Accounts of the Ineffable

Saying Something of Something

Reflecting on art forms as collectively sustained symbolic structures, Geertz (1973) observes that string quartets, still lifes, and Balinese cockfights “generate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display. [They] are not merely reflections of a pre-existing sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in the creation and maintenance of such sensibility” (p. 451). As ways of “saying something of something,” he argues that art forms organize subjectivity; they render it inspectable, reflexively crafting the world into objects, making everyday experience comprehensible by “presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed” (p. 443). Such collectively sustained social structures are constitutive: that is to say, the myths, rituals and ceremonies they reproduce give shape to our lives through permitting the “re-enactment of social practices across the generations” (Giddens 1991, 23).

Reflexive Accumulation

The present moment of “crisis” in the politics of the international governance of debt financing is said to herald the emergence of new reflexively constituted social forms—perhaps, even a responsible capitalism based, as Gowans (2010) and others suggest, on new liberal cosmopolitan notions of global citizenship! Some argue that a third wave of globalization is emerging as we enter a period of renegotiation and transformation of institutions supporting the global integration project. In his trenchant diagnosis of the conditions of globalization, Giddens (1991) situates the reflexivity of modernity as the engine of tensions between local contextualities and the globalization of social activity. He writes “everyone is in some sense aware of the reflexive constitution of modern social activity and the implications it has for her or his life” (Giddens 1991, 14). At that time he was commenting on how writings on the subject of marriage and intimacy are not only part of the reflexivity of modernity; they also serve routinely to “organize, and alter, the aspects of social life they report on or analyse. Such knowledge is not incidental to what is actually going on, but constitutive of it” (p. 14). Giddens distinguishes between the monitoring of action intrinsic to human activity and the reflexivity of modernity, which he refers to as the “susceptibility of most aspects of social activity to chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge. Such information or knowledge is not incidental to modern institutions, but constitutive of them” (p. 20). He concludes that in the face of claims to the authority of reason and the doctrine of objectivity, the “reflexivity of modernity actually undermines the certainty of knowledge” (p. 21).

Principle Pandering to Power

Initiated by the 2008 subprime mortgage crises, a torrent of commentary of various ideological hues has addressed the so-called contemporary crisis of global capitalism and its manifest failure to generate prosperity for all. Such writing records how, over the last thirty years enormous current account imbalances have been built up by both deficit and surplus economies. Striking a balance between domestic consumption and production has become a global issue as democratic governments make promises to buy votes and, if elected, sell debt to finance the promises they cannot afford to break. Economic strategies built on debt-fuelled consumption or excessive export dependence have become the subject of intense scrutiny. Awash in formidably stern calls to austerity, Eurozone economies continue to stagnate as the money supply is manipulated to little effect through quantitative easing. The wilting dynamism of the BRIC economies forges export-led growth while avoiding protectionism. A crisis of sovereign debt presently threatens to cripple the financing of several European governments whose securities have been awarded the status of junk bonds. International speculation takes as its subject not whether, but when debt default will occur. The specter of national resentments and failing social cohesion is stirred. Markets speculate on who will control the process of default and whether it will be orderly. Contagion is at work in international banking and firewalls essential. The interests of lenders and borrowers no longer coincide. Creditors, investors, and depositors find themselves obliged to accept “hair cuts.” Global GDP stands at $65 trillion; around a third of this consists of the trading of debt in the form of bonds. For some, wells of risk capital have dried up and prayers for growth go unanswered. Credit rating agencies, once the servants of market efficiency, are now cast in the role of judge, jury, and executioner as those dark clerks scrutinize the credit worthiness of national economies. Meanwhile, the scourge of poverty, suffering, and disease continues apace; the trickle-down of wealth creation is choked; inequality spreads like a virus; and several states emerge uncertainly from painful transitions of governance, stumbling toward approved forms of liberal democratic polity. Meanwhile growth falters, unemployment soars, and elections loom. And so it goes.

In Whose Service Do We Write “Globalization”?

Living in such interesting times provides many eager professional enthusiasts for outrage with opportunities to crank rhetorical handles around the expansionist evils of global capitalism and its despotic twin, that other transcendental signifier, neoliberalism. For some the stakes are indeed high and the politics of refusal, injustice, and remediation dangerous. But not necessarily for those trading insider ideologies from the sidelines of bourgeois academic discourse; for there connections between words and polity, between theory and practice, between intellectual ideas, political engagement, and independence of approach, remain masked, unspoken, and disavowed, but publishable.

It is also not the first time we have lived in such interesting times. Speaking in Paris in 1934, Benjamin (2007) explored the organizing function of writing and its relations to the apparatus of production, arguing that what matters was that authors induce others to write, to put “an improved apparatus at their disposal. And [that] this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is readers, or spectators into collaborators” (p. 233). He warned of easy rhetoric that can grip the imagination of strident critics where, “thinking they are in possession of an apparatus that in reality possesses them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control” (p. 234). He asks us to consider in whose service we write; whose interests are being served through our writing and publishing activity: the academy; the discipline; the subject; the polity? Is the community that practices marketing scholarship not writing in the service of certain class interests: those of the bourgeois public of publishers, editors, educators, learned societies, reviewers and investors? The absurdity that is the discourse of managerial relevance superimposes itself upon such questioning of the relation between “quality” in marketing literature and its claims to intervene in the apparatus of social production.

Indeed, Benjamin’s work concludes that the writer faces only one demand, “the demand to think, to reflect on his position in the process of production” (2007, 236). And this short essay marks one brief moment in wider efforts at disciplinary transformation through harnessing the existentially troublesome virtues of reflexivity and radical doubt, of “hunting assumptions” (Brookfield 1995), of fostering an attitude of continuous revision and reflection in the cultural construction that is Marketing. Indeed, as Brookfield (1995) observes, “in many ways we are our assumptions. Assumptions give meaning and purpose to who we are and what we do. Becoming aware of the implicit assumptions that frame how we think and act is one of the most challenging intellectual puzzles” (p. 2).

Honorific Dissembling

Paraphrasing Galbraith’s trenchant views on the vested interest of economists, Piercy (2006) observes: “The trouble with marketing research is marketing researchers” (p. 253). While Zaltman (1997) has previously explored some of the underlying issues Piercy discusses, this commentary finds a point of departure here. It also finds inspiration in Bourdieu’s call to a reflexive sociology when he observes that “people whose profession it is to objectivize the social world prove so rarely able to objectivize themselves, and fail so often to realize that what their apparently scientific discourse talks about is not the object but their relation to the object” (1992, p. 68). Bourdieu (2004) describes the dangers of a nonreflexive understanding of the research process, arguing that a precondition for a critical sociology is “the objectivation of him or her who objectivizes” (p. 68). In exploring how the researcher and the community of marketing academics shape the production of a research subject, I paraphrase Bourdieu in calling for a “reflexive return on the [marketing] researcher and his or her universe of production” (p. 68). Taking the construct “reflexivity” as an illustrative research site, this commentary argues that an essential precondition for the development of a “critical disposition” is a more sophisticated understanding of how the reflexive character of the community of marketing scholars is implicated in the production of the research subject. In this sense then, the problem with marketing research can indeed be said to be marketing researchers, particularly where the quality of the insights the community generates is persistently undermined by a widely taken for granted nonreflexive understanding of knowledge production processes, whether they configure the incantations of marketing claims to knowledge as ideological critique, marketing science, or management technology.

Heroic Confessionals

Drawing on the work of Hardy and Clegg (1997), I suggest that the research subject is seen, not as a stable constellation of essentialized characteristics to be found in a research site but as a constituted, socially recognized category of analysis. The research site is rendered “visible” by instruments of vision or mediating optics, which speak of the politics of positioning all wrapped up as simple conceptual devices used to frame the topic and subjects within it. And such positioning implies responsibility for our “enabling practices” (Haraway 1991, 193). The point being that we destabilize the neutrality and objectivity of the researcher and the research narrative if we put the position of the research subject in play, typically through problematizing authoritative or prescriptive representations that translate research subjects into mute respondents able to express themselves only by virtue of the provision of preconceived categories (Thompson, Arnould, and Stern 1997). In paraphrasing Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) those authors write that:

Being able to work strategically with unstable categories and knowledge claims asks researchers to speak the language of reflexivity and to better understand their role in the communal production of inquiry as a situated practice (Cunliffe 2003). To illustrate these points this essay explores the construction of the marketing subject. I suggest that in the absence of reflexive research praxis within our community, our knowledge institutions merely reproduce problematic authority relations, as illustrated by the recent public fit of conscience rehearsed by the consumer research community (Luce, McGill & Peracchio 2012). In doing so no light is shed on the important translation work done by researchers caught up in subtle webs of disciplinary agency that empower them to appropriate the voices of research subjects (consumers and managers alike) and to silence them, or otherwise play them in the name of a representational protocol publicly held to be essential to the successful translation from the field to the printed page.

To explore the idea of “doing the subject” (deCerteau 1988, 149) is the key point of performing our knowledge. In other words the marketing subject is the accomplishment of everyday practices within the social formation we know as the academy. Like cooking or gardening, “just doing it” summons numerous ways of operating, silent technologies which constitute innumerable practices that distribute discursive space, so organizing social relations and generating discipline (de Certeau, 1988, xiv). This essay considers the idea that the marketing subject is an everyday practice—a “way of thinking invested in a way of acting” (p. xv). The conditions of possibility of this practice are embedded in the complex network of policies, moral grammars and legitimating devices aimed at facilitating desired social outcomes, by means of which to manage consensus and build disciplinarity in the image of the authorized collegiate. If we practitioners of Marketing as an academic discipline and a global knowledge brand are not prepared to see the disembedding and disembodying consequences of our social technologies for the claims we make about our work and how it should shape the lives of others, then the formative conditions of “conceptual colonization” are always already coded into the discipline by design.

Those conditions are matters of and for institutional governance and not merely the self-censorship efforts of heroic individual scholars or efforts to implement practice conceived to bring together the voices of knowledge consumers and knowledge producers. If such structural conditions are deeply embedded in the academy’s understanding of its own practices, consider how ill-equipped we and it might be to judge how the “marketing subject” works or gets done in other cultural conditions. Indeed, the author sometimes wonders how we marketing academics can judge the (ir)relevance of our knowledge products regarding, say, cultural branding, so to advise executives what they should be doing to encourage creativity, if we cannot see how our research gaze is already mediated by institutionalized norms and practices that confine our own ability to be innovative in our everyday occupational work practice and culture. In speaking marketing as a univocal language underpinned by the ideological doctrine of disembodied objectivity, we render our knowledge projects blind to difference, diversity, and particulars.

Commonplace Contrarian

If, as one sage put it, “today’s treasure is tomorrow’s trash,” then I guess today’s trash must be yesterday’s treasure. That said, I really wish I could find a way to agree with the reviewers who, with censorious brevity, trashed a working version of this essay citing an apparently “gratuitous gush” of unnecessary secondary sourcing as a fatal critical observation. The reviewers may not have been comfortable with the idea that not only did the paper bear the traces of many writers but the author also interpreted convention regarding citation practice in a way that refused shortcuts. However, this commonplace incident in the publishing life of the practicing marketing scholar, this micro-interaction, this scene of contest, discipline and display, offers passing access to a research site where universes of production collide, revealing how little we understand our own practices as a disciplinary community and how they are implicated in the production of the discipline and its subjects. Being suggestive of different logics of practice as they play out within the community of marketing scholars, the cameo in which the reviewers, the author, the acid tools of critical discourse, the citations, and the research community were bound-up, brings us to the point of this essay: that claims to inadequacy in knowledge, built upon the winning of cool distance from the work of others, or the construction of evidence, conjecture, and assertion upon which to assemble positions regarding division and difference, that such claims function constitutively, to bring forth gaps as concrete social entities and make possible strategies for addressing them. Thus, one marketing academic’s sense of the marketing subject, at least when it comes to passing judgment on citation practice, is another’s sense of unnecessary distraction and dysfunctionality. And if the marketing subject is reduced to a decision made by two or three reviewers —in this case empowered and protected by the convention of reviewer anonymity and opacity—about the work of another, the structural conditions of the marketing subject and its moral conditions and consequences can be seen to be embedded in the governance of the conduct of research practice within the knowledge-authorizing institutions of the academy. And we have to ask ourselves: Where is the disciplinary space for the practice of reflexivity and for the emergence of the partial and particular in the collective discourse by means of which we craft the marketing world into admissible objects?

Conclusion

So, this brief essay marks one author’s curiosity with the strategic assemblage that is the globalizing marketing subject as constructed by the Western institutions that govern the discipline and regulate its knowledge production practices. The point is not so much to reheat previous discussion of what is a rather abstractly contentious topic but to build a line of argument that makes discussion possible in better informed and less divisive terms. For the discussion is by no means exhausted, nor are the reasons for having it about to go away as our research manufactures visions of subjects, spaces, natures, consumers, lifestyles, and so on in the service of a globalizing marketing subjectivities. The article introduces subject matter from other epistemological regions to enrich marketing’s discursive nexus and it attempts to energize a dormant sense of the potential for new knowledge products and practices that might flow from an expanded understanding of the partial and particular marketing subject, as one example of what it might mean to bring reflexivity to marketing’s critical disposition. To paraphrase Alfred Marshall, marketing scholars, like everyone else, must concern themselves with the ultimate aims of man and woman.