Consumption and Identity

Jonathan Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9783718655915
• eBook ISBN: 9781135305420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2004. Studies in Anthropology and History is a series that will develop new theoretical perspectives, and combine comparative and ethnographic studies with historical research. Volume fifteen and this is about the relation between consumption and broader cultural strategies. The papers are the product of a workshop organized in Denmark under the aegis of the Center for Research in the Humanities which took place in 1989. While the majority of participants were anthropologists, there were also sociologists and historians present.

CHAPTER ONE

Capitalism, Consumption and the Problem of Motives

Some Issues in the Understanding of Conduct as Illustrated by an Examination of the Treatment of Motive and Meaning in the Works of Weber and Veblen*

Colin Campbell

INTRODUCTION

The he necessity of according a central role to typical patterns of motivation in their explanations of the workings of capitalism and the events surrounding the Industrial Revolution was recognized by most of the major social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whether their focus was on production or consumption. In the case of both Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen, for example, certain distinctive motives (or complexes of motives) are identified as lying at the heart of the conduct which in the one case prompted entrepreneurs and workers to adopt modern attitudes toward work and money making, and in the other prompted the newly affluent to engage in the continuous consumption of luxury goods. They were, of course, not alone in this and other theorists of the time also stressed the necessity of understanding the motives which impelled people to engage in economic activities, although the factors which drove individuals to work received far more attention than the impulses considered to lie behind consumption. Not all these theorists consciously made explicit use of the concept of motive, but even those who did not, like Marx (perhaps the most notable exception), can be seen to have encountered the necessity of drafting in other terms, (in his case ‘interests’, ‘ideology’, ‘praxis’ and ‘false consciousness’), to play a similar role in the overall explanatory scheme.¹ However, whether they were explicitly stated or merely constituted a taken-forgranted framework for analysis, assumptions about motives can be said to have been an essential part of all theories of capitalism, the market and modern economic life.

What is immediately noticeable, however, is that these various theories do not all emphasize the same motives, even when dealing with identical forms of conduct Sombart, for example, saw the underlying urge to consume new luxury goods as lying in eroticism,² whilst Veblen considered that it stemmed from envy of the rich and an associated desire to engage in emulative behavior.³ Similarly, in considering the activities of entrepreneurs, Marx tended to stress the importance of material self-interest, whilst Weber focused on the role of religiously-inspired ideas of duty and the associated need for reassurance of election. Whilst these varying accounts are not all irreconcilable (or at least with a little ingenuity it might be possible to render some of them compatible), the fact remains that different theorists have emphasized contrasting motives in their separate accounts of the same phenomenon.

Although the merits of these competing theories of capitalism have been extensively debated, surprisingly little attention has been specifically directed at resolving these differences. Hence what might be called the problem of motives still awaits resolution through a comprehensive programme of research aimed at adjudicating between the rival claims. However, it is also clear that these differences stem, at least in part, from contrasting theoretical and methodological assumptions over the concept of motive and its role in constructing explanations of human conduct, and hence that any serious attempts to resolve this problem requires that these issues should constitute the initial focus of inquiry. Thus, the merits of the claims advanced in favor of one motive rather than another are, in the long run, less important than the manner in which the motivational understanding of conduct is itself conceived. For this will naturally tend to determine both how the nature and content of motives is established, and how these are related to those encompassing systems of subjective meaning which are constituted as values and beliefs. The focus of this discussion will thus be on the contrasting treatment accorded to the concept of motive in the works of two of the major theorists of capitalism, Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen, in the hope that such a discussion will shed some light on how social theorists and historians should best approach capitalism and ‘the problem of motives’.

THE MOTIVATIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF CONDUCT

Before examining the treatment of motives in the works of these theorists it is worth reviewing the grounds for insisting on the importance of motivational forms of explanation of historical events and for rejecting the claim that understanding can be obtained without any reference to subjective meaning. This involves answering some important questions. Is it really the case, for example, as Collingwood has claimed, that to explain actions it is always necessary to ‘discern the thoughts’ of agents,⁴ and hence that the principal task of any investigator (whether historian or social scientist) must be to seek to discover the operative subjective meanings of actors. And that in addition since no historical account can be formulated which does not involve the claim that certain individual human actions took place that this also necessarily includes some presuppositions concerning the nature of the operative motives. A claim which, it has been suggested, applies as much to collectivities such as nations, social classes or organizations, as to individuals.⁵ For example, is it really not possible to understand the economic conduct of individuals and hence the processes underlying the Industrial Revolution without recourse to an investigation into those subjective meanings which accompanied behaviour? Cannot the system of capitalism be grasped as a whole and understood in terms of its own inherent logic? Or alternatively, is it not possible, through observation alone, to obtain an adequate grasp of the meaning which is attached to the conduct of individuals?⁶

To begin by tackling the last question first, there is general agreement that some considerable portion of human conduct cannot be understood by reference to subjective meanings. This generally comes under the heading of ‘behaviour’ and covers obviously unwilled and unintended acts such as reflexes like kneejerks or sneezing. As Weber observes, this is ‘merely reactive behaviour to which no subjective meaning is attached’ and is therefore in marked contrast to action which is defined as ‘all human behaviour when and in so far as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it’.⁷ Obviously it follows from this that proper interpretive or motivational understanding can only be applied to action, with behaviour of necessity the subject matter of observer-style causal explanations. This, however, still leaves the essentially problematic and difficult task of deciding, in relation to any particular event or item of conduct, how far it would be correct to view it as ‘action’ or ‘behaviour’. For, although there is little dispute over the extremes (rarely is sneezing regarded as ‘action’ or playing chess treated as ‘behaviour’,⁸ what Weber describes as ‘a very considerable part of all sociologically relevant behaviour’ is ‘marginal between the two’.⁹ Significantly however, in the light of the present discussion, economic conduct is one category of human behaviour which most social theorists seem happy to label ‘action’ in this sense: indeed, for some, including Weber himself, in its inherent rationality it represents the quintessential form of action. Despite this, it is important to recognize that this may not always and everywhere be the case and that some instances of economic conduct might not be informed by much in the way of accompanying subjective meaning but, in the form of habitual or traditional practices, approximate to ‘behaviour’. However, even here there is the presumption that such conduct probably originated as action and hence that the process of understanding might require some attempt to recover these initiating meanings.

There is a marked difference, however, between accepting that some portion of human conduct is behaviour and endorsing the claim that all human conduct should be approached as if it fell into this category. This is the central tenet of behaviourism, a movement which was itself a reaction against the excessive reliance upon introspection by earlier generations of psychologists and ‘armchair’ social theorists. Although this has never been a prominent tradition of thought within history it has been an important strand within social thought and especially so at the turn of the century when biological and evolutionary versions of this perspective prevailed. Veblen, as we shall see, was among those who were influenced by these ideas. Today, behaviourism has little support within the social sciences, whilst even within psychology the cognitive revolution has meant that thought is once more a respectable topic for study.¹⁰

A much more significant challenge to the interpretivist tradition of inquiry has been mounted in recent decades by Wittgensteinianen inspired perspectives which, whilst accepting that meaning is the principal subject matter of academic inquiry, have sought to locate it within the social context of action rather than within the individual. Here the central claim is that the meaning of an action can be found in the rules or norms which govern the situation of its occurrence. Hence the ‘meaning’ to be attached to the motorist’s movement of his arm is understood to be a signal of his intention to turn right because ‘if a man driving a car extends his arm in the proper manner he has signaled whether he intended to or not’, and consequently, ‘if the right performance transpires under the right circumstances, the act has occurred’.¹¹

Similarly, whether a man’s act in putting a ring on the finger of a woman signifies marriage or not depends, not on his subjective motive in performing this act, but on the context in which it takes place. To extrapolate from these examples to the economic system which is capitalism, it could be said that the ‘meaning’ of such processes as the production, distribution or consumption of goods is not to be found in the minds of industrialists, retailers or consumers but in the institutional settings in which these actions occur. Such an argument clearly has much force and it is obvious that in the processes of learning about an alien or unfamiliar culture any investigator would need to discover precisely just such rules in order to be able to discern ‘what is going on’. Yet this form of ‘explicating meaning’ is also very limited, consisting essentially of little more than a process in which actions are identified or labelled. For whilst it enables the analyst to conclude that this item of behaviour is a signal or that item is a marriage ceremony, there is no accompanying account of the conduct in purposive terms. Thus precisely why the driver wished to turn right or the man in question become a husband remains a mystery To this extent, the ethnomethodological tradition of inquiry, whilst facilitating a general cultural mapping of conduct, fails to provide an explanation in terms of a personal, goal-directed and motivated model of action. It is in this respect reminiscent of what Weber referred to as the ‘direct observational understanding’ of action,¹² a process in which the observer draws upon an existing stock of knowledge in order to interpret actions, a stock of knowledge in which familiarity with the rules plays a central part. Thus Weber states ‘that we…understand by direct observation…the meaning of the proposition 2Ü2=4 when we hear or read it’. ¹³

Now there is no particular reason why capitalism should not be ‘understood’ in a similar fashion. For just as we can comprehend the meaning of mathematical equations once we have mastered the underlying axioms so too may we grasp the internal logic which binds various institutional practices. The relationship between private property, for example, (especially as represented by the joint stock company) and consumer sovereignty, the free market, and the price mechanism may indeed be understood in this manner. To that extent, capitalism, like any distinct sociocultural entity, may be described meaningfully without recourse to either motives in particular or subjective meaning in general. Indeed it is precisely because this is true that the nature of the phenomenally operative meanings which did in practice accompany such conduct in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and North America has to be regarded as problematic. For the forms of economic conduct essential to the workings of capitalism do not logically require the presence of any one particular set of motives to be present. What is central to the system is conduct which is characterized by certain specific intentions, such as profit-seeking, or utility maximization, rather than any specific motives.¹⁴ But Weber goes on to contrast ‘observational understanding’ with ‘explanatory understanding’, a process which does involve comprehending in terms of motive the meaning an actor attaches to the propositions twice two equals four, when he states it or writes it down, in that we understand what makes him do this at precisely this moment and in these circumstances’ (italics in original). He continues:

Understanding in this sense is attained if we know that he is engaged in balancing a ledger or in making a scientific demonstration, or is engaged in some other task of which this particular act would be an appropriate part. This is rational understanding of motivation, which consists in placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning¹⁵

He then provides his famous examples, observing that we understand the chopping of wood or aiming of a gun in terms of motive in addition to direct observation if we know that the woodcutter is working for a wage or is chopping a supply of firewood for his own use, or possibly is doing it for recreation.¹⁶ Now the important feature of Weber’s concept does not lie simply in placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning as he states, but rather in the fact that this context is personal and psychological in character. For whilst it is true that perceiving the significance of an act in terms of its position in a meansends chain is to extend our understanding, unless it is obvious how that chain connects with the actor’s pattern of personal gratifications, the character of our comprehension is merely intentionalist and not motivational. Thus, although it is useful to know that the clerk is balancing a ledger or that the woodcutter is an employee this knowledge in itself tells us nothing about motive only about intention. To understand such items of conduct ‘motivationally’ requires that we relate the actions to the goals and desires of those who undertake them, to outcomes which are desired for their own sake and not simply as means to a further end. Motivational understanding thus involves connecting conduct to psychological states and especially to patterns of gratification. In this sense it goes one step beyond mere intentionalist understanding by dealing with what the action in question ‘signifies’ for the actor. Hence whilst we may know the ‘meaning’ of an act we may not know what it signifies personally unless we know how the achievement of a particular result relates to the hopes, fears and wishes of the individual. Thus it is crucial to the process of motivational understanding that one gains insight into what are the critical goals in question. Obviously the clerk is adding up columns of figures in order to balance a ledger, but is that an important goal in his life? Does succeeding in balancing the books provide him with a significant sense of personal achievement? A goal which he looks forward to eagerly? Or is it merely one more tiresome chore to be got out of the way before he...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine