Regions and archipelagos of consumer culture

Abstract

Marketing scholarship often employs geographical regions to demarcate and contextualize market and consumer research. Regions help researchers grasp phenomena that span over areas larger than a single locality. However, the potential for regions to create greater understanding in consumer research has been limited by researchers’ acceptance of geopolitical frontiers as the natural boundaries of cultural practices. We introduce critical regionalities and the archipelago metaphor as an analytic lens for interrogating and redrawing regional borders while preserving the benefits of a regional approach. Combining poststructuralist and critical historical perspectives, we argue for greater sensitivity to place and history in operationalizing regional consumer cultures. To illustrate this approach, we take Latin America as our point of departure and use examples from the central consumption areas of food and dwelling, for example, the consumption of rice and beans and the rise of gated communities. We contribute to recent theoretical developments in marketing and consumer culture theory with a flexible notion of regional consumer culture, paying critical attention to the relationship between analytical scales and researchers’ reflexivity. This approach also allows for more attention to non-Western contexts, ontologies, and epistemologies.