Neuromarketing in the making: Enactment and reflexive entanglement in an emerging field

Abstract

In: BioSocieties (2015) 10(4): 400--421. Abstract:As the neurosciences make their way beyond the laboratory, they become influential in a wide range of domains. How to understand this process? What are the prospects for, and dynamics of, influence, uptake and rejection? This article reports our attempts to track the emergence of neurosciences with particular reference to the emergence of the field of neuromarketing. Our key initial tasks included the identification and definition of the field, the negotiation of access, and establishing relations with participants and informants. These tasks gave rise to what are often construed as familiar 'methodological difficulties', such as how to define the field and what to make of the reactions and responses of those involved in neuromarketing. In this paper we present some of our experiences of researching the empirical materials of neuromarketing to assess different responses to 'methodological difficulties' in studying science and technologies in the making. We draw on analytic resources provided by Science and Technology Studies (STS) to address the challenge of studying emerging fields of science, practices and technologies. In particular, we draw on the concepts of multiplicity, performativity and practical ontology (Mol, 2002;Law, 2004;Jensen, 2010) to argue that a particular approach to 'methodological difficulties' can actually enrich our research objectives.We suggest that reflexivity be understood, not predominantly as a methodological corrective to the problems of detecting an antecedent object of research; but as revealing some of the ways in which neuromarketing is enacted.Page 3/39 ethnographic distance. We pursue the sense and implications of the suggestion that our problem in answering 'what is neuromarketing?' has to do with its "seemingly paradoxical ontology" as a multiple object (see also Jensen, 2010: 21, on the electronic patient record).By this we mean that neuromarketing is enacted differently by different actors in diverse practices and spaces (cf. Mol, 2002). This seems to pose a paradox in the sense that the technology under study is neither coherent nor consistent (Jensen, 2010: 21). But we suggest that a description of our attempts to confront and manage this 'seeming paradoxical ontology' itself provides a useful resource for revealing key features of the social dynamics of neuromarketing.Based on our fieldwork encounters, this paper aims both to draw on and contribute to themes in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields that highlight the researchers' entanglements with objects and actors they study and follow. In other words, we consider the enactive or performative 1 capacities of our own research practices and theoretical commitments, and how these contribute to the enactment of the realities we set out to understand. At the same time we pay attention to how neuromarketing performs us.This acknowledgement of the ontological politics (Mol, 2002) involved in researching neuromarketing raises new questions. Most notably the ...

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