No assemblage required: On pursuing original consumer culture theory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our title plays with the promise on certain consumer goods packages of “no assembly required,” but in fact we call upon the reader to assemble new theories rather than rely on existing ones like assemblage theory. We argue that consumer culture theory (CCT), also known as interpretive consumer research, has thus far not fulfilled its potential as a theory-generating discipline. Our reluctance to attempt creative theorizing is institutionalized by calls for theory-enabled research rather than truly emergent theory. This retreat has recently been strengthened by the rise of Big Data and correlational approaches that eschew theory altogether. In order to change this situation, we recommend a three-stage approach: (1) original phenomena-driven inquiry, (2) combining grounded theory and abductive reasoning, and (3) generating and comparatively analyzing alternative theoretical explanations. We briefly conceptualize the first two stages and illustrate the third using an example of consumer brand masking and bluffing in Africa. We demonstrate the use of two criteria for comparative theoretical analysis: (a) fit with the data and (b) potential usefulness in other contexts. We also argue that sometimes multiple theories are needed. CCT researchers are uniquely positioned to pursue original theory, and in this article, we offer some ideas as to how this can be done.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it