Investigating the meanings attributed to consumer and electoral choice experiences of individuals in the context of their everyday choices within a consumer culture.
The thesis is situated within three core contextual strands. The first of these outlines the veracity of what has become known as a ‘democratic deficit’ in many Western liberal countries, that is, a concern about the extent and nature of engagement with, and in, the political process. The second focuses on societal level trends that lead to contemporary culture being widely considered consumerist in nature, where, to paraphrase Bauman (2000), contemporary life is guided by a consumer ethic where our identity is now firmly based on being a consumer. The third strand can be seen as an outcome of the first two, whereby the idea of the marketisation of politics is considered a response to concerns about the ‘state’ of electoral participation. This sees democratic principles adapting and fitting into a marketing paradigm that, for example, equates pluralism to market competition, and, crucially for this thesis, voters to consumers . This marketisation of politics gives rise to political marketing as both a set of contemporary practices and as a method of understanding what is happening in the political arena .
Conceptually I outline a trajectory that sees a number of shifts taking place in the consumer behaviour literature with regard to the emphasis placed on researching consumers. As with most such changes in the prominence afforded to specific ways of understanding within any discipline, there is no neat start and end of phase. Indeed, it is apparent that each phase of consumer behaviour research has left significant traces in future phases, and that conceptualisations of choice remain a contested field, (Gabriel and Lang 2008). A vital consequence of the historical changes in emphasis found in consumer behaviour is that the perception of choice has shifted over time too. The second section of the chapter outlines a case for privileging a meaning-making perspective for consumer choice and goes on to comment on various strands of meaning that are already afforded to consumer choice in the literature. In the third section I articulate a case for a more explicit transferral of consumer choice as meaning-making, to help us understand political choice, in effect revisiting and updating the case made in Dermody and Scullion (2001).
A first- person description of the lived experience of participants is important because, although it accepts pre-given cultural meaning, it argues that there is uniqueness about how individuals incorporate their cultural and historic baggage into their particular lives. As a result, it is the personal meaning of the participants’ experiences that this thesis aims to describe, understand and interpret. This existentialist-phenomenological approach places primacy on the individual’s experience rather than on an abstract theory related to that experience. Given the focus of this thesis is about individual subjective experiences of choice, and given that existential-phenomenology locates meaning in the individual’s contextualised experience, the adoption of such a philosophical and methodological position seems most appropriate.
Still in writing up stage but clear themes have emerged ….
From the data it became apparent that choice was most meaningful to the participants when they felt that they had either created or desired the context in which choice emerged or where they believed others close and important to them had created or desired the context in which choice emerged. In these types of situations choice had the role of reinforcing their sense of self and the worthiness of their lives. Other types of situations that they simply ‘found themselves in’ or in which they felt in some way pressured into facing resulted in choice being framed in a different manner and, generally, coming to mean something less resonant to them. Here, choice was about coping, rising to the challenge or being indifferent to it and engaging with decisions seen as simply part of the routines of life that had to be made in order to move on. This resonates with one of Thompson et al’s consistent findings, (1990, 1996, 2004), that the degree of control one perceives is critical in determining the types of meanings associated with the specific choice experience. For some of my participants the former category of choice was rare, limited in both scale and frequency. Others purposefully sought out the contexts where they would find the more meaningful types of choice. In very broad terms it can be argued that the centrality of choice in the everyday lives of the individual was dependent on how much time they spent in situations that they felt responsible for being in verses situations where they felt were in some way imposed. This seems to be a practical manifestation of the philosophical notion of ‘first-order’ choice or what Kane (2003) refers to as self-forming actions. At some meta-level individuals directly or inadvertently choose the types of contexts that occupies most of their everyday life, either it is what I will call ‘agency rich’ or ‘agency poor’ and this first-order choice shapes the overall meaningfulness that choice is attributed in their lives.
