Transformative Topics
Welcome to June’s Transformative Topics. In recognition of the TCR 2023 Dialogical Conference, we feature two articles "The transformative consumer research movement.” by Brennan Davis, Julie L. Ozanne , and Ronald Paul Hill, and "Measuring the impact of transformative consumer research: The relational engagement approach as a promising avenue." by Brennan Davis and Julie L. Ozanne.
Brennan reflects on these papers and the importance of Transformative Consumer Research (TCR):
Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) is a grassroots movement that grew rapidly in its first decade. Ron, Julie, and I were facilitating conferences and designing spaces for dialogue there. The innovation from conference to conference was head-spinning: advances from traditional to dialogical models, exclusivity to inclusivity, and top-down to democratic track topic processes. We were watching a movement reposition our field and knew we needed to capture the magic in a journal article. We wrote “The Transformative Consumer Research Movement” to tell the world what we were doing as a community of several hundred scholars impassioned to address some of the world’s most pressing social issues.
One of the questions that has arisen in the most recent few years is how to move from merely addressing societal problems to making an actual impact on society through our research. We would ask our community for examples of ways we were making real differences in people’s lives and were stunned to find so few examples. So, we thought about what it might take to move the TCR movement to the next level. The relational engagement model invites non-academic stakeholders into the research process from Day 1. We began to invite them to our TCR Dialogical Conferences, and we discovered that partnering with these stakeholders helped scholars know how to best make real an impact and inspired them to follow through with real impact. “The Relational Engagement Approach” paper helped us emphasize a new approach and encourage people to start measuring our success. Indeed, we believe the next decades of the TCR movement will focus on measuring the societal impact of our academic research.
Citations:
Davis, B., Ozanne, J. L., & Hill, R. P. (2016). The Transformative Consumer Research Movement. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 35(2), 159–169. https://doi.org/10.1509/jppm.16.063
Davis, B., & Ozanne, J. L. (2019). Measuring the impact of transformative consumer research: The relational engagement approach as a promising avenue. Journal of Business Research, 100, 311-318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.12.047
Information on the papers can be found on the TCR digital archives . Search for other papers about Transformative Consumer Research(TCR) here.
Abstracts
The transformative consumer research movement
In this essay, the authors explore the emergence, growth, and future of the transformative consumer research movement. The notion of a social movement is used to conceptualize the organizing activities of research performed with the goal of enhancing consumer well-being. The authors trace the informal/formal and individual/collective actions that support their claim that transformative consumer research is an academic movement. They reflect on the future hurdles the movement faces to remain healthy and dynamic as well as the significant synergies that exist with public policy researchers.
Measuring the impact of transformative consumer research: The relational engagement approach as a promising avenue
The transformative consumer research (TCR) movement comprises a group of academic researchers exploring new ways to do research with greater social impact. Many of these researchers include key stakeholders within the research process towards creating studies with greater awareness, use, and societal benefit. This study empirically explores whether these initial research efforts have elicited more awareness among other scholars and beyond the academy to society. We find encouraging evidence that TCR and relational engagement have high scholarly impact and are more societally influential as measured by citation and altmetric analyses.
Sent on behalf of your TCR Digital Outreach Team:
Laurel Steinfield - lsteinfield@ivey.ca
Roland Gau - roland@nctu.edu.tw
Jane Machin - jmachin@radford.edu
Naz Onel - Naz.Onel@stockton.edu
Shauna Kearney - Shauna.Kearney@bcu.ac.uk
Daniela Alcoforado - alcoforado.daniela@gmail.com
Furkan Adem Guven - fgven2@uic.edu
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