sociocultural

experiential

symbolic

ideological

While representing a plurality of distinct theoretical approaches and research goals, CCT researchers nonetheless share a common theoretical orientation toward the study of cultural complexity that programmatically links their respective research efforts.

CCT is an interdisciplinary research tradition that has advanced knowledge about consumer culture (in all its heterogeneous manifestations) and generated empirically grounded findings and theoretical innovations that are relevant to a broad constituency in the base social science disciplines, public policy arenas, and managerial sectors.

First and foremost among these myths is that consumer culture theorists study particular contexts as ends in them- selves; therefore, the argument goes, CCT contributes little to theory development in consumer research (Lehmann 1999; Simonson et al. 2001).

A second misconception is that the primary differences between CCT and other traditions of consumer research are methodological. [...] Consumer culture theory researchers embrace methodological pluralism whenever quantitative measures and analytic techniques can advance the operative theoretical agenda.

CCT research is misperceived in some disciplinary quarters as a sphere of creative expression, voyeurism, entertaining esoterica. and sonorous introspection of lim- ited relevance to consumer research's broader theoretical projects or the pragmatic interests of managers and policy makers.

In this work, consumers are conceived of as identity seekers and makers.

Consumer culture theorists have turned attention to the relationship between consumers' identity projects and the structuring influence of the marketplace, arguing that the market produces certain kinds of consumer positions that consumers can choose to inhabit.

In contrast to traditional anthropological views of people as culture bearers, consumers are seen as culture producers.

The key research question driving this program of research is this; how does the emergence of consumption as a dominant human practice reconfigure cultural blueprints for action and interpretation, and vice versa?

This stream of CCT research also addresses the ways in which consumers forge feelings of social solidarity and create distinctive, fragmentary, self-selected, and sometimes tran- sient cultural worlds through the pursuit of common con- sumption interests

this genre of CCT builds upon Maffesoh's (1996) ideas on neotribalism.

The third domain that CCT addresses is the institutional and social structures that systematically influence consumption, such as class, community, ethnicity, and gender.

what is consumer society and how is it constituted and sustained?

To address this problematic, consumer culture theorists investigate the processes by which consumption choices and behaviors are shaped by social class hierarchies; gender; ethnicity; and families, households, and other formal groups.

Consumer culture theory ex- amines consumer ideology—systems of meaning that tend to channel and reproduce consumers' thoughts and actions in such a way as to defend dominate interests in society (Hirschman 1993).

What normative messages do commercial media transmit about consumption (Hirschman 1988)?

How do consumers make sense of these messages and formulate critical responses (Hetrick and Lozada 1994; Hirschman and Thompson 1997; Murray and Ozanne 1991; Murray, Ozanne, and Shapiro 1994)?

In this research program, con- sumers are conceived of as interpretive agents whose mean- ing-creating activities range from those that tacitly embrace the dominant representations of consumer identity and life- style ideals portrayed in advertising and mass media to those that consciously deviate from these ideological instructions.