Time, Space and the Market: Retroscapes Rising Review

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(More customer reviews)To write the chapters of this book, Sherry and Brown tapped some of the keenest minds currently investigating marketing and consumption questions with the perspicacious eye of anthropologists and cultural observers. Moving from the spiritual to the theoretical, there is also some very solid theory-building scholarship present in the book.
My taste in ethnography tends to run towards the more personal, and it is for this reason that I find the most personal chapters of the book-like those by Holbrook, Sherry, Schau, and Brown-to be the most satisfying. I find the book to be most powerful when its authors are the most authentic and the most autoethnographic. If I can fault the editors for anything, it would be for not drawing enough of their contributor's personal perspectives, the idiosyncratic, from the rich context of retroscapes. Perhaps this is a flaw with the entire field of consumer research. As scholars, we are reticent to emerge from behind our prose as living, emotional beings with rich experiences. This makes us vulnerable, exposed, but it is also the richest source of our knowing and our experience, as Holbrook's masterful chapter readily demonstrates.
Ethnographers and phenomenologists like Dilthey, right up to current scholars like Laurel Richardson, Norman Denzin, and Caroline Ellis have been urging scholars of all stripes to place more personal voices within our emotionally distant research narratives. Time, Space, and the Market proves it can be done. It does a superb job of realizing some of this representational potential. But the achievement is realized only in patches and spots.
All this talk of preferences for personal voices, however, should not be read as slighting the theoretical impact of the book. For those interested in building theory about retailing and retro, there is material aplenty here. The book will rewards careful and even leisurely reading by anyone interested in what it means to shop in contemporary societies, what it means to be contemporary, in what are the tensions of living and marketing in a particular era positioned vis à vis other particular historical milieux. An underlying theme of deep and continuing interest is the tension between commercialization and culture, between the worlds of communities, and the universe of marketplaces. This topic will not go away, and the variety of interesting topics and approaches here can help to inform a variety of individual contributions to its study.
The book has wonderful European-American representation, which provides North American readers with a sense of some of the genuinely exciting research taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. While there are definite variations in the quality of its chapters, this is the price paid for reflecting diversity. In summary, there are generally few Marketing books that one could recommend to people outside the field as having merit as entertaining in themselves. I believe that several of the chapters in Time, Space, and the Market actually hit that high bar of accessibility, insight, and sheer provocative fun. This is a book that deserves to be read.

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