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PATRICK WEHNER Project title: "Marketing, Media, and the Discovery of Consumer Lifestyles"
My research traces the emergence of "lifestyles" as both a model of identity and a way of imagining markets and audiences. I am currently documenting the network of marketing experts and academics that helped popularize this elusive notion in the 1950s and 1960s. These research entrepreneurs proposed that ethnographic studies of consumer "lifestyles" could help business leaders devise strategies in response to a burgeoning "middle-income class" that made many of the conventional wisdoms of marketing appear suspect. I am also exploring the question of how media professionals came to regard "lifestyles" as a useful means of imagining the cracks and contours of social life in the U. S. What cultural changes inspired reporters, editors, producers, and publishers to embrace "lifestyles" as a category of news coverage in the 1970s and 1980s? How do media decisionmakers use this notion to understand and classify their audiences today? Beyond these historical investigations, I anticipate that the studies being conducted by researchers at the MARIAL Center will raise further questions about the degree to which Americans today define themselves in terms of "lifestyle." How, for example, is the lifestyle imagery of advertising reconciled with family rituals that have traditionally served as a basis for identity? To what extent have lifestyles become part of our definitions of community and our perception of everyday life in the United States?
"No Place
Like Home? Media Audience Research and Its Social Imaginaries"
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