This paper analyzes the relationship between production and consumption in terms of relational materialism and performativity (Callon 1998; Latour 2005) in “a posthumanist practice theory orientation” (Nicolini 2012): (i) introducing the analogy of “material culture as text” (Olsen 2013); (ii) and considering the practices of institutional work (Lawrence, Suddaby 2006) that connect “human and nonhuman actors” (Carlile et al. 2013) with “institutional dynamics in markets” (Araujo et al. 2010; Dolbec, Fischer 2015). To investigate how things are transformed into (written) discourse and, in general, as the latter builds the relationship between things and texts (“textual approach to things”: de Groot 2009; Olsen 2013), the work takes the form of a case study using an original project by the British Museum as revelatory incident (Belk 1988, 2006). The analogy with the “(re)turn to things” in the evolution of archaeological studies (Shanks, Tilley 1992; Olsen et al. 2012) allows you to reflect on a practice-based approach in marketing studies.
