Cambridge Scholars Publishing Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research

The cultural consumption research landscape of the 21st century is marked by an increasing cross-disciplinary fermentation. At the same time, cultural theory and analysis have been marked by successive ‘inter-’ turns, most notably with regard to the Big Four: multimodality (or intermodality), interdiscursivity, transmediality (or intermediality), and intertextuality. This book offers an outline of interdiscursivity as an integrative platform for accommodating these notions. To this end, a call for a return to Foucault is issued via a critical engagement with the so-called practice-turn. This re-turn does not seek to reconstitute venerably Foucauldianism, but to theorize ‘inters-’ as vanishing points that challenge the integrity of discrete cultural orders in non-convergent manners. The propounded interdiscursivity approach is offered as a reading strategy that permeates the contemporary cultural consumption phenomena that are scrutinized in this book, against a pan-consumptivist framework. By drawing on qualitative and mixed methods research designs, facilitated by CAQDAS software, the empirical studies that are hosted here span a vivid array of topics that are directly relevant to both traditional and new media researchers, such as the consumption of ideologies in Web 2.0 social movements, the ability of micro-celebrities to act as cultural game-changers, the post-loyalty abjective consumption ethos. The theoretically novel approaches on offer are coupled with methodological innovations in areas such as user-generated content, artists’ branding, and experiential consumption. About the Author George Rossolatos, MSc, MBA, PhD, is an academic researcher, marketing practitioner, and the editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics. His major publications include Handbook of Brand Semiotics (2015); Semiotics of Popular Culture (2015); Brand Equity Planning with Structuralist Rhetorical Semiotics (2012, 2014); //rhetor.dixit//: Understanding Ad Texts’ Rhetorical Structure for Differential Figurative Advantage (2013); Applying Structuralist Semiotics to Brand Image Research (2012); and Interactive Advertising: Dynamic Communication in the Information Age (2002), in addition to numerous articles in trade and academic journals. His research interests focus on cultural consumer research/popular culture, branding/advertising, and new media, and span various disciplines such as discourse analysis, semiotics, cultural studies, cultural sociology, rhetoric, phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and communication theory.