Articulating consumers through practices of vernacular creativity

Abstract

The paper discusses the constitution of the consuming subject in lifestyle practicesof belonging and difference, taste and choice in the material circumstances of everyday living. Itconsiders how lived moments of mundane activity can be understood, not simply as sites of socialreproduction and unknowing regulation, but as fields of invention, transformation and reflexivestruggle. In particular we unpack the contribution to be gleaned from a thoughtful return to DeCerteau et al. (1998), a theorist of practice whose lucidly insightful works, we claim, remainlargely silenced within contemporary debates over the turn to practice in consumer research(Schau, Muniz, & Arnould, 2009). It is argued that current conceptions of practice withinmanagement and marketing find themselves corralled by the authoritative legacy of the worksof Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1990) which has the effect of marginalizing other traditions of practicetheorising: here consumption practices are formatted into logics of rational calculation. Wesuggest that the work of de Certeau offers an alternative to reductive discursive accountings,revealing the emergent and material character of mundane sense and deed, where the ordinary isfigured as the realm par excellence of improvised vernacular consumption practices. In seeking torepair mechanistic underpinnings by linking practices and structure in the everyday lifestyle workof consumers, we hope to turn our gaze towards the moral and political character of that whichpractice theory calls forth. Born of necessity such practice laughs in the face of Bourdieu'sdismissal of the ‘choice of necessity'.