Foucault (1977) is well-known for the working of power as a producer of knowledge in society. According to Foucault (1977), power not only produces knowledge but power also serves and applies knowledge in a wide range of spaces from self-discipline to relationships with other individuals and public institutions in society. In this way, a Foucauldian understanding of power-knowledge relationship enable us to understand and justify how
73 power constitutes our behaviour, our relationships with others and the rules that are taking place in different social settings from prisons to churches to schools and hospitals. For Foucault (1977), any social setting is a ‘field of experience/ action’ which is controlled, produced, reproduced and modified by a ‘power game’ through knowledge available to us which in turn constitutes what should be perceived as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ in that setting, or what justifies why order of things in a situation should dictate as A rather than B or C as possible alternatives.
Some examples from the works of Foucault (1977) might explain to some of us why it is just acceptable to keep people categorised as inmates under observation in public institutions such as prisons or hospitals. Foucault (1977), therefore in these examples, help us to understand how we perceive power as helpful to maintain or reward normal behaviour and prevent or punish abnormal behaviour in our pursuit of an efficient society. Such exercise of power by which public organisations discipline abnormal behaviour is not only about how we accept the effect of power on others. Rather, power as conceptualised by Foucault (1977) also maintain self-discipline since we need to understand how we view a certain behaviour as normal or abnormal (i.e. defiant) in our society. In this sense, a criminal would be self-disciplined in terms of submission to consequences or punishment towards his or her criminality.
The inseparable power-knowledge produce effect in markets and spaces of consumption in the same way it affects behaviour and spaces of social relationships. Building on the works by Foucault (1977) it would be possible to understand consumer power in terms of knowledge available to consumers in many aspects from their relationships with producers (i.e. marketers) to products and ‘order of things’ in the marketplace. It would be also possible to understand that normal and abnormal consumer behaviour may not only defined
74 according to how knowledge is created or advocated by producers (e.g. rules and terms).
But consumers (as social actors) can also influence how knowledge informs perception of normal or abnormal behaviour in spaces of consumption.
Traditionally, consumer power has been linked to consumers’ knowledge through the selection of products they purchase for their consumption. Apparently, many published academic works over the past decades have focused on consumers’ knowledge in terms of how consumers evaluate products and services available to them in the marketplace (e.g.
Alba and Marmorstein,1987; Andaleeb and Basu,1995; Park et al.,1994; Rao and Monroe,1988). Researchers often examine consumer knowledge through comparisons of consumers’ experiences and familiarity with products (Cordell, 1997), consumers’ individual perspectives (Ratchford, 2001) and evaluation of consumer alternatives (Capraro et al., 2003). Cordell, (1997), for instance, measures consumer knowledge in terms of product evaluation through a comparison of consumers’ familiarity (i.e. subjective expertise) to their objective expertise of products in the marketplace. Objective expertise is found to be a better predictor than familiarity and subjective expertise in terms of product evaluation in the marketplace. Likewise, Schaefer (1997) evaluates consumer knowledge through comparisons of various dimensions that impact on consumers’ use of the country of origin in the evaluations of alcoholic beverages. However, Schaefer (1997), in contrast to the findings by Cordell (1997), suggests that neither brand familiarity nor objective or subjective product knowledge have effect on consumers’ use of the country of origin cue in product evaluations in the context of alcoholic beverages.
Ratchford (2001) evaluates consumers’ knowledge through comparison of what he referred to as the ‘economic perspective’ of products with other search perspectives (i.e. life cycle consumption patterns, lifestyles, brand loyalty, choice of features, and search behaviour).
75 Results by Ratchford (2001) shows that consumers learn by doing and focus their consumption and search for products in ways that increase the impact of their accumulated expertise. Capraro et al. (2003) evaluate consumers’ knowledge through comparisons of alternatives available to customers in the context health insurance services. Results by Capraro et al. (2003) suggest that the level of objective and subjective knowledge of consumers has a direct effect on the evaluations of alternatives in the health insurance beyond consumers’ satisfaction.
Overall, findings from comparisons of consumer knowledge in the context of products evaluations illustrates that a consumer never is disciplined by knowledge created, distributed and advocated by producers. Consumers use information provided by producers to individualise products in line with their expectations and consumption experiences. Thus, consumers are able to modify fields of consumption through subjective and objective expertise of knowledge about products in much the same way producers constitute the spaces of consumption and consumer behaviour in those spaces.
Researchers refer to different consumer subjectivities which results from the variation of knowledge available to consumers. For example, Clarkson et al. (2013) notes that consumers seek different types of consumption experiences which is determined by level of experiential knowledge within a product category. Clarkson et al. (2013) propose two groups of consumers who seek different consumption experiences in a product category: ‘novices’
who diversify their consumption experiences to broaden their consumer knowledge and
‘experts’ who focus their consumption experiences to deepen consumer knowledge. The classification by Clarkson et al. (2013) could be viewed as a simplified perspective on the subjective and objective variations in terms of consumers’ knowledge, but such classification might help marketing practitioners to define different groups of consumers based on how
76 knowledge is sought by those consumers rather than how knowledge is constituted by producers. But most importantly, this classification by Clarkson et al. (2013) might help us to understand how the variation of consumer knowledge could mean different subjectivities (i.e. representations) of consumers.
Similar to Clarkson et al. (2013), Jin et al. (2014) proposes two groups of consumers who rely on different judgments or justifications for variations in prices: high-power status consumers who perceive stronger price unfairness when paying more than other consumers and low-power status consumers who perceive stronger unfairness when paying more than they themselves paid in previous transactions. So this proposition by Jin et al. (2014) also help us to understand the subjective differences between consumers and how their perception of knowledge/power affect their behaviour in the marketplace. But actually this work by Jin et al. (2014) begs a question of whether those consumers make assumptions about unfairness in prices based on knowledge or it is perception of power that drive the way by which knowledge about unfairness in prices is constituted by those consumers. The results from Jin et al. (2014) show that the state of power/knowledge determines consumers' perception of self-importance in connection to normality/abnormality in the marketplace. So this again bring us to the main premise of Foucault’s argument regarding the relationship between power and knowledge in society. Indeed, this work by Jin et al. (2014) is a good example which illustrate that power not only serves knowledge but it is also implied in knowledge and the creation of norms and rules in fields of action (i.e. the marketplace).