Managing the 21st-century Consumer: Social Representations of Contemporary Consumers in the Business Media

Abstract

Guided by the social constructionist contention that “definitions of reality have selffulfilling potency,” this dissertation takes an original approach to one of the most enduring and contentious debates in the multidisciplinary field of consumer studies (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 145). For centuries, social theorists from economics, political science, and sociology to cultural studies, psychology, and marketing have wrestled with the question of whether capitalist consumers are sovereign powers or manipulable dupes. Rather than examining the objective existence of consumer power, as scholars traditionally have, this study investigates the business world’s beliefs regarding consumer power via a content analysis of the prominent business management magazine Harvard Business Review (HBR). Situated at the intersection of economic sociology and cultural sociology, this research draws upon social representations theory, consumer studies scholarship, theories of the business media, and research on management knowledge diffusion to assert and then demonstrate that cultural conceptions of consumer power have economic consequences for capitalist consumers. Employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, the study first weaves together illustrative quotes and evidentiary examples from HBR to produce two descriptively rich qualitative portraits of the powerful and manipulable sides of the business media’s social representation of 21st-century consumers. Following this, the study’s quantitative findings demonstrate that Harvard Business Review predominantly represents contemporary consumers as sovereign powers rather than manipulable dupes at the beginning of the century. Finally, using binary logistic regression analysis to examine the relationship between HBR’s consumer representation and its consumer-related business strategy advice, the study concludes by showing that the business world, speaking via the pages of Harvard Business Review, primarily subscribes to a belief in consumer sovereignty and that this belief operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than an ideology in the economic realm by encouraging the promotion of consumerempowering business practices. In addition to offering these empirical findings as an original contribution to the discipline of sociology and the study of consumers and consumption, the dissertation’s methodology chapter draws upon lessons learned during an extensive coding frame development process to offer theoretical insight regarding the question of how consumer power should be conceptualized.