Dr. Eric Arnouldis Visiting Professor of Marketing at the Aalto University Business School and Adjunct Professor at EMLYON France. He has been on faculty at four European universities and several in the US. He has pursued a career in applied social science since 1973, receiving a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1982. Aalto University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2016. Early ethnographic research in West Africa inspired his approach to contemporary market mediated society. Current interests include collective consumer creativity, human branding, sustainable business practice, visual representations, and digital mobility. Craig J. Thompson is the Churchill Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published in a wide range of marketing, consumer research, and sociological journals. He has co-authored the book The Phenomenology of Everyday Life and co-edited Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy. Craig has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Culture. Craig is the current president of the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium. Craig was the Society for Marketing Advances 2014 Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award. In 2017, he was named an Association of Consumer Research Fellow.
‘Edited by the luminary co-founders of the CCT movement, this book is more than mere reference work, it′s a rallying cry! Explaining the fundamentals of consumer culture theory in a sophisticated and rigorous, yet accessible, tone and format, this volume speaks to a new generation of CCT scholars - educating, engaging, and informing them like no other book in the field. I can′t wait to bring this into my classroom!’ -- Robert Kozinets ‘Consumer Culture Theory is one of the most exciting areas of interdisciplinary inquiry today. This textbook offers the definitive review of CCT by the leading scholars in the field. Each chapter tackles a complex theoretical issue in CCT and brings it to life with verve. The volume delivers a range of challenging theories in an accessible and exciting manner without in any way diluting the power of the ideas. A book that readers will be eager to turn to again and again.’ -- Douglas Holt ‘Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) made easy – in terms of access and overview. This book gives a solid overview of some of the most important sources and insights provided by the research community of Consumer Culture theorists. Curious marketing practitioners, students and scholars, sociologists and anthropologists interested in consumption… Indeed, everybody grabbling to understand consumer culture… you can all start here!’ -- Søren Askegaard ‘Right from the opening pages it is clear that this is no run-of-the-mill textbook. It is a collection of lively and engaging works that illuminate the kind of innovative and challenging research, as well as the diverse positions and contexts that have helped shape this dynamic discipline. It is bound to become a major resource for CCT scholars and students at all levels of their career.’ -- Christina Goulding ‘In this well-curated volume, the editors bring coherence to the eclectic CCT field and make it approachable for a broad audience. The different chapters represent a wide variety of theoretical traditions, methodological orientations, and empirical settings and manages to give room for necessary stylistic idiosyncrasies, without ever compromising the consistency of the book as a whole.’ -- Jacob Östberg ‘A sociologically informed view of the theoretics of consumer culture, this engaging collection of essays by a distinguished group of international scholars orients readers to the interplay of ideology and materiality in the contemporary world. Replete with compelling examples and provocative pedagogy, the text is classroom friendly and sure to promote discussion.’ -- John F. Sherry ‘This user-friendly textbook is most informative for students of consumer research who want to find out what Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) is and how CCT’s sociocultural perspective complements conventional consumer psychology. The chapters, which provide simple yet lucid synopses of recent research and make theory accessible with cases are most welcome.’ -- Güliz Ger ‘This collection of essays by highly reputable CCT scholars provides an exciting textbook for understanding consumption as primarily a social and cultural activity, rather than as an individual psychological process. This second edition includes six completely new chapters that pair with the revised chapters from the first edition to consider consumption as an active process that produces and structures cultural meaning.’ -- Melanie Wallendorf