Methodological nationalism: pitfalls in consumer research and their remedies

An outcome of two hundred years of hegemony of the nationstates in the world is a certain type of blindness that afflicts social sciences, particularly consumer research, and leads to caveats in research designs, analysis, and interpretation. Modern nation-states combine the idea of a culturally unified nation and the idea of a sovereign state that governs it. The lack of problematization in the role of countries as containers of a national culture, often referred to as methodological nationalism, and the assumption that countries are the natural units of analysis when examining macro-cultural processes lead to a number of commonly repeated mistakes, such as naive generalizations and misinterpretation of research findings. The purpose of this article is to discuss the potential implications of methodological nationalism in consumer culture and marketing research and also to identify strategies that allow researchers to avoid or minimize the problems that stem from it. Methodological nationalism is a term coined by Martins (1974), and later used by Smith (2004) and other social scientists. It refers to the "assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world" (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, p. 301). Critics of methodological nationalism argue that it makes certain historical trends and forms of identity completely invisible. Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) extended the debate on methodological nationalism by explaining that it can occur in three different forms: silencing, naturalization and territorial limitation.