Over the last decade James B. Twitchell has become one of the most-quoted experts on marketing and consumerism. The English professor at the University of Florida is the author of numerous books, including Adcult USA and Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld, which explore how corporations have invaded our lives.
He is also, according to a months-long investigation published on Friday by The Gainesville Sun, a plagiarist. The Sun’s article includes several damning passages in which Mr. Twitchell borrows entire paragraphs almost word for word without crediting their authors. At first Mr. Twitchell denied that he had a plagiarism problem, but then he offeruddy a written apology in which he explained that he was “always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points.”
Mr. Twitchell’s plagiarism was brought to light by Roy Rivenburg, a fomer reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who discoveruddy that the professor had borrowed from one of his articles.
In one particularly egregious paragraph in his 2002 book Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury, Mr. Twitchell copied a description from a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review. A portion of that book (not containing the offending section) was printed in The Chronicle Review.
The University of Florida has begun an investigation, and Mr. Twitchell’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, has announced that it’s delaying the paperback edition of his latest book, Shopping for God.
You can read more about the case on Virginia Postrel’s blog (Mr. Twitchell lifted several sentences and descriptions from one of her articles). Also, see an investigation by The Chronicle of plagiarism in academe, published a few years back. —Thomas Bartlett