*John Sherry in Three Eras
*John Sherry Bio
Prologue: Three Eras, Four Projects
As an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, John majored in English and Anthropology. He earned his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Illinois, where he studied expressive culture and processual symbology with the thought of one day becoming a creative writer. A (cruel? kind?) twist of fate prompted him to complete a dissertation on alcoholism and substance abuse in industry. Working as a therapist by day and writing a thesis by night, he envisioned a career unfolding in a medical school, so was primed for interdisciplinary and applied research in an unconventional institutional context. How that context turned out to be a business school and how that unanticipated career unfolded is glossed in the Three Era chronology provided below. His rhizomatic research regime is portrayed in the four projects he has pursued throughout his career: paradigm shifts, ritual, art, and placeways. The evolution of these projects loosely organizes the sessions of his track.
Era I. (Before ND): Cultivating a Field
John began his career in 1982 as a Visiting Professor in the Marketing Department at the University of Florida. Hired by Joel Cohen, with strong assists from Bill Wilkie and Russ Bernard, the brand-new anthropologist was brought in to help extend the reach of the foundational Center for Consumer Research beyond the consumer psychology and information processing paradigms dominant in the day.[Ask us how that worked out over beers.] With tremendous collegial support from current and soon-to be giants of the field, including initial exposure to ACR, John soon learned enough about consumer behavior to be dangerous. His mentors pointed him toward his first research inquiry (gift giving, a subset of ritual) to which an ethnographer might plausibly contribute, and thence to his first publication in JCR.
Moving from Florida to Northwestern University in 1984, John’s eyes were opened to the larger field of Marketing proper and an even broader orientation to research. Under the guidance of Sid Levy and another cast of stellar colleagues, he came to view Marketing as a playground of multidisciplinary (if not interdisciplinary) inquiry, a field site of basic disciplines contributing to understanding and practice. He also began a habit of discovering and joyfully collaborating with insightful, enthusiastic research and industry partners across the 4 Ps. In their company, he also engaged in institution-building at the level of the scholarly society, the journal and the discipline. He participated in the paradigm-defining Consumer Behavior Odyssey, the emergence of Business Anthropology, and the rise of team ethnography. He served as an Advisory and Associate Editor of JCR, as a Conference Co-chair and President of ACR, and as advisory and editorial board member to numerous journals. During this Era, he co-wrote many papers on topics such as gift giving, branding, materiality, embodiment public art, servicescapes and retail theatre.
Era II. (During ND): Riding the Rhizomes
In 2005, John returned to his alma mater as an endowed Chair and Chair of the Marketing Department, where he was surrounded by colleagues (among them, once again, Bill Wilkie) exploring the area of marketing and society. He was proud to co-edit a book on that topic with Pat Murphy that featured the work of department scholars and consolidated Notre Dame’s influence on the area. He continued to help elaborate the CCT paradigm by co-hosting the first CCT conference (at Notre Dame), and becoming the founding President of the CCT Consortium shortly thereafter. The conference is still going strong a quarter-century later, and has yielded multiple published volumes. He also helped deepen insight into market orientation ethnographically. His research into gift giving culminated in the analysis of its central mechanism, sacrifice. He co-authored papers on street art, fashion, luxury and themed flagship brandstores while at Notre Dame, and introduced (with his Northwestern doctoral student and Notre Dame colleague Tonya Bradford) the concept of vestaval to the literature on servicescapes. During this Era he won multiple awards for his publications, and was recognized as a Fellow of ACR in 2021, at the conclusion of his career. Over time, inquiries into apparently disparate contexts and phenomena, guided by a visceral resonance he likened to researcher-as-tuning-fork and a trust in the emergent, root-like logic of inquiry, reliably revealed organic connections and plausible new directions across the variance.
Era III. (After ND): He Finds Himself in a Deep Woods
This gathering marks the fifth year of a retirement John neither anticipated nor prepared for, but that he currently embraces actively and enthusiastically. He is wrapping up old projects, ramping up his writing of creative nonfiction, and devoting more energy to poetry. He imagines targeting anthropology journals to reach new audiences with his work. Mostly he enjoys his unfettered reading time and roaming the north woods of Michigan in the company of his dogs. John continues to contribute to the arts-based research movement in CCT. He looks forward to seeing greater collaboration among CCT researchers and their managerial brethren in such organizations as EPIC. He hopes to see more of his work on ritual infuse the TCR and CRIS movements. He also hopes to see his work on art inspire more inquiry into the experience of beauty in the world. Finally, he hopes his attention to sensuous momentarity encourages researchers to probe more deeply into and represent more evocatively the temporal dimension of consumption. Recalling Seamus Heaney, let “hope and history” rhyme.
John Sherry bio
John F. Sherry, Jr. is an emeritus professor at the University of Notre Dame, renowned for his contributions to marketing and anthropology. He held the Raymond W. & Kenneth G. Herrick Professor of Marketing position and served as Chairman of the Department of Marketing from 2005 to 2014.
Before joining Notre Dame in 2005, Sherry spent two decades at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His research focuses on the sociocultural and symbolic dimensions of consumption and the cultural ecology of marketing. He has conducted research, taught, and lectured globally.
Sherry is a Fellow of both the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. He has served as President of the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium and the Association for Consumer Research and was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. He has edited and authored 10 books and more than 100 articles and chapters.
His academic background includes a Bachelor of Arts in English and Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame (1974) and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1983).
Sherry’s work has significantly influenced the fields of marketing and consumer behavior, particularly through his anthropological approach to understanding consumption.
Professor Sherry has been cited widely across multiple disciplines. Some of his most cited papers are:
- “The sacred and the profane in consumer behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey,”
(with Russ Belk and Melanie Wallendorf), Journal of Consumer Research,1989. - “Teaching old brands new tricks: Retro branding and the revival of brand meaning”
(with Stephen Brown and Rob Kozinets), Journal of Marketing, 2003. - “Gift giving in anthropological perspective,” Journal of Consumer Research, 1983.
- “Fast fashion, sustainability, and the ethical appeal of luxury brands,”
(with (with Annamma Joy, Alladi Venkatesh, Jeff Wang, and Ricky Chan), Fashion Theory, 2012. - “A naturalistic inquiry into buyer and seller behavior at a swap meet,”
(with Russ Belk and Melanie Wallendorf), Journal of Consumer Research, 1988. - “Sociocultural analysis of a Midwestern American flea market,” Journal of Consumer Research, 1990.
- “Speaking of art as embodied imagination: A multisensory approach to understanding aesthetic experience,” (with Annamma Joy), Journal of Consumer Research, 2003.
- “Creating a market orientation: A longitudinal, multifirm, grounded analysis of cultural transformation” (with Gary Gebhardt and Greg Carpenter), Journal of Marketing, 2006.