Consumption, Psychology and Practice Theories

A Hermeneutic Perspective

Tony Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317301264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

Practice theories of our equipped and situated tacit construction of participatory narrative meaning are evident in multiple disciplines from architectural to communication study, consumer, marketing and media research, organisational, psychological and social insight. Their hermeneutic focus is on customarily little reflected upon, recurrent but required, practices of embodied, habituated knowing how—from choosing 'flaw-free' fruit in a market to celebrating Chinese New Year Reunion Dining, caring for patients to social media 'voice'. In ready-to-hand practices, we attend to the purpose and not to the process, to the goal rather than its generating. Yet familiar practices both presume and put in place fundamental understanding. Listening to Asian and Western consumers reflecting—not only subsequent to but also within practices—this book considers activity emplacing core perceptions from a liminal moment in a massive mall to health psychology research. Institutions configure practices-in-practices cohering or conflicting within their material horizons and space accessible to social analysis.

Practices theory construes routine as minimally self-monitored, nonetheless considering it as being embodied narrative. In research output, such generic 'storied' activity is seen as (in)formed, shaped from a shifting hierarchy of 'horizons' or perspectives—from habituated to reflective—rather than a single seamless unfolding. Taking a communication practices route disentangles and avoids conflating tacit and transformative construction of identities in qualitative research. Practices research crosses discipline. Ubiquitous media use by managers and visitors throughout a shopping mall responds to investigating not only with digital tracking expertise but also from an interpretive marketing viewpoint. Visiting a practice perspective's hermeneutic underwriting, spatio-temporal metaphorical concepts become available and appropriate to the analysis of communication as a process across disciplines. In repeated practices, 'horizons of understanding' are solidified. Emphasising our understanding of a material environment as 'equipment', practices theory enables correlation of use and demographic variable in quantitative study extending interpretive behavioural and haptic qualitative research.

Consumption, Psychology and Practice Theories: A Hermeneutic Perspective addresses academics and researchers in communication studies, marketing, psychology and social theory, as well as university methodology courses, recognising philosophy guides a discipline's investigative insight.

1
Mind the Gap?

Bridging Philosophical Hermeneutics and Practice Theories

Project

In this first chapter, I begin to explore co-incidence or distance between practice theories and philosophical hermeneutics. Both argue for understanding-in-practices—or practical habituated unreflected upon understanding how—evident in our everyday ‘coping’ behaviour as fundamental. Propositional understanding that something is the case—or reflection—is secondary. I trace a threefold narrative of ‘moments’ characterising practical understanding, following its theorising through hermeneutics (Husserl to Heidegger, Gadamer to Ricoeur), seeing it finally flourish as generically configured action, embodied and equipped, embedded within habituated horizons of understanding. Tacit horizons of focussed behaviour or practical understanding (such as concern for human dignity in caring) are often distant cognitive frameworks of involvement, far from the attention of an actor. As such, they are an eminently suitable subject for research from health psychology to marketing. In this chapter, I commence constructing a hermeneutic perspective on social practices from ‘making’ meaning while watching television to our purchasing everyday products in the local supermarket.

Considered from a hermeneutic perspective, our human understanding is fundamentally or ‘primordially’ exemplified by using equipment, in the philosopher Heidegger’s example, a hammer. We can be said to ‘understand’ its usage. Visibly incorporated in habituated, hence ‘ready-to-hand’, behaviour as an embodied narrative belonging to an accustomed generic goal-directed practice, our understanding implicitly or tacitly anticipates and actualises an activity subject to a public standard of achievement. In practices, attention is upon aim or goal rather than embodiment or equipment.

Our engagement with entities ready-to-hand does not involve explicit awareness of their properties; instead, we ‘see through’ them to the task we are engaged in. When we are smoothly driving in nails with a hammer, our focus is on the thing we are building not the size or shape or colour of the hammer.

(Dotov et al., 2010)

Such habitual, little reflected on, ‘skilled coping’ (ibid.) in material circumstances involves our knowing or understanding how to act appropriately. This embodied perception of surroundings precedes secondary reflective propositional knowing that. ‘Performative’ knowing is distinct from ‘declarative’ asserting (Brown and Duguid, 2001: 199). So, for instance, a female Chinese frequent mall visitor told us in a research focus group: ‘Basically, I expect good security from the mall’. Her statement can be interpreted hermeneutically as referring to material/metaphorical ‘horizons of understanding’ (Gadamer, 1975) from which she enters this shopping mall, supporting her forward ‘projecting’ (ibid.) there of ‘good security’ from an enabling equipped ‘social tool’ (Burchell, 2017). Her embodied understanding of the mall as secure is evident not in concurrent propositional assertion but rather as projected by her habitual mode of walking, thus visible in her behaviour (e.g. how she carries valuables, displaying a tacit view of the place as equipped to deter ‘snatch thieves’). ‘Whatever they are called—practical understanding, habitus, tacit knowledge, skills, competences—capabilities are embodied through practices.’ (Wallenborn and Wilhite, 2014: 60) Visual evidence of affective intentionality (understanding) (e.g. finding a mall secure) can be constituted behaviourally. Embodying assumptions formed through repetition, a horizon of understanding informs action—or as Bourdieu, similarly, writes, ‘embodiment is the creation of a memory by repetition’ (1977: 59).

Importantly, truth conditions for this embodied public narrative of projecting and producing participatory activity need not include (indeed may be taken to exclude) her thinking about security when in the mall. Rather, the evidence is ‘embodiment in publicly accessible activity’ (Rouse, 2006: 504). While not reflected upon during this practice, a subsequent occasion of research allows her to speak about her expectation, integrated with mall events in a ‘hermeneutic circle’ (Gadamer, 1975) of her behavioural ‘assemblage’ (Canniford and Shankar, 2013), conjoining meaning and material. Albeit mundanely instantiated here in a mall, understanding ‘constitutes the basic being-in-motion (Bewegtheit, movedness) of the existing human being (Dasein)’ (Gadamer, 2006: 39).

As Davey writes, unpacking the qualities of ‘unquiet understanding’, ‘the notion of practice is central to how we understand ourselves as hermeneutic subjects’ (2006: 55)—not least in a focus group. Here Heidegger’s hermeneutics moves our understanding of ‘understanding’ from replicating subjectivity (Dilthey) to projecting and producing public meaning in a behavioural narrative. What then is the ‘primordial’ structure of ‘being there’ in everyday living as understanding-in-practices? How do our wider ‘value-laden horizons of (generic) expectations’ (Livingstone, 2012: 189) (such as ‘good security’ in a mall) (in)form or shape more specifically occupied ‘orientations’ (Morley, 1992: 50) in understanding particular practices (e.g. purchasing products) we appropriate—or are alienated from—in daily living? How is their embodied ideational relationship evident?

Understanding-in-Practices: Presuming, Projecting and Producing Behavioural Narrative

Practices produce narrative incorporated in behaviour. From supermarket apple selection to seriously watching sports, we actualise a meaningful story. Bodies display a purpose. We are always already immersed in projecting understanding of our circumstances—implicitly future orientated. I see a suitcase—not (empiricist) sense-data. Albeit distracted by more immediate items—at the ‘back of our minds’ we visibly coordinate our conduct during repeated visits to a shopping mall or social media site, thus constituting meaning from a ‘horizon of understanding’ (Gadamer, 1975) the world that can subsequently be ‘voiced out’. Behaving thereby tacitly aims at intelligibility, shaping ‘life-narratives’ (Gaviria and Bluemelhuber, 2010: 127). A sequence of action belongs to a cultural ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein, 1991), referenced in subsequent reflecting. ‘Forms of life’ are visibly evident behaviourally, conceptualisation woven into an activity, ideationally imbricated in the landscapes of our everyday doing, supporting our realised tacit expectation shaped within background boundaries, the ‘horizons of understanding’ mapped in hermeneutic philosophy of practices.

Cultural memory is incorporated in behavioural movement. On a horizon of understanding, the ‘sediment of past experiences’ is ‘converted’ into ‘dispositions for future actions’ (Wallenborn and Wilhite, 2014: 58). Our making sense (viewing or visiting) involves our presuming, projecting and producing a story in our intelligible behaviour, aligning and alienating us from others, or simply generating apathy. Thus understanding (in)forms life. Behaviour projects narrative meaning from an interpretation of one’s situation evident in activity where entity as equipment is perceived not as object but rather as enabling (or disabling). So in short, ‘everything (people) touch and do is infused with the underlying order that gives them their expectations of the world (…) characteristic of their particular society’ (Miller, 2008: 287). Generic expectation accommodates/is amended by event.

By means of the lived body human agents possess knowledge about how to cope with what is at hand that neither presupposes conscious representation nor a representation in propositional terms but is ‘knowledge in the hands’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 144).

(Gartner, 2013: 342)

Hermeneutics asserts our fundamental understanding of entities as ‘equipment’ answering to our immediate interpretive interests (fruit with ‘no flaws’) from wider reflective concerns (health)—the ‘meaningful presence of something to someone in terms of that person’s concerns and interests’:

thus ‘we alone have the ability to make sense of things, and we do so by connecting a possibility of something we encounter with a possibility or need of ourselves: we take what we meet in terms of its relation to our everyday concerns and goals’.

(Sheehan, 2014: 256–257)

Understanding is then the tacit teleological way we manage practices, forming habituated activity aiming at implicit goals, locatable as a ‘level of competence or performance prior to (…) verbal articulation’ (Rouse, 2006: 515). ‘Interpreting’, on the other hand, as during a research focus group, takes for its theme such pre-reflective understanding, now presented reflectively as informed by ‘horizons of understanding’ (Gadamer, 1975) shaping practice. ‘Basically, I expect good security from the mall’, as our participant interpreted shopping site, understanding seen behaviourally. Here her thought is ‘a derivative aspect of the overall intentionality that we exhibit as we actively engage with the world around us’ (Larkin et al., 2006: 106 emphasis in original), a future-oriented concern.

People’s habituated ‘capacity to encounter objects as ready-to-hand involves grasping them in relation to (their) own possibilities-for-being’ (Mulhall, 2005: 77). Such tacit ‘projection’ is the

core of what Heidegger means by ‘understanding’. But any such projection both presupposes and constitutes a comprehending grasp of the world within which the projection must take place (ibid.: 81). (Halting understanding when issues arise or in research discussion) we engage in what Heidegger characterises as ‘interpretation’, and the structures of our everyday comprehending engagement with these objects thereby become our explicit concern (ibid.: 84).

Hermeneutic theory of practices—initiated by Heidegger (following Husserl), then shaped socio-politically by Gadamer and Ricoeur—provides accounts of ubiquitous human understanding incorporated in everyday activity. Heidegger’s thesis of understanding’s temporal dimension, with its consecutive ‘moments’ of ‘fore-having’ resources, ‘fore-seeing’ possibility and actualising ‘fore-conceptions’ links the first phenomenologist with later hermeneutic writers. All rejected empiricist theorising of perception as immediately seeing (unmediated) ‘sense-data’. While Heidegger can be considered to have replaced the Cartesian dualism (separation of mind and body) which he attacked with a subsequent dualism (between ready-to-hand habituated behaviour and reflection), historically his inclusion as initiating a history of hermeneutic ideas rein-voked as practice theory is inescapable. His narrative of embodied human understanding as ubiquitous holds despite recent evidence of his unacceptable political turn to fascism and anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany (Hadjioannou, 2017).

For Heidegger, interpretive or hermeneutical understanding was not the province of specialised human disciplines (nor of a transcendentally construed phenomenology) but rather a constitutive feature of every human being inserted both in the world and in the movement of temporality.

(Dallmayr, 2009: 26)

So how should we consider, consent to or criticise as well as position theoretically mundane practices of always already making meaning, embodied/embedded/emplaced/evident in watching television, using the Internet or walking around our shopping mall but rarely reflected upon while we engage in such activity? More exotically, we can philosophically reflect how, ‘in conceptualising high-speed motorcycling as a practice, we are concerned with the interconnections between material technologies, ways of understanding, forms of bodily action and meanings’ (Murphy, 2015: 3).

How are our dispersed horizons of understanding not only vocally, but visibly incorporated in behaviour shaped politically or structured by a distant ‘power and domination’ (Grossberg, 1984: 399)? What can consumer researchers learn about practices as habituated modes of understanding (and identity construction) when presented by a participant in marketing or media, psychology and sociology focus groups? ‘Mature social agency is habitual through and through’ (Crossley, 2001: 95). How does ready-to-hand unreflective behaviour reproduce challengeable assumptions?

Let’s say, a simple one: apples. Maybe the apples look the same to the guys (laughter). No offence. But, we, we, we pick the apple that looks nicer with no flaws …. Like this apple looks fresher. Something like this. Normally, they would say, ‘it’s just the same. Just grab and go.’

(Female, Chinese student mall visitor addressing a focus group)

Here a research participant reflects upon a past purchase. Uncertainty over a precise account (‘something like this’) suggests she is making explicit a practice lacking concurrent reflection—her immersing in implicitly anticipatory custom, generic behaviour involving habituated, ready-to-hand bodily movement, to which there is normally no need to attend, let alone reflect on wider horizonal considerations. (In Chapter 4 on psychology, we hear from a research participant lamenting pain as signalling a failure of bodily ‘equipment’.)

Hearing this account, we learn of a tacit fore-structured understanding-in-practice, assuming, anticipating and actualising a shared narrative. So assuming ‘we’ will (fore-)have apples from which to choose, this participant presumes without reflecting or fore-sees typical characteristics requiring attention. The fruit will not all ‘look the same’: there will be some that ‘look nicer with no flaws’ or ‘fresher’, so indicating enhanced ability to function as a nutritional tool (Zeug). Visibly exercising a choice shaped by this concerned fore-conception, its behavioural inclusion means she will not ‘just grab and go’ but rather act, emplacing (albeit unreflectively) a horizon of affective caring.

Moreover, this fore-understanding, partially constituting the horizon of understanding from which she enters the shopping mall, is emphasised as gendered. ‘Maybe the apples look the same to the guys.’ Embedded in her behavioural being-with-others, this speculative purchase on a shareable positioning informs her selective behaviour as a way of looking at entities—her perspective legible as attending to presenting ‘fresher’ apples for selection, but only reflected upon in the focus group. Exercising a habituated expertise, her attention will be on the apples, not on her bodily activity. Her practice is distinct from (say) the accomplished pianist who attends to their finger movements with the aim of expressive playing where ‘the playing is continually responsive to (their) thought about the piece, (their) decisions to speed up or slow down, and the like’ (Annas, 2012). Here, the piano playing is clearly embodied and instrumentally enabled, ‘finger-focussed’ generic activity with its specific qualities emerging (in)formed by an affective positioned understanding of the ‘piece’.

Many of our mall visitor’s other regular activities (such as her slipping on shoes) are likely to be ready-to-hand, requiring lesser attention, if also incorporating assumptions about equipment or environment. Similarly among the ‘guys’ for whom selectively picking fruit seems unnecessary when their differing expectations are confirmed by experience, ‘it’s just the same. Just grab and go’. Only if apples were found to be indubitably ‘fresh’, ‘with no flaws’ or unavoidably visibly ‘flawed’ would habituated and tacit anticipation require attention, revising—or expectation be presented-at-hand. Here there is an account of perceiving as a cultural practice far from seeing empiricist ‘sense-data’, embodied narrative emplacing a horizon of gendered alignment: ‘we’ are apart from ‘guys’. Our Chinese shopper positions her apple purchasing as a ‘gendered practice’ (Martin, 2003).

Italicised terms are taken from the early Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962), an initiating if problematic treatise on philosophical hermeneutics. They show how an everyday, habitual activity or a practice embodies ‘constitutive elements’, ‘materials, meanings and competences’ (Shove et al., 2012: 13, 15). Engaging with hermeneutics as a philosophical analysis of activity, so articulating a perspective on practices as assembling meaning, the following pages consider behavioural narrative from audiences watching television and mall visitors to participants in health psychology research.

A Dasein (being-in-the-world) is defined by its intentionality and the various practical projects that it engages in, from hammering a nail to posting a photo online, and these activities transform the entities into equipment (Zeug).

(Halpin and Monnin, 2016)

Heidegger positioned generic ‘understanding’ as embodied and primarily practical. This account is directed at Descartes’ dualism, the separating of mental and physical activity or positing a human ‘ghost in the machine’ (Ryle, 1949) as a ‘basic misconception’ (Ricoeur, 1974: 223) in philosophy.

Heidegger had to struggle against this (conceptual) picture to recover an understanding of the agent as engaged, as embedded in a culture, a form of life, a ‘world’ of involvements, ultimately ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Crossing Hermeneutic Horizons of Culture and Discipline
• 1 Mind the Gap?: Bridging Philosophical Hermeneutics and Practice Theories
• 2 Hermeneutic Social Theory of Practices: Conjoining Philosophy and Sociology
• 3 Hermeneutic Practices in the Business School: Reflection On/In Habituated Consumption
• 4 Consuming Psychology: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis - Thematic Understanding in Hermeneutic Practices
• 5 Consumer Practices Viewing Screens: A Hermeneutic Perspective on Constructing Identities
• Conclusion: Hermeneutic Practices - From Anthony Giddens to Algorithmically Generated ‘Horizons of Understanding’ (Hans-Georg Gadamer)
• References
• Index