John O'Shaughnessy (academic)


John O'Shaughnessy is a British academic and business writer.
He is emeritus professor of business, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, New York and formerly senior associate of the Judge Institute of Management Studies at Cambridge University. Before going to Columbia in 1967, he was a senior lecturer at Cranfield School of Management. Before entering academia, he had been a marketing manager and an industrial consultant.
O’Shaughnessy taught at Columbia University Graduate School of Business from 1967 to 1993, serving also on the University Senate as well as chairman of the Management division of the school. During his 25-year tenure at Columbia, he supervised both Ph.D. students in his seminar on the Philosophy of Science as well as teaching MBA students on topics ranging from marketing, general management, and business policy. Morris B Holbrook, one of his colleagues, wrote of him that he shared insights with younger members of that faculty “in a spirit of generosity seldom encountered in academia.” He previously taught as senior lecturer at what is now Cranfield University from 1962 to 1967. Latterly he was senior associate at the Judge Institute of Management, Cambridge, and emeritus professor at Columbia. He also taught as a visiting professor at the New School of Economics in Lisbon in Portugal.
Born in England in 1927, O’Shaughnessy served in the education branch of the Royal Air Force in India and the Middle East. He held a number of industrial appointments including a team member in the management services’ unit at British Celanese. Later, he was market research manager and also internal sales’ manager at Tootal Broadhurst Lee. This experience was to influence his subsequent academic study; he was part of the last generation of business school professors to have worked extensively in industry. One of his important contributions was to base sales territories on workload and system of call cycle planning, and this informed his first book, Work Study Applied to a Sales Force. As a consultant he had many clients, including Shell, British Petroleum, Interpublic, IBM, Nestlé, Chester Barrie, Kidder Peabody, Citicorp and the International Labour Office.
O’Shaughnessy's principal contribution lay in three areas. He energized the study of ethno psychology and attempted to switch the focus away from rational decision-making to the study of emotion. He regarded the literature on consumer behavior as generally subservient to models derived from microeconomics and believed this to be, if not an irrelevant path, then certainly a subsidiary one. Rationality was often a post-hoc attempt at a logical justification of what had been an emotional event. Decisions were often made emotionally before any subsequent cognitive elaboration. O’Shaughnessy pursued such a perspective in a number of significant books, including Why People Buy, The Undermining of Beliefs in the Autonomy and Rationality of Consumers, and The Marketing Power of Emotion. The Penguin Dictionary of Marketing described his book Why People Buy as "the first book in marketing to employ hermeneutics in interpreting what consumers say before, during and after buying."
Secondly, O'Shaughnessy sought to apply his learning in the social sciences and philosophy to the study of consumer behavior. This was explored in such works as Explaining Buyer Behavior: Central Concepts and Philosophy of Science Issues, and the 400-page Consumer Behavior: Perspectives, Findings and Explanations. His view of much of the research in business schools was that it was self-referential, relying on business scholarship but failing to embrace and integrate other developments in the social sciences which might better illuminate the phenomena under investigation.
Thirdly, O’Shaughnessy has been a significant advocate of interpretivist approaches to marketing and consumption phenomena, and highly critical of mechanistic models of how decisions are made. His book Interpretation in Social Life, Social Science and Marketing sought to place the idea of interpretation at the core of consumption and marketing research, while rejecting some of the more voguish theories. His scholarly skepticism always intruded, for example, in his article "Post-modernism and marketing: separating the wheat from the chaff", published in the Journal of Macromarketing in 2001.
Over his long publishing career – fourteen books and numerous journal articles – O'Shaughnessy has been the antithesis of the micro-specialist. His was a broad canvas, introducing into academic marketing, often for the first time, concepts and theories from an extensive range of social sciences and philosophy. An abiding theme of his work was his call for methodological pluralism and multiple perspectives. He argued that the social sciences represent different perspectives which provided additional windows onto a problem but they seldom individually offered sufficient explanations. He often joked that academics trained in a specific social science tradition were like someone given a hammer who treats every problem as a nail which needed to be knocked. His books have been translated into eight languages. Morris B. Holbrook wrote of his “brilliantly compendious, beautifully integrated books” which, together with his conversation, “burst with intellectual energy, creative impulses, and unbounded curiosity.”
In general he stood against the over-rationalisation of our understanding of decision-making. Emotion, not reason, was what really mattered in choice – when shopping, when voting and in every other conceivable aspect of the way we live now. This was a romantic rather than an enlightenment understanding of what makes people tick. A restless rebel against intellectual provincialism of business schools, John O’Shaughnessy's work has emerged as a useful corrective to un-interrogated paradigms, norms and habits within the discipline. He would not, as he was fond of saying, offer the truth, but an approach to tracking the truth through multiple perspectives. He was ultimately a perspectivist, and a persuasive advocate of those perspectives he held dear.
John O'Shaughnessy was married for 64 years to Marjorie Jackson by whom he had two sons Nicholas O'Shaughnessy and Andrew O'Shaughnessy.

Publications

He has published 14 books on business topics, two of which, on organization, going back to 1965, are being reissued. He has published in many marketing journals, including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Marketing Science.
Books published by John O’Shaughnessy include: