Looking back on the fragile extended self

Belk’s seminal paper opens with the self-evident and unremarkable observation that ‘We cannot hope to understand consumer behaviour without first gaining some understanding of the meanings that consumers attach to possessions’ (Belk, 1988: 139). That individuals derive self-identity-related meanings from the possessions they own is not especially controversial, and nor is the suggestion that they occasionally develop attachments with possessions to the extent that they consider them to be an intimate and extended part of themselves. Furthermore, there is little reason to doubt that this basic observation about middle-class Americans and their disposition towards material possessions was widely understood in 1988. Christopher Lasch’s award winning bestseller The Culture of Narcissism (1979), for example, observed that success is frequently measured by material possessions and outward displays of wealth, and that consumer culture encourages individuals to constantly seek new and better goods as a means to enhance their self-image. Many of the seminal sources that Belk cites provides ample evidence of a general acknowledgement of the role that material possessions play in identity. By the time Belk published Possessions and the Extended Self in 1988, he had published papers on materialism, self-identity and ‘symbolic’ consumption in Advances in Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Research. A striking question that Thompson (2024a) reflection on Belk’s Possessions and the Extended Self raises then is why many consumer researchers were apparently so reluctant to consider Belk’s suggestion as a valid area for systematic enquiry until the mid to late 1980s and why this otherwise uncontroversial statement has assumed such canonical status that remains until today. What changes were occurring in American academia and society at the time to account for an apparent willingness by the consumer research establishment to grant institutional legitimacy for an otherwise widely accepted truism?

We can approach this question by considering some of the main differences between the various commentaries and analyses on the significance of consumer goods published throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Belk’s opening premise operates as a kind of distraction because the pressing question was not primarily concerned with importance of recognising the meanings that consumers attach to possessions. This had been extensively addressed in many different ways to reflect various ideological, political and other scholarly motives and aims. For those following in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, the main motivation concerned identifying and critiquing cultural processes that were transforming individuals (Belk’s ‘selves’) into passive consumers who are more concerned with acquiring goods than questioning the social order, distracting individuals from recognising their true interests and the possibility for social change. For others, the apparent fixation on issues of self-fulfilment and materialism in American society emphasised a conservative desire for a return to more communal and civic values to counterbalance the pervasive epidemic of self-obsession and alienation. 1970s and 1980s anthropology and cultural studies promoted the view that material culture essentially operated as communication, conveying messages about social position and personal identity. This approach sought to expand the discourse on consumption choice to incorporate (and celebrate) the wider ‘world of goods’ to include cultural norms, social obligations and cultural practices rather than maintaining the narrow focus on individual utility maximisation. Why then was this anthropological formulation the one that Belk and others chose to use to build bridges across the business school? Part of the answer is that this broadly albeit superficially apolitical, celebratory and expansive ‘ontology’ of consumption was the most compatible and least destabilising for the US business school at this time. Unlike the majority of the many more critical approaches to consumer identity and consumer culture, this quasi-anthropological import supplied a discourse in which the consumer emerges as a complex, meaning-making self with agency and creative potential, and free to explore, negotiate, navigate and flourish in a diverse material culture of virtually endless communicative opportunities. The importance of Possessions and the Extended Self as well as its lasting significance lies not in its basic content, which was to a large extent self-evident and uncontroversial, but rather in the choice of discourse through which to incorporate a more general attention to the significance of consumer goods in shaping identity and social relations. Echoing Botez and Hietanen’s (2024) remarks about how religion manifests in consumption contexts, the purpose was not simply to analyse or even to critique the implications of consumer culture but to show how consumption can help people create meaningful lives and to create a coherent self-narrative out of material goods (Ahuvia, 2005).

Thompson rightfully acknowledges the unique significance of the paper for the history of academic consumer research, and the development of what became consolidated as Consumer Culture Theory. For interpretivist consumer researchers who were shaping their own academic identities in the early to mid 1990s, it is difficult to overstate the seminal importance of Belk’s paper because it provided valuable evidence to legitimise an academic minority in the marketing departments of US Business Schools who were weighing up the risks and opportunities of following interpretive, qualitative and cultural approaches. Incidentally, many Consumer Culture Theory researchers continue to express similar concerns today, that is, that their approach has the status in the Business School of a minority of a minority within a minority. Thompson’s essay not only lays out a descriptive explanation of what this experience of academic marginalisation looked like back then but also identifies the uniqueness of Belk’s article to present a seemingly progressive agenda in a format and style that was palatable, acceptable and intriguing enough for an otherwise conservative community of academic gatekeepers.

Possessions and the Extended Self can be read as a kind of basic cultural studies primer intended for an audience of business school students and academics for whom awareness of social theory, political economy, sociology and anthropology was lacking. The underlying premise of the paper, namely, that middle-class North Americans appear to have a particular preoccupation and obsession with their material possessions, and that they routinely invest significant aspects of their identity and sense of self in the things they consume and aspire to consume can be read today as a rather unique insight into this wilful blind spot of business schools at that time. Ironically this period was the golden age of American consumer culture, following the two presidential terms of Ronald Reagan whose neoliberal shining city on the hill of low taxes, mega-malls and reduced government regulation successfully rebooted the American Dream of a nation that was more prosperous, more secure and happier. The imminent collapse of the Soviet Union provided the American public with empirical self-confidence that its consumer culture really did represent something like the end of history. The only outstanding question was how long it would take the rest of the world to get with the program of extending their own selves with mass produced consumer goods, retail-based leisure and entertainment and carb-heavy diner chains. That we can observe with the benefit of hindsight that this optimistic Fukuyamaesque vision failed to materialise is not especially surprising to those surveying the wreckage of neoliberalism today. If millennials and zoomers are interested in the cultural zeitgeist of North American consumer culture at the time when Belk’s article was published, as well as its subsequent fall into dilapidation and almost total collapse in the following decades, watching some of the numerous excellent vlogs and YouTube documentaries on the death of mall culture is a great place to start (for example, see https://shopbrightsunfilms.com/ and https://defunctland.com/).

It is in this spirit that Thompson’s essay identifies quite correctly the real genius of Possessions and the Extended Self. Its most important impact was to attempt to counter an obvious and for many self-evident criticism that ‘marketing science’ was essentially little more than a parochial managerialist ideology concealed in a pseudo-scientific preoccupation with statistics and experimental models of imaginary stylised buyers, market exchanges and corporate interest. This remains a significant issue and the same basic criticisms remain, albeit with updated contexts and concerns (see Holbrook, 2024). That marketing and consumer behaviour research had maintained its conservative obsession with information processing and utilitarian individualism to the point of irrelevance for so long may have provided the necessary institutional willingness to embrace something like Possessions and the Extended Self. The ontological bridge that Thompson describes provides a way to begin to understand the mechanisms by which seemingly disinterested academic communities came to find a mutual institutional acceptance in this ‘new’ area of research. For many Early Career Academics, Belk’s paper along with a small selection of other influential articles published in the 1980s represented their first exposure to a whole new paradigm and a mall-sized selection of methodologies for approaching the study of marketing and consumers. It is fair to say that the paper helped many researchers to consider taking their own personal ontological transition as well. While Possession and the Extended Self might not itself have been a Class A misdemeanour (indeed it remains quite the recreational read even today almost 40 years on), it was a gateway to harder literary substances for many researchers. This was a time when getting hold of the good stuff about consumer culture was practically impossible for most early career faculty. One notable aspect of the paper, particularly for a contemporary reader, is that it openly references and discusses both Marxism and Freud—two (though only two?) of Paul Ricoeur’s three “Masters of Suspicion” (Ricoeur, 1970). Belk’s descriptive accounts of these theories of the self under siege are diplomatically presented so as to avoid too much controversy, leaving it to the reader to decide, ‘The views of Sartre, Marx and Fromm on having, doing and being present significant questions that are not necessary or possible to resolve here (Belk, 1988: 146)’. It is therefore probably not worth dwelling too much on what the Marxists, post-Marxists and Freudians would have made of Possessions and the Extended Self at the time had they come across the article. One suspects not much. The theorisation and critical analysis of the consumer society, the critical and cultural theory on the construction of the consumer subject and the general critique of what was then often referred to as ‘postmodernism’ and nowadays frequently referred to as ‘neoliberalism’ were all well underway across the social sciences by the time Belk’s Possessions and the Extended Self is published in JCR. From this broader perspective, the paper was an already somewhat of an anachronism when it was published, but all that this really reemphasises is the intellectual chasm between what was happening in cultural studies and cultural theory throughout the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s as compared to the sterile and stifled intellectual climate of the business school at that time.

A critical approach might be to analyse and expose Possessions and the Extended Self as an exercise in bourgeois conservative appeasement, whereby just enough intellectual appropriation is tolerated by the marketing research establishment, ensuring that politically uncomfortable content implicit to the intellectual trends and innovations sweeping across the social sciences were dutifully expunged and neutralised. The cultural turn in social science is often understood today as representing a departure from the dominance of approaches that prioritised economic, political or structural explanations of social systems. However, while many of the theorists who are associated with the Cultural Turn developed extensive critiques of modern sociology, including radical reinterpretations of modernist social theory, many continued to offer profound critiques of capitalism by focussing on how cultural forms and practices both sustain and resist capitalist power and ideology. The cultural turn emerged from a general recognition that modernist sociology and political economy were inadequate to respond to the radical transformation of market capitalism and that new, arguably more sophisticated theoretical interventions and critiques were needed. It highlighted how cultural practices, meanings and identities are intertwined with capitalist structures and processes, examining how media and consumer cultures perpetuate capitalist ideologies and how consumer goods are imbued with symbolic meanings that reflect and perpetuate social hierarchies and existing power structures. While the Cultural Turn is largely characterised by its critical stance towards capitalism, it also opened up new opportunities whereby certain aspects and interpretations could be crafted that were either agnostic about the relationship between capitalism and culture or openly supportive of it. Cultural analysis could be developed to highlight the adaptive and integrative capacities of capitalist systems, demonstrating how cultural analysis can enhance and inform market practices, market strategies and economic growth.

Possessions and the Extended Self demonstrates how a very particular and selective appropriation of Cultural Turn ideas were appropriated and curated for the needs and requirements of the 80s US business school and helps to explain why a largely apolitical, pro-capitalist, celebratory expansion of consumer ideology prevailed – a kind of sterilised, Disneyized (Bryman, 1999) version of cultural theory that provides for limited progressive intellectual contribution in consumer research. The immediate ‘critical’ reviews of the paper generally reinforce this requirement for an illusion of dissent. Cohen (1989), for example, comments that Belk’s paper was beautifully written, intuitively appealing, captivating and useful as a ‘meta-concept’. The rather lack lustre criticism was that it probably lacks explanatory power and empirical value. But Thompson’s essay provides a defence against this kind of critical reading by acknowledging that a key strength of the paper was that it operated in a translational capacity. It enabled marketing pseudo-psychologists to embrace a broader concern with identity and material culture. Examining the paper in purely conceptual, theoretical terms – that is in terms of specific content, fails to consider that the purpose of this project was not simply to provide an alternative interpretation for consumer research but rather to change and challenge consumer research as an institution from within by taking full advantage of ‘paradigmatic fault lines’. Very similar arguments from authors of other seminal papers in the consumer research area have been given to explain how significant accommodations had to be made throughout the review process in order to get ‘progressively disruptive’ papers into establishment journals. Authors on topics such as Liberatory Postmodernism and Consumer Culture Theory, for example, have often stressed the realpolitik of making progressive, even critical, interventions in the field whereby explicit attention and anticipation of what the ‘mainstream’ audience would be willing to tolerate had to be taken into account and pandered to.

There is however a problem with all of this consensual ontological bridge building. These inevitable compromises baked in certain trajectories for interpretive consumer research which have hindered other possible approaches ever since. Indeed, one could argue that this was part of the desired outcome in the first place (Fitchett et al., 2014). Bridge building and the imaginative re-visioning of boundaries is after all at least two-way process, and it is rarely an equal exchange. As business schools grew in size, significance and hegemony through the 1980s, they also expanded in disciplinary scope with an almost colonial intensity. Traditions that were once generally considered to reside within fields such as sociology gradually found themselves being drawn into the gravity well of the business school. Belk’s foray into material culture studies, together with others of that generation of consumer researchers who imported social science disciplines such as semiotics, anthropology and linguistics, is a testimony to these shifting tides. In this respect, the ontological bridges that Thompson describes were built from the demolished wreckage and salvaged remains of 20th century sociology and political economy. These fields went from providing generally critical commentaries on the role of business and independently from business schools, to being appropriated and consumed by these very same institutions. Thus, we can read Belk Possessions and the Extended Self and other papers like it not as ontological bridge building but rather as an example of a more general form of intellectual colonialism. A group of pioneering Ulysses’ whose voyages discovered new domains of knowledge and fashioned them to the conditions of the neoliberal business school. The success of this project remains an open question. One could quite plausibly argue that the same instrumental, conservative, managerialist, positivist, cognitive-experimentalist dogma remains as dominant in the field today as it did back then, in fact perhaps this orthodoxy is even more entrenched and ascendant nowadays. All that had really been achieved was that marketing academics were no longer restricted to performing neoliberalism as pseudo-psychologists and could now branch out into endless new odysseys as pseudo-discourse analysts, pseudo-ethnographers and even the occasional pseudo-Marxist. There is no doubt a theory or two somewhere or other than explains and outlines how capitalism is able to so artfully appropriate and deterritorialise its own critique and then commodify it as a new form of progress and enlightenment, but such theories are as silent today as are the dead anchor stores and abandoned theme parks that litter the North American cityscape.

It is important to bear in mind that Possessions and the Extended Self along with the vast majority of consumer research was and remains primarily a story about North America and North Americans written for North Americans by North Americans. While other people in other places (‘cultures’) have comparable, perhaps even identical experiences, desires and material disorders (Gollnhofer et al., 2024), this does not detract from the American-ness of the general discourse of consumer research. The collapse of the mass consumer culture that Belk was writing in and about is especially raw and visceral for many middle-class Americans today. North Americans nevertheless retain a set of cultural values where possessions, consumption and materialism are especially significant when compared to other parts of the world. North Americans continue to have many, many more possessions, perhaps even chronically so (Huang and Wong, 2024). In North American consumer culture possessions and the sense of self is, at least in many important respects, a particular case rather than one that is easily generalisable to other parts of the world. Perhaps in the future Consumer Research in North America will be looked back on as a special case of a nation gripped by its own particular materialistic narcissism epidemic (Hartley, 2021) rather than a general or universal condition with Belk’s paper is its epitaph.

This critical suggestion regarding the generalisability of Possessions and the Extended Self might be expected to produce a reactionary and defensive response, especially from North Americans or those in invested in some exported version of the American Dream. One might eagerly point out that Belk is not describing a specific North American subject – a particular geographical situatedness as such, but rather a particular class location of a capitalist subject which is equally relevant to describe the experiences affluent and materialistic people everywhere. It is an expression of Western European ressentiment as well as a less than subtle attempt by relatively wealthy consumers in other parts of the world to indemnify themselves from potential criticisms regarding affluence, privilege and economic inequality. But such attempts to universalise the experience of North American consumer culture are really just an exercise in economic and cultural apologetics.

Thompson is quite right to emphasise the pragmatic necessity of building ontological bridges. The practical reality is that power often determines the scope and effectiveness of policies and priorities. The question for consumer research today then, and learning from Belk’s bridge building as well as Thompson’s, is what intellectual infrastructure could, or should cultural consumer researchers be looking to invest their careers in today? What bridges might they want to build? Perhaps Belk was too successful in that cultural approaches are now so fully incorporated and assimilated, albeit as a somewhat minor partner, that there really is little conflict beyond some minor performative differences. The continued canonical value of Possessions and the Extended Self casts a long shadow that operates to limit, control and marginalise alternative ‘cultural’ approaches that refuse to conform to a CCT, US centric genre and style, reproducing a new generation of Heimdallian gatekeepers in the process. Unless the discipline is prepared to look outside of its narrow, conservative and parochial comfort zone, it will be destined to reproduce ever increasing irrelevance and continue to be disregarded by other academic and intellectual interventions across the social sciences and beyond when it comes to significant questions about consumption, consumers and culture. These consequences are all too visible for those in precarious economic circumstances with limited and unequal access to what many would have traditionally considered to be fundamental and basic expectations, especially in wealthy economies. If the marketing and consumer research establishment genuinely wishes to ensure that it does not continue to be perceived as little more than an idiosyncratic lobby group for neoliberalism that wraps itself in pseudo-scientific discourse in order to signal some kind of academic credibility in an age of capitalist realism, then it may be necessary for consumer researchers to be prepared to build those ontological bridges anew and strive once again to open the borders some more.

Thompson’s essay on Possessions and the Extended Self should be read as a pragmatic and diplomatic call for action. It is a source of optimism that generations of researchers can look back on Belk’s paper and the world in which it was written and find it enjoyably conservative, nostalgic and even a little quaint, a bit like an episode of Stranger Things. But such warm and comfortable regressions only offer a temporary respite from the necessary bridge building that is now needed more than ever if the discipline is to survive. The struggle in consumer research today is no longer between positivism and interpretivism, qualitative and quantitative methodology, reason or emotion or psychological versus cultural accounts. Like the abandoned anchor stores in the decaying malls of America, debates about moderating variables, theories of reasoned action, discourses of the self and identity, consumer sense making and so on are potentially all chalked up for their own type of intellectual Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Future generations of marketing researchers might well come to wonder whether understanding the consumer as a ‘self’ is relevant or interesting beyond some kind of historical curiosity about a short bygone era of North American middle-class hubris between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Internet. Future marketing researchers might be expected to frown and wonder what were those chasms again over which ontological bridges had to be built?

Even if some semblance of the fragmented, transparent and shattered self manages to survive as a relevant analytical category, it is far from clear what role, if any, material possessions will play in whatever remains of ‘consumer identity’. This process has accelerated in the digital age where possessions are often only valuable as devices through which to connect to the virtual, or as stage props in the play of presentation and performance. The value of possession, the credulity of the object to represent and signify a sense of self and the belief in the illusionary symbolism of consumption will likely continue to diminish. In the future, there will no doubt be numerous cases and examples where minority tribes and subcultures will attempt to resurrect the nostalgic simulacra of the self and possession. These communes of practice will obsess over salvaged recordings on vinyl discs to resist and reject the virtualisation of music. They will store libraries of books as a futile means to hold back the disappearance of the printed page. These efforts will continue to revolve around intersections of cultural capital, ownership, material possession and the ‘self’, although in the end, even this will probably disappear and dissolve, unless captured as museum exhibits for posterity. And Consumer Culture Theory will no doubt eagerly and fetishistically document them (see, for example, Beverland et al., 2024). Even when the consumer is dead, killed by the consumer capitalism that created them, there will perhaps be caves and lakes for ages yet (see, for example, Grant et al., 2024) in which their shadow will be resurrected and parodied in some vague attempt to fill the void left by a diminished and absent subject. The object has its revenge in the end (Baudrillard, 1990).

If Thompson is right in his analysis of Possessions and the Extended Self, it is the institutional critique and not the content or context that matters. As many consumer researchers are at pains to stress, the consumer is not destined to disappear because of their transcendence into virtual worlds. The transformation into digital selves is merely the latest phase of postmodern capitalism, and one that is worthy of endless study (Belk, 2013). But this is all a distraction. (Post)modern virtual consumer culture is no less ‘material’ than its possessions and commodity-based precursor. Digital cultures are reliant on massive infrastructures of material technologies that consume enormous amounts of scarce resources as well as an insatiable amount of energy, much of which continues to be extracted from fossil fuels. The only major difference then is that the consumer no longer wishes to take responsibility for, or even acknowledge the existence of the material possessions that enable and facilitate their fragmenting and disappearing digital selves. Consumers today may come to valorise a kind of hypocritical ascetic minimalism with the ability to off-shore the negative environmental and political violence committed by their extended selves. If Belk’s consumer selves celebrated and indulged their intimate affair with possessions, then the digital consumer of the future seeks an alibi and immunity from any current or future liability for reparations. As Žižek repeatedly jokes (Žižek, 2002), today we want coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol and love without its dangerous moment. Consumer researchers extend this fantasy further to desire consumption without materialism and cultural theory without political economy, a tendency that reflects a deeper unwillingness to engage fully with the contradictions of consumer capitalism.

The ontological bridge that is needed now then is not concerned with some pedantic and esoteric disagreement about the nature of the consuming subject and the methods that can be legitimately deployed to interrogate it, but rather the urgency of promoting awareness about and culpability for the consequences of consumption. If we take Thompson’s analysis seriously then, which I think we should, then an appropriate and fitting legacy for Possessions and the Extended Self would be for critically minded, culturally focussed and politically aware consumer researchers to find ways to build bridges with all of those constituencies that make up the institutions of the business school so that it becomes possible to fully acknowledge the broader consequences of marketing and consumption (see, for example, Thompson and Kumar, 2020, 2021; Thompson, 2019, 2024b).

The idea that structures of global capitalism are responsible for irreversible ecological damage and unsustainable levels global of inequality is generally accepted outside the business school. The idea that the US/’Western’ model of consumer culture is not sustainable and that much of the attention in business schools on issues such as sustainability and social responsibility is often disingenuous and cynical is a view that is widely held outside the business school. The question then is why the institutions of consumer research are so reluctant to take these kinds of analysis seriously as valid or relevant areas of enquiry. What changes need to occur in American academia that might open up a greater willingness in the marketing and consumer research establishment to finally permit these otherwise widely accepted truisms and common-sense notions get some measure of institutional legitimacy in the marketing departments of the business school?