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Isabelle Szmigin : Isabelle Szmigin is a Lecturer in Marketing in the Department of Commerce, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK.
Gordon Foxall: Gordon Foxall is Professor of Consumer Behaviour in the Department of Management, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK.
Introduction
Despite the publication in the last 15 or so years of a body of candidly interpretive consumer research (Hirschman, 1992; Holbrook and Grayson, 1986; Levy, 1981; O'Guinn and Belk, 1989; Belk et al., 1988; Wallendorf and Arnould, 1991; Hill 1991), this approach to studying consumers is still at the vanguard of consumer behaviour research. It has received much criticism (Calder and Tybout, 1987, 1989; Hunt, 1989) and has been equally vigorously defended (Holbrook, 1987; Holbrook and O'Shaughnessy 1988; Ozanne and Hudson, 1989). As Spiggle (1994) pointed out much of the controversy over interpretive consumer research has been at the epistemological level. Of special consideration has been the issue of how knowledge emanating from such research can and should be evaluated (Calder and Tybout, 1987, 1989; Hirschman, 1985; Thompson et al., 1989).
Additionally, there is what might be called the "scientific" debate which questions which types of research can be classified as "scientific" and implies different levels of research from the everyday to the scientific and together with this an implied value judgement of the relative contributions of each (Calder and Tybout, 1987, 1989; Holbrook, 1987; Hirschman, 1985). More recently there has been an increasing challenge to the view that the scientific method should have predominance over other approaches (Brown, 1995; Belk, 1995) in an area of research where the irrational and unpredictable aspects of consumer behaviour are increasingly being acknowledged (Goulding, 1999).
The body of interpretive research emanates almost entirely from a relatively small band of well established consumer researchers based in the USA who having developed their reputations in more "traditional" areas of consumer research, risk less by exploring more controversial approaches and at the same time have more likelihood of having their research published and thus brought to a wider audience (Hirschman, 1985). Even so, interpretive research can be found published in only a few places; primarily the Journal of Consumer Research and specialised conferences. Writing in 1986 Hirschman reported that over the previous three decades there had only been one empirical study reported...