Engaging in times of COVID-19 and beyond: theorizing customer engagement through different paradigmatic lenses

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider a broadened suite of paradigmatic lenses to help better understand customer engagement during and beyond COVID-19. During this period of uncertainty and economic downturn, many customers are questioning their ways of living and being, and thus businesses are engaging customers in new and evolving ways. To appreciate this broadened realm of engagement requires researchers and businesses to embrace existential humanism as an alternative, yet complementary, paradigmatic lens.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper. The authors consider three distinct paradigmatic lenses on human (inter)action—economic rationalism, institutionalism and existential humanism—and apply these lenses to deepen the underlying theorizing of the customer engagement concept. Further, the authors illustrate how customers engage with businesses in distinct ways, seeking meaning congruent with the challenges faced during COVID-19.FindingsThe authors argue that the common tripartite model of cognitive, emotional and behavioral customer engagement, typically informed by reductionist and unilateral paradigmatic lenses, is insufficient to understand why customers seek to engage with businesses during and after COVID-19.Originality/valueIn providing a broader paradigmatic perspective, the authors make a plea for a stronger consideration and activation of spiritual engagement in marketing. The current COVID-19 environment challenges extant philosophical assumptions of engagement theorizing, which we address by way of existential humanism. The authors contribute through a more differentiated perspective of engagement, accounting for a broader spectrum of human experience. This enables more informed theorizing across levels of abstraction, while emphasizing diverse avenues for future engagement for a time even beyond COVID-19.

Science Fiction and Psychology

Psychology and Science Fiction goes beyond such incidental observations and engagements to offer an in-depth exploration of science fiction literature’s varied use of psychological discourses, beginning at the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century, and concluding with the ascendance of neuroscience in the late twentieth century. Rather than dwelling on psychoanalytic readings, this literary investigation combines with history of psychology to offer attentive textual readings that explore five key psychological schools: evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, behaviourism, existential-humanism, and cognitivism. The varied functions of psychological discourses in science fiction are explored, whether to popularise and prophesy, to imagine utopia or dystopia, to estrange our everyday reality, to comment on science fiction itself, or to abet (or resist) the spread of psychological wisdom. Psychology and Science Fiction also considers how psychology itself has made use of science fiction in order to teach, to secure legitimacy as a discipline, and to comment on the present.

Angelopoulos and the Time-image

This chapter examines the transition between the ‘politics’ of Theo Angelopoulos' early films and the ‘humanism’ of his later work. Commentators such as David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson have accounted for this change of direction in Angelopoulos' films. Bordwell, for example, notes the shift from a first political phase to one that is more inspired by an existential humanism. Angelopoulos himself declares that after Marxism and Brechtian methods had had their day, he turned to something grounded in humanism and existentialism. The chapter considers Gilles Deleuze's concept of the ‘time-image’ and how it provides a means of distinguishing between two aesthetic modalities by way of their articulations of the past, of time and of memory. It argues that the key distinction is between what Deleuze calls a ‘recollection-image’, and that which he terms ‘pure recollection’. While Angelopoulos' early films are constructed by way of recollection-images, his later films offer pure recollection.