Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Marketing Theory, 20 (4), 2020, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2020 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Marketing Theory page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/MTQ on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
Accepted author manuscript, 842 KB, PDF document
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - The Interrupted World
T2 - Surrealist disruption and altered escapes from reality
AU - Jones, Scott
AU - Cronin, James
AU - Piacentini, Maria
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Marketing Theory, 20 (4), 2020, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2020 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Marketing Theory page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/MTQ on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - Following Breton’s writings on surreality, we outline how unexpected challenges to consumers’ assumptive worlds have the potential to alter how their escape from reality is experienced. We introduce the concept of “surrealist disruption” to describe ontological discontinuities that disrupt the common-sense frameworks normally used by consumers, and that impact upon their ability to suspend their disbeliefs and experience self-loss. To facilitate our theorization, we draw upon interviews with consumers about their changing experiences as viewers of the realist-political TV-drama House of Cards against a backdrop of disruptive real-world political events. Our analyses reveal that, when faced with a radically-altered external environment, escape from reality changes from a restorative, playful experience to an uneasy, earnest one characterized by hysteretic angst, intersubjective sense-making and epistemological community-building. This reconceptualizes escapism as more emotionally multi-valenced than previously considered in marketing theory and reveals consumers’ subject position to an aggregative social fabric beyond their control.
AB - Following Breton’s writings on surreality, we outline how unexpected challenges to consumers’ assumptive worlds have the potential to alter how their escape from reality is experienced. We introduce the concept of “surrealist disruption” to describe ontological discontinuities that disrupt the common-sense frameworks normally used by consumers, and that impact upon their ability to suspend their disbeliefs and experience self-loss. To facilitate our theorization, we draw upon interviews with consumers about their changing experiences as viewers of the realist-political TV-drama House of Cards against a backdrop of disruptive real-world political events. Our analyses reveal that, when faced with a radically-altered external environment, escape from reality changes from a restorative, playful experience to an uneasy, earnest one characterized by hysteretic angst, intersubjective sense-making and epistemological community-building. This reconceptualizes escapism as more emotionally multi-valenced than previously considered in marketing theory and reveals consumers’ subject position to an aggregative social fabric beyond their control.
KW - Assumptive worlds
KW - binge-watching
KW - Breton
KW - escapism
KW - realism
KW - surreality
KW - suspension of disbelief
U2 - 10.1177/1470593120914705
DO - 10.1177/1470593120914705
M3 - Journal article
VL - 20
SP - 459
EP - 480
JO - Marketing Theory
JF - Marketing Theory
SN - 1470-5931
IS - 4
ER -