Between the screen and the plate
Event Date: 22 February 2017
Speaker: Dr James Cronin
Time: 2pm
Location: Strathclyde Business School, Cathedral Wing, CW507b. Tea, coffee and cakes will be provided from 1.30pm.
Please confirm your attendance with Christina MacLean (christina.maclean@strath.ac.uk).
Title: Between the screen and the plate: Engaging with the narratives that TV food documentaries use to “move” consumers
Biography: James Cronin is a Lecturer of Marketing at Lancaster University Management School, UK. His principal research interests are in the sociological aspects of consumer behaviour, health, sustainability, and wellbeing. His work addresses social issues surrounding cultural environments, the consumer life course and consumer life conditions and market issues such as sustainability that impact consumer lives. His work appears in journals including Sociology of Health & Illness, European Journal of Marketing, Consumption, Markets & Culture, Journal of Marketing Management and Journal of Social Marketing.
Abstract: Television has been considered both a dominant agent of consumer socialisation and distributor of meaning to construct symbolic representations of the material world. Here I propose that the active viewership of television documentaries constitutes an important trigger for social action as well as a novel mode of “non-proximal” ethnographic enquiry and, on these grounds, I call for its enhanced consideration within interpretive consumer research (ICR). I discuss ongoing work I have co-authored which explores how televisual documentary film in the area of food should not be evaluated narrowly on the merit of documenting reality but should be recognised for its ability to hybridise fact and fiction in enabling both understanding and intervention in the political and ideological aspects of consumption. I engage with how institutional issues of the food marketplace are channelled into quasi-actionable concerns for consumers both on and off screen through the strength of accessible narratives, told filmically and affectively.
The story-telling aspect of primetime TV-based documentaries serves as a catalyst to spur active interpretation from audiences and allows viewers to connect the narratives being produced onscreen to the ongoing positioning of themselves as consumer subjects and their relationships with organisations and institutions in broader worlds. These interpretations and subsequent sense-making activities engender consumers’ “real involvement” in the documentary-as-project and can be considered both a resource for analysis (in the academy) but also a form of unfolding social action (in the naturalistic world). I present a number of analyses of the types of social action brought about narratively through documentaries around diverse issues such as diet and health, mindful and ecologically viable consumption, and interest in novel recipes and forms of cooking.
This session raises important questions about television’s role in institutionalisation by exploring how it “moves” behaviour through selective representation of truths and the creative treatment of actuality in the marketplace.
Published: 20 March 2018
