Dissertations

Dissertations

The adoption of new innovations is the theme that links the selection of doctoral dissertations in this issue. More precisely, each dissertation illustrates the importance of understanding the adoption and diffusion of innovations within their wider cultural and social contexts. Each dissertation involves a historical analysis of the adoption of very different innovations,coffee, supermarkets and surveys.

The Starbucks story has all the ingredients of marketing legend. Howard Schultz failed to persuade his employers at Starbucks, a coffee importing company, that there was a market opportunity for coffee houses dispensing gourmet coffees. He left the company and opened his first coffee house in Seattle eventually buying out his former employer and rebranding his now expanding and successful chain of coffee houses Starbucks. Schultz is accredited with changing and even creating a new coffee culture (Rose, 1996).

Of course the coffee house culture is not a recent invention, particularly in Europe (the famous Viennese coffee houses were locations for Lazarsfeld's pioneering qualitative market research interviews in the 1920s and early 1930s). By contrast with continental Europe, England is not normally associated with coffee house culture yet a dissertation with the intriguing title, The Social Life of Coffee. Commercial Culture and Metropolitan Society in Early Modern England, 1600-1720 (Brian William Cowan, Princeton University, 2000)examines the adoption of coffee and the development of the coffee house in seventeenth century England.

The author argues that the English virtuosi or gentlemanly élite, with their interest in the novel, the strange and the exotic, provided the catalyst for the acceptance of coffee. This elite possessed the cultural capital to legitimate coffee as can efficacious and pleasant drink, thus disassociating it from other exotic drugs such as opium. The virtuosi played a central role also in the early development of the coffee house and its associations with sobriety and learned discourse, which later facilitated its commercialisation and more widespread consumer appeal and patronage in metropolitan London. More generally,Cowan's research provides a fascinating insight into the early development of consumer culture in England.

Tracey Ann Deutsch's (2001) dissertation Making Change at the Grocery Store: Government, Grocers and the Problem of Women's Autonomy in the Creation of Chicago's Supermarkets, 1920-1950 (University of Wisconsin-Madison)examines the transformation of food retailing in the first half of the twentieth century. The author argues that new consumption-oriented laws and regulations and new gender relations shaped the supermarkets' strategies. Thus, it was not simply their lower price appeal that enabled supermarkets to gain widespread acceptance and popularity. The emergence of supermarkets, she argues,represented a transformation in the buying and selling of food, the ways that policymakers governed and the places in which women claimed and exercised power.

There are various historical analyses of the development of social and market research surveys and polls during the early twentieth century. Jean Converse's(1987), Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-1960(Berkeley, University of California Press) represents one of the most detailed accounts of the development of both market research and social surveys. Sarah Elizabeth Igo's (2001) dissertation, America Surveyed: The Making of a Social Scientific Public, 1920-1960 (Princeton University) seems to cover some of the same territory. However, whilst Converse and others have focused on the researchers and research organisations that developed the survey, Igo also provides a perspective from the research subjects.

Igo focuses on three seminal bodies of work, the Lynd's Middletown,Kinsey's reports on sexual behaviour and Gallup and Roper's consumer and political opinion polls. In addition to examining how these studies were undertaken and conclusions developed, Igo explores public reactions to the studies – the ways that Americans argued with, accommodated to and absorbed social data about themselves.

Full details and abstracts for these dissertations can be obtained from the UMI ProQuest Digital Dissertations database, which can be located at http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations

ReferenceRose, J. (1996) "Starbucks: inside the cofee cult", Fortune,vol 134 No. 11 pp. 190-200