Gendered scholarship: Exploring the implications for consumer behaviour research

PAYAL KUMAR

SANJEEV VARSHNEY
AUTHOR NOTE

Payal Kumar (corresponding author)

Doctoral Scholar, XLRI,

Vice President, Editorial & Production, SAGE India Publications Pvt. Ltd

XLRI, Circuit House Area (East), Jamshedpur 831 035, India

Tel: 09971490293, +91 (11) 26197757, Fax: +91 (11) 4053 9234

e-mail: payalk1@gmail.com; payal.kumar@sagepub.in

Author’s Biography:

Payal Kumar is a Doctoral Scholar at XLRI specializing in Organizational Behaviour. She completed her
Master of Arts in Religious Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, 1991,
where she topped her batch in the dissertation. After two decades of experience in print media and in the
corporate sector, today she holds the post of the Vice President Editorial & Production at SAGE Publications
India Private Ltd, where she is responsible for the editorial, production and design departments. Payal Kumar’s
research interests include gender and leadership. She also conducts workshops for doctoral scholars and faculty
on the Art of Academic Writing.

Sanjeev Varshney

Associate Professor of Marketing, XLRI, Circuit House Area (East),

Jamshedpur 831 035, India

Tel: 09955328181

e-mail: sanjeevvarshney@xlri.ac.in, Fax: +91 (657) 222 7814

Author’s Biography:
Abstract

A content analysis of three leading consumer behaviour journals over a five-year period shows that an average
of 2.44 %, 4 % and 5.8 % of published papers represent gendered scholarship, and that in two out of these three
journals there has been a decrease in the number of such publications. This paper explores the possibility of
whether more representation of gendered scholarship could enrich the traditional framework of consumer
behaviour —a discipline that lacks consensus on epistemology and is also starved of theory building—by means
of critical introspection leading to possible new ideas, new methods and theory building.

Keywords: Consumer behavior, epistemology, gendered scholarship, theory building, research methodology
Introduction

Consumer behavior research seeks to produce knowledge about consumer behavior, and more specifically about

consumption (Holbrook, 1987). Research in this discipline can be broadly classified as a means to an end in the

form of applied consumer research, which aims to solve problems of business, government or of consumers; or

as an end in itself, wherein existing scholarship seeks causality as the primary rationale, with an aim to

generating new knowledge (Bagozzi, 1992).

Research in this field is often multidisciplinary, drawing from other disciplines such as macroeconomics,

microeconomics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and humanities (Calder and Tybout, 1987),

which in turn has led to not only a rich diversity of topics being published, but has also led to an impressive

quantity of consumer behavior research output (Sheth, 1992). However, arguably, the downside of this

multidisciplinary approach is that the scope of consumer behavior has become so wide that it has led to an

identity crisis of sorts in which there is seemingly little consensus on what to research and how to execute this

(Simpson et al., 2001), and in which concepts and models resemble the variety of responses of seven blind men

touching an elephant, which if left uncorrected could lead to a devaluation of the discipline (Sheth, 1992). This

lack of cohesive identity is summed up by Jerome N. Kernan (1987, 134): “In the end, we might conclude that

consumer research is an elusive as jazz: each can be described; each must be felt; but neither will concede its

quintessence.”

Apart from the contention that this is a disjointed field that has led to epistemological camps evolving at odds

with one another (Simonson et al., 2001), several marketing scholars have leveled a multitude of scathing

attacks at the consumer behavior discipline over the last 30 years, including that there are very few universal

laws, that there has been negligible theory building and that in fact there is no “accepted core of knowledge”

(Saad, 2008, 437).

In light of this apparent epistemological haziness, this article questions the androgenic ideology of the consumer

behavior discipline, brought to the fore by a content analysis of the Journal of Consumer Behaviour from 1980

to 1990 that indicates the dominant ideology to be masculinist, with positivist and quantitative models of

consumer behaviour theories as predominant, and with human behavior often represented by the machine
metaphor (Hirschman, 1993). We suggest that apart from a multidisciplinary approach, this discipline can be

enriched by multiple intellectual perspectives, more specifically in the form of heightened sensitivity to the

gendered nature of consumer research (Bristor and Fisher, 1993; Venkatesh, 1980), moreso since buyer–seller

interaction and consumption activities are fundamentally gendered (Beetles and Crane, 2005).

There have been some articles on feminist thought and consumer research, notably the critique of consumer

research by Bristor and Fischer in the Journal of Consumer Research (1993). However, there has been no recent

study to assess whether leading consumer behaviour journals are publishing articles from a gendered

perspective. In this article, building on Hirschman’s content analysis of one journal, we conduct a content

analysis of three leading journals, in order to explore what the contents reveal about the nature of research in

this field, given that journal publications are used as a medium to disseminate knowledge (Lortie et al, 2007). In

an effort to provide more exhaustive findings in terms of breadth and depth of understanding (Johnson et al,

2007), we also add a new element to the methodology by conducting a qualitative study, where the researcher

does not manipulate the phenomenon of interest by means of prediction and generalization of findings

(Golafshani, 2003).

Operalization of terms

Consumer research is defined in this article as “anything broadly related to the acquisition, usage and disposition

of products by end users” (Baumgartner, 2010).

Since epistemology concerns the theory of knowledge, in this article feminist epistemology (which is also

known as social epistemology) refers to a specific approach, to the theory of knowledge, rather than a doctrine.

This approach constitutes a part of the critical management school of thought in organizational theory.

Gendered perspective and gendered scholarship are used interchangeably to mean the generally accepted

perspective pertaining to this theory of knowledge.

In this article male and female refers to biological sex, and masculine and feminine to socially constructed

gender. To define the gender, it is perhaps appropriate to begin with understanding what gender is not. It is not a

bipolar definition of male and female in terms of physiological characteristics, and as such gender is not fully

determined by biological sex in that not all women are feminine, nor men masculine (Bem, 1974). While gender

has been defined as a social construct embedded in power relations, and as an analytical tool (Stewart and

McDermott, 2004), in this article we define gender as a sociocultural concept that refers to the socialization of
men and women into male and female roles, and which implies that gender differences can be subject to change

(Catterall and Maclaran, 2002; Catterall et al., 2005). Arguably marketers need to be cautious on relying on

simple sex differences as indicators of consumer behavior, given that there are women that exhibit masculine

traits and men that exhibit feminine traits (Catterall and Maclaran, 2002).

Conceptual framework

Consumer researchers of the 1970s largely dwelt on two gender-related topics, namely gender portrayals in

advertisements and how gender could be used to predict consumer behavior. The 1980s saw more theoretical

perspectives emerging, from focusing on the meaning that consumers attach to products from a psychological

point of view, as in Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) prospect theory; to focusing on the consumer’s social and

cultural point of view, as opposed to an economical or psychological one, as in Arnould and Thompson’s (2005)

consumer culture theory.

The 1980s also saw postmodernist scholars challenge elitist assumptions and redefine gender as a more

nebulous construct, as opposed to the watertight, mutually exclusive categories of masculinity and femininity.

However, since then there have been studies on the negotiation of gender roles, and also an emphasis on the

masculine identity, indicative of a more mainstream androgenic position. In a sense there has been a cyclical

movement in the definition of gender, with more recent studies again defining this in dichotomous terms, “as a

two-sided coin as constructions of masculinity, and what it is to be male, inevitably generate and constitute

constructions of femininity, and what it is to be female” (Bettany et al., 2010, 16).

To summarize the trends in the extant literature, gendered scholarship, which was earlier sporadic and envisaged

to be on the margins and as niche, akin to a subdiscipline, gradually came to be recognized as a strong body of

work and as one of the most important and challenging arenas for marketing scholars (Bettany et al., 2010),

largely due to certain studies, such as the framing of three theoretical approaches towards shopping by women,

namely shopping as empowerment, as flanerie or private pursuit, and shopping as self discipline (Winship,

2000). Gendered scholarship also received credibility with the advent of the bi-annual Academy of Consumer

Research conference on gender, marketing and consumer behavior in 1991 (Beetles and Harris, 2005).

However, more recently, scholars have observed that gendered scholarship in the marketing and consumer

behavior disciplines has “slightly lost its way” (Bettany and Woodruffe-Burton, 2006); and that “critical,
feminist voices have been barely audible,” which could possibly be attributed to a decline in gendered

scholarship in general (Catterall, 2006; Catteral et al., 2005).

It is in this context that we examine whether there has been much change in perspectives from Hirschman’s

study, and whether the suggestion of greater inclusiveness of the gendered perspective in terms of gendered

scholarship in the consumer behavior field by the review articles of Catterall and Maclaran (2002) and Beetles

and Harris’ (2005) has been heeded. Catterall and Maclaran (2002) conducted a study on gender and consumer

behavior and suggested that consumer researchers need to be open to new perspectives in their search for

theories, while Beetles and Harris’ (2005) literature review of gender, feminism and marketing suggests that

many unexplored areas would benefit from a gendered perspective (see table 1).

<Insert table 1>

Table 1: A summary of the two review papers on feminism and consumer behaviour

Caterall and Maclaran, 2002 Beetles and Harris, 2005

1. Literature review of consumer 1. Literature review of marketing, sales and feminism,

behavior, which had focused on two which had focused on seven main areas: (1) Consumer

main themes: (1) The portrayal of behavior (2) advertising (3) decision-making (4) e-

women in advertisements (2) how feminization (5) sales (6) the feminization of marketing

gender can predict consumer behavior. roles (7) the feminization of marketing theory and

language. The focus of the review is on research from a

2. An analysis of the shift in focus of
feminist perspective.
consumer research in the 1990s,

including more interdisciplinary, new 2. Future agenda for research: A call for more research in

insights and new methodologies. the e-feminization area; on women in sales and

management; longitudinal studies on feminization of

3. Future agenda for research: A call to
workplace roles in marketing, advertising and public
develop the two emerging gender
relations; and exploring marketing discourse from a
theories of materialistic feminism and
feminist perspective, which may assist in redefining
evolutionary psychology.
marketing and marketing theory.
 The scope of research The scope of research

This is a young and developing research More research from this area will assist its movement from

area which has the potential to contribute an important sub-discipline to mainstream marketing

to theory building. practice; and marketing discourse from a feminist

perspective may redefine marketing theory.

 

Source: Computed by author

More specifically, the research questions in this article are:-

1. Following on from an analysis of papers published in the three leading consumer behavior journals, to

what extent is gendered scholarship—which gives primacy to the lives of women—represented in the

consumer behavior discipline?

2. At a macro-level, in view of the partiality of individual knowledge (Bristor & Fischer, 1993), can

gendered scholarship enrich (not replace) the existing traditional paradigm, and if so, what implications

will this have for both management practioners and researchers?

It is suggested that gendered scholarship can lead to a critique of traditional epistemology in the form of critical

introspection, leading to new ideas, methods and theory, which in turn can enhance our understanding of both

social life and the new consumer. The model designed (see figure 1) depicts a more fertile ground for

managerial solutions, for theory building and also for researchers to have more of an insight into their own

consumer behavior.
<Insert figure one here>

There is potential for this model to have a dynamic aspect to it, as reflected by the feedback arrow, in which

more answers found in terms of applied and theoretical knowledge could lead to more gendered scholarship.

Gendered scholarship

In this section we draw on the extant literature in order to assess the contribution that gendered scholarship has

had on academic rigour in general and to research methodology in particular. This section will also address the

relevance of gendered scholarship to consumer behavior research.

i. Contribution of gendered scholarship

Gendered scholarship consists of a multitude of narratives that have cumulatively challenged existing

epistemology, especially the traditional binary thinking of traditional scholars that is said to have oversimplified

and reified gender differences (Annamma and Venkatesh, 1994).

While feminist theories are not homogenous, what they do have in common is that they seek to critique gender

bias by explaining and challenging the existing pattern of relations between the sexes (Bristor and Fisher, 1993);

to the extent that these feminist theories are at times interpreted as being subversive and destabilizing (Krishna,

2007; Jain, 2010).

The three main feminist narratives (see table 2) include feminist empiricism (also known as liberal feminism)

which critiques an androcentric and hence partial knowledge about social reality, and introduces women’s

experiences as essential for producing value-free knowledge. The second narrative, feminist standpoint (also

known as women’s voice feminism, and not to be confused with the ‘feminine standpoint’—which may still be

an androcentric standpoint), questions the very goal of objectivity, suggesting that traditional research is socially

situated and masculinist (Harding, 1991), in which even theorizing is identified with maleness (Gatens, 1996).

Here scholars have even questioned whether the academic reward system is biased in favor of male scholars

(Swafford, 2007).

The third narrative, feminist postmodernism (also known as poststructuralist feminism and as feminist relativist

epistemology), suggests that culture and economics are so closely linked that consumption is the function of the

totality of needs and wants that stem from social formation (Mascarenhas, 2011). This school of thought also

suggests that there is no homogeneity among women, and that in fact there are many versions of social reality

(Jain, 2010; Reynolds, 1993).

<Insert table 2 here>

Table 2: Three main feminist epistemologies

Advocates Rejects Criticism

Feminist Traditional empiricist Non-inclusion of Accepting empiricist methodology as

empiricism methodology women’s issues and gender neutral negates inner

perspectives experiences of women; the bipolar,

androcentric conception of knowledge

as subject–object based remains

unquestioned.
Standpoint Feminist standpoint, Traditional empiricist Can there be a feminist standpoint

epistemology which is distinct from methodology and common to all women?

a male perspective. goal of objectivity as

masculinist.
Feminist Epistemological Traditional concepts Though it rejects androcentric

postmodernism pluralism: knowledge of rationality and epistemology, postmodernism fails to

is defined according objectivity offer a clear alternative; can we totally

to gender, age, etc. reject rationality?

Source: Computed by author

Of the three feminist narratives, it is largely postmodernist feminism that has deconstructed binary opposites by

questioning whether constructs such as the mind and body, or nature and culture are in fact mutually exclusive

dichotomous distinctions (Gatens, 1996). Such traditional dichotomies can be traced back to the ancient Greek

association of good, light, and unity with maleness, and the more negative distinctions with femaleness. Nancy

Jay (1981) suggests that such distinctions can never be neutral in that one part of a dichotomy always has a

positive value, while the other—being devoid of this value—is automatically perceived of as negative. And

therefore light infers that darkness is devoid of light.

Another dichotomy that feminist scholars have challenged, is that reason rather than emotion is indispensable

for acquiring knowledge, and that emotion is in fact epistemologically subversive (Jaggar, 1989). Since the time

of Plato, reason had been associated with rationality and maleness, whereas emotion had been associated with

irrationality and femaleness. Questioning this tradition, feminist scholars suggests that emotion and experience

also play a vital role in acquiring knowledge, for example in the profession of a midwife. In fact it is posited that

feminist epistemology itself is an expression of certain emotions that are characteristically male, such as

obsession with control and fear of contamination (Jaggar, 1989).

Leon Reynolds (1993) goes as far as to say that for gender epistemological theory, sensation is the only method

of establishing truth claims, with value being placed on a posteriori knowledge, or knowledge acquired by

experience, rather than a priori knowledge, which is drawn independently of experience. As an advocate of a

posteriori knowledge, Radha Krishna Naidu (1994) suggests that for certain types of knowledge a paradigm

shift has to take place which goes beyond the empiricist framework. He adds that top-rung scholars are “more

likely to experience the limitations of the intellect as a vehicle of knowledge, and perhaps, at times they get

inadvertent glimpses of what lies beyond intellect” (83). To sum up, feminist scholars seem to suggest that

feminist epistemology is more expansive in that this is not bound by traditional dichotomies.

Apart from challenging existing epistemology, gendered scholarship has also contributed to academic rigor in

that it has led to a major shift in psychology from sex as a biological construct, to gender (Chrisler & McCreary,

2010). Psychoanalytical scholars suggest that the selves of women and men tend to be different, with the former

involved in boundary negotiations, separation and connection, and the latter involved more in defensively firm

boundaries and denials of self–other connections (Chodorow, 1997; Stewart and McDermott, 2004).
Similarly, in consumer behavior research, scholars are increasingly suggesting that consumers often respond

differently by choosing different products even though the apparent economic (objective features) of the choice

seems invariant (Monroe, 1987). One example of differences in response to advertisements is a study that

suggests that men are less likely to draw inferences from gynocentric advertisements because of lack of interest

and lack of familiarity with gendered text, while women seem more likely to be able to draw inferences from

both gynocentric and androcentric texts (Stern, 1993).

Gendered scholarship has also brought to the fore behavioral decision theory, which re-evaluates the assumption

of normative decision theory that an ideal decision maker is one who is fully informed, is able to compute with

perfect accuracy, and is fully rational (Kahn et al., 2006). In the field of consumer behavior research this re-

evaluation acknowledges that consumer behavior can at times be complex, irrational and unpredictable in nature

(Goulding, 1999). This feminist critique of rational decision-making has also impacted the study of welfare

states and other policy paradigms (Orloff & Pailer, 2009).

Another fundamental contribution of gendered scholarship is the demonstration of the thoroughly socio-cultural

nature of all aspects of the gender system and the omnirelevance of gender to social life (Chafetz, 1997).

To sum up, feminist epistemology puts under the microscope the three traditional epistemologies of rationalism,

where reason is of prime importance; empiricism, where knowledge is derived from observation of objective

reality; and naturalism, where knowledge is the representation of our interactions with the biological world.

Feminist scholars go as far as to suggest that a more all-encompassing development of science could have taken

place had there been more feminist scientists, as theories like Newton’s three laws on bodies and motion, or the

big bang theory of creation, are based on object-based epistemology, while feminist scholars tend to give

primacy to relational and process-based epistemologies (Nutan Sarawagi, Nov 28, 1997, Feminist critique of the

construction of knowledge in science – or see Sandra Harding 1986 The science question in feminist, Ithaca,

NY: Cornell university press).

As with any research approach, there are limitations associated with gendered scholarship, especially that it does

not offer the validity and reliability of the positivist tradition; nor is the element of replicability of the study a

concern; and that the studies often have a narrow focus, so much so that there is a danger of ignoring the

experiences of men (Beetles and Crane, 2005).

This scholarship has also been criticized for providing a limited view, for example a gendered perspective may

explain shopping behavior such as reaction to advertisements, but does this lens explain the emotions or

motivation behind this? Similarly, feminist scholars’ rejection of naturalism on the grounds that the complexity

of human behavior cannot be reduced to the gene level, but rather that behavior stems from social constructs,

has come under scrutiny through studies like that of Saad (2008) which suggests that consumers are biological

beings shaped by common evolutionary forces, so much so that the purchase of a luxury sports car and the

splendor of a peacock’s tail, can both be categorized as a sex-specific sexual signals,

ii. Feministic Contribution to Research Methodology

The history of gendered research methodology can be broadly divided into three main periods: first research was

on women, for women; second research was overtly political; and third it espoused qualitative organizational

behavior reassessed methods (Stanley and Wise, 2006).

Just as there is no homogeneity in gendered scholarship, so too there is no standardized form of gendered

research methodology. Rather, feminists have challenged existing quantitative and qualitative methodologies by

raising questions as to what extent good research in the past has represented scientific validity and reliability,

and to what extent it has instead been a social construct of men (Roberts, 1981; Bose, 1995).

Overall, feminist methodology has shown its worth in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and

organizational behaviour, by raising questions about traditional methodology, from the selection of research

topics from an androcentric stance, to biased research designs that used primarily male subjects, to

overspecificity in which it is impossible to tell from a study whether the results apply to one or both sexes

(Eichler, 1988, Goulding, 1999). These questions are important given that while research methodology may not

have intrinsic value in itself, efficacy of research designs contribute to knowledge (Krippendorff, 2004).

Feminist scholars have also displayed a greater involvement between researchers and their subjects (Thomson,

1997) which has given rise to meaningful relationships in the overarching aim to improve the lives of women

(Maguire, 1987).

There was a noticeable change in the consumer behavior discipline in the 1980s: “New consumer behavior”

shifted research from the decision-making process of the consumer to experiences surrounding that act of

consumption; in which consumers came to be seen as socially connected beings rather than simply consumers
(Catterall and Maclaran, 2002). In a radical departure from what was studied and how it was studied in the

traditional positivist paradigm, researchers began focusing on the linkage of consumption with the rest of human

existence (Belk, 1995). This led to a change, a significant shift in the research methods employed, from the

predominantly positivistic research approach (Varshney, 2010) to interpretivist approaches such as ethnography

and interview-based methods (Fellman, 1999).

Such studies facilitated a greater comprehension of internalized consumer and managerial experiences, by

means of metaphors, nonverbal communication and visual imagery (Zaltman, 1997). Ethnography also aided in

comprehending consumer experiences which may otherwise not have been adequately conveyed, for example,

some advertising researchers reported that consumers in focus groups increasingly tend to use language derived

from advertising instead of reporting their more genuine responses (Malhotra and Peterson, 2001).

Added insight into consumer behavior was provided by a hermeneutical study by Craig J. Thompson (1997) that

suggested that consumer preferences were not necessarily the result of the inherent utility of a product, but

rather due to “the meaningful relations the women experienced between the salient conditions of their lives and

products and services” (450).

Furthermore, utilizing data from memory-work methodology, Friend and Thomspon (2003) depict how stories

can be used to gain an insight into consumption experiences and give voice to women consumers. Depicting the

importance of narrative inquiry, interviewees recounted nasty retail encounters, to show how social constructs

related to identity, such as gender and ethnicity, have real meaning in the shopping experience.

iii. Relevance of gendered scholarship to consumer behavior research

Based on a literature review it is suggested that gendered scholarship can make a valuable contribution to the

consumer behavior discipline for the following reasons:-

1. The ever-changing consumer, with a shift from the rational consumer to an experiential consumer in

which consumers are seen to be the arbiters of meaning, requires a different research perspective and

hence a possible answer lies in feminism, in which primacy of experience or a posteriori knowledge is

more valued, and in which the consumer’s social and cultural milieu is taken to be an important

consideration in consumption. Lifestyles are changing, as a result of which so too are the economics of

the household, especially in the allocation of women’s time in acquiring commodities (Venkatesh,
 1980). An apt example of a study on the changing consumer is provided by Kates and Shaw-Garlock

(1999), who suggest that consumers do not decode advertisements as had earlier been assumed, but

rather that they interpret them according to both personal meaning and their historical and cultural

setting. Similarly, another study suggests that implicit reference points in consumer choice arise mainly

from the perspective of the consumer in terms of goals, individual preferences, reference group and

culture (Tarnanidis et al., 2010).

2. In spite of a rich diversity of topics, consumer behavior research so far has elicited few plausible

answers for management practitioners on the one hand (Tadajewski, 2008), and for policy makers and

peer disciplines on the other hand, especially in comparison to marketing strategy, marketing research

and functional subdisciplines of marketing (Sheth, 1992). Beetles and Crane (2005) suggest that the

gendered perspective can contribute to understanding the buyer–seller relationships, which in turn can

have an implication for sales training and evaluation; that this perspective can be meaningful with

regard to decisions on the deployment of sales persons; can contribute to market research by enhancing

customer relationship management; and furthermore, epistemologically, the feminist approach could

give the researchers time to reflect on their own behavior as buyers or sellers.

3. In spite of the rich diversity of topics, there has been little contribution from this discipline in the form

of theory building. It is suggested that the gendered perspective is dynamic, and that postmodernist

scholarship in particular ensures that a sufficient amount of critical introspection of epistemology

constantly takes place, which may lead to new theories in a field starved of theory building. Theory

building with a gendered perspective is a more all-inclusive one than the traditional androcentric

espistemology, as it does not exclude but rather incorporates the androcentric perspective into a larger

framework.

4. The answer to intellectual myopia lies in intellectual pluralism in that diversity of scholarly opinion

introduces more rigorous notions of knowledge. Feminist scholars contend that by diversifying the

kinds of knowers, new questions are raised and new interpretations of wisdom presented (Chafetz,

1997). Acknowledging the importance of new perspectives that may run counter to the prevailing

paradigm, an editorial published in the Journal of Consumer Research in April 2010 has specifically

appealed for conceptual contributions of this kind.

Method

In order to answer the research questions a mixed methods approach has been used, which is a procedure for

collecting, analyzing and mixing or integrating both quantitative and qualitative data within a single study

(Creswell, 2005). The rationale for using this approach is that when combined, quantitative and qualitative

methods provide a more complete picture of the research problem via inductive and deductive thinking (Green,

Caracellin and Graham, 1989), that this approach is more suited for interdisciplinary research, and also that it

encourages the use of multiple worldviews (Creswell & Clark, 2011).

Content analysis, a systematic technique for compressing many words into fewer content catergories based on

coding, seemed the most appropriate form of analysis, especially since this enables the researchers to compare

readings of the same text by readers of different genders or from diverse socioeconomic or educational

backgrounds (Krippendorff, 2004) and also allows for inferences to be made with regard to social attention

(Weber, 1990).

This study is a content analysis of the abstracts of three leading journals in the consumer behaviour discipline

from 2006 to 2010 (following on sequentially from the two literature reviews), namely Journal of Consumer

Research (JCR), Journal of Consumer Psychology (JCP), and Journal of Consumer Affairs (JCA), in order to

ascertain how much research represents a gendered perspective. According to the Thomson Reuters journals

citation report, JCR, published by the Chicago University Press, has an impact factor of 2.590; JCP, published

by Elsevier Science, has an impact factor of 2.405; and JCA, published by Wiley-Blackwell, has an impact

factor of 1.804. These three journals also figure in a bibliometric analysis, with many papers from Journal of

Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology being widely cited (Baumgartner, 2010). These

journals have also figured in worldwide faculty perceptions of marketing journals, based on two indices, namely

importance/prestige index and also the familiarity index (Hult et al., 1997). In this study, which used a stratified

sample of 1,000 marketing academicians, the overall ranking of JCR is 3 and JCP is 27.

A Google Scholar ranking of marketing journals shows that Journal of Consumer Research figures in the top

four journals (Moussa and Touzani, 2010), while Journal of Consumer Affairs has been lauded as “a unique and

valuable standard in its field today” (James and Cude, 2009: 167).
In this design first the quantitative, numeric data was collected and then analyzed from 731 papers (barring

editorial and reviews) over a five-year period. The number of qualifying articles were 369 (JCR), 224 (JCP) and

138 (JCA).

So as to get around the limitation of the possible usage of synonyms which may lead to an underestimation of

the importance of a concept, a word frequency count was followed up by a keywords in their textual contexts

(KWIC) search to test for the consistency of usage of works. The words were selected from the key words used

in the two literature reviews of 2002 and 2005 and include gender, feminism, women in marketing, stereotypes,

feminization, male, girls, shopping behavior, sexism, sex role, marital roles, saleswoman, nudity, patriarchal,

matriarchal, eco-feminist, feminine and beauty, a search was done Some words that were added to this list

include female, man and woman. The inter-rater reliability, or interobserver reliability, a useful evaluation tool

(Bresciani et al., 2009; Krippendorf, 2004) was conducted with two coders working independently, with an

inter-rater reliability of 90%.

This was then followed by a qualitative study in order to be able to elaborate on the quantitative data in terms of

refining the results (Swafford, 2007). For this the number of items investigated was 25, coded on two

descriptive variables, namely year of publication and gender of authorship; and on two variables that required

some amount of interpretation, namely type of paper in terms of approach to data collection (empirical,

literature review, theoretical/conceptual), and type of paper in relation to topics addressed in terms of identifying

the primary focus of each article, and also in identifying the representation of the three types of feminist thought

(feminist empiricism, standpoint epistemology and feminist post-modernism).

Results

The findings show that from 2006 to 2010 only an average of 2.4% of 369 abstracts in Journal of Consumer

Research, 4% of 224 abstracts in Journal of Consumer Psychology and 5.8% of 138 abstracts in Journal of

Consumer Affairs are from a gendered perspective (see table 3). Grouping all the three journals together, this

comes to a total of 25 papers out of 731, which is 3.4%. There is a consistently low representation of less than

3.5% per year in Journal of Consumer Research, while Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of

Consumer Affairs show a healthy trend in 2006 with 12% and 14.29% abstracts, respectively, only to be

followed by a steady decline thereafter, with some years showing not a single such abstract (2007 in Journal of

Consumer Psychology; and 2008 and 2009 in Journal of Consumer Affairs).

<Insert table 3 about here>

Table 3: Papers from a gendered perspective in three leading consumer behavior journals

Journal of Consumer Research

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Total

No. of abstracts 72 67 93 86 51 369

Gendered

scholarship 1 2 2 3 1 9

Percentage 1.4 2.9 2.1 3.4 1.9 2.44

Comment: A consistently low representation of less than 3.5% per year

Journal of Consumer Psychology

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Total

No. of abstracts 41 32 36 64 51 224

Gendered

scholarship 5 0 1 1 2 9

Percentage 12 0 2.7 1.5 4 4

Comment: A decline over the years to a third of the publications in

2006.

Journal of Consumer Affairs

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Total

No. of abstracts 21 20 31 30 36 138

Gendered 3 1 0 0 3 7
 scholarship

Percentage 14.29 10 0 0 8.33 5.8

Comment: A steady decline of such publications over the years.

Source: Computed by author.

The demographic profile of the authors reveals that the first author is predominantly female (58.3%). If the first

and second authors are taken jointly, then male authors outnumber female authors (26% and 22%, respectively).

The second and third authors are 2:1 male to female (second author: female: 33.3%; male 66.7%; third author:

female 36.4%; male 63.6%), while the fourth authors are all male. The demographic profile also shows that the

scholarship stems predominantly from American scholars (see table 4, chart 1).

<Insert table 4 about here>

Table 4: Demographic profile of

authors

First author Second author Third author Fourth author

Total: 24 Total: 24 Total: 11 Total: 3

14 F, 10 M 8 F, 16 M 4 F, 7 M 3M

8 USA, 3 non-1 USA, 2 non-

16 USA, 8 non-USA16 USA, 8 non-USA USA USA

Key: F= Female, M = Male

Source: Computed by author

Chart 1: Demographic profile of authors

 Demographic Profile of Authors

30
24 24
25
Total
20
16 1616 Female
14
15 Male
10 11
8 8 8 USA
10 7 8
Non-USA
4 3 3 3
5
0 1 2
0
First author Second author Third author Fourth author

<Insert chart 1 about here>

An analysis of the 25 shortlisted papers reveals that in terms of methodology, 75% of them have made use of

experiments while 19% are from a hermeneutical/ethnographic approach. Most of the papers can be classified as

from the purview of scientific knowledge, as opposed to everyday knowledge and interpretive knowledge

(Calder and Tybout, 1987).

Approximately 25% of the papers are steeped in applied research, while the remaining 75% try to verify existing

theories or expand to them in some way. One paper Eun-Ju and Schumann (2009) is an attempt at theory

building, in which a contextual gender influence theory (CGIT) is proposed, which has a direct bearing on trust

in online exchange relationships. This data supports our contention that the gendered perspective is not

restricted to simply challenging the repertoire of existing theories, but also has the potential to add fresh insights

in the form of theory building.

The shortlisted papers were then analyzed to deduce common themes and topics. This qualitative study reveals

that in terms of comprehending consumer behavior and preferences the papers address a wide variety of topics

from food choices; financial services such as extended service contracts to household savings; attitudes about

bodily appearance, fashion, sex, attractive salespersons; reaction to external stimuli such as advertisements to

the effect of a single stimulus or stimuli such as music and fashion; choice in relation to breast cancer treatment;

apparel purchases on the Internet; and the trend of debt repayment after divorce.
The papers were then analysed in terms of feminist perspectives. While all three perspectives were found

represented (see examples in table 5), only one paper represented the feminist postmodernistic stance.

Table 5: Feminist perspectives in three leading consumer behaviour journals

Feminist empiricism, in 1. An exploration of attitudes towards sexual advertisements, which suggests that
which women’s
experiences are seen as women’s spontaneous dislike of sexual ads softened when the ad could be
essential for producing
value-free knowledge interpreted in terms of commitment cues, while men were relatively unaffected by

the same cues (Dahl et al., 2009).

2. A study on the effects of culture, gender and moral obligations on responses to

charity advertising across masculine and feminine cultures (Nelson et al., 2006).

3. A study that suggests that financial literacy was higher amongst college-educated

men with wealthy parents than high-school educated women whose parents were

not wealthy (Lusardi et al., 2010).

Feminist standpoint
perspective in which
knowledge is said to be
socially situated
1. An exploration of how veiling, a deviant practice in the secular middle
class, became transformed into a fashionable choice for Turkish women
(Ozlem and Ger, 2010)

2. An exploration of whether exposure to thin or heavy media images

positively or negatively affects female consumers’ appearance self esteem,

in which the authors specify that all the participants in this empirical study

were young, female university students and thus the findings cannot be

extended to men or to individuals in other stages of life (Smeesters and

Mandel, 2006).

3. A hermeneutical investigation in order to obtain an in-depth understanding

of the lived experiences of women who had been diagnosed and treated for

breast cancer, in order to understand why women’s decisions in the

context of breast cancer treatment is overdependent on biomedicine

(Wong and King, 2008).

4. An empirical investigation on how female consumers’ attitudes relating to

bodily appearance are linked to their perceptions of the aesthetics of

fashion (Alladi, 2010).

 Feminist postmodernist
perspective, in which
there is said to be no
homogeneity among
women
1. An ethnographic study of how mothers and daughters differentially
construct consumer identities based on their different socializations in the
context of mass migration of poor Turkish women into an urban milieu

dominated by the Western consumer culture (Ustunder and Holt, 2007).

5. DISCUSSION

i. Journal Gatekeeping under Scrutiny?

Journal of Consumer Research’s 2010 editorial categorically states that new perspectives are important as they

“illuminate an idea that rings true, even though it may run counter to a prevailing paradigm, worldview, or

metaphorical lens for viewing consumer behavior” (vi). And yet while this journal is the only one out of the

three to have published a solitary paper from the feminist postmodern perspective, only 2.44% of the total

number of published papers between 2006 and 2010 are from the gendered perspective.

Journal of Consumer Psychology as its name suggests, is devoted to the psychological perspectives on the study

of the consumer. This journal accepts theoretical and empirical papers that contribute to an understanding of

psychological processes underlying consumers’ thoughts, feelings and behavior. Given that this journal

encourages research on cultural and individual differences in consumer behavior, one would have anticipated

several papers from the feminist empiricist perspective, yet only 4% of the total number of published papers

between 2006 and 2010 are from the gendered perspective in general.

The multidisciplinary Journal of Consumer Affairs in its ‘Aims and Scope’ states that this is a leading journal

with a focus over the last four decades on the interests of the consumer. Yet it appears that the “consumer” is

largely defined in androcentric terms since only 5.8% of the papers stem from the gendered perspective.

Given that journal gatekeeping is said to be an intellectual activity that contributes fundamentally to how a

discipline develops in the form of the control of content (Swafford, 2007), the results of this article will prove to

be insightful to journal peer reviewers. The low representation of papers from a gendered perspective calls into

question the gatekeeping of these journals by the editors and reviewers (Powell et al, 2009). However, this is an

assumption that would require further investigation. While Sheth (1992) had written about tolerant gatekeeping

in leading journals, he referred to a multidisciplinary approach, rather than a multi-perspective approach.

Journal editors and reviewers may also need to introspect on the observation that leading journals function more

like a mirror (Swafford, 2007), reflecting what scholars put forth as their web of understanding, rather than a

window providing a view of the dynamic field of consumer behavior discipline as it stands today. While this

mirror itself currently does not reflect the true brilliance of perspective diversity, even if it did, feminist scholars

may argue that a mirror is necessary but not sufficient. “If we only change the nature of what is published in our

journals without changing the lives of the people we study, the goals of critical theory and feminism will never

be reached” (Thorpe and Holt, 2008).

Another reason for the dearth of gendered scholarship in this domain could be the dearth of gendered

scholarship research output as a whole in other disciplines too, possibly because feminist perspectives are

viewed as having a lack of generality or academic value (Simeone, 1987; Spender, 1981) and as such are not

attracting many scholars.

ii. Future Directions for Research

Future studies could address this very issue of why there are so few articles from the gendered perspective. Is it

because such research is not being generated or because such articles are being rejected by gatekeepers, or a

combination of both reasons?

This exploratory research can be built upon in several ways. In terms of the gender of the author, one could

conduct a larger study on the differences in approach to theoretical perspectives, methodology, and issues being

discussed, between female and male authors of articles from a gendered perspective and compare this to female

and male authors of articles from a traditional perspective. Gender and discipline could also be examined as

moderating variables in relation to research productivity (Kumar & Israel, 2011), given that some studies

suggest that regardless of one’s discipline, male faculty exhibit more research productivity than females (Naz

and Weber, 2003).

Also, while acknowledging that consumer behavior is based on coercion, reflex, habit or social psychological

processes, one could also scrutinize in more detail the papers that have been derived from a traditional

perspective and analyze which of these had the potential to have been studied from a gendered perspective,

especially in the area of choice (Bagozzi, 1992).

A citation analysis could also be conducted in the next five-year period (2011-15) to see the frequency of

citations of the 25 articles from a gendered perspective. This may lead to some pattern emerging: if these have

been cited to a large extent, then it is likely to indicate that the gendered perspective is getting adopted, in spite

of so few articles having been published in this area. The results of such a study would show whether the

gendered perspective is being recognized in mainstream scholarship, or whether the citations are restricted to

cross referencing between articles from a gendered perspective (of the five articles published in 2010, we

observe that two articles have cited from the earlier shortlisted articles: Ozlem and Ger (2010) has two 2007

citations, while Venkatesh (2010) has a 2010 citation).

iii. Limitation of this Study

It is assumed in this article that following the two literature reviews of 2002 and 2005 which called for more

research from a gendered perspective, that the increase in such research productivity would be linear. However,

there is a possibility that such an increase could take place in waves. In order to ascertain this, the content

analysis of the three leading journals in the consumer behavior discipline, would have to be carried out for

future issues in a more longitudinal study.

The scope of this study could also be increased to more consumer behavior journals, given that the exploratory

qualitative study of this article brought forth only 25 papers from 3 journals with a gendered perspective.

iv. Conclusion

Referring to the first research question to what extent gendered scholarship is represented in consumer

behaviour research, we find that rather than a progression from Caterall and Maclaran’s appeal for more

research from the theoretical perspective of material feminism and evolutionary psychology in 2002, in fact

there has been a decrease in the number of papers from the gendered perspective over the years in two out of the

three leading journals in this discipline.

It is a matter for conjecture as to why papers with a predominantly androgynous paradigm have been

consistently selected for publication in the top three consumer behavior journals, in which “the consumer” is

conceptualized as a homogeneous entity that is all-inclusive of men and women, ignoring not only between-

gender differences (Lusardi et al., 2010) but also within-gender differences.

Further study would also be required into why the emergence of radically different post-modern theoretical and

methodological perspectives of the 1980s have almost disappeared. The qualitative study of this article clearly

shows that only one paper out of 731, in Journal of Consumer Research, an ethnographic study of how mothers

and daughters differentially construct consumer identities, was drawn from postmodern feminist thought. In

other works, the very feministic perspective that has the potential to bring forth greater introspection

in consumer behavior research in terms of critical instrospection, is in fact the least represented. We

suggest that this is a possible wake-up call for feminist scholars in terms of research productivity in

the consumer behavior area.

And so, in answer to the second research question, on whether gendered scholarship can enrich the traditional

paradigm, we suggest that gendered scholarship is not simply a critique of traditional epistemology in terms of

critical introspection, but that it has the potential to lead to new ideas and new methods, which in turn can

enhance our understanding of both social life and the new consumer.

So far, the sparse feminist scholarship that exists has been said to have simply consisted of rich epistemological

critiques of “malestream” consumer behavior scholarship, which is said to be of little value in itself. For

example, a study in which males and females had different preferences for espresso coffee was criticised by

Belk and Costa (1998) as having negligible practical relevance for marketers and also as not serving to improve

our theoretical understanding of consumer behavior. However, we suggest that critiquing can be important, for

example Marshall (1984) challenged the apparent universal validity of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by

asserting that women may be motivated by social rather than individual needs.

We further suggest that critiquing also paves the way for more valuable contributions to the consumer behavior

discipline in the following ways:-

1. By recognizing the ever-changing consumer: By pinpointing the masculine blinders

that researchers have worn, feminist scholars have revised the existing traditions and in doing so have

contributed to the discipline’s understanding of both social life and the life of the consumer, in a

discipline where the consumer is being perceived as a user, not buyer, and where consumption for

many female consumers is seen more as experiential and recreational (Bellenger and Korgaonkar,
 1980) rather than utilitarian. However, not enough gendered research is being generated for these

perspectives to be incorporated into the mainstream theory canon (Beetles and Harris, 2005).

2. By questioning existing theories: This greater churning of thought by questioning

existing theories is likely to lead to more varied solutions for marketers, may create a possible fertile

ground for theory building, and can also lead to a greater introspection of the researcher’s own

consumer behavior pattern (see figure 1).

3. By embracing that lifestyles changes amongst both men and women require new

interpretations of wisdom. A case in point is the new insight that gendered research provided into

sexuality and consumption which led to an understanding of romances as soft-core pornography

appealing to women as an integrative effect on their lives (Stern, 1993). Or the study that provided

additional ways of thinking about attitudes toward advertisements by suggesting that gender affects the

consumer’s perception of an advertisement source as credible depending on whether it is perceived as

androcentric or gynocentric (Stern, 1991).

In other words this scholarship can lead to solutions for managers and more theory building, and in doing so can

contribute to the three broad types of knowledge, namely everyday knowledge of thoughts that people have of

their own behavior, scientific knowledge consisting of theories, and interpretive knowledge that provides an

understanding of behavior in terms of a system of ideas (Calder and Tybout, 1987).

To make this model fully dynamic we suggest that not only is more research from the gendered perspective

necessary, but that all three schools of feminist thought need to be represented as they bring with them their own

value: Feminist empiricism needs to pervade the consumer behavior discipline with greater rigor, and be

modeled together with the feminist standpoint epistemology, in that what is to be researched and published in

top journals of the field must take into consideration women as a marginalized group, moreso as the researcher

theorizes only about what has been observed and experienced (Montgomery et al. 1989). The deconstruction and

the continual challenge to the prevailing power structures by feminist postmodernism is also equally important

as a means of preventing feminists from falling prey to dogmatism, ensuring that the organic growth of feminist

epistemology continues and also ensuring that researchers are continually reminded that there is not just one

legitimate way to conceptualize knowledge.

We conclude that the scope of the traditional paradigm can be enlarged by gendered scholarship, which can aid

in preventing our “blind and tacit acceptance” of the existing paradigm (Maguire, 1987: 27) as a single scientific

method for the justification of knowledge claim (Anderson, 1986). Furthermore, gendered scholarship can also

facilitate a better comprehension of the complexities of consumer behavior, which ought not to be reduced to a

narrowly circumscribed, simplistic model (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982). If ignored there is a possibility the

gendered perspective would again be relegated to a sub-discipline, rather than an epistemological construct that

strives to recognize diversity, facilitate social change and also promote epistemic egalitarianism by overcoming

bias.

Acknowledgments: The authors are grateful to Dr P Jetli, Prof M Thakur, Ms J Kattula and to the three peer

reviewers for their critical comments and to Ms S Lall for her assistance in data collection.

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List of Headings

1) INTRODUCTION

1) OPERATIONALIZATION OF TERMS

2) CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

1) FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY

2) What is feminist epistemology

3) Feministic contribution to research methodology

4) Feminist scholarship in consumer behavior

1) DATA COLLECTION

1) DISCUSSION

2) Journal gatekeeping under scrutiny

3) Future directions for research

4) Limitation of study

5) Conclusion
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