The scalar politics of difference: Researching consumption and marketing outside the west

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between knowledge hierarchies and sociospatial ordering of the world and, in doing so, to problematize the ways we study and understand consumption and marketing outside the West. By sociospatial ordering of the world, I refer to scalar divisions that organize and mobilize hierarchical perceptions of the world. Adopting a view of scale as a way of knowing and apprehending the world, I trace the origins, uses and effects of three scales – Third World, non-Western and emerging markets – that organize and inform research about marketing and consumption outside the West. Each of these scales indicates an imagined distance from an assumed central point and mobilizes visions that order and organize not only places, but knowledge produced in and about these places. I show that these scalar configurations are neither neutral nor transparent designations, but politically charged, sociospatial constructions that privilege certain representations, meanings and identifications over others. In the process, they shape knowledge production, permitting particular forms of difference – absence, plurality and excess – to take shape, circulate and gain legitimacy. I conclude by discussing the possibility of a notion of difference that does not rest on a negative comparison between two entities but is generative, affirmative and non-hierarchical.