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Substantiating Byzantium: The role of artifacts in the co‐construction of narratives
Author(s) -
Chronis Athinodoros
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of consumer behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.811
H-Index - 43
eISSN - 1479-1838
pISSN - 1472-0817
DOI - 10.1002/cb.1509
Subject(s) - narrative , materiality (auditing) , sociology , aesthetics , rhetoric , scholarship , exhibition , artifact (error) , narrativity , premise , narrative criticism , consumption (sociology) , epistemology , narrative inquiry , psychology , linguistics , visual arts , art , political science , philosophy , neuroscience , law
Acknowledging the abundance of narrative elements in servicescapes and anchored on the premise that consumption experiences are co‐constructed, this research extends existing servicescapes scholarship by theorizing the role of material objects in the co‐construction of narratives at storyscapes, that is, those servicescapes where narratives are at the center stage of the consumption experience. Using a museum exhibition of Byzantine heritage in Thessaloniki, Greece, the findings provide insight on the way in which consumers engage and “read” material artifacts in narrative co‐construction. The emergent framework theorizes consumer participation as narrative substantiation and sheds light on its four constitutive narrative‐construction processes (completing, relating, recontextualizing, and imagining) and on the ways in which consumers anchor these processes on artifact's materiality (artifactual knowledge, practicalness, intermateriality, and realness). Furthermore, this research offers an alternative approach to the existing language analogy according to which objects have their own voice and rhetoric. I see objects, instead, as contributing an evocative engagement according to which consumers unpack objects not only in their reference to the servicescape narrative but also in reference to their own personal and collective lives. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.