Transcending paradigmatic schisms and building ontological bridges: How Russ Belk’s “extended self” became canonical consumer research

Introduction

Belk (1988) was not just a seminal article in the history of consumer behavior, but one of the most influential articles of recent history (Ladik et al., 2015, 202).

At the time of this writing, Belk’s (1988) “Possessions and the Extended Self” has almost 16,000 citations on Google scholar. As astounding as that number may be, such surrogate measures of impact fail to capture the more qualitative, historical influence that Belk’s conceptualization of the extended self has had (and continues to have) on the field of consumer research. In this essay, I will more closely examine the institutional circumstances, manifest at both intra- and inter-disciplinary levels, which set the stage for Belk’s extended self to acquire its seminal status and, then, further consider the state of the inter-paradigmatic pluralism that has arisen in its wake.

As a starting point, Belk’s (1988) was a synthesizing tour-de-force that integrated the works of William James, Jean Paul Sartre, Eric Fromm and a host of anthropologists and humanistic psychologists. Furthermore, Belk (1988) was a very timely contributor to the “interpretivist turn” (Sherry, 1991) that was reshaping the epistemological standards of the consumer research field. Yet, these ostensible explanations still beg the question of why Belk’s “extended self” so substantially outshone contemporaneous works similarly arguing, on interdisciplinary grounds, that consumers should be viewed as socio-culturally situated actors whose identities are constituted through socio-material relations (Arnould, 1989; Levy, 1981; McCracken, 1986; Mick, 1986; Sherry, 1983; Solomon, 1986; Wallendorf and Arnould, 1988). The answer to this question lies in the broader confluence of intellectual debates and inter-disciplinary trends that contextualized the publication, reception, and longer-term ramifications of Belk’s canonical concept.

Extending paradigmatic schisms

In the years preceding Belk (1988), consumer research’s parent field—marketing—had been polarized by an ongoing philosophy-of-science discord. The gauntlet was first thrown by Anderson (1983) who challenged the logical-empiricist world-view (Hunt, 1976) that had framed academic marketers’ understanding of science and the scientific method, throughout the post-WWII era (Brown, 1996; Tadajewski, 2006). Anderson drew from anti-foundationalist philosophers, such as Wittgenstein and Feyerabend, and sociology of knowledge arguments (Kuhn, 1962) to contend that scientific research is not an objective, empiricist undertaking. Instead, it is a politicized and assumption-laden social endeavor, where rival paradigmatic factions vie to determine what kinds of research questions and methodological orientations would be granted scientific legitimacy. Anderson’s (1983) critical relativist challenge to hallowed ideas of scientific objectivity and correspondence theories of truth sparked an intense debate over the very meaning of “marketing science” (Anderson, 1986; Arndt, 1983; Desphande, 1983; Hunt, 1983, 1990; Peter and Olsen, 1983).

Marketing’s positivist versus critical relativist antagonism unfolded predominately along epistemological and tacitly political lines (see Tadajewski, 2006), with surprisingly little attention paid to practical, research implications. Concurrently, a different kind of paradigmatic conflict was disrupting the field of consumer research. Rather than focusing on abstract philosophy of science questions, a cadre of consumer researchers began to challenge the theoretical and substantive constraints posed by the dominant ontological view of consumers as rational decision makers. These rebellious voices argued that consumer researchers needed to investigate the emotional, experiential, and cultural aspects of consumption and, thereby, broaden the scope of consumer research beyond its prevailing focus on calculative, utility maximizing, buyer behaviors (Belk, 1984, 1986a, 1986b, 1987a, 1987b; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; McCracken, 1986; Rook, 1985; Sherry, 1983).

While these calls often endorsed the use of qualitative methodologies (Belk et al., 1988; Holbrook et al., 1989; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Thompson et al., 1989), they generally treated marketing’s philosophy of science debate as a background factor. In this regard, Hudson and Ozanne (1988) marked an important inflection point in this “broadening” debate because it explicitly linked the epistemological (i.e., what research methods are deemed to be scientifically legitimate?) to the ontological (i.e., what is the nature of consumers and consumption?).

By suggesting an inherent alliance between a critical relativist epistemology and the ontological agenda of studying the phenomenological and socio-cultural aspects of consumption, Hudson and Ozanne (1988) reframed the latter orientation in terms of a more radical set of implications than preceding expressions of the broadening argument. For example, Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) represented the consumer-as-rational decision maker model and the humanistic-experiential orientation as complementary theoretical approaches that could each contribute to a more complete understanding of consumer behavior. In contrast, Hudson and Ozanne (1988)—along with Anderson (1986), Holbrook and O’Shaughnessy (1988) and Hunt (1991)—argued that the act of supporting an “alternative” ontology (i.e., a view of consumers as meaning-seeking, socio-emotional actors) definitively placed researchers on the critical relativist side of a contentious epistemological divide. ¹

To clarify, the use of qualitative methods in consumer research was mired in a philosophy of science maelstrom well before Hudson and Ozanne (1988), particularly in the context of the journal review process (see e.g., Calder and Tybout, 1987; Holbrook et al., 1989). However, Hudson and Ozanne (1988) helped to form a paradigmatic assemblage (interpretivism) whose underlying assumptions were defined through a direct contrast to an opposing construction of “positivistic” consumer research, thereby, intertwining ontological precepts with epistemological ones. Rather than the “complementarity” thesis advanced by Holbrook and Hirschman (1982), consumer researchers increasingly accepted the conflictual proposition that the “positivist” and “interpretivist” paradigms were incommensurate ways-of-knowing.

This conflation of ontological and epistemological assumptions is particularly germane to the initial disciplinary reception of Belk’s (1988). As a conceptual paper that made scant reference to any methodological or epistemological issues, Belk’s (1988) defining premise—that a co-constitutive relationship exists between consumers’ sense of self and their material and symbolic possessions—could have been seen as equally applicable to the interests of “positivistic” consumer researchers, rather than being classified as an exemplar of the “interpretivist” paradigm.

Such an ecumenical reading, however, would have had to ignore that Russ Belk had been one of the leading voices, and if not the leading voice, championing the cause of broadening consumer research’s methodological and theoretical horizons (Belk, 1984, 1986a, 1986b, 1987a, 1987b; Belk et al., 1988). On a related note, Belk (1988) drew from the fields of anthropology, humanistic psychology and the humanities, all of which had become politicized signals of one’s identity as an “interpretivist” consumer researcher (Holbrook et al., 1989).

Owing to these situational convergences, Belk (1988) was commonly regarded as a major impetus to the ongoing interpretivist turn in consumer research (Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Sherry, 1991) and by implication, as staking out an adversarial position toward “positivistic” consumer research (see Cohen 1989). Yet, this now conventional “paradigm schism” reading obscures that the ontological assumptions underlying Belk’s (1988) concept of the extended self closely aligned with anti-rationalist (and anti-dualistic) trends that would eventually precipitate significant changes in the fields of cognitive science, social psychology, and subsequently, consumer psychology. Accordingly, Belk (1988) altered consumer research’s inter-paradigmatic conversations in ways that were not immediately apparent at the time of its publication.

Extending an ontological bridge

Preceding Belk (1988) and even Holbrook and Hirschman (1982), some consumer psychologists (aka “positivistic” consumer researchers) had begun to seriously question the efficacy of the rational decision maker model for understanding consumer behavior (Kassarjian, 1978). Olshavsky and Granbois (1979, 98) boldly stated this contrarian view: “we conclude that for many purchases a decision process never occurs, not even on the first purchase.”

While such iconoclastic propositions remained marginal ones during the 1980s era of consumer research, (as defined by publications sponsored by the Association for Consumer Research, most notably the Journal of Consumer Research), similar ontological precepts were gaining traction in the proximate base disciplines of cognitive science and social psychology. These research spheres were gravitating toward the interrelated ideas that 1) human cognition is structured by cultural practices (particularly linguistic ones) and embodied interactions with the material world (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987) and 2) that individuals’ preferences and decisions are outcomes of oversocialized somatic responses operating below the level of conscious awareness (Zajonc, 1980). Zajonc and Markus (1982) would interject this latter thesis into the consumer research literature by arguing that consumers’ somatic-affective predispositions are the primary drivers of their preferences. From this ontological standpoint, consumers are observers of their subconsciously-driven choices and make rationale sense of them, post hoc, when seeking to explain their behaviors.

During this transitional period, Belk (1988) provided another potent argument in support of an anti-rationalist ontology. The extended self was also a psychology-friendly concept because it placed individual consumers at the center of these socio-material and cultural networks, rather than focusing on broader socio-cultural structures that shaped consumption practices, such as ritual actions (McCracken, 1986, 1988; Rook, 1985), cultural myths (Levy, 1981), and global flows of meanings and objects (Arnould, 1989). These more structurally-oriented articulations of interpretivist consumer research were, quite simply, an ontological bridge too far for many consumer psychologists of that era.

Rather than “positivism” per se, consumer psychology’s key paradigmatic commitment was to the principle of “methodological individualism,” which holds that social phenomena should be explained as the consequences of individuals’ actions, intentions and motivating identity goals (Alexander, 1987; Schumpeter, 1909). Belk’s (1988) placed interpretivist consumer research on a methodological individualist register whereby agentic consumers orchestrate an ensemble of identity-defining material and symbolic objects. In so doing, Belk’s (1988) created an intellectual bridge between the interpretivist view of consumers as socio-culturally embedded actors (Arnould, 1989; McCracken, 1986; Wallendorf and Arnould, 1988) and consumer psychologists seeking to move beyond the limitations of the rational decision maker model. This intra-disciplinary alignment eventually precipitated consumer psyche studies on topics formerly associated with interpretivist consumer research, such as the cultural shaping of cognition and emotion (Aaker, 1999; Aaker and Williams, 1998; Briley et al., 2000) and the ways in which consumers’ choices and preferences reflect their identity goals (Aaker, 1999; Berger and Health, 2007; Escalas, 2013; Reed, 2004).

As noted by one reviewer, Belk (1988) does not explicitly consider that the self, extended through relations to possessions, has also likely been inscribed in the ideological practices of corporate capitalism and the marketization of identity (Holt, 2002). In this regard, both methodological individualism and neoliberalism are highly compatible with the image of consumers as rational free agents, who maximize their utilities (or construct their identities in whatever forms their imaginations and desire can conjure) through assiduous market choices (see Ahlberg et al., 2022). This neoliberal construction of the consumer stands in diametric contrast to critical perspectives that interrogate how the market reproduces inequities and biases related to class, gender, ethnicity, and other forms of sociological structuration (Hetrick and Lozada, 1994; Tadajewski, 2022).

While Belk (1988) did not rock the marketing mainstream’s ideological boat, it was not alone in this regard. Throughout the 1980s, much of the emerging interpretivist consumer research literature endorsed a generally celebratory portrayal of consumption (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; McCracken, 1986, 1989; Schouten and McAlexander, 1995; Sherry, 1983) that cast the market as a resource for consumer empowerment rather than an implement of corporate power. Given this disciplinary backdrop, I suggest that Belk’s (1988) tacit alignment with the field of marketing’s neoliberal (and uncritical) predilections represents a potentially necessary but not sufficient condition for understanding its canonical influence. In the following section, I will highlight these some of these differentiating considerations.

A genius of translation

[I]t is perhaps the vagueness of the concept that has contributed to its longevity and the extensive literature that has flourished as a result. The very aspect of the concept that Cohen (1989) decried has turned out to be its strongest element, as it leaves further research avenues open to scholars of all intellectual persuasions (Ladik et al., 2015, 202)

It would be richly ironic if Cohen’s (1989) positivistic complaint that the extended self was too vague to be a legitimate scientific construct inadvertently identified the very reason for its profound disciplinary impact. However, vagueness is seldom a property that can mobilize disparate actors to become aligned around a unifying idea or goal, or what Callon (1988), characterizes as a process of translation.

Rather than “vagueness,” my analysis suggests that Belk (1988) exhibited two forms of genius that are integral to its transformative influence. The first relates to the seemingly aesthetic qualities of the article. Even Belk’s staunchest critics readily acknowledge that the essay is “beautifully written” (Cohen, 1989, 125). However, this aesthetic praise circumvents a more consequential question—why did this particular expression of “beautiful” writing galvanize and inspire a diverse community of researchers?

The resonate aesthetics of Belk (1988) emanate, at least in part, from its genius of mythopoesis—that is, skillfully integrating compelling mythic themes into a contemporary narrative. Belk’s “extended self” exhibits a Promethean motif that portrays consumers as producing their identities through an arrangement of valued possessions and material and symbolic artefacts. In so doing, Belk (1989) did not appeal to ephemeral, emotional states that were not explicitly linked to the market, such as consumers’ fantasies, feelings, and fun (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982), or that would necessitate consumer psychologists adopt a foreign theoretical vernacular or ontological outlook (Anderson, 1986; Hudson and Ozanne, 1988; Mick, 1986; Solomon, 1983). Rather, Belk’s (1988) conceptualization of consumers’ self-fashioning relationships to their possessions offered a logic for consumer psychology to broaden its paradigmatic view of the “consumer,” without having to diverge from its methodological individualist predilections.

Second, Belk (1988) manifests a genius of timing. By the late 1980s, the interpretivist turn had destabilized consumer research’s disciplinary status quo. Yet, the subdiscipline of interpretivist consumer research had yet to establish a cohesive paradigmatic identity beyond its associations with qualitative methodologies. Conversely, consumer psychologists were beginning to grapple with paradigmatic anomalies (Kuhn, 1962) that posed challenges to the consumer-as-rational-decision-maker model. In the midst of this disciplinary tumult, Belk’s “extended self” provided a timely and compelling rationale for interpretivist consumer research to establish itself as a sub-discipline investigating the ways in which consumers construct their personal and collective identities through co-constituting relations to a wide array of market resources (Ahuvia, 2002; Curasi et al., 2004; Holt, 2002; Tian and Belk, 2005). For consumer psychologists, Belk (1988) offered a bridge between “cutting edge” currents in consumer behavior (and where the interpretivist movement was widely recognized as a source of innovation) and inter-disciplinary arguments for a more holistic understanding of consumers (Markus and Nurius, 1986), that could better address the emotional, social, and noncoconscious dimensions of consumer experience.

Figure 1 offers a graphic representation of how these two geniuses precipitated a process of translation (Callon, 1988) in the field of consumer research.OPEN IN VIEWER

To begin with the Figure’s upper left circle, in the midst of the aforementioned disciplinary disruption, Cohen’s (1989) strident critique of Belk (1988) and Belk’s (1989) ensuing rejoinder had the paradoxical effect of more rapidly diffusing the concept of the “extended self” throughout the broader field of consumer research. This debate, waged in the field’s flagship journal, signaled that Belk’s “extended self” concept harbored disruptive implications that consumer psychologists could not ignore. As Belk (1989, 131) presciently stated in his rejoinder: “Of greater importance for present purposes is re-emphasizing the types of consumer behavior resistant to understanding with prior concepts that may be able to be understood in terms of the extended self construct.” In hindsight, the Belk-Cohen dissensus presented consumer psychologists with a choice between continuing to chafe at the increasingly stultifying limitations of their orthodox paradigmatic outlook or expanding their theoretical horizons to encompass a more experiential and relational understanding of consumers.

Turning to the genius of mythopoesis, other leading “interpretivist” researchers of this era had also advanced conceptual frameworks that shared affinities with consumer psychology’s methodological individualist ethos (e.g., Hirschman, 1986; Mick, 1986; Solomon, 1983). However, these conceptualizations were steeped in very specific, theoretical vernaculars that “mainstream” consumer researchers (i.e., consumer psychologists) could, in a classic Kuhnian fashion, discredit as “jargon” or ghettoize as “weird science” affectations that had little relevance to the interests of “legitimate” consumer researchers. Belk (1988) circumvented this paradigmatic parochialism by focusing on a profoundly elemental relationship—self-creating (Promethean) consumers and their possessions—that could resonate with a broad swath of consumer researchers, regardless of their paradigmatic orientations.

Thus, Belk (1988) exhibited a translation capacity for consumer researchers who identified with either the positivist (i.e., consumer psychology) or interpretive paradigms. In the former case, Belk (1988) helped to translate the interests of consumer psychologists into a broader concern with identity and its social and material fashioning. Consequently, consumer psychology of the last 10 to 15 years now looks considerably different from the narrow disciplinary interests that Cohen (1989) sought to defend. For example, Escalas (2013) prefaced a Journal of Consumer Research curation edition—highlighting exemplary consumer research on consumer identity—with this statement:

Consumer researchers have recognized for a long time that people consume in ways that are consistent with their sense of self (Levy, 1959; Sirgy, 1982). Important thought leaders in our field have described and documented that consumers use possessions and brands to create their self-identities and communicate these selves to others and to themselves (e.g., Belk, 1988; Fournier, 1998; McCracken, 1989). Although early research tended to focus on broad conceptual issues surrounding consumers and their sense of self, recent research takes a more granular approach, breaking down the relationship between identity concerns and consumption to look at the effects of specific self-related goals and of different aspects of self-identity on consumer behavior. For example, why would someone drive his Prius to work but drive his BMW to a blind date? Impression management? Value expression? Need for affiliation?

While Escalas’s introduction cites several noteworthy CCT articles, those featured in this curation special issue were all conducted by consumer psychologists using experimentalist methods. As evinced by this special issue, “identity” has become a core interest of consumer psychology that is generating a burgeoning array of studies (e.g., Saint Clair and Forehand, 2020; Sheehan and Dommer, 2020; Wang et al., 2021).

For interpretivist consumer researchers, or what would latter come to be known as Consumer Culture Theory (Arnould and Thompson 2005), Belk (1988) helped to stabilize the axiology of interpretivist consumer research around the goal of understanding the co-constituting relations between consumers and market resources. To illustrate this translation effect, Fournier’s (1998) “Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research,”—an award winning article with over 13,000 Google scholar cites—is widely regarded as having transformed and revitalized research on brands. As Fournier explains, her article was a direct extension of Belk (1988): “Belk (1988) provided the first exhaustive argument for the fact that possessions were meaningful to people, beyond their utilitarian value, serving deep purposes as people went about living their lives. This paper opened the door for the next proposition: people might actually have relationships with products, possessions and brands” (quoted in Ladik et al., 2015: p. 201).

Belk (1988) also helped to spark the materialist turn in CCT that would eventually give rise to a preponderance of path breaking studies steeped in actor-network theory (Epp and Price, 2010; Hoffman and Novak, 2017), assemblage theory (Canniford and Bajde, 2016) and Foucauldian perspectives (Roux and Belk, 2019; Shankar et al., 2006; Thompson and Hirschman, 1995). This CCT research stream not only emphasizes the materiality of cultural meanings and consumption practices but it has also “decentered” consumers in ways that often diverge from the methodological individualism manifest in Belk’s original conception of the extended self (see Belk, 2013).

In sum, Belk (1988) first appeared to deepen the schism between the interpretivist movement and consumer psychology (as per the contentious exchange between Cohen, 1989; Belk, 1989). However, its broader ramifications have had the opposite effect, as a legion of CCT-friendly consumer psychologists (see Arnould and Thompson, 2007; Thompson et al., 2018; Wright, 2002) now draw conceptual inspiration from culturally oriented consumer research. Thus, Belk (1988) demonstrates that the paradigmatic fault lines of the late 1980s and early 1990s could, indeed, be bridged through an imaginative re-visioning of boundaries, both ontological and paradigmatic.

Conclusion: Toward a more discriminating pluralism

For those working in the subfield of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) (a.k.a., interpretivist consumer research) (Arnould and Thompson, 2005), the intra-disciplinary pluralism fostered by Belk (1988) too often seems to betray a kind of paradigmatic appropriation. That is, consumer psyche studies re-frame empirical findings and theoretical relationships that CCT researchers have extensively documented and discussed as conjectural hypotheses to be empirically tested. For example, Aaker (1999, 54) introduced the concept of the “malleable self” to argue that her study offered the first definitive empirical proof that “brands can be used for self-expressive purposes.” Berger and Heath (2007) similarly demonstrate a novel (consumer psychology) finding that consumers make choices in order to signal their identity to others and that consumers will make “divergent” choices to avoid conveying unwanted associations (i.e., the hipster who no longer wants to wear the T-shirt of an “indie band” that has garnered mainstream popularity).

These articles frequently cite Belk (1988) in support of broad ontological propositions such as, “consumers use products to construct and express desired identities” (Berger and Heath, 2007, 123). Their authors then make an epistemological pivot to suggest that they are testing pathbreaking propositions—for example, “people often diverge to communicate or signal their identity to others” (Berger and Heath, 2007, 122)—as understood within the frame of the consumer psychology literature and its hypothetico-deductive methodologies. Through this rhetorical maneuver, these studies portray CCT findings as “context of discovery” conjectures while casting their research as “context of justification” verifications of knowledge (Hunt, 1983).

Using this epistemic rationale, consumer psychologists can incorporate analytic concepts that have been integral to CCT research, such as consumer identity projects or cultural capital, into extant psychological explanations of consumer behavior, where these constructs typically function as moderating or mediating variables (Bellezza et al., 2014; Berger and Ward, 2007, 2010, Van Laer, De Ruyter, Visconti, and Wetzels, 2014). In so doing, these studies render the borrowed analytic concepts, regardless of their theoretical foundations (and underlying ontological assumptions), as mere grist for the theory testing mill. This indiscriminate pluralism often results in psychological reductionism or selective erasures of settled knowledge in the CCT paradigm—and its foundational disciplines—and, thereby, engenders highly truncated, one-sided, and distorted inter-paradigmatic conversations.

As one illustration of psychological reductionism, Berger and Ward (2010, 558) define Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of cultural capital as “nonfinancial social assets, such as cultural knowledge, that people have in a particular domain.” While this definition addresses some aspects of cultural capital, it omits the concept’s most crucial sociological features. Bourdieu characterizes cultural capital as “a weapon and as a stake of struggle” that enables its possessors to wield power and influence over others in a field of competition (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, 98). Absent this sociological interest in socially stratified power relations, conflicts over scarce resources, and positional struggles waged in socio-economic hierarchies (Bourdieu, 1984; Holt, 1988; Üstüner and Holt, 2007), “cultural capital” becomes little more than a synonym for “consumer expertise” (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987).

Of course, the transition to the lab from the field will necessarily entail some sacrifices of socio-cultural complexity in return for analytic precision. However, psychological reductionism primarily treats the borrowed socio-cultural construct as an instrumental means to interject a degree of novelty into status quo conceptual models and methodological operationalizations. Rather than promoting an exploration of transformative ontological implications, this form of indiscriminate pluralism serves a strategic aim of imbuing an otherwise orthodox consumer psyche study with a pluralistic aura of boundary spanning innovation.

Turning to selective erasures of established knowledge, this rhetorical outcome arises whenever researchers situated, in the borrowing paradigm, claim to have discovered new theoretical pathways that have, in fact, been well trod by prior CCT research. Schmitt et al. (2022) demonstrate how efforts at pluralistic theory building can often presuppose a series of systemic erasures. Their article’s central premise is that the field of consumer research currently lacks an “integrative framework on consumption ideology” Schmitt et al. (2022, 74). The authors then aim to fill this putative void by constructing such a framework that draws from a broad review of diverse studies and theorizations related to the topic of ideology, many of which are part and parcel of the CCT literature.

In making their contribution case, (Schmitt et al., 2022, 88) criticize these CCT studies for being “micro-theorizations” that do not constitute a full-fledged theory of “consumption ideology.” This positivistic rationale, however, erases one of the key insights offered by CCT analyses; the ideological processes that lead individuals’ to volitionally define their identities through the market cannot be reduced to the operation of a hegemonic narrative, such as a singular consumption ideology controlled by the culture industries (c.f., Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972).

Rather, consumer subject positions are heterodox formulations that variously draw from gender ideologies (Drenten et al., 2020; Gurrieri et al., 2020), class-based ideologies (Dion and Borraz, 2017; Henry 2005), normative political ideologies (Crockett and Wallendorf, 2004) and “responsibilizing” neoliberal ideologies (Giesler and Veresiu, 2014), among other ideological sources. The significance of these cultural, sociological, and political intersections has been further highlighted by prominent historical studies that have analyzed how materialist lifestyles and practices of ceaseless material acquisition became socio-politically legitimated and culturally ennobled, despite competing moral narratives and the countervailing efforts of anti-consumerist social movements (Cohen, 2003; Cross, 2000).

Schmitt et al.’s (2022) integrative framework, therefore, collapses key differences among the diversity of ideological discourses that serve, but not exclusively so, the twin interests of capitalist wealth accumulation and the marketization of individuals’ identities, lifestyles, and social relationships. It also erases the divergent sociological and psychological implications manifest in these studies’ respective conceptualizations of ideology, such as Bourdieusian analyses—where ideology is seen as force that naturalizes socio-economic inequities between groups and creates misrecognitions of one’s social position Allen (2002); Üstüner and Holt (2007)—and Foucauldian analyses which dispense with the “repressive” concept of ideology in favor of a more productive view of power/knowledge (Thompson 2004).

Such simplifications could, perhaps, be justified if the ensuing framework did provide a new and productive logic of analysis, as Schmitt et al. (2022, 85) assert. However, their supporting arguments rely on still other paradigmatic erasures. For example, these authors state that their “new framework posits that ideas and ideals related to consumerism are part of a consumer’s lived experience and manifest themselves in consumption” (Schmitt et al., 2022, 85). By implying that this proposition is an emergent discovery of their integrative framework, they invite readers to forget that this view of consumer subjectivities—as interpellations of a capitalist system dependent upon ever rising rates of consumption—has been a recurrent motif of the cultural studies and CCT traditions for decades (see e.g., Ewen, 1976; Holt, 2002; Murray and Ozanne, 1991; Peñaloza and Barnhart, 2011; Thompson and Haytko, 1997). The authors’ corollary claim that consumerist-oriented ideas and ideals are manifest in consumers’ “lived experiences” reiterates a classic theoretical principle that cultural and ideological meanings take hold through individuals’ collectively shared affective bonds and emotional experiences or what Williams (1961) characterized as “structures of feeling” (also see Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria, 2021).

Schmitt et al. (2022) then provide a set of illustrative case studies intended to demonstrate that their consumption ideology framework can “provide new insights beyond existing studies” (75). They inform readers that consumers engage in upcycling behaviors in order to resolve conflicts “between the consumerist objective of constantly buying new products and consumers’ desire to reduce consumption” (Schmitt et al., 2022, 85) and that consumers use TikTok to express their dreams and fantasies, which, in turn, can be co-opted by commercial interests (Schmitt et al., 2022, 87). However, these proposed “new insights” are conventional wisdom in the CCT paradigm, such as the idea that individuals negotiate ideological contradictions through their consumption practices (Holt, 2002, 2004; Thompson and Haytko, 1997) or that social media platforms commodify and marketize consumer desires and fantasies in the conduct of surveillance capitalism (Airoldi and Rokka, 2022; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2013; Kozinets, Patterson, and Ashman, 2017; Zuboff, 2019).

In summary, CCT researchers investigating the ideological shaping of consumption would regard these self-proclaimed, novel explanations as axiomatic theoretical premises (or an enabling lens, see Dolbec et al., 2021). In studying the ideological shaping of consumption, CCT researchers, as a matter of course, identify how ideological influences are enacted, modified, and resisted in a given consumption context, with the general aim of showing how specific subject positions and, their concomitant consumption practices, are ideologically inscribed in power relations (see e.g., Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria, 2021; Holt and Thompson, 2004; Izberk-Bilgin, 2010; Kozinets, 2008; Kozinets et al., 2021; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013; Thompson et al., 2018).

Moving from critiques to solutions, how could consumer psychologists engage in a more discriminating and innovative form of paradigmatic pluralism; one that eschews the reductionism and selective erasures that can result from the appropriative, “grist for the theory-building mill” approach? ² One such model of pluralism would seek to open new venues of research through ontological reconfigurations of established theorizations. Here, let us recall that Belk (1988) is, above all else, an ontological reconfiguration of core assumptions about the self—as an atomistic entity—that held sway in the broader consumer research field. Following this canonical lead, CCT researchers have frequently developed pluralistic theorizations that illuminate cultural or sociological processes/structures that have been implicit (and hence undertheorized) to psychologically oriented explanations of consumer behavior (Allen, 2002; Fischer, Otnes and Tuncay, 2008; Holt, 1997; Thompson and Troester, 2002), thereby creating revised theoretical understandings of these formative intersections between the psychological and the socio-cultural.

Van Laer et al.’s (2014) “Extended Transportation Imagery Model,” provides a useful reference point to more thoroughly illustrate the types of conceptual shifts could facilitate such bridging conversations between CCT and consumer psychology. Belk (1988) and Van Laer et al. (2014) both emphasize the theoretical modifier “extended” in their respective conceptualizations. However, the latter authors use this term in a more conventional sense of incorporating a broader set of explanatory variables into an extant psychological model:

In keeping with the transportation-imagery model (Green and Brock, 2002), our model

Accordingly, Van Laer et al. (2014, 803) conceptualize “the story receiver” (i.e., the consumer being narratively transported) as a socially autonomous information processor whose sense-making responses to a story are defined by a bundle of psychological and demographic traits. This ontological conception elides the broader CCT axiom, emanating from reader-response theory, that consumers interpret stories through culturally shared codes and reading strategies (Ritson and Elliott, 1999; Scott, 1994). From this relational standpoint, Van Laer et al.’s (2014) narratively transported consumer is a social actor whose reading strategies hail from particular interpretive communities. Furthermore, individuals likely participate in multiple interpretive communities, enabling them to interpret stories through a repertoire of strategies. For example, imagine a consumer who is a science fiction fan, a member of the transgender community, and a follower of libertarian political ideals. Such a reader could interpret a given fantasy narrative in diverse ways and generate a mix of responses (and potentially conflicting feelings) that could affect their transportability in myriad ways, depending on which frame-of-reference were to take priority in a given social context.

However, Van Laer et al.’s (2014, 803) extended model presumes that consumers exhibit a more unified disposition toward stories. Their six story receiver “antecedents,” with the exception of attention and familiarity, are represented as enduring traits that operate independently of any particular story or genre—that is, age, education, sex, and the story receiver’s “chronic propensity to be transported.” This latter psychological construct, however, harbors the potential for hypostatization that faces any, de-contextualizing, trait-based explanation (Askegaard and Linett, 2011). In regard to the specified demographic factors, one implication of the extended self (as well as the broader CCT literature) is that such broad, objectivizing classifications are far too coarse to explain the ways in which a consumer will experience a given narrative (see e.g., Holt and Thompson, 2004; Mick and Buhl, 1992). As just one counter example, gender identity, and its myriad socio-cultural/discursive constructions, is an analytic construct that is likely to reveal more about how and why stories transport consumers, than demarcations based on biological sex (see Drenten et al., 2020; Gurrieri et al. (2020).

While making some notable strides toward a more synergistic form of pluralism, van Laers et al.’s (2014) “extended transportation model” remains wedded to reductionistic assumptions that are not conducive to understanding how consumers’ experience of narrative transportation are constituted in an extended network of socio-cultural relationships. In this regard, Van Laer et al.’s (2014) most extensive engagement with topically related CCT research occurs in their “directions for future research,” where they discuss interpretive communities (including gender and social differences), and potential effects emanating from narrative genre and the medium of communication. However, these socio-cultural and contextual influences do not merely function as additional antecedents to be included in an atomistic model of the consumer.

Rather, they call for an ontological reconfiguration of the very concept of narrative transportation, such as conceptualizing it as a process of self-extension, whereby consumers can explore desired or undesired possible selves and/or enjoin new imaginative capacities, via the related concept of the “extended mind” (see Heersmink, 2020). From this ontological standpoint, consumer psychologists could investigate how narrative structures, and related contextual influences, can encourage (or discourage) consumers’ imaginative flights of fancy or how consumers’ participation in an interpretive community can alter their capacities to be narratively transported or their willingness to integrate these imaginative identifications into their everyday consumption practices (see Kozinets, 2001). Such pluralistic investigations could further analyze how and why certain narrative structures (e.g., mythic and archetypic forms, key binary oppositions and their resolutions, intertextual references, and semiotic relations) capture consumers’ imaginations and the kind of identity transformations that ensue from those narratively-mediated travels. (Arnould, 2008; Peñaloza and Mish, 2011)

Let’s now consider how the logic of ontological reconfiguration could have obviated the erasures of Schmitt et al. (2022). Rather than appropriating CCT knowledge into a totalizing framework, these authors could have identified potential theoretical synergies between theories of consumer psychology and research on the ideological shaping of individuals’ market choices, consumption practices, and perceptions of market resources. Their pluralistic extensions could have then, among many other possible options, 1) developed propositions about the psychological processes that facilitate consensual acquiescence (or resistance) to different forms of ideological influence (see for example Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria (2021) and 2) theorized how individuals’ socio-cultural immersion in capitalist realism (Fisher 2010), the commercialization of private life, digitized corporate surveillance, and algorithmic taste governance, and their corresponding ideological narratives shape their beliefs about “marketplace cooperation and manipulation” (Wright, 2002, 677) and the motivations of market actors. This latter option could further link the analysis of capitalism’s heterodox power structures to Wright’s (2002) “market metacognition” proposals.

In closing, consumer psychologists can and often do selectively poach constructs and ideas from CCT research. The “incommensurate paradigm” is a modernist construction that has clearly given way to postmodern practices of pastiche and hybridization. However, if one values innovation and synergistic interdisciplinary exchanges, these pluralistic undertakings should generate new lines of flight from established conceptual orthodoxies.