Abstract
This book suggests how we might approach the explanation of the central pattern of behavior in affluent, marketing-oriented societies. The task is well worth the effort since it is a central component of both social scientific endeavor and the need to comprehend ourselves in the twenty-first century. While our parents and grandparents were primarily producers, we are more likely to define ourselves as consumers. Parts of our very identities are bound up with something as superficially trivial as our shopping behavior. There is, of course, much more than this to consumer choice: so much so that seriously seeking to understand ourselves as consumers ought surely to assume a dominant position in our epistemological landscape.
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Notes
- 1.
Academic marketing is not a discipline in its own right, but an application area that relies on the perspectives, theories, methodologies, and techniques provided by disciplines such as economics and psychology. At a theoretical level, therefore, it generally incorporates rather than creates. As a result, it frequently makes philosophical and methodological assumptions that stem directly from the deliberations of other scientists pursuing other ends. Whatever discipline forms the predominant underlying intellectual basis of marketing science at the moment—it was once economics, has been and continues to be economic psychology, but sociology and anthropology have had their days too—tends to provide a philosophical and theoretical foundation of a sort, somewhat ad hoc, and necessarily temporary. There may not be an easy alternative to this, given the nature of marketing inquiry, but it raises certain difficulties of explanation. For the methodological imperatives imported into marketing are, inevitably, not constructs that are in some way absolutely characteristic of the discipline involved but only those that are currently acceptable to the exponents of that discipline or a subdisciplinary section of it.
- 2.
By operancy I mean the processes described by operant behaviorology or operant psychology in terms of the linkages between behavior and its contingent environmental consequences. See the discussion of radical behaviorism in Chapter 2.
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Foxall, G.R. (2016). Introduction. In: Perspectives on Consumer Choice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50121-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50121-9_1
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