Shopping, Place and Identity

Peter Jackson, Michael Rowlands, Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134733910
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Engages in key debates in contemporary consumption and identity studies, yet presents a firmly grounded study that will complement the more speculative writing about shopping, place and identity that has developed in recent years.

1

CONSUMPTION AND SHOPPING

Introduction

Not so long ago, consumption was an academic outcast, rarely mentioned except in passing by any but a few authors who had usually stumbled across the work of writers such as Simmel and Veblen. Then came a period of expansion which, not entirely accidentally, coincided with a major consumer boom in many countries around the world. This period of expansion produced a number of canonical studies – works such as Douglas and Isherwood's The World of Goods (1979), McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb's The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982), Appadurai's The Social Life of Things (1986), Miller's Mass Consumption and Material Culture (1987), and Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987) – which became the intellectual basis of the study of consumption. Diverse as these works were in Character and style, they all agreed on three things: first, the paucity of theoretical or empirical research on consumption; second, the diversity of the social relations involved in consumption which made the category into, at best, a catch-all and, at worst, a confusion; and third, the need to consider consumption through many different kinds of social relations: gender, kinship, ethnicity, age, locality, and so on.

We are now faced with the fruits of a first generation of empirical studies of consumption, all the way from collecting to car boot sales and from catalogue shopping to party selling (Clarke 1997; Crewe and Gregson 1997), and with a profusion of theoretical frameworks, all the way from psychoanalysis to pragmatism (Bocock 1993). The problem is no longer that consumption is an unknown topic but that it is, in some senses, known too well: the unorthodox has become a new orthodoxy with all the problems that entails.

Of course, this trajectory is hardly unique. A number of other recent academic subcultures have followed much the same path, for example media studies and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Academic subcultures like these can even be characterised in some of the same ways as the study of consumption. They are fundamentally interdisciplinary. They are unsure of their exact focus; therefore they debate endlessly their central terms. And they have come to be seen as particularly concerned with different kinds of knowledge and with the nature of the object.

How, then, can we understand modern consumption studies, and, most especially, the place of shopping as a crucial element of such studies? This chapter is a critical review of work in this field. To this end, it is in four sections. The first is a brief history of the study of consumption in three stages, highlighting the issues raised by each stage of work. The second then considers shopping itself. Here, the concern is both with the sheer diversity of approaches to shopping that are possible and with beginning to develop the framework which informs the work in this book. The third section then considers the issues of place and identity as vital determinants of modern consumption. In the final section, the four different threads of consumption, shopping, place and identity are brought together again through a consideration of the literature on shopping malls.

A brief history of the study of consumption

Writing a brief history of modern work on consumption is not easy. Studies of consumption have taken diverse approaches to an almost bewildering set of topics, all set within a number of disciplinary frames, each with their own procedures and protocols (Miller 1995). This section identifies three main stages of work, a first stage which covers the period from the 1960s to the late 1970s; a second stage which covers the period from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s; and a third stage which covers the most recent period of time. As with all such chronicles, this one is necessarily rough and ready.

The first stage

Let us begin by harking back to the early days of research on consumption. Why did ‘consumption’ become a rallying call for so many researchers? Four main reasons come to mind. First, a whole new landscape of consumption was coming into view: not just the supermarket (in Britain chiefly a product of the 1960s) but the retail warehouse park and the shopping mall (of which Brent Cross was the first real British example). Second, there was the implicit opposition to production. Consumption could therefore stand for many things – as an implicit critique of what were perceived to be productionist approaches (such as in Marxism); as the mark of a shift in the nature of production towards new times; or as an index of the decline of production-based working-class cultures and the rise of consumption-based middle-class cultures. Third, and relatedly, consumption was a way of gently introducing concerns about culture into social sciences still often dominated by approaches based on political economy. After all, consumption was still recognisably ‘economic’, wasn't it? Fourth, consumption, and especially advertising, provided a playground of interpretation for intellectuals in the humanities who, through the medium of cultural studies, were moving into the social sciences. These concerns of the humanities came together most obviously in the work on subcultures which were often identified with and through particular consumer objects (Willis 1975; Hebdige 1979).

The second stage

The second stage was one in which the study of consumption came to take on its own independent dynamic, becoming a recognisable subfield of a number of disciplines. Independence was declared in a number of ways.

First, consumption was cast adrift from production. Consumption became a world of its own, bolstered especially by the work of Bourdieu and de Certeau who became the all-purpose patron saints of consumption, with Bourdieu's (1984) consumer categorisations ameliorated by de Certeau's (1986) emphasis on amorphous, dynamic and flexible consumer ‘tactics’.

Second, consumption became deeply implicated in discussions of the construction of subjectivity, most especially the construction of self and identity (Willis 1991; Nava 1992). Using a variety of theoretical frameworks, from social constructionism to psychoanalysis, consumer objects could be positioned as key elements of the construction of a whole range of selves and identities and most especially sexual and ethnic identities (Wilson 1992; Reekie 1993; Jackson 1994; Swanson 1995).

Third, practices which could legitimately be regarded as aspects of consumption proliferated. Consumption came to include practices like consumer festivals (Miller 1993), collecting (Belk 1995), catalogue shopping, new age shopping, and the like.

Fourth, an accepted natural history of consumption took shape which, identifying consumption as a key characteristic of modernity, described an arc from the arcades and department stores of Paris through to the shopping malls of the United States. Most specifically, consumption was interpreted as a part of the specular moment of modernity (Bowlby 1993; Pred 1995). Vision becomes the key sense because western societies are characterised by an excess of display which has the effect of concealing the truth of the society that produces it, providing the consumer with an endless supply of images that can be understood as either detached from the real world of real things – as Debord (1966) implies – or as simply working to efface any trace of the symbolic, condemning the consumer to a world in which everything can be seen but nothing can be understood (Cooke and Wollen 1995). The connections to the masculine gaze were quickly made (Bowlby 1985).

Then, fifth and finally, the study of consumption becomes increasingly integrated with and tied to spaces and places. In line with a general increase in interest in space and spatial metaphors, more and more attention was paid to particular consumption spaces which were no longer seen as just passive backdrops but as spaces with their own properties which could intervene in the construction of difference. These spaces could therefore be studied for their own sake and not just as examples of more general processes (Glennie and Thrift 1992).

These five articles of a newly independent constitution formed the core of research into consumption in the second stage. However, like all such articles, they have proved open to revision. These revisions have formed the substance of the third stage. In this third stage, what we see is a growth in work on consumption, a parallel extension of work on consumption into new areas and, not surprisingly, the growth of doubts about previous writings on consumption as the results of this new research are digested.

The third stage

As in the second stage, there are five main issues. The first is, perhaps surprisingly, production and distribution. Many commentators feel that second-stage writings too often ignored the role of production and distribution, leading to both a lack of emphasis on the role of producers and distributors and an equal lack of emphasis on the role of consumers’ choices on producers and distributors. Two particular illustrations of these lacunae are in order. First, there is the role of the workforce in shops and stores – from sales assistants to security staff to the managers and administrators, which is widely ignored even though they are an integral part of many forms of consumption. For example, du Gay (1996) shows the way in which sales assistants in one department store negotiated competing pressures from managers (who had become more intent on principles of consumer service), from within the workforce (for example, the fact that ‘concessions’ staff were able to wear clothes they had chosen themselves while all other staff had to wear uniforms was a source of friction) and from more and more demanding consumers. For many sales staff the increasing emphasis on the consumer had taken place directly at their expense, by providing them with less and less latitude at work. In turn, this diminished their sense of ‘ownership’ of the store:

We're us and they're them, yeah. What they don't seem to understand is that we're customers too. We go shopping too. It's almost like they think we're slaves. We don't leave here but go into a little corner where there's beds and we go to sleep there and get up the next morning and come out in the shop … There's no idea amongst the customers that we're just at work.

(shop assistant cited in du Gay, 1996: 160)

At the same time, the emphasis on the sovereign consumer has, if anything, made the ‘face work’ of sales skills more important in many retail organisations, leading to more and more systematic attempts to inculcate such skills into the workforce, a development which, to an extent at least, the workforce often ‘resists’, for example through ‘backstage’ irony and mockery (Crang 1995; Crewe and Lowe 1996). Then, second, there are the major organisational changes going on in certain parts of the economy which are leading to greater and greater ‘demand pull’ (Lowe and Wrigley 1996). In particular, in countries like Britain and the United States, retailers have often become more and more powerful at the expense of producers.¹ In turn, this new relationship means that consumers are more able to directly register their changing preferences on producers which, in turn, have to rapidly adjust their output. For example, Cook and Crang (1996) show how Euro–American consumer preferences for exotic fruits have in turn produced far-reaching effects on producers in the countries that export these fruits (see also the papers in Howes 1996).

Another concern of the third stage is the emphasis on not just the consuming subject but also on the consumer object in the belief that ‘taking artefacts, images and performances as quasi-texts is to overlook their most fundamental properties so far as users and witnesses might be concerned’ (Journal of Material Culture 1996: 8). What exactly is the relationship of the subject and object in consumption? There are a number of views of how this ‘in-between’ relationship might be framed so as to produce a better sense of the object world. In one of these, which follows the work of Merleau-Ponty, the intention is to formulate a phenomenological knowledge which mobilises notions such as ‘the flesh’ and a metaphorics of touch in an attempt to capture the intimate, sensual aspect of the subject–object relationship (Game 1991; Grosz 1994). In practice, this means concentrating in particular on the different mediations through which the subject experiences the object, and vice versa. In another view, which follows the work of Benjamin, subject and object are confounded by a tacit, everyday knowledge: ‘the tasks facing the perceptual opportunities at turning points in history, cannot be asserted, be solved by … contemplative means but only gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation’ (Taussig 1992: 12). In particular, Benjamin was concerned with understanding the new forms of tactility that were swarming over the visual register as a result of the invention of photography and film. One other view is so-called actor-network theory – here the subject and object are co-produced in heterogeneous networks. Or, as, Callon and Law (1995: 501) put it, ‘there isn't a reality on the one hand, and a representation of that reality on the other. Rather, there are chains of translations. Chains of translation of varying lengths. And varying kinds. Chains which link things to texts to things, and things to people, and so on.’ Then, in one more view, there is a more general emphasis on ‘material culture’ which argues that the current dichotomy in Western societies between persons and things is historically and geographically transient and which, by drawing on diverse anthropological and historical evidence, has attempted to move beyond what is still a pervasive humanism.

A third concern has been with the constitution of subjectivity. This concern has been generated by a series of related puzzles that arise out of work which, in the second stage, too easily and unproblematically assigned consumer objects to subjects, in part because of an overdetermination of social categories such as class and status (Mort 1996). This concern might be framed as three different questions about how consumer objects produce subjects. There is, to begin with, the question of what might be termed ‘singularity’. How is it that ‘the range of specificities that we may inhabit comes together in singularity’ (Probyn 1996: 24). Consumer objects clearly have a crucial role in producing the singular person and space.

Then there is the problem of ascribing general meaning to consumer objects, when the meanings are always worked out performatively, according to situations that pertain in quite specific spaces and times, situations which are often constrained in terms of the kinds of meanings they make possible or visible. Thus, for example,

material objects are clearly implicated developmentally in the creation or maintenance of a sense of self. Yet it is hard to argue that the importance of a cuddly toy or comfort blanket for an infant derives from the communally printed image. It is especially difficult to suggest that the reasons why an old person may treasure family photographs is because of the symbolism (if there is any) attached to photograph albums themselves.

(Campbell 1996: 103)

And there is also the problem of ‘rationality’. It is still often assumed that consumers make definite choices as a result of discrete actions, even in postmodernist accounts (Campbell 1996). This assumption often underlies even the work of those who realise the problematic nature of this depiction. Thus many commentators smuggle a rational account back in, for example by adopting a distinction between habit and conscious choice (Campbell 1994,

1996).

Thus, what is now transpiring might be called a more practical approach to consumption, one which is based in a notion of everyday consumption practices as ‘basically repetitive, intuitive and inventive’ (Hermes 1993: 497). Such a notion displaces the vocabulary of rationality, choice, and representation by a vocabulary of joint action and embodiment (Thrift 1996). Thus consumption is seen as a practical–moral and contextually specific activity, rather than an intellectualised and abstract system of knowledge, which results from the intersection of numerous actor-networks.

A fourth concern has been with the history of consumption, precisely as a reaction to a standard history of consumption which intertwines it with a history of modernity. As historians have become increasingly interested in consumption so they have overturned a number of the assumptions associated with the standard history. Two corrections have been particularly important. Chronologically there has been enough work now on seventeenth-, eighteenth and nineteenth-century consumption in Europe and North America to push back the borders of what can be regarded as ‘modern consumption’ practices to the early eighteenth century, or even the late seventeenth century. In turn, many apparently novel consumer practices have been shown to have deep historical roots. For example, one of the reasons why department stores come late to Britain...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• SHOPPING, PLACE AND IDENTITY
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 Consumption and shopping
• 2 History and Development of Brent Cross and Wood Green shopping centres
• 3 Methodology
• 4 Shopping poilicy and shopping practice
• 5 Family shopping and the fear of others
• 6 The nature of shopping
• 7 John Lewis and the cheapjack; a study of class and identity
• 8 Englishness and other ethnicities
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index