• demonstrate knowledge of the marketing mix (4Ps); segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP); and the consumer behaviour process (search behaviour and the linear model of problem-solving)
• explain how and why consumer culture theory and consumer psychoanalysis approaches challenge managerial views of consumer behaviour
• explain and exemplify the role of concepts like ‘hedonism’, ‘identity’, ‘experience’ and ‘consumer tribes’ in consumer culture theoretical approaches
• demonstrate knowledge of Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘capital’, ‘habitus’, ‘taste’, ‘differentiation’ and Bourdieu’s interpretation of the role of cultural intermediaries in the consumption process
• explain and exemplify the tenets of the performativity theory of markets in relation to the role of equipment, objects and calculative practices in consumer marketing
• explain and exemplify the difference between valuation and evaluation practices in mundane consumer markets
• critically analyse and evaluate the role of cultural intermediaries in the consumption process, in particular of professions in the ‘creative industries’ (advertising, fashion, music, public relations)
• demonstrate knowledge of the analytic role played by core concepts in critical research in marketing, in particular ‘value’, ‘rent’, ‘surplus’, and ‘commons’

This course will introduce undergraduate students to managerial and socio-theoretical perspectives on marketing and the consumption process. The main focus of the course will be the discussion of various approaches to the understanding of consumer behaviour and the active role of consumers in shaping contemporary markets. The course will begin with a survey of how ‘mainstream’ marketing strategy attempts to identify and shape consumer attitudes and behaviours. In the following two meetings, this managerial view will be juxtaposed with more recent approaches in the theory of consumer behaviour, namely consumer culture theory (CCT) and psychoanalytic interpretations of the social and cultural meanings of consumer products. This will be followed by a meeting that specifically focusses on historical methods and asks what contributions historical research can make to our understanding of contemporary consumer culture. This session will act as a bridge between the three opening meetings and the following four meetings on sociological theories of consumption. The key argument is that historical research can inoculate researchers against the dangers of reified and uncritical theorizations of contemporary life. The following four meetings will each be dedicated to the discussion of a major sociological approach to consumption and consumer culture. This part will start off with a session on Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the role of symbolic consumption in the production of social differences. The following session will help students understand how and why sociologists in the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) tradition interpret markets as performed by agencements composed of human and non-human actors. The next session will focus on recent developments in the sociological theorization of valuation practices as developed, among others, by Luc Boltanski. In the session before last, on Critical Theory, the course will return to some questions about the problem of the agency of consumers as active co-creators of value in the consumption process. In this session, various problematizations of consumption as discussed in the earlier meetings will be brought together and tested for their explanatory and analytical power.

For our very last meeting, we will leave the class-room and conduct a field trip to observe a daily consumption practice in situ. This exercise, which will focus on the take-away cup of coffee as a mundane item of consumption, is designed to help students put into practice the theoretical insights gained during the previous meetings. For this meeting, the class will be split up into several sub-groups, some of which will visit the ‘Joe and the Juice’ outlets in Frederiksberg Shopping Centre, while others will visit the CBS canteens at Solbjerg Plads and Kilen. By employing observational methods from CCT, students will study how the material setting of coffee consumption invites and precludes certain forms of consumer rationality and sociability. After the field observation, which should last for ca. one hour, students will meet back in class in order to discuss their insights and interpretations. The course convener will invite a representative of CBS Catering to debate with us the decision taken some years ago to replace reusable porcelain cups with disposable paper cups.

Consumer Culture Theory

• D. Rook, ‘The Ritual Dimension of Consumer Behavior’, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1985), pp. 251-264.
• R. Belk, ‘Cultures, consumers and corporations’, in: L. Penaloza, N. Toulouse, L. Visconti (eds.), Marketing Management: a Cultural Perspective (2012), pp. 15-29.

Psychoanalytic Theory and the Consumption Process

·D. Bennett, ‘The Libidinal Economy of Advertising: Psychoanalysis and the Invention of the Consumer Unconscious’, in: D. Bennett, The Currency of Desire:Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution (2016).

R. Salecl, The Tyranny of Choice (2010), chapters 2 and 3, pp. 14-72.

Historical Research and the Poverty of Theory

• G. Eckhardt and A. Bengtsson, ‘A brief history of branding in China’, Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2010), pp. 210-221.
• O. Sullivan and J. Gershuny, ‘Speed-up society? Evidence from the UK 2000 and 2015 time use diary surveys’, Sociology, early online publication June 23, 2017.

Bourdieu and Consumers’ Capital(s)

• R. Dunn, Identifying Consumption: Subjects and Objects in Consumer Society (2008), chapter 2, pp. 51-76.
• B. Longhurst and M. Savage, ‘Social class, consumption and the influence of Bourdieu: some critical issues’, Sociological Review, Vol. 44, Issue S1 (1996), pp. 274-301.

Actor Network Theory and the ‘Equipped Consumer’

• F. Muniesa, ‘Testing Consumer Preference’, in: F. Muniesa, The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn (2014), chapter 5, pp. 79-95.
• F. Cochoy, ‘Calculation, qualculation, calqulation: shopping cart arithmetic, equipped cognition and the clustered consumer’, Marketing Theory, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2008), pp. 15-44.

Valuation Practices and the Consumer

• F. Heuts and A. Mol, ‘What is a good tomato? A case of valuing in practice’, Valuation Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2013), pp. 125-146.
• M. Cécile and V. Rabeharisoa, ‘Taste as a form of adjustment between food and consumers’, in: Rod Coombs, Ken Green, Albert Richards, and Vivien Walsh (eds.), Technology and the Market: Demand, Users and Innovation (2001), pp. 234–253.

Critical Theory and the Consumption Process

• G. Ritzer, N. Jurgenson, ‘Production, consumption, presumption: the nature of capitalism in the age of the digital “prosumer”’, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 10 (2010), No. 1, pp. 13-36.
• A. Arvidsson, ‘Brands: a critical perspective’, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2005), pp. 235-258.
• D. Zwick, S. Bonsu, A. Darmody, ‘Putting consumers to work: “Co-creation” and new marketing govern-mentality’, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2008), pp. 163-196.

Field Observation/Field Trip

·B. Harris and E. Probert, ‘Waste minimisation at a Welsh university: a viability study using choice modelling’, Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Vol. 53, No. 5 (2009), pp. 269-275.

R. Belk, E. Fischer and R. Kozinets, ‘Ethnography and observational methods’, in R. Belk, E. Fischer and R. Kozinets, Qualitative Consumer and Marketing Research (pp. 57-91). London: SAGE.