Episode 041: Markus Giesler

Marketing

Nov 1

Prof. Markus Giesler, of the Schulich School of Business at York University, is a consumer researcher. This means he looks at how markets dynamically shape human behaviour. He is an Editor at the Journal of Consumer Research and the bright spark behind one of the most popular courses at our school, "Customer Experience Design." It’s a course that models customer experience design for his students in every lecture, project, and assignment. In this episode, he talks about his latest research paper, “The Consumerization Of Care,” in which he explores how we as a society have responded to the global pandemic in ways that redefine social solidarity.

Transcript

Cameron: My guest today is my Schulich colleague and friend, Professor Markus Giesler. Markus is a consumer researcher, which means he looks at how markets dynamically shape human behavior. He's an editor at the Journal of Consumer Research and the bright spark behind one of our most popular courses at Schulich, "Customer Experience Design." It's a course that models customer experience design for his students in every lecture, project and assignment. Today I get to talk to him about his latest research paper, "The consumerization of care," in which he explores how we as a society have responded to the global pandemic in ways that redefine social solidarity. I hope you enjoy our conversation... Markus, welcome to the podcast!

Markus: Thanks, Cam it's nice to be here.

Cameron: It's a pleasure to have you joining me. I've been plotting your appearance on this podcast for many, many years, trying to figure out like, when is the optimal time? And as I told you I've tried to, as a white male host, make a real priority on not having two white guys talking about their own stuff.

But maybe this is the right time to do that. Your paper is a bit of a move away from some of the research that I'm familiar with. So this most recent paper on the consumerization of care is looking at these new ideas of solidarity that you and your co-authors have developed. So maybe you could start for me and just define what you mean basically by the word solidarity.

Markus: Well, in a technical way, solidarity describes the moral obligation that we feel to share resources with others by personal contribution to those who struggle or to those who are in need. And maybe also through taxation and the state that organizes some form of redistribution. So that is what solidarity is traditionally.

One of the reasons why we became interested in this project is that we saw that that definition was changing in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. So that led us to ask the question of what happens to social solidarity during the pandemic and how does it affect our understanding of social solidarity, care, vulnerability, the needs of vulnerable populations? And what role does the marketplace play in changing those understandings?

Cameron: Traditional understandings of solidarity would come either from like a personal ethic, a sense of obligation to somebody, to others, or some sort of an institutionalized form of solidarity, like taxation and income redistribution, welfare systems employment insurance, those kinds of things.

And you're moving beyond that to understand what are the market mechanisms that play here and how do they shape our practices? Are you focused on the practices or our experience or our understanding? What is the focus there?

Markus: I think all three of them, our practices, experiences, and understandings of solidarity have changed during the pandemic in part owing to the influence of market-based institutions upon our understanding of solidarity. So just to give you an example, if you recall how life was like in early 2020 when the pandemic had just hit, we had just begun to grapple with the epidemiological implications of a mass pandemic.

Solidarity at that time meant we had to completely shut down in the world, practically. We all had to stay at home. We had to refrain from engaging in marketplace and consumption- related behaviors. It was all about like doing all this in an effort to protect the vulnerable. The old the chronically ill, and the young, the children. And that's what happened.

That's effectively how we express solidarity towards each other. The problem with this is that from a marketplace standpoint, from a standpoint of capitalism, that's probably the worst scenario ever because that means no consumption and no business. And if you look back at the pandemic, especially the earlier time of the pandemic, you will recall that there was absolutely no need to shop. I mean, except for maybe hand sanitizer and some kind of cleaning wipes and those sort of things. And,

Cameron: We we were baking bread at home.

Markus: Yeah, everybody returned into this sort of primordial state of being at home, not giving a lot of attention to the marketplace, the mall, even Amazon.com.

None of these things really seem to matter, and that's a huge problem. What that means is that traditional definitions of solidarity work against the interests of capitalism in the marketplace, because they're all about redistribution and all about giving resources from those who have to those who haven't.

And what that meant concretely in terms of practices and understandings of solidarity was that in order to protect the interests of the vulnerable, we had to refrain from consumption. We had to refrain from going out to the mall. We had to refrain from going on vacation and doing all these wonderful consumption things. And then over time, if you fast forward to today, you're now seeing that solidarity actually means doing just that. What better way to express solidarity with Austria than to actually travel to a ski resort, to help the entrepreneurs and the tourism industry there? What better way to express solidarity than to take that Air Canada flight to the Caribbean?

Because you want to express solidarity through your market and consumption choices. And therein lies of fundamental difference, and that's the focus of our research.

Cameron: Yeah. It's interesting because everything that you've described implies a lack of solidarity with other people in the population. For example, if you want to take a flight to the Caribbean to express solidarity with the tourism operators and the local populations there, the people at risk are the flight attendants who have no choice but to accompany you on the flight.

Markus: Not just the flight attendants, but also a whole slew of actors that constitute the tourism experience on the ground. People working at the airport, people in service responsibilities, typically lower paid service jobs. All these have been made vulnerable or have been exposed to the marketplace and capitalism in an effort to keep the economy running at the expense of people's health.

And that's just very interesting. How could our definitions of solidarity shift so much during the past three years? Who was in charge of those new and different definitions that are actually much more market based, not so much redistributive, not so much solidarity-based or democracy-based.

And so that's why we began to be interested in the definitions of solidarity and how they've changed.

Cameron: Well, like many of the best research papers, you're really focusing on contradictions and trying to understand them. Right? So there's a whole bunch of contradictions at play here in the paper. And I wonder about this shift in your language, where you're using not just the word solidarity, but the plural, solidarities.

Is that part of this exploration of the contradictions?

Markus: Absolutely. So what we find is that, in fact, the market has found new ways to transform our understanding of solidarity into various market-based solidarities. So there's a plural here, and it has to do with how we are supposed to position ourselves vis-a-vis particular types of social challenges.

For instance, the idea that we need to protect each other and ourselves during a pandemic, which entails a mask, which entails staying at home, those kinds of things. But, that in turn contradicts with this idea of market freedom, the idea of freely roaming around the marketplace and doing things that are completely against the interests of protection, right?

There is this idea of staying at home. Being at home, which was a traditional idea during the early days of the pandemic, contradicts this very capitalist idea of unlimited mobility, like being able to travel wherever you want. So each of these contradictions has led market institutions to redefine the parameters around solidarity, around what it means to express solidarity towards another more vulnerable population.

And what we are interested in is understanding what models are now available to us as consumers, not just as citizens, but as consumers, to resolve these contradictions, so that we can demonstrate to ourselves and our friends that we're expressing solidarity, while at the same time serving the interests and the needs of capitalism in the marketplace.

Cameron: One of the words that comes out in your paper when you're describing market-based solidarity is the word localized. This isn't a central government approach where we've got a one size fits all mechanism for enforcing solidarity, but this is very localized, very almost individualized.

Markus: Right. Solidarity from a classic standpoint is actually not localized at all. It is an idea of redistributive justice, and that's a systemic thought. That's something that exists on the level of, let's say, the state or on the level of maybe the city, but not like down to the neighborhood, down to the street, that kind of locality or localization.

What we've seen is that during the pandemic, people began to express this solidarity or loyal interest in supporting local business and therein lies an interesting tension, Cam, of capitalism. On the one hand, you want to shut down the marketplace because that's just what you need to do during a pandemic in order to prevent new infections.

On the other hand, you have all these local businesses that obviously suffer from that very act of shutting down the marketplace. So for that reason, you need to find a way to express the responsibility for the protection of localized businesses onto the shoulders of individual consumers.

If you try to think back to, let's say, the summer of 2020, the fall of 2020, all of a sudden this idea of shopping locally became very important. And that's one example of how governments and public institutions shifted the onus of responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations away from its own domain onto the shoulders of individual consumers.

And you need to ask yourself also then, what's the other local population to be protected? Well, it's people who work in the medical sector, like nurses and doctors, and if you think about initial expressions of solidarity, it was all about, hey, let's protect those people because they're working at the front lines.

So here we see how solidarity shifted away from frontline workers to localized businesses. From, the protection of part of the working population to the protection of the business circle, small businesses, and that's just an interesting shift and has to do with how we've become responsiblized to take care of the marketplace and of the economy rather than all frontline workers.

That's just one example from the paper.

Cameron: So you raised the question of who is driving this. Do you see this as just a natural metamorphosis of our understanding of solidarity as people realize they really want to get a latte now? Or is this, maybe to be more cynical, some sort of a co-optation of the notion of solidarity to redefine it in ways that are conducive to capitalism.

What's your theory here?

Markus: I would say it's the latter. It's a co-optation of care. In order to function effectively, markets and capitalism require certain parameters to be in place. We all need to have certain ways of feeling about stuff. We all have to have certain ways of acting about stuff, so we need to be consumers.

And consumers require certain kind of parameters of, like, how we move, how we act, how we think, how we feel others needs to be in place. Now, when a pandemic hits, or any other unforeseen kind of crisis happens that has the potential to undermine the basic parameters of, free market capitalism. And it's no surprise that it does that because the pandemic really required us to stay at home, refrain from traveling, refrain from going to the mall, doing all these things that are needed in order to keep the economy going.

So what does it take in order to sustain an economy in a marketplace that's completely built around individual freedom, during a time that precludes individual freedom as an option, in an effort to take care of others, in an effort to take care of more vulnerable populations? Well, you need to co-opt care in a manner that makes people navigate freely in the marketplace, despite the fact that they're putting their own health and the health of other people at risk.

So that's the big irony we live in now. If you think about where we are in October, 2022, the pandemic is over. It's factually over. You go to the airport, people are no longer wearing masks. You go to the university campus, in-person teaching is happening. The pandemic's over. If you talk about the pandemic, if you express your concern around more specific, democratic expressions of care and solidarity, you get a lot of dirty looks. Because we've now moved on to a market-based solidarity system that's all about expressing your solidarity with others through consumption.

What best way to express solidarity with students? In-person teaching, because they need, like, the expressive kind of reality of in-person teaching. It doesn't really matter whether they get sick or not. What matters is that the tuition-based student model is in operation and sustains itself. And that requires in-person teaching.

All of this goes to show that capitalism is not natural. It requires a lot of interventions into people's behavior. And rather than us engaging in these interventions into the social system to prevent the exposure of vulnerable populations to a deadly virus, it's now all about the opposite thing. How can we keep the market going despite the fact that the virus continues to be deadly?

Cameron: I'd like to talk a little bit about how you went about studying this. I'm going to start with the fact that this requires a lot of multidisciplinary skills. So who's on the research project with you? Who are your co-authors? What do they all bring to the paper?

Markus: Well, first of all, all the compliments go to my doctoral student Benedikt Alberternst. He is stationed in Berlin, Germany. He was with us at the Schulich School of Business here at York for the past six to eight months. And he and I did this project together. There are two more co-authors that are on his dissertation committee, his supervisors on the Berlin end of things, Andreas Eggert and Lena Steinhoff. They are taking the backseat on this project, but are also part of the co-author circle in terms of discussing where we want to go with this. So Benedikt is the lead here, and he did what consumer ethnographers do, which is collect interview data, engage in participant observation, analyze media and institutional documents that are available that talk about how we think about solidarity in the context of the pandemic. And so the totality of data in this particular context is hard drives upon hard drives of institutional and interview data that we then analyze to see whether there are any changes in the language that we use to refer to solidarity in the context of the pandemic.

And there are definite changes that we found.

Cameron: Well, there's so many different sources of data here. You've got stuff from the mainstream media, newspaper articles and that sort of thing. You've got all the interviews that you did, which I'd like to learn a little bit more about. You've looked at marketing communication from various firms. You've looked at government policy and policy reports. And this is typical of an approach that is looking at contradictions, right? You're not just taking one great big database and trying to find a statistical correlation between X and Y. You're trying to understand all the different ways in which people are trying to make sense of responsible behavior, solidarity, in the pandemic, and you're finding that it doesn't all line up.

Markus: That is correct. First of all, it's very common for the type of social research that we do that there are multiple levels of data and that there is no quest for causality here, but rather the conditions of possibility in the Foucauldian sense, you know, to ask yourself what does it take to make a reality possible within which solidarity gets defined in this way rather than another way? In order to answer such a question, you need a lot of different data levels and layers that come together to shape our social reality. And what conditions of possibility are around for us as consumers to navigate the marketplace?

So what we found is that there are typically four different types of solidarity consumers, marketplace solidarity consumers, that are now in circulation. So if we want to demonstrate solidarity as consumers through the marketplace, there are four different ways to which that is possible.

Those modalities are the local hero. That's the kind of consumer who emphasizes shopping local, supporting local businesses, that sort of thing.

Ironman. That's the consumer who is seemingly protected against any and all forms of biological danger, biological hazards, because, "We're strong, we're enduring, we're somehow resilient against the virus. It doesn't affect us. So we're now like an Ironman."

There's the wellness advocate. This idea that fighting the pandemic isn't really about biomedical forms of intervention. It's really a lot more about psychological wellbeing and wellness and those fluffy notions of "Wellness Wednesday," as we call it here at the university.

And then there's the conscious tourist. This idea that one way which you can support others during the pandemic is to actually travel, is to go into tourism regions, to support people on the ground who work in these jobs, like in hotels and resorts. And one way to show solidarity towards those people is to actually go, rather than stay away.

I don't know if you know this, but Western tourists have carried COVID-19 variants into various parts of the world where people with much more vulnerable social and economic existences are living, to the detriment of those people and their families. But now we're thinking that this is actually a way to support healing from the pandemic. It is to be a conscious tourist.

I'll give you an example of the latter model. I was invited to be part of a wine sampling, wine tasting, at the end of a conference this past summer. So the idea was that, a great way to heal from the pandemic is for us to come back together as a community to reserve a table at a wine tasting, to all come together in a sort of hot box setting where we all possibly give COVID to each other and the waiters in the room. But the idea here is that this form of conscious tourism, which is a consumption practice, is a way to show solidarity during the pandemic.

Cameron: It does sound paradoxical.

Markus: It is paradoxical and I think you and I and many others right now are looking at what's happening in the world and sometimes wondering just where the hell am I? This is almost like a zombie kind of situation of sorts. And yet we have, if you think about our own behavior, become socialized into accepting many of those parameters. I find it increasingly difficult to teach wearing a mask because I get dirty looks from students and colleagues thinking, "Why is this guy still in pandemic mode? The pandemic is over."

And yet I feel I have to protect myself and others by wearing a mask. And this idea of mask wearing becomes increasingly less and less legitimate as a consequence of these market based solidarity interventions.

Cameron: Well, it's actively de-legitimized, right? The online trolls.

Markus: If you think about the four consumer types that I've just introduced, right? The local hero, the Ironman, the wellness advocate, and the conscious tourist, you can see that it's a form of Iron Man performance almost. So go into a badly ventilated classroom and do the lecture anyways, because you are a good sport in the pandemic, which means if you want to be a good colleague and a good instructor and a good professor, you do it. You don't do it with a mask.

And the idea is that the pandemic has given us some biological resilience. And, one great way to protect yourself against the pandemic is to actually expose yourself to the virus. So we're more used to accepting that than to say, Okay, students need to wear a mask because that is a way to prevent the virus from spreading. While students mustn't wear a mask because they cannot express their emotions properly, right?

So they have the wellness advocate. So student wellbeing is a matter of no mask, rather than mass. So you see there are all these instances where conventional wisdom, which is wisdom steeped in a more traditional understanding of solidarity, a redistributive understanding of solidarity, gets put on its head in an effort to support the interests of the market and of capitalism.

Cameron: These are Orwellian redefinitions of these words.

Markus: Yes. certainly the era we live in is one that's characterized by Orwellian tendencies and the pandemic's probably not the only domain we could point to. I've done research with other colleagues here at Schulich that has looked at the role of global elites and shaping what we cannot or cannot do as consumers in the marketplace.

If you look at how poverty is addressed, global warming, chronic illness, all these different things are now increasingly the domain of private institutions that come in -- enterprises, rich people, multi-billionaires -- that are not legitimate democratic decision makers, but influencers that, in an Orwellian way, drive shape and constrain what we can or cannot do as citizens.

So this does not necessarily contribute to the thriving of democratic structures. No.

Cameron: Right. I want to just touch on the interview data. How much of your data was based on interviews? How were they conducted? Tell me about that.

Markus: Yeah, the kind of research we do as consumer anthropologists or sociologists is often very pedestrian, conversational research. So we talk to people and ask them about their most recent summer vacation and how they went about protecting themselves in the context of the pandemic, in the context of COVID-19, during their vacation, and then you just let them talk. And one of the strategies that I often have when it comes to interviewing people is that I try to be as naive and as curious as I can possibly be. A former dissertation supervisor of mine referred to that as the "man in the moon" type of strategy. You're like from a different planet. You come to the earth, you have absolutely no idea how people go about the pandemic. And what you will find is that when you have that kind of technique in your interview style, people open up and they are actually very curious about sharing what they believe is right and what is wrong.

I began by defining solidarity as a moral obligation. Whenever we think about and talk about something that's moral, we feel that we have an evangelizing urge and imperative. We want to share with others what ought to be done, what is right and what is wrong. And that is the key to unlocking a lot of popular understandings around what is seen as inappropriate or legitimate in the context of the pandemic. So, these kinds of more conversational interviews.

Cameron: You need a lot of open ended questions.

Markus: You need a lot of open-ended questions. There are different types of interviews that you can do as a social scientist, but you know, this is not the structured interview, where you go in and have kind of like a list of prepared questions. It's just a conversation that you have.

You do go in, because this is hermeneutic research that involves tacking back and forth between the data, the interview, and some form of theoretical conceptualization, including the four consumer types that I mentioned. So you can ask consumers about these four types and ask them about their own behavior with respect to how they protect themselves, what they think is right or wrong with respect to the psychology of, let's say, protecting children, the return to school.

These are all topics that many people, many of us have opinions about, and those opinions enlighten our understanding of what moral structures exist with respect to our understandings of solidarity.

Cameron: You've got a large mass of contradictory data. What do you do with it and how does, how do these four types -- amongst all the possible roles that you can think of -- how do these four types emerge as the things you want to identify?

Markus: Great question. Cam. There are different ways of doing qualitative research and there's not one right way that's always very important to remember. There are grounded approaches that really built upon an empirical understanding of the data. You expect a theoretical understanding to bubble up from the data, and from the interview data and other types of data. That's not what we did here. So we picked what is called or is referred to as a hermeneutic approach, where you have the data on the one hand, and then on the other hand you have a preliminary conceptual understanding of what you think is going on.

And as you can imagine, as you go from interpretive cycle to interpretive cycle, both the data change as well as your conceptual understanding, because you tack back and forth. That is an approach that I personally find much easier than the grounded approach where you stare at the data and you stare at the data and you stare at the data and it's almost like staring at ghosts.

And no empirical or conceptual understanding emerges from the empirical data. So, going back and forth between the data and the theory is especially a social approach where when you are in a team of two or three co-authors, you can have these beautiful triangulating conversations with your co-authors, and saying, "Okay, so I see this is the conceptual apparatus that structures people's sayings and doings in this interview context."

And then you have another coauthor who says something else, and then you have contradictions and tensions and you go from round to round to build a more saturated, empirical understanding of what is going on.

Cameron: You're not only trying to identify these potential roles that you've labeled here. You're also trying to understand the mechanisms behind them. And you use this word from Michel Foucault, the dispositif, which is the apparatus that's at work, the social, semi-structural, technology or whatever that drives these sorts of things. So what's the link between these roles and these dispositives?

Markus: Well, at some point during the project, Benedikt and I, as the two driving forces behind the project in fact were pretty confident that we had something here about these specific consumer types that exist around normalizing market-based solidarity, but we just didn't know how they had been created.

My home theoretical context is Foudauldian post-structuralism, and so for me, the almost natural thing to then ask is, okay, so now that we have a particular type of social reality or subjectivity, what are the conditions of possibility for that subjectivity to become dominant?

And that's where these dispositives come in where we ask, okay, what are the layers, the normative layers, or what kind of influencing forces exist, in order to shape these types of consumers? And we found that there are five. There are traditionally only three. We found two more, which was kind of interesting. Not a contribution in its own right, but it's just interesting that, when you ask yourself what makes these consumer types possible, then we found that there are five different forces.

There's the important role of the legal apparatus, the regulatory structures in society.

There is this whole conversation around risks and securities. Right? So like, at what risk? What about emergency rooms? The risk of chronically ill versus regular. So there's a risk conversation. That's the second thing.

There is this entire discipline dispositif, which is all about the dirty looks we get at the airport for wearing a mask, the policing that happens directly and indirectly in terms of social control and surveillance. That's the third one.

And then we find these two more, which I find interesting. One is all about emotion. The idea that, if you think about the conversations we had about the return to school, how much we talked about the emotional kind of complexities of young people: how happy and unhappy they are and how depressed they become and how desolate they are.

There's this heightened focus on emotions. So these conversations around emotionalities are extremely important for making these market-based solidarity types possible, romanticizing this vulnerable emoting self, where institutions felt compelled to have these Wellness Wednesday emails that are all about how we can feel our way through the pandemic.

Rather than have a political kind of mandate towards protecting the vulnerable, it's all about feeling the right way and getting kids to feel the right way. And one more example on the role of emotionality is kids are okay to sit in COVID-19-contaminated classrooms for as long as they're happy being together. Being alone at home fosters unhappiness. It might protect them from COVID-19, but the very fact that they're isolated and not with each other, that's the prima facie evidence for how schools need to be reopened. And there, you see there's this trade off between emotions and biomedical health where it's all about like emotional health being almost more important. To the point where, in fact, this then takes over the medical discourse where "kids need fresh air" means "kids need to be in school in badly ventilated classrooms," but what we mean is their happiness is at stake.

Right? So you can see the amazing and fascinating world of emotions of COVID-19. And the last, dispositif that we see is one that deals with history and time and how we refer to the past, the present and the future, and how the pandemic has heightened our focus on the present, how it's about entitlement to experience stuff in the present. That's very important for the market and for capitalism.

This idea that a teenager will forever be unhappy if they won't have the drink binging party that typical market-based teenagers are supposed to have in capitalism. If we can't have that present moment entitlement, then forever our lives will be ruined. So the focus on the present, the temporality focus, if you will, so the deemphasizing of the future -- don't think about whether you will suffer from long COVID down the road. Long COVID, that's neither here nor there. What matters is that your emotional needs are met here and now. Your Christmas must happen with the family regardless of what the infection numbers tell us. So this focus on the present, this temporality dispositive, as we call it, was definitely a very influential, normative element in shaping the different consumer types that we identified in our project.

Cameron: It's a rich model of all of these things that are pushing it, and I can, recognize my own experiences in each of these. I mean, you talked about the emotional dispositive The people who were saying that it's important to look after emotions, they weren't wrong.

It was a very tense and difficult emotional time and a sense of isolation. And I can remember those Zoom classes and just how responsible I felt for managing the emotions of the students who were isolated at home and trying to make some sort of a connection through Zoom with each of them.

And it was, um, not easy, but it was, I felt it was rewarding and I've, in some ways, I've found it more rewarding than being in a classroom where I'm seeing all these students who no longer seem to care about the pandemic. When they were on Zoom, you could see it in their faces. They were worried. And granted, two years is a long time to maintain a state of anxiety, and I understand that emotionally we can't continue in that mode without something giving. And what's given is our sense of risk. You've got that security dispositive about risk calculus and that sort of thing. There's a lot going on in your paper.

Markus: I love what you're saying about emotions. There's this sociologist of emotion, Arlie Hochschild. There's this other sociologist of emotion called Eva Illouz. Both scholars remind us of the important role of emotions for the proper functioning of capitalism and how we need to navigate feelings and how feelings are super important for capitalism to operate effectively, especially when we are supposed to be self-governing economic subjects.

That requires a particular type of emotionality. And we can see how for the duration of the pandemic, at every step of the way, there were powerful institutions telling us how we ought to and not ought to feel. Right. There was a lot of normative pressure on feeling... you know, "It's okay to feel kind of entitled to having a vacation. Don't feel like this is terrible. Don't feel like you're endangering others. Go on vacation. You deserve it." Right? So there was that. And so happiness was a very contested notion throughout it all.

Cameron: There's always been a huge connection between emotion and capitalism. You know, look back to the car ads of the 1950s and '60s, right? It's all about emotion and your sense of self-image. How are you going to feel driving that particular car?

Markus: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And how we need to feel in a normative sense right, is also very important. It's not just that a brand like a new Apple computer can make us feel great, or like a new car can make us feel better and happier. It's also that, in order to be good sports throughout the pandemic, we need to feel a particular way and we need to sort of emphasize and/or take responsibility for, the feelings of others. Right. And Cam, that's what you mentioned when you said, okay, my students on Zoom. It was hard. It was hard to get to them and to see happiness, amidst all this gloom and depression.

Cameron: Yeah, definitely. I want to ask you, what happens next after Markus Giesler writes a paper, like where does it go? Obviously the paper itself is published in an academic journal, it's read by academics. What else happens with your papers?

Markus: So typically these papers take an awful lot of time in the review process where the colleagues that we have in our field assess the validity of our findings and the worthiness for our contribution. And once that is said and done and the paper gets published, then I personally think there's a lot of value in promoting the scholarship and making it relevant to stakeholders that are not immediately part of the intellectual conversations that we might have in our field.

So I care a great deal about sharing research findings with policymakers, with practitioners, with social activists and activist organizations, with people who are in consumer rights groups. And in this particular case -- since we talk a great deal about medical expert regimes -- medical decision makers, medical policy makers, just so that these findings aren't more broadly shared and understood and not kept within that ivory tower of our immediate field-level conversations.

Cameron: Can you give me an example of some work that you've done with activist groups or policy makers?

Markus: Sure. So in our field there is a institution called the Marketing Science Institute, which is a conglomerate of researchers that are interested in bridge building between the world of science and the world of practice, marketing practice. So, here we talk with decision makers in organizations about what can be done differently in order to create more equitable or more effective marketing level outcomes. That's one thing that I've done in the past with research that I've published. I typically have these Marketing Science Institute-enabled workshops with senior executives, with policy makers from a variety of different organizations that come together to adjust their own policies and adjust their own strategies around the specific industry, product, brand or service that they manage.

I have in the past also worked with executives in the context of what is called the Big Design Lab, which is like my own version of the Marketing Science Institute. But that was a pre-pandemic thing where we would gather in various parts of the world, have workshops on theoretical insights and how they translate into practice and policy.

That's one thing that I've done. And now as an editor at the Journal of Consumer Research, I have a great deal of influence over how we can share the research findings of our colleagues with people out there, in practice and policy and strategy, and a variety of different industries and expert regimes, through the website and other activities that we're doing at the journal.

Cameron: Can you give me an example of how you think these four consumer types might play out into the discussions around appropriate policies, say for healthcare or university return to campus, for instance?

Markus: So if I'm a university president, and or a provost, and I'm now looking at the ways in which I should run my institution amidst this ongoing pandemic danger of infection, I need to ask myself whether these four types of consumer subjectivity that I've talked about are actually how I want to expose my students and faculty at the expense of vulnerable populations, such as racialized minority students, people who come from lower social and economic backgrounds that have real trouble living in smaller households, bringing COVID-19 from campus back into their families, or whether I draw on technology to embrace new and different models of knowledge conveyance and education. So you could, if you wanted to, learn from this and create a more strategically competitive university and a competitive university that deals with these pandemic realities rather than perpetuating and reinforcing them.

You can think about other contexts such as airlines and tourism. What does it mean to be a responsible tourism resort during the pandemic? How do I protect my workers? How do I protect other vulnerable populations in the pandemic? And what does it take to get consumers to embrace an understanding of solidarity that's more conducive to the interest of those workers rather than to the interest of capitalism itself?

So there are a variety of different stakeholders and institutional actors that could benefit from these insights, from these findings, of this research project. But there's also, let's face it, quite a bit of resistance because the status quo is always easier to defend. I mean, we see some of this in our province here with our policy makers and the political realities. What is here in Ontario called the Ford Government are somewhat resistant to social science insights around the pandemic and solidarity.

Cameron: The word "somewhat" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Markus: Yes.

Cameron: The possibility here that these terminologies and mechanisms might be taken up and used to... and exploited to make things worse, is always there. I think it's inherent in any attempt to explain society, is that anybody gets to use that explanation and run with it, and it's not always the people that we hope are going to run with it.

Power has a lot to do with this. Right? The ability to take these things and use them. I think of for instance, back in the time of George W. Bush, the way that Karl Rove co-opted a lot of postmodern theory and a lot of linguistic theory from Richard Rorty to redefine political discourse and say basically we're not responsible for communicating with these other groups because they don't speak the same language that we do. So we'll just focus on our little base here and talk to them and we don't have to worry about facts because meaning is constructed when facts are consumed, not produced. So, you know, that whole cynical approach to our understanding of the world was reshaped by these people who were in positions of power and took these nuanced understandings of the way that people use language and turned them upside down and turned them into weapons.

Markus: Absolutely. And these are very powerful actors and institutions that are doing this. A while ago I saw a book by Bill Gates, How We Manage the Next Pandemic. So we're being socialized as a people, as a population, into understanding it to be the normal course of action to confront the next virus, the next deadly virus with that same casual market freedom as we have learned to approach COVID-19, at the expense of people in vulnerable populations. The chronically ill, the elderly, the young, the sick, and the poor. And that's just not... that's... that's normal. That's absolutely normal. It's okay to go to conference and you wonder where are those like two, three thousand other colleagues that I've had? They can no longer afford to go because they're chronically ill. And the association that organized the conference no longer cares about meeting those colleagues needs. So the hybrid approach, the approach on Zoom, which was praised as an accessible approach, is no longer the name of the game because it's more important that we as a community can enjoy each other's physical presence.

That's a very ableist approach. And that's an approach that almost reminds us of eugenics, right? The kind of social normativity based around the worthiness of your genes, the worthiness of your biological ability. And that's the reality we live in.

This is not fantasy. This is not a dystopian tale. This is the reality we live in.

Cameron: This idea of a perpetual pandemic is very similar to the idea of the perpetual war, the war in Afghanistan, in Iraq, that just goes on and on and on. America is permanently at war and now we are permanently in the state of pandemic. There won't be a break between this pandemic and the next one, it'll just be more pandemic.

Markus: Exactly. And Naomi Klein has this great idea of the shock doctrine, this idea of normalizing people into this belief that the state of crisis is the new normal. In as much as the crisis is the new normal, so as the pandemic, so there will be other pandemics and it's okay to see people die and suffer from it for as long as we can remain open for shopping.

Cameron: This is uh, a very sobering discussion. When I think of your classroom, I've had the pleasure of evaluating your teaching as part of your T&P process over the years, and I know how much fun you have in the classroom and how much joy your students get out of the class as well... where do you take work like this in terms of teaching?

Like how do you make use of these kinds of insights and translate them into an MBA course or a BBA course?

Markus: You make it almost seem as though these insights are somewhat less useful in a business school. I think I find them very useful because there's this next generation of business decision makers or senior leaders that are going to influence the course of our institutions, public and private.

And I think having these kinds of understandings that are more sociologically driven around the unintended consequences of market based normativity and understandings, is exactly what that next generation of leaders needs in order to create a better world, better institutions, a better university, a better enterprise, a better Apple Computers, and a better Disney.

And that's exactly what I'm doing in my course, that we unearth and re-politicize the marketplace. Unearth those latent political tensions that have been glossed over by Wellness Wednesday propaganda to look into what's beneath the emotions, what kind of political dynamics are there that we as senior decision makers in business and in public institutions need to keep in mind.

I also think that all of this is very compatible with the motto of the Schulich School of Business, which is all about redefining the future of business. If we want to redefine the future of business, I say we need to re-politicize business and scrutinize very critically what capitalism can be, what it shouldn't be, and how we can define a world that's slightly different than the world that we currently live in.

Cameron: We need to create the space for those conversations in our classrooms.

Markus: And to be quite honest, I think that's one of the biggest selling points for me personally to be at Schulich, that we have that kind of a culture, where asking the right and the critical question about capitalism leads to novel insights that in turn benefit both public and private sectors.

Cameron: It's sometimes a challenge to present my own observations on capitalism to a bunch of eager MBA students, who want nothing more than to graduate and become the recipients of dividends and employee stock options and that sort of thing as their career progresses. So I always tell them, "You don't have to agree with anything that I say. You just have to understand the process of thinking critically about it. I'm going to model it for you. You should be able to do this too. You'll come to different conclusions than I do and I look forward to having those discussions."

Markus: I agree. And also to be quite honest, Cam, this kind of knowledge and insight from sociology can help companies become more competitive by positioning themselves differently than the mainstream out there and we know there are a number of Canadian companies, for instance, that have benefited from things that have been taught in a critical tradition at the Schulich School of Business, to the benefit of their competitive position relative to larger corporations such as Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft. So it's possible to do that. I think that's why we're all super excited to be at Schulich, because that's the kind of place where that kind of thinking and doing is possible.

Cameron: Well, I look forward to hearing more about where you're going with this paper. I hope you keep me up to date. I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me about it. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you, and I look forward to the next time we get to consume responsibly at a local restaurant.

Markus: Thanks for having me, Cam.

Links

Markus Giesler faculty page

Website for Dr. Markus Giesler

Credits

Host and producer: Cameron Graham
Photos: McKenzie James & York University
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Descript, Audacity
Recorded: October 25, 2022
Location: Toronto