Back to the roots! Methodological situationalism and the postmodern lesson for studying tribes,practices,and assemblages

Introduction

Postmodernism, performativity, postsociality, poststructuralism, praxeology, posthumanism—interpretative consumer researchers have mobilized a range of theoretical tools to question essentialist, mentalist, humanist, positivist, or rationalist conceptualizations of consumer culture (Brown, 1994, 1995, 1999; Cova et al., 2013; Elliott and Cova, 2008). Moving beyond the realms of “pure” symbols, discourses, and identities, they have set out to further the reach of culturalist theorizing deep into the hinterlands of naïve naturalism, crushing modernist dichotomies along the way: mind and body, man and nature, subject and object. Postmodernist theories, as I will call them for the sake of my argument, show that social order or meaning is not given, but procedurally accomplished by virtue of something other than just willful individuals. Over time, this other has been given many names—rhizomes, systems, and dispositifs. Taken together, the family of postmodernist theories has delivered salvo after salvo of devastating blows to the imaginary fortress of modernity, turning rationality to rubble and dichotomies to dust. So successful they have been that interpretative consumer research (ICR) increasingly finds itself asking: Where do we go from here? How to develop our research interests and topics in a shifting intellectual and institutional environment without falling back behind the critical postmodernist insights?

This question becomes all the more pressing if research presented under the moniker Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) is sharply criticized as lacking the reflexivity of postmodernist consumer research because it allegedly aligns with neoliberal ideology (Cova et al., 2013; Fitchett et al., 2014; Moisander et al., 2009). This alignment is being fiercely contested by many key proponents for good reasons (Askegaard, 2014; Thompson et al., 2013), which shows that opinions are divided about what postmodernism proper has really taught us. As some try to inscribe a certain narrative of the past in order to legitimize a particular trajectory into the (socialist?) future, others correct such readings of the past, but only in part because they hold a different vision of the said future. Instead, while everybody agrees in a heartbeat that researchers need to be reflexive (who wouldn’t?!), there is substantial disagreement regarding what exactly researchers need to be reflexive about when it comes to their work and its impact: not only the abstract macro-conditions such as neoliberalism and late capitalism, but also institutional and organizational meso-conditions that shape not just what is being written, but more importantly what ends up being read and followed up on. As important as this debate is, I fear that something is missing from the picture, namely reflection on the micro-conditions of research, on methodology, and the empirical grounding of consumer research. By adding this aspect, we could read the discussion not as a quarrel between alternate nostalgic narratives of a not-so-distant past, but productively as a spirited debate about possible future directions of ICR. Yet for all its merit, the current form keeps us from asking more directly: What should we be doing next?

The word doing is of the essence here. For this, debate should really be one about the how of researching, theorizing, and conveying arguments. Neither supposedly definitive description of the past nor normative prescription of what the result of future research must supposedly look like (Anticapitalist! Utopian! Postcolonial!) will help much. Instead, we should deliberate which methodological mechanisms, theoretical toolboxes, and effective expressions are suitable to build on the key insights of the postmodern project and avoid beaming ourselves back into a modernist future. Can we really just continue to find new and clever ways of rediscovering the demonstrable fluidity of just about everything? By doing so, ICR is indeed in danger of losing its critical edge and sink into the morass of mainstream saturation and incrementalist stagnation (Cova et al., 2013).

The cure recently subscribed against such demise is considering the context of contexts (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Earley, 2014), along with the injection of a healthy dose of radical thinking (Bode and Østergaard, 2013; Cova et al., 2013; Denzin, 2001; Firat and Tadajewski, 2009). What seems less clear, however, is just what kind of researching, theorizing, and disseminating deserves the label “radical?” Some urge us to gaze toward the communist horizon (Cova et al., 2013) or “dream of a radically democratic society” of free individuals (Denzin, 2001) in order to gain a reinvigorating perspective on consumer research. I instead suggest casting our eyes down to the ground, true to the original sense of the word “radicalis”—that which concerns the roots.

Because for all its virtue, the danger of conceptualizing the context of context (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011) is that it can encourage us to read any empirical phenomenon at hand as yet another manifestation of an ostensibly pre-given superstructure such as a Bourdieuian Field (Thompson, 2004), a Badiouian Truth (Earley, 2014), or a Baudrillardian Simulacrum (Østergaard and Fitchett, 2012). We need to be vigilant to disprove Latour’s (2005: 148) polemic that: “Context stinks. It is simply a way of stopping the description when you are tired and too lazy to go on.” If the quintessence of the postmodernist argument is that all meaning and order is procedurally accomplished (and thus plural, fluid, and contingent), then macro-contexts are never just there, nor have they “inevitable consequences” (Fitchett et al., 2014: 498)—ever. Hence, macro-contexts cannot adequately explain micro-contexts; in particular, because this would mean to ignore the importance of what Goffman (1964) called The Neglected Situation. Instead, it must be the empirical duty of the researcher to show how exactly the macro-social phenomenon is made present and reproduced in local situations (Collins, 1981; Knorr Cetina, 1988). For this reason, I argue that both ICR and CCT need to heed the insights of the postmodernist theories they apply, without falling prey to essayism, by following the principle of methodological situationalism.

Methodological situationalism

In its original formulation by sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina (1981b, 1988: 22), methodological situationalism demands “that descriptively adequate accounts of large-scale social phenomena be grounded in statements about actual social behaviour in concrete situations.” In order to become a heuristic principle that operationalizes the main arguments of postmodernist thinking, I propose to reformulate this definition as follows:

Theoretically adequate accounts of social phenomena must be grounded in empirical observations of manifest meaning or social order in concrete situations.

This reformulation contains three important changes. First, the principle is extended to all social phenomena, although it is arguably still most critical to apply it to accounts of what are frequently considered large-scale phenomena, such as systems, discourses, or markets. Notably, assemblage theorists argue that micro versus macro is not a suitable categorization for understanding social order (Bajde, 2013; Hill et al., 2014), and the reformulation accommodates this view. Second, a postmodernist will detect a whiff of realism in the original expression “statements about actual social behavior,” and hence it is better replaced. Addressing empirical observations directly not only makes the intent more clear, but also invokes the fact that theoretical accounts are ultimately a result of scholarly practices of producing knowledge that are indexical, contingent, and enmeshed into non-neutral academic structures. The term “empirical observations” is simply chosen to include as wide an array of data production practices as possible. The third and most critical change is the claim that methodological situationalism will not result in adequate description, but rather theoretical adequacy. From a postmodernist view, better descriptions cannot and should not be the aim of social science, because there is no representation, only construction. Some have concluded that if so, we might as well let go of the idea of being guided by data alone and instead construct scholarly narratives that help some preconceived cause, usually a political one (Earley, 2014; Fitchett et al., 2014). I believe this is tantamount to giving up on social thought and doing something else instead, namely politics. (And the popular claim that all social thought or theory is inevitably political means just that: letting go of the very idea of empirical social science as a whole). This essay is meant as a reminder that a very different conclusion can be drawn from postmodernism as well.

It rests on two pillars: The first is the insight that the social construction of reality is itself an empirical phenomenon that can be observed and theorized in more or less adequate ways. The second is the notion of theory. A theory does not claim to be a description of reality but has to answer to very different standards than mere opinion or intervention. Among the most important ones are logical consistency, some degree of generality, empirical adequacy in light of observable phenomena of lived social life, and theoretical adequacy with regard to theoretical frameworks or paradigmatic a priori. This last point is fundamental: social theory has to answer to theoretical arguments. Adequately answering to the powerful arguments of postmodernist theory, I will detail in the following, requires not only adopting certain theoretical tropes, but also a certain methodology and topicality for consumer research. I will make this argument by realerting the reader to the situational roots of postmodern phenomena, not in the sense of narrating its historical origins, but rather of scrutinizing the epistemologies that provide it the empirical grounding without which there would be nothing to interpret in the first place. Radical thinking in this sense concerns, to put it with Kant, the empirical conditions of the possibility of the postmodern critique.

To provide an idea of these conditions, the kitchen is a good place to start. Let me, for the sake of gaining a tangible example, engage in a bit of kitchen philosophy and sit down with the consumer amid the material multiversity of technological appliances that is the perfectly mundane and boring Western kitchen. For the postmodernist, it is easy to show that transgression, multiplicity, bricolage, and emergence abound in the modern kitchen. She can point to moralized myths of hygiene; embodied performances of gendered identities; hybrid constellations of natural ingredients, technological tools, and human doings; ritualistic reproduction of taste; and much, much more. The immediate and deep theoretical implication of such demonstrable multidimensionality seems clear: Panta Rhei! No essences, just processes! The world is flat!

A theoretical headfirst dive into a maelstrom of contingency and fluidity might be tantalizing for the “creative destabilization” and “radical invigoration” it can bring (Cova et al., 2013: 215). However, the careful empirical works that postmodernist theory inspired found kitchen users primarily interested in re-stabilization and pacification (Epp and Price, 2010; Truninger, 2011) and working hard to ensure their kitchen remains “well-kept and organized” (Coupland, 2005: 108). Indeed, even disorder is an expectable normality in the kitchen that manifests as piles of stuff, layers of mess, and stages of disorganization that require boundary work of some kind (Denegri-Knott and Parsons, 2014; Maycroft, 2009). More fundamentally, disorder is only meaningful in its relation to the order it replaces or defies. Zooming in onto the empirical detail of lived life, in other words, the seemingly messy postmodern kitchen (O’Donohoe, 1997) is a place of order in that it is intelligible, useful, and ready. To be sure, it is a microcosm of order that is not ontologically given, but continuously accomplished. But even the fully reflexive postmodern consumer, bravely facing the possibility of her own ephemerality, hardly seems to have a problem carrying on doing what needs to be done in a kitchen. In short, I argue that ICR relies on the given situational order as a resource, providing us the opportunity to problematize behind the back of the consumer facing an essentially unproblematic world. If that would not be the case, we would all be in limbo once we try to make an empirical observation.

Am I trying to suggest that the postmodernist argument has failed by pointing to the inherent order of situations? Far from it. What I argue is to be done, instead, is to turn the postmodernist argument from its head—the demonstrable adequacy of abstract notions like multiples, rhizomes, or assemblages—back onto its feet—the immediately evident ongoing local accomplishment of order and meaning. The inherent and stubbornly stable order of concrete situations, I suggest, does not make the postmodernist argument obsolete, but rather made its formulation possible in the first place. The first question that needs answering if we are to reinvigorate consumer research, accordingly, is: How could it happen that the local procedural accomplishment all but vanished out of sight?

Sociologists of science argue that successful theories and concepts work as boundary objects (Knorr Cetina, 1999; Star and Griesemer, 1989): only because they can be read from different angles, different communities of scholars subscribing to differing epistemologies and styles of scientific work can build them into their work. Accordingly, we should find those ideas that were part of the postmodernist intervention to enjoy especially strong reference and relevance that are also open to moderate, if not conventional, readings. To be sure, I am not suggesting that using these concepts means to squander all of PoMo’s critical edge! Rather, they allow for a shared conversation despite underlying deep disagreements in matters of ontology and epistemology, conversations in which some arguments may be edgy, and others less so. Three prominent examples come to the mind: tribes, practices, and assemblages. All three frameworks are at the core rejections of the classic subjectivist explanation of orderliness, particularly the automatic order-making capacity of the human mind. But to various degrees, all three have been used in studies and arguments that have lost theoretical or methodological sensitivity for the situational grounds of social phenomena. In the following, I will thus discuss all three from a critical angle by asking how well they account for situational order and intelligibility.

Tribes and communities

The classic and arguably still dominant programmatic view of consumer culture prevalent in the ICR or CCT is one that emphasizes the inherently cultural nature of the social world and the formative role of communities (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001; Schouten and McAlexander, 1995), tribes (Cova et al., 2007), or identity projects (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). The rationale behind conducting ICR, in this view, is that interpretation is the modus operandi within which the social world is opened up to the consumer, and thus the researcher needs to follow this path as well in order to be able to decipher the social origins of the discourses, sign systems, or ideologies within societies and their subgroups (Cova and Elliott, 2008). Interpretation, however, is something an individual subject does. In this way, this view is grounded in a classic individualist ontology of the social.

From this perspective, the meaningfulness and orderliness of the exemplary kitchen is thus an effect of the capable individual making use of it and its things by interpreting and acting. More specifically, the fabric of the kitchen as a site that is meaningful and workable is a cultural fabric. It is for this reason that any site of social order comes to be seen as the work of a tribe: the anthropoi populating the classic cultural anthropologists’ notion of culture have woven its fabric of meaning with their formative hands, sign-processing minds, and discourse-producing voices. And further, it is by virtue of being a member of the community of those acculturated to make sense and use of sites like Western kitchens that we might feel at home there, or can have a coffee, or wash our dishes. In this paradigm, we find the acculturated, knowledge-bearing, world-interpreting subject as the building block of the social and as the reason behind the kitchen’s intelligibility.

To be sure, it would be a misrepresentation to frame a community or tribe as nothing but a group of individuals. Rather, it is the ritual, the gathering, the interaction that brings the consumer collective about and by doing so instigates and manifests the tribe member as a tribe member. The community, in other words, must first perform culture so that meaning can arise, and it is ultimately on the basis of the said performance—ritual, symbolic interaction, aesthetic sign play—that the cultural fabric that turns the kitchen into an intelligible site of consumption emerges.

As stated, my intention is not to criticize this widely accepted view, although I do treat it as one to which there are potent alternatives. But I want to point out that when a community or tribe of agentic consumers is taken as the unit of analysis in consumer research, there is a certain propensity that the phenomenon being analyzed is left hanging in the air. It is tempting to study discourses (Humphreys, 2010; Thompson and Haytko, 1997), sign systems (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard, 2006; Mick, 1986), or mythologies (Thompson, 2004; Thompson and Tian, 2008) as if they were free-floating superstructures existing independently from local, situated manifestations. Tempting, because this misleading assumption allows the researcher to isolate, purify, and aggregate, making the analysis both economic and the resulting study appear conveniently “clean.” In a similar fashion, it sometimes appears as if rituals, gatherings, and symbolic acts just happen, but do not really take place. The material is often acknowledged for its semiotic qualities, but seldom for its pragmatic and immediate effects (Bajde, 2013; Dant, 2008). Likewise, the body is one shaped by discourses and used toward identity-expressive ends (Bjerrisgaard et al., 2013; Thompson and Hirschman, 1995); but hardly ever one that is shaping interaction orders or imposing emotions and moods on the tribe’s members (Smith, 2015). This neglect, to be sure, is by no means absolute. Every empirical research article bears scars from the struggle between thick description and focus on the core phenomenon or contribution. But to some extent the neglect is systematic, because things, bodies, and situational settings are, first, qua definition external to the group of people that form a tribe, and second, can subsequently only be considered part of the cultural phenomenon to the extent that they have been designed, crafted, shaped, controlled, steered, thought up, or designated by tribe members in pursuit of the given cultural frame or symbolic end (e.g. Schouten and McAlexander, 1995). They are, in other words, taken to be reflecting culture and sociality, but not to be part of it in any strict sense.

And here lies the paradox I am seeking to carve out with my plea for returning our scholarly gaze to the situational roots. Both the empirical topics studied—the brandfests (McAlexander and Schouten, 1998) and rafting trips (Arnould and Price, 1993) and Brat performances (Ostberg, 2007)—and the methodologies employed—the immersion and participation and observation—are effectively oriented toward something other than communities per se: situated social interaction. Once the researcher starts asking how things become vested with symbolic qualities, how status is distinguished or identity expressed, and how tribes are gathered or conflicts played out, the unit effectively analyzed must necessarily be some concrete social encounter. It is here, in the microverse of focused, symbolic interaction that congregations of consumers cocreate culture, community, and consumer value. The theoretical tools employed, however, force the researcher to systematically exclude certain aspects of the phenomenon at hand by artificially distinguishing between issues, internal versus external, to consumers or their communities. When building on a social ontology of communities or tribes, the analyzed unit and the unit of analysis no longer match. The situation suddenly becomes a context or container to the “actual” phenomenon, namely the consumer or groups thereof.

From tribes to assemblages and practices

As a response, tribes or communities have recently undergone relatively radical redescriptions based on two contemporary strands of social thought: as assemblages (Canniford and Bajde, 2015b) and as bundles of practices (Schau et al., 2009). For reasons that have more to do with serendipity and politics than theoretical substance, assemblage theory and practice theory remain largely separate in consumer research, despite the fact that at least in the way they are being defined and used in our field, they share more commonalties than differences. The similarities between both approaches are not surprising, given that both grew out of the sociology of science and technology, in particular careful ethnographic analysis of laboratory work. This work explored laboratories as densely ordered places of social conduct through which the scientific reality of “things” such as natural laws, scientific facts, or features of human bodies is made visible (Knorr Cetina, 1981a; Latour and Woolgar, 1986). Paying close attention to the prerequisites and structures of the in situ production of intelligibility or perceive ability of social things, researchers found that social processes are not adequately reducible to humans acting intentionally and accordingly proposed to take something other than the isolated individual as the basal unit of the social. This unit needed to be inclusive and multidimensional in order to accommodate the different aspects identified as relevant, yet also discernible, stable, and specific enough to serve as the workhorse for thorough theorizing and solid methodology out in the manifold fields of interest scholars might plough.

Probably because they had always kept an eye on applicability or adequacy toward phenomena extramural of the close confines of laboratories, the early champions of nonindividualist ontologies of the social did not name places or situations themselves as the building brick of sociality, but instead assemblages or social practices, respectively. Nevertheless, both ontologies insist that the local situation is the only site where said assemblages or practical assembling can manifest. More fundamentally, they also hold that it is by virtue of either that such situations providing meanings, insights, or experiences can unfold (Latour, 1992; Schatzki, 2002). If it is assemblages or practices we are to theorize, in other words, it is situations we must study.

A research program that insists on always starting with the situated accomplishments of consumption phenomena does not imply a particular theory, stream of literature, or style of research. For example, it shares many ideas with the recent call for developing a non-representational marketing theory (Hill et al., 2014) to increase our “attentiveness to often imperceptibly fine details of social life” because we ought to be more careful how the methodologies chosen prefigure the theoretical constructs that emerge. But while I fully agree that we need the kind of post-human empirically driven theorizing Hill et al. (2014) are recommending, I doubt this necessarily means we have to subscribe to a particular assemblage ontology as the only one enabling it. Clearly, assemblage ontologies do not have a monopoly on inspiring research that draws on the rich detail of lived life to develop holistic accounts of social phenomena that decenter individual subjects and their actions. Various micro-sociological theories such as ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and post-phenomenology (Ihde, 1995) come to mind, as well as a whole range of practice theory approaches that remain conspicuously absent from articles promoting actor–network theory (ANT)or nonrepresentational approaches for building marketing theory. This is problematic in so far as both approaches invoke the theoretical notion of practices explicitly and in a pivotal position, namely to describe how assemblages or networks of actants manifest in any given social situation (DeLanda, 2006). Assemblage and practice theory hence offer rival vocabularies based on near-identical theoretical assumptions. For example, the “habitual, unreflexive and non-contemplative” dimension of the social or the “automatic knowledge” (Hill et al. 2014) that non-representational theory focuses on is mirrored in practice theory’s insistence to treat routinized doings or embodied skills as the building blocks of the social.

Practice theory

The idea of practice theory, at its most simple, is to gather the different aspects of meaningful social situations together and bundle them into a unit called a social practice. This bundle entails all those dimensions crucial for establishing meaningful and orderly social situation: trained and skilled bodies, explicit and implicit rules, constraints and affordances provided by material things, moods and emotion, and broadly shared understandings (Arsel and Bean, 2013; Schatzki, 2002; Shove et al., 2012; Shove and Pantzar 2005).

At the core of practice-based ontologies, we thus find a quintessentially postmodernist move, namely the abstinence from subjectivism, shifting the basal unit of the social world from individuals and their deeds to practices and their manifestations in routine doings. In essence, the aim is to reformulate every entity, quality, or state as such a doing: doing being old, doing value, doing a brand—and, to continue the example, doing a kitchen. The kitchen comes to be seen as an ensemble of preparing food, storing pots and pans, hanging out at during a party, and so forth (Shove, 2003). Such doings, it should be clear, entail much more than just an intentional actor following some mental plan—or is it not that the toaster toasts the toast? The links, to speak with Cova and Cova (2002), are indeed more important than the things in this framework; but in this case so much so that the things are being sucked right into this doing of links and feature only as elements inherently and irredeemably intertwined with the practices that occasion their very intelligibility (Reckwitz, 2002). It is only in the midst of cooking—of cutting, measuring, following recipes, being hungry, and attending to food preparation—that a pot of risotto on the brink of being al dente acquires precisely that phenomenal gestalt after which countless cooks are after around the world—that smell, that density, that promise of taste. Shifting the basal unit of social analysis from individuals to practices, in other words, at the core means going back to the social roots of meaningful experience and asking once more what it is that provides for its stable reoccurrence. (And the term reoccurrence does allow for the fact that there is bad or burned or inauthentic ready-made risotto, all of which are apparently risotto nevertheless.)

In the words of Schatzki (2002: 77–78)—what something is, is what it is understood to be—and one immediately needs to add that, for Schatzki, understanding is a skillful bodily doing composed of two halves inevitably going hand in hand: being able to do X and being able to identify X. In other words, expressing an understanding means doing something intelligibly—that is, intelligible to oneself as much as to others, not just symbolically or “signifyingly” in a secondary sense of something happening outside of, or before, or instead of, the “actual” doing. At the core of every assembling practice, to conclude, lies intelligibility, conceptualized as embodied understanding manifest in concrete bodily, material, teleo-affective, temporal, and spatial performances. And the key point for my quest to reemphasize the importance of situational order for consumer research: such performances must take place. They must inevitably happen in concrete moments and specific situational settings. At least as clearly as in the case of communities or tribes, observing consumption practices implies observing concrete situations. In the end, this is already given by the fact that practice theory is at the heart a Heideggerian enterprise, for whom human or social being is necessarily being in the world (Heidegger, 1962). And it is here, in the concrete situation, that we find the elements of practices that practice theory insists on.

In contrast to this inherent situatedness of practices, however, there is a tendency in consumer research to portray practices independently of their context and to compile inventories of practices that collectively account for a certain phenomenon (e.g. Schau et al., 2009). As in the case of assemblies, I am not suggesting that such a procedure is not compatible with the theoretical foundation, or could not lead to useful insights. However, the danger—once again—is that it could lead to looking past those details that matter most, and to start the analysis with an assumption of the extra-situational given-ness of the very social entities (such as brand communities, value, or brands), whose origins and enactment one set out to study. Part of the problem, I hold, is a tendency to study practices by using methodologies that do not take situatedness seriously. Interviewing, in particular, from a practice perspective first and foremost provides clues about—well, the practice of answering interviews (Atkinson and Silverman, 1997; ten Have, 2004). Re-appreciating the fundamental role of the social situation for consumer culture, in my view, would (a) mean to pay more attention to the situational setup occasioning the illustrative interview quotes many authors use as their primary proof and (b) develop a more systematic and reflexive notion of interviews, data, and understanding in light of the practice-minded ontology of assembling that such research is built on (Valtonen et al., 2010). More fundamentally and more importantly, however, this means re-appreciating consumer research as a study of situations and the ways in which they become sites of consumption.

Assemblages and actor–networks

Given the common roots and paradigmatic views shared with practice theory, it is not surprising that assemblage approaches become subject to similar caveats when scrutinized from a situated perspective. First, ANT—primus inter pares among assemblage approaches (Canniford and Bajde, 2015a)—employs the language of actors and networks, which carries the danger of being misread, sometimes triggering a return to essentialist or individualist accounts in spite of the nonessentialist ontology informing the theory (Arnould and Thompson, 2015; Hill et al., 2014). Second, assemblage theory in general and ANT in particular have an inclination to point at the larger scheme of things—the global networks and flows, the historical processes and tendencies. This tendency grows out of a refusal to accept boundaries as a feature of networks, and instead treating them as something enacted by interested parties (Bajde, 2013; Bettany, 2007; Bettany and Kerrane, 2011). Canniford and Shankar (2013: 1051), for example, “theorize consumers’ experiences in nature as an outcome of hybrid consumption assemblages” consisting of “cultural scripts,” “material geographies,” and “technological resources.” Three macro-level meta-categories—scripts, geographies, and technologies—are thus employed to explain the reproduction and contestation of a fourth ephemeral entity: discourses of nature. But as it is the case with communities and practices, concerning oneself with such lofty things is only possible because of, and if, and as a reflection of, consumers’ experiences taking place, in this case down at the beach and out in the waves, as the authors show. But if, at any moment, a discussion of discourses, scripts, or “material semiotics” loses sight of the local manifestation of any entity and its networks, this discussion becomes a theoretical flight above the clouds—undisturbed but erratic. As authors try to reconcile both the situated and the global, borderless nature of assemblages, methodological situationalism offers them a clear rule that can be used as a practical measure to ensure the adequacy of a given empirical study and ensure that an account of an assemblage stays true to its postmodernist ontological a priori.

Third, it is just as crucial as avoiding unfounded gesturing toward meta-entities to not let the pendulum swing too far into the other direction. We must not misread the discovery of a tacit dimension of the social as enabling us to break free from theoretical presuppositions altogether. At times, nonrepresentational and assemblage theorists both inside and outside of consumer research seem to promote an exaggerated ethos of a kind of pre-theoretical purity that reminds one of overly idealistic grounded theory approaches. Proponents of nonrepresentational marketing theory might be read to suggest that social science can operate free of “pre-existing categories” and “a priori conceptions” (Hill et al., 2014) as it strives to avoid to “rebuild the social” (Latour, 2005) in conventional ways. My fear is that if we indeed “answer Latour’s call to ‘just describe’” (Hill et al., 2014), we need to make sure the result is something other than naïve empiricism. As much as I concur regarding the chimera of representation, we need a better understanding of what should move in its place. Just replacing representation with description will not solve the conundrum, even if it is “an inventive and ideographic description” (Hill et al., 2014). Theoretical innovation requires recasting the social in unconventional ways, just as postmodernist thinkers taught us—but doing so without building on a whole range of a priori assumptions is simply impossible. And the term “description” effectively masks this fact. It is for this reason that, in the definition of methodological situationalism, I replaced the term “descriptively adequate” with “theoretically adequate.” Of course, nonrepresentational theory has to draw on assumptions about theory and nonrepresentation itself. It is precisely because “theory is involved in the performance of reality,” (Hill et al., 2014) that we must pay more attention to theory, not less.

If one follows the argument that we need to focus on the rich surface of situations, echoed by Valtonen et al. (2010) and Hill et al. (2014), then one might ask which theoretical vocabulary is most suitable to orient the research toward the identifying details and capture their crucial role. This is precisely what the principle of methodological situationalism is trying to inspire. Which theoretical notions would be counted as theoretically adequate in accordance with this principle depends on the particular case and question at hand in any given study. Hill et al. (2014) offer an interesting bouquet of alternative concepts such as onflow, atmosphere, and precognition, which in my view blends in well with the rich established vocabulary available in the practice theory literature, for example, phenomenal field, taste regime, timeflow, or constellations (Arsel and Bean, 2013; Hartmann et al., 2015; Woermann and Rokka, 2015). What unites these and many others, I suggest, is that they exhibit the kind of theoretical adequacy that methodological situationalism seeks to foster.

Conclusion

In the past decades, consumer research has witnessed the taming of the postmodern beast. That must not be a bad thing. Domesticated and docile animals can be put to labor much more effectively, helping us to plough the fields of scholarly interest. Yet if we believe that the beast is now not just tame but also lame, then two strategies for reinvigorating the “edginess” of our thinking seem viable. First, we can perpetually return deep into the jungle of books where the most ferocious exemplars of “radical” social thought roam, hunt them down, put them in chains, and drag them out of their natural habitat and into the little academic garden that is the business school. Then let them loose and stand by the sideline to watch how they trample all over the roses. I admit that this is fun to do. But we cannot expect all foreign beasts to really make sense in its new habitat—for example, when we drag political philosophy into a marketing context (Earley, 2014). The danger that it brings is what one might call methodological meta-lomania, namely the willingness to accept very general statements about the current state of “the” Western or Capitalist society or consumer as an empirical foundation for theoretical arguments. Hence we better consider the second option: Accepting that former “radical” theories will inevitably be transformed when they are introduced to new pastures, we can feed them a rich diet full of juicy detail harvested from the most conspicuous of situations to sharpen their senses and reinvigorate their critical abilities. As we turn to novel theoretical horizons and ever-broadening contexts, keeping in mind the situated condition sine qua non of any form of sociality might prove crucial. To this end, I recommend following the principle of methodological situationalism. I believe that future consumer research can thus save itself from stepping back behind the postmodern insight by purposefully shackling itself to the situational bedrock said insight rests on. Standing on solid empirical ground, we can then take the height of the stars.

Put in less metaphorical terms, it must be stressed that the situationalism I advocate here is a methodological principle, not a topical or theoretical restriction. Higher order phenomena such as institutionalization processes or discourses can and should be studied in accordance with the principle of methodological situationalism. It requires the researcher to demonstrate the manifest impact of, for example, institutions or discourses “on the ground” in concrete situations and trace its effect across several situations spread out in space or time (Woermann et al., 2015 ). In contrast, the principle is fulfilled almost automatically when it comes to studying micro-phenomena, as there is no danger of losing track of their situational roots. But when we theorize on the level of contexts of contexts (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011), we must take extra care to prove just how our phenomena and theoretical figurations manifest in concrete situations, lest our accounts become unmoored and float out onto the sea of speculation and idealization. Yes, methodological situationalism can be a nuisance, an impediment to the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) or political utopianism (Cova et al., 2013). Because the postmodernist lesson is that there should be one. That we cannot and must not prove that something is the case, but only show how it is the case. Neither theoretical nor political ambitions must undermine our status as a field of empirical research. And more than theoretical finesse or political axiology, our guiding star must be adequacy—adequacy of concepts, methods, and forms of expression with regard to the inevitably local and procedural accomplishment of the social.

In conclusion, tribes, practices, and assemblages are not out there, but in here. All three variants of an ontology of the social, able to undergird consumer research informed by and sensitive to postmodernity, theoretically and methodologically exploit the fact that all rhizomes and multiples and transgressions and polycontextures eventually manifest in orderly and meaningful situations. The fact that they do should remind us to pay continued and systematic attention to situated order, just as consumers perpetually do. Rather than trying to advocate absolute superiority of one ontology over the other, we might ask ourselves to which extent they each aid and enforce this important task of ICR. In doing so, I believe it is time to reinvigorate the debate on methodology in our field. When postmodernist views first arrived, among the most important effects was the collective reflection on the role of the researcher, the nature, and possibility of science (and art), and also practicalities such as how to conduct discourse analysis or analyze intertextuality (Cova et al., 2013). Now that interpretative consumer researchers are increasingly cooking up new forms of postmodernist food for thought with the help of post-individualist theory, it might be time to check if the old methodological pots, pans, and procedures are a good match for the fresh recipes. A litmus test for finding out, I tried to argue, is the extent to which a methodology and the theory it rests on is able to capture those definitive details of local orderly situations through which the social takes place.