, but losing, acts to market with lower risk and costs, thanks to the TV exposure they had received and the fan base they had developed.

Whilst the plethora of traditional music merchandising, from clothing to calendars, remains, somewhat subconsciously, value is being drawn from music lovers using the explicit text-to-pay and premium rate automated telephone call voting mechanisms, consumers are being lured onto the ITV X-Factor web site to download paid for live recorded tracks and also in the paid advertising that surrounds the multifaceted content that is generated by the X-Factor promotions arm and immaterial labour from social media participants. Carefully worded, quickly spoken disclosure statements seek to mitigate against potentially unethical breeches of broadcasting codes of conduct. Buyers beware.

In the X-Factor model the financial exchange for access to the music is less central, it becomes more concentrated on the co-created experience, supported by weekly affirmation and reaffirmation of their appreciation of an artist or group of artists via the much promoted paid voting systems. Pleasure is derived from social interaction, anticipation of and participation in multi-media coverage in, around and of the X-Factor experience. Ownership of the music, which is not always of the highest quality, has become a less central factor.

Driven by digital technology change perhaps music can be seen as coming full circle, assisted by X-Factor and its facsimiles, re-orientated in its pre-recording technology position, less of a product, more of a co-created community experience, which encompasses both the physical and virtual dimensions.

Gerlinde Mautner Seminar: Discourse and Marketization, at Royal Holloway February 1st

Gerlinde Mautner, an applied linguist, will give a seminar on critical perspectives on discourse and marketization at Royal Holloway in Moore Lecture Theatre 1 at 1.PM, Wednesday February 1st. All are welcome. Below is an abstract of the talk, and below that a brief biography of Professor Mautner. 

Please come along!    

Saving the Frog from Boiling: Critical Perspectives on Discourse and Marketization

Maladaptation to gradually building threats to survival is so pervasive in systems studies of corporate failure that it has given rise to the parable of the "boiled frog." If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to scramble out. But if you place the frog in room temperature water, and don't scare him, he'll stay put. Now if the pot sits on a heat source, and if you gradually turn up the temperature, something very interesting happens. As the temperature rises from 70 to 80 degrees F., the frog will do nothing. In fact, he will show every sign of enjoying himself. As the temperature gradually increases, the frog will become groggier and groggier, until he is unable to climb out of the pot. Though there is nothing restraining him, the frog will sit there and boil. Why? Because the frog's internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared to sudden changes in his environment, not to slow, gradual changes. (Senge: 1990, 22)

The parable of the boiled frog – inaccurate in scientific terms but spot-on metaphorically – neatly captures a cluster of phenomena currently engulfing industrialized societies: the elevation of “the market” to a general social principle governing not just money-based exchange relationships but life in its totality. As part of this process, “management” is transformed from one form of social organization to the one and only form that commands legitimacy in social domains as diverse as government, education and religion, to name just a few. This “managerial assault” on the lifeworld (Hancock and Tyler: 2008, 39) has been progressing at considerable pace, yet slowly enough not to force itself into the public consciousness to any appreciable degree. Also, the sheer scale and ubiquity of the trend further encourages its naturalization. It is the task of Critical Discourse Analysis – and of its critical sister disciplines such as Critical Management Studies (Alvesson and Willmott eds: 1992) – to expose this fallacy and to demonstrate the role that discourse plays in establishing and sustaining “the market” and “management“ as pervasive and dominant paradigms. Thus, in terms of the metaphor introduced at the beginning, it falls to CDA and other critical approaches to sound the alarm when they find the water to be heating up even though for many people its current temperature may still feel comfortable enough.

Furthermore, the apparently inexorable rise of the market society seems a perfect test case for unpacking a multi-layered social phenomenon. First of all, the marketization of the lifeworld bears testimony to the funda­mentally dialectical nature of the relationship between language and society, a core assumption of CDA (Fairclough: 1992, 64; Reisigl and Wodak: 2009, 89). Marketized discourse on the one hand reflects marketized social structures and relationships. On the other hand, the language choices that people make continuously reinforce and recreate the social conditions that gave rise to them in the first place, so that discourse ends up as both a mirror and driver of social change. A second reason why the market society can be seen as a test case is because it feeds on precisely the intricate connection between the public and private spheres that has been one of CDA’s ongoing interests. With educational institutions acting as powerful mediators and multipliers, a closed circuit of cultural reproduction is created, ensuring that the market society has both the governance structures and the people it needs to function. A third aspect of this intricacy concerns the absence of a readily identifiable culprit. In trying to capture the scale, depth and discursive manifestations of marketization we are effectively dealing with what Hardy and Palmer call "spiderless webs of power relationships" (1999, 386; emphasis added).

Summarising an argument developed in greater detail elsewhere (Mautner, 2010), I will discuss the impact that marketization is having on discourse in a variety of social domains. In conclusion, I will argue that CDA ought to join forces more frequently and more intensively with Critical Management Studies and ensure the dissemination of counterdiscourses through Critical Management Education.

References:
Alvesson, M. / H. Willmott, eds. (1992), Critical Management Studies, London: Sage.
Fairclough, N. (1992), Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hancock, P. / M. Tyler (2008): “Beyond the confines: Management, colonization and the everyday”. In: Critical Sociology, 34 (1), 29–49.
Hardy, C. / I. Palmer (1999): “Pedagogical practice and postmodernist ideas”. In: Journal of Management Education, 23 (4), 377–395.
Mautner, G. (2010): Language and the Market Society. Critical Reflections on Discourse and Dominance, London and New York: Routledge.
Reisigl, M. / R. Wodak (2009): “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)”. In Wodak, R. / M. Meyer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. 2^nd ed., London: Sage, 87–121.
Senge, P. M. (1990), The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, New York: Doubleday.

Gerlinde Mautner is Professor of English Business Communication at WU, the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Her PhD in linguistics from Vienna University was a study of British news discourse; methodologically, it combined critical discourse analysis (CDA) with computer-aided corpus linguistics. Gerlinde's current research also focuses on the relationship between language and society. She's particularly interested in contested sites where business and other lifeworlds interact. In a recent monograph, for example, she investigates how discourse both shapes and is shaped by marketisation (Language and the Market Society, Routledge 2010). Forthcoming publications deal with the sociolinguistic and legal aspects of public signage, on the one hand, and applications of CDA in management studies on the other. Gerlinde regularly spends extended research periods at UK universities (such as Lancaster, Cardiff and, in 2011 and 2012, King’s College London). In 2008, she was elected to the Board of the Austrian Science Fund (a grant-giving body similar to the ESRC and HSRC). She is on the editorial boards of Organizationand Critical Discourse Studies. Her own management experience in higher education includes a four-year term as WU's Deputy VC for International Relations (1998-2002) and Head of Department (since 2005).