Grant McCracken

Trained as an anthropologist (Ph.D. University of Chicago), Grant has studied American culture and business for 25 years.

He has featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and worked for many corporate clients including Coca-Cola Company, Diageo, IBM, IKEA, Chrysler, Kraft, and Kimberly Clark. He started the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, where he did the first museum exhibit on youth cultures.

Grant has taught anthropology at the University of Cambridge, ethnography at MIT, and marketing at the Harvard Business School. He is a long time student of culture and commerce. Many academics prefer to look askance at interactions of culture and commerce. Grant believes this is the secret of American culture. He has explored this theme in two books: Culture and Consumption I, and Culture and Consumption II.

He has also looked at how Americans invent themselves. This helps explain, he thinks, what’s happening in the new media space and properties like Second Life. It also helps him understand Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. He had explored this theme in two more books: Big Hair and Transformations: identity construction in a contemporary culture.

He is a student of American culture. Plenitude published in 1997 looked at the new explosive growth of contemporary culture. In Flock and Flow, he shows how contemporary culture and commerce change.