The New Consumer Online: A Sociology of Taste, Audience, and Publics
Edward F. McQuarrie
London: Edward Elgar, 2015
Back Story
This book has special meaning for me because it marks the end of the first phase of my life as a scholar, and the beginning of a new phase, which might turn out to be a second phase of scholarship, but which might instead launch a new, post-scholarly writing phase. Time will tell.
The book consists of three essays. Each started life as a standard attempt (during my first scholarly phase) to construct a paper that would pass muster at a peer-reviewed journal. Had these attempts gone smoothly, or at least not been too tumultuous, the book would never have been written. I might still be extending that first phase of my scholarship. I might not even have retired.
The underlying projects were launched around 2010. I had finally gotten excited enough about the new age of the Web to want to do research on how consumers were affected by such new phenomena as blogs, online reviews, social media, and the like. Taking each essay in turn:
- Fashion blogs
This essay started life as a paper aimed at the Journal of Consumer Research, where it did finally appear—after what felt like endless grief. A total of seven iterations were required to get the manuscript accepted. In concrete terms, that meant receiving six emails saying revise and resubmit, revise and resubmit, revise and resubmit, revise and resubmit, revise and resubmit, revise and resubmit; to get to that one final email containing the word “accepted.” Stamina plays an under-appreciated role in academic publishing success. We outlasted the first review team and survived a change in editor. It was grueling.
If you put the book essay and the journal paper side by side, you will see that, after setting aside findings, the book essay is much longer. But almost every paragraph unique to the essay represents material initially written for the journal paper, and then discarded, as we scrambled to address reviewer objections, producing revision after revision. The bulk of what is new in the essay thus consists of material retrieved from the cutting room floor.
I found it excruciating, to write what I believed to be a contribution to the topic, and then to have to throw that material away. Again. And again. To conceive the thought, to hone its expression, and then have to trash it, over and over—it just about broke me.
In the end, the effort it took to get this paper published broke me free of the notion that writing papers for peer-reviewed journals was the highest and best use of my time. I began to separate from academia. But I hadn’t yet decided to stop writing for scholarly journals altogether.
- Yelp and online reviews
Only with the second essay did I get to the point of “you can take this peer-reviewed journal publication gig and _____ “
By 2010 Yelp had emerged as a leader among providers of online reviews. Yelp also presented an opportunity to collect interesting and novel kinds of data, different from the self-reported rating scales used in experiments and surveys. Yelp published numerical and text data on review objects, and a good bit of historical data regarding each reviewer’s activity. It appeared to us to offer an enormous archive.
Several projects were launched off our Yelp data collections, and two were written up for journal submission. The first effort was rejected at four different journals across four different sub-fields; by the end, this took the form of a desk reject at a not highly rated journal—i.e., the fruits of all that labor were judged not even good enough to send out for review, at a journal that was way down my list of publication outlets. Proceeding in parallel, the second effort got rejected at two different journals across two different sub-fields. I’m sure I could have got it rejected at several more journals, but by then, the fight had gone out of me.
As these rejections accumulated, coming not too long after the grueling grind endured with the fashion blog paper, it slowly dawned on me: the things I wanted to write, and the intellectual contributions that seemed meritorious to me, were not anymore what journals in my field wanted to publish. Although I could be deluding myself, I decided the Yelp papers were not getting rejected because fatally flawed, or because the contribution was insufficient; they were rejected because they were the wrong kind of paper for the outlets to which they had been sent.
Journals want theory and equations; I wanted to hold up this new-to-the-world phenomenon for examination and scrutiny in depth. Journals strive to deepen their silos (editors may claim otherwise, but the facts are what they are); but Yelp didn’t fit into any silo.
The Yelp projects marked the beginning of the end of my commitment to publish in the prestigious peer-reviewed journals that had been required to earn tenure and promotion at my university.
Yelp gave the push; and then Pinterest came along to provide the final pull.
This essay did get published, and on the third try, so that it gave somewhat less grief than the first two. But to get it published in a journal, my co-author (whom I’ll give a shout out for her tough-mindedness) first had to convince me to drop all the material that I liked best and thought made the most novel intellectual contribution. If you put the journal paper and this essay side by side, you can readily identify that material.
That realization killed any further motivation to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Plus, it was so much more enjoyable to write up these essays in book form than it had been to construct papers to withstand the slings and arrows of an outrageous review process. Plus further, another editor had dropped by my office shortly before, Alan Sturm of Edward Elgar. Remembering how important Harry Briggs had been in launching me as a book author, I made sure to keep Alan’s card.
It was even more satisfying to write The New Consumer Online than it had been to write the Market Research Toolbox and Customer Visits.
And so, you may see me write more scholarly books (see the page on Visual Branding), but are unlikely to see my name on a peer reviewed journal article dated after 2016.
Whether there is a more general problem with peer review, beyond my recent vicissitudes, is an interesting question, about which I may blog. In the meantime, McQuarrie (2014) may be relevant.