Resumo

Few topics have been so rich over the history of consumer studies as CCT. Yet, despite the progress, there is a distressing sense that something is amiss. Even the most committed consumer culture theorists have observed that the field lacks more consistency and have been concerned about the multiple voices and the possibility of us speaking side by side due to the tensions inherent in a multidisciplinary field. This review attempts to discern structure in the manifold threads of CCT research that are in the pages of Top Journals, so a bibliometric analysis of the literature is developed.

CCT has been a major outlet for advances in consumer theory. The objective is to run bibliometric analysis of the literature and created co-citation networks to identify relationships between frequently cited pairs of references. The ais is to prove that CCT serves to managerial purposes, their vital importance for the ground and their unique relevance to the future of consumption, business, and society studies.

Some fields adapt the consumption concept for limited purposes while CCT scholars confront questions: Does consumption culture theory still serve to managerial purposes? How can it last to be a vital research thread for the ground at large? And what, after all, is the unique relevance of CCT to the future of consumption, business, and society studies? This review attempts to discern structure in the manifold threads of CCT research that have taken shape in the pages of Top Journals. We synthetically detailed the results of a bibliometric analysis of the literature (Linnenluecke et al., 2020).

Given that CCT is a theoretical field, relatively new, multidisciplinary, and always subject to new theoretical configurations, one can better comprehend and assess this path by seeing CCT not as a monolithic collection of ideas in a vacuum but rather as the product of work seeking to institutionalize new perspectives about consumption, marketing, markets, and identity in theory and practice. The evolution of these networks over four periods of development and identified associational themes, statistically generated clusters of co-citations that constitute a pattern of close association.

Understood in this light, CCT has reached not an ideal but an inflection point where we can either (a) hunt ever-narrower specialized insights, often talking past each other in service to deep-rooted foundational disciplines, or (b) identify next steps for making these ideas more convincing, insightful, and impactful to institutions, academia, managers, individuals, and the society they are building together.

Arnould, E., & Thompson, C. (2005). Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(4), 868–882. Belk, R. (2014). The labors of the Odysseans and the legacy of the Odyssey. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 6(3), 379–404. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-09-2013-0056 Linnenluecke, M. K., Marrone, M., & Singh, A. K. (2020). Conducting systematic literature reviews and bibliometric analyses. Australian Journal of Management, 45(2), 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/0312896219877678