The World of Consumption

The Material and Cultural Revisited

Ben Fine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136214523
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Consumption has become one of the leading topics across the social sciences and vocational disciplines such as marketing and business studies. In this comprehensively updated and revised new edition, traditional approaches as well as the most recent literature are fully addressed and incorporated, with wide reference to theoretical and empirical work. Fine's refreshing and authoritative text includes a critical examination of such themes as: * economics imperialism and globalization
* the world of commodities
* systems of provision and culture
* the consumer society
* public consumption.This book presents an updated analysis of the cluttered landscape of studies of consumption that will make it required reading for students from a wide range of backgrounds including political economy, history and social science courses generally.

1
Introduction and Overview

Introduction

The study of consumption has expanded prodigiously over the last twenty years. The first edition of World of Consumption was written as the field was reaching its adolescence with all that this entails in terms of growing pains and experimental pleasures. The following decade has witnessed an accelerating interest in the subject. Now, far from occupying a subordinate academic niche, consumption is increasingly served by a bewildering range of contributions (Glennie 1995: 164-5). These draw upon the different objects of consumption themselves, their social significance, the sequence of activities that lead to consumption, and the different sites of consumption across country and household, quite apart from the wealth of illustrations across time and space. Equally varied have been the methods and theories for investigation of consumption both within and across the social sciences, as is evidenced by a number of surveys, which are often necessarily partial, specialised and rapidly dated in their coverage (e.g. Fine and Leopold 1993, Miller 1995b, Gabriel and Lang 1995, de Grazia and Furlough 1996, Holbrook 1995, Miller (ed) 2002).¹ To the extent that such surveys have dropped off in numbers, the reason is that the subject matter has become too vast to cover. In short, consumption is a moving, expanding and an evasive target, especially in view of the array of analytical weapons with which it has been assaulted.

In the previous edition, a warning was signalled that unless it was careful, the study of consumption would be liable to degenerate into a more scholarly version of US consumer studies, a hodgepodge of eclectic theoretical and empirical elements, leading to a self-confessed chronic state of disarray.² Is the same true of the more academic study of consumption that only lags the emergence of consumer studies by a decade or so?³

Although not addressing this issue directly, and not necessarily departing from the assessment to follow, Miller et al, (1998: 1) would seem to suggest otherwise. They see consumption as shifting from 'academic outcast' through three stages of research over the past two decades.⁴ The earlier works are perceived to have emphasised lack of theory and empirical studies and the diversity of social relations attached to consumption, rendering it a confusing catch-all in taking account of gender, kinship, ethnicity, age, locality, etc. Apart from concern with interdisciplinarity and with knowledge and meaning, the literature was marked by being unfocused and by endless debate over central terms. This first stage was prompted by four motives: to make consumption more visible through study of the new landscapes of consumption (supermarkets, retail parks, shopping malls); to counterpose consumption to production; to place culture in opposition to political economy; and, primarily through advertising, to inspire interpretative studies especially around subcultures. The second stage is characterised by five aspects: the creation of a presence for consumption as its own subfield within disciplines; consumption is set adrift from production; emphasis is placed upon subjectivity, self and identity; the scope of study is expanded to include festivals, collecting and the like; and consumption is seen as a key aspect of the history of modernity through display and gaze, tied to time, place and construction. Finally, the third stage reflects five main issues: the restoration of production and the inclusion of distribution, thereby incorporating the active role of consumers and workers; emphasis upon material culture and the interaction between the subjects and objects of consumption; corresponding interest in contextual specificity; more work on the history of consumption; and also on space and place as instrumental in the making of consuming identities.

As a broad brush, the account of Miller et al. has much to commend it. But, not surprisingly, it is far too neat and tidy, leaving as many questions unposed as answered. In particular what is the timing of this periodisation (and can three stages be squeezed into two decades), and does it fit equally across disciplines and topics? Although the study of consumption across the social sciences may have exhibited some changing emphases and postures, it can also be interpreted as having become increasingly chaotic, not least because the progress identified by Miller et al. is far from uniform or complete across the literature, with successive stages supplementing rather than displacing one another. Not everyone can be in, let alone recognise, the analytical vanguard. Even those that have been in the lead in some respects are capable of straddling the divides posited by Miller et al., as in Ritzer's (1993, 1998) successive contributions, ultimately leading to a brutally frank stages-defying amalgam within a single contribution let alone across the literature as a whole (Ritzer 1999a: 76):⁵

In the end, this is not a work in postmodern theory, or any other theory for that matter. The goal is to gain a greater understanding of the new means of consumption and to that end theoretical tools that work will be employed, whatever their origins. In order to create the theoretical framework for this book, I have borrowed the ideas of exploitation, control, rationalization, and disenchantment from modern social theory and the notion of reenchantment from postmodern theory. This book offers what the postmodernists call a 'pastiche' (a mixture of sometimes seemingly contradictory ideas) of modern and postmodern ideas in order to analyze the cathedrals of consumption. The latter, of course, are themselves combinations of modern, postmodern, and even premodern elements. Both the subject matter and the theoretical perspective of this book stand with one foot in some of social theory's oldest ideas and the other in some of its most contemporary thinking.

If periodisation within the study of consumption is questionable, a notable neglect in Miller et al. is consideration of the broader intellectual context as if the study of consumption has experienced a self-contained inner momentum of its own. But its evolution, as is at least implicit in their account, has depended upon a much broader renegotiation across the social sciences of the relationship between what might be conveniently termed economy and culture, although other oppositions are represented and representative, not least production and consumption. Thus, Ashkenazi and Clammer (2000) acknowledge how consumption has been at the forefront of the study of material culture in view of its bringing together a number of core and classical themes - gender, class, critical theory, mass society — and new themes such as media studies, popular culture and the ethnography of conformity and resistance in everyday life. The study of consumption emerged during, out of, and as a major part of the rise of postmodernism. The social sciences are now, unevenly and variously, on retreat from its excesses. What exactly has this all entailed?

One consequence has been a number of notable achievements in the study of consumption. Six readily spring to mind, and these will be elaborated and justified at greater length during the course of the chapters that follow. First, as already mentioned, contributions have been both wide ranging and diverse. In addition, in contrast to a decade ago, it is no longer so common to find studies of consumption that are motivated or rationalised by the wish to balance its neglect relative to production. But the pendulum between the two has now swung towards or past its midpoint, if not so far as presumed by Quataert (2000: 1), 'the consumption of goods, not their production, drives history. ... Modernity is also marked by the rise of mass consumerism, and by its ascendancy of the consumer over the producer'.⁶ Indeed, the pendulum has in some respects begun its return, albeit perturbed, journey. Many have become interested in bringing production back into the study of consumption.

Second, rational choice methodologies, or those more generally based on methodological individualism, have made remarkably little headway in the literature on consumption. The two obvious candidates for rendering this otherwise are economics and psychology. In their mainstream versions both have generally been studiously, even contemptuously, ignored. From psychology, the idea of consumption as the means by which to fulfil natural, instinctive or biologically determined needs has proved an anathema both to postmodernist preoccupations with the meaning of identity and the objects of consumption themselves and to social theory more traditionally based on structures, relations and agencies.

If such psychology is dead for consumption, economics might be considered undead. For everyone recognises that prices and incomes, and the economy more generally, are vital to the study of consumption. But much of that vitality has been lost in the cultural turn. As a result, more by accident than design, the study of consumption has not fallen prey to 'economics imperialism', the process by which the traditional subject matter of the other social sciences has been appropriated by economics, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 7. This is despite the success with which economics imperialism is currently sweeping, albeit unevenly, across the other social sciences. Whilst it now purports to incorporate history, institutions, custom and culture, mainstream economics remains empty when it comes to the meaning of the consumed to the consumer (and, indeed, treats the consumer much like a mini-enterprise with utility as its sole product). Given the meaning of consumption as starting point, and production as point of departure, it is apposite that mainstream economics should be studiously ignored in the recent rise of the study of consumption.

Third, not surprisingly, the study of consumption took the popular notions of consumer society or consumerism as an initial analytical prompt in two different, if closely related, ways. On the one hand, following the pioneering work of McKendrick et al. (1982), the birth of a consumer society is seen as part of the historical landscape. On the other hand, whether through the questionable notion of consumer sovereignty or through the less sanguine perspective organised around the diseases of affluence, consumerism has encouraged an unduly ethical reading of consumption. Is it good or bad? Humphery (1998: 209) observes an intellectual legacy of 'participation in consumption cultures as socially destructive, culturally bereft and politically dangerous'. But there has been some shift towards less negative approaches over the last two decades as well as celebration of consumption as resistance. Further, Humphery

emphasises the importance of the mundane and the everyday, rather than the spectacular. ... Consumption is undoubtedly connected to these fantastic worlds. But it may be that pleasure and excitement are overly 'written in' when it comes to the cultural analysis of consumer society.

(p. 26)

However, whether for ethics or for history, on which see Chapter 8, the notion of consumer society has been so widely and indiscriminately used that it has become recognisably empty of precision and explanatory content.

Fourth, with the major exception of economics, the study of consumption has been highly conducive to interdisciplinarity. An initial phase in the literature like so many newly emerging topics, was marked by the simple intra-disciplinary application of ready-made, off-the-shelf theory to consumer and consumed. But this has given way to genuine fertilisation across disciplines in appropriate recognition that the subject of consumption knows no analytical boundaries. The exceptional exclusion of economics is paradoxical. For it reflects both the authority and impenetrability of the discipline - to other social sciences and as it presents itself, it is technically formidable and the narrowness of the analytical terrain upon which it exercises its command. The result is both an absence of mainstream economics and a neglect of the economic, a point to be taken up later and throughout.

Fifth, whilst consumption may have taken production as its point of departure, it has increasingly rejected a simple dichotomy between production and consumption. The literature has liberally incorporated other, intermediate activities between production and consumption, and recognised them to be of significance. This is true of design, retail, advertising, shopping and so on.

Finally, primarily as a reaction against the interpretative excesses of postmodernism, the study of consumption has increasingly sought to integrate material and cultural factors. What objects are and how they are perceived are inextricably linked to one another, and to the processes by which they are brought to the consumer and used (and discarded).

The approach to consumption as material culture, however, confronts a major stumbling block — its relationship to the economy and to economics. How can the economy be brought back in following the postmodernist cultural turn, and the much longer standing divide between social and cultural and economic analysis? In many ways, this is how the first edition of World of Consumption can be interpreted and justified. It represented an attempt to convince cultural theorists of consumption to take the economy seriously (and economists to do likewise for culture). There is a world out there that must be acknowledged as a source not only of the objects of consumption but also of how they are and can be interpreted. Hopefully, this message is now increasingly pushing against a door that is ajar if not fully open. As a result, it is possible to move on to a new message, one that avoids the horns of the dualism between the material and the cultural.

The new message is disarmingly simple. Consumption in the modern world is primarily served by capital and capitalism, and these must analytically figure prominently both as material and cultural categories in the study of consumption. Whilst mainstream economics is appropriately set aside as being incapable of providing that material, let alone the cultural, element, a political economy of capitalism is essential. It must address the nature of commodities and money, for example, as the unavoidable conduits in the provision of consumption as well as those of its aspects, cultural or otherwise, that appear to evade or negotiate commercialism. But this is to anticipate the content of what is to follow for which an overview is now provided.

Overview

The next chapter establishes certain features of the present intellectual environment. Currently, there is a dual retreat, uneven and faltering, from the excesses both of neo-liberalism and of postmodernism. On the one hand, the idea no longer prevails that the market does or could work perfectly. Consequently, greater interest has been stimulated in examining how economic and noneconomic factors, the market and the non-market, interact with one another. At or below the national level, for example, this has allowed the notion of social capital to flourish. On the other hand, emphasis on the interpretation or deconstruction of the meaning of the material world is conceding ground to attention over how that world is materially created. In this respect, to an even greater extent than the fashionable social capital, the idea of globalisation has exploded across the social sciences during the last decade. It too has sought to confront the articulation of the economic and the non-economic. It has tended to do so by positing them as being in opposition to one another - as the heterogeneity of the national, social, etc., is washed over by the homogeneous tidal wave of the global economic. The culture of consumption, in particular, is perceived to be resistant to globalisation despite McDonaldisation.

Globalisation has, then, provided a ready-made framework for examining a wide range of economic and social phenomena. But it is flawed not so much in terms of being exaggerated or not, the dominant issue in a literature marked by pros and antis, but in its understanding of the economic and the corresponding opposition drawn with the non-economic. This is demonstrated in Chapter 2 by discussion of finance, the markets for which have been understood to be the epitome of, and metaphor for, globalisation.

It follows that globalisation has limited purchase in explaining rather than describing the articulation of the material and the cultural. Another candidate has, however, presented itself for the task, economics imperialism. Again, over the past decade or so, mainstream economics has sought to colonise the other social sciences and has succeeded as never before. This is because it has moved from an approach based on the non-economic, as if reducible to being equivalent to a perfect market, to one in which the non-economic is to be understood as the rational response to market imperfections. The new phase of economics imperialism has, however, made limited impact on the study of consumption because it is incapable of genuinely addressing the social construction of the meaning of objects, taking these (as well as the identity of consumers) as self-evident.

What, then, are the alternatives to economics imperialism and globalisation? This is the subject of Chapters 3 and 4 in which a critical but constructive review is undertaken of a number of traditional concepts deployed across the social sciences. Two broad conclusions are drawn. First, in Chapter 3, the dichotomy between commodity and gift is discussed and shown to be an invalid dualism. What is crucial is to uncover the social relations underpinning the forms that these represent. For the two broad categories conceal a diverse range of material and cultural relations. Little is to be gained, and much to be lost, in treating all commodities and commodity forms as mutually equivalent in some other sense and also as the 'other' world of an equally heterogeneous category of non-commodities or gifts. As the literature has come to recognise, commodities can express gift relations and vice versa. Nonetheless, the chapter concludes, a full understanding of capital commodity production is an appropriate starting point for examining the differentiated nature of more general forms of exchange - putatively commodity, gift or otherwise.

Chapter 4 is concerned to establish, contrary to much received wisdom, that capitalist commodity production as analytical starting point does not preclude an appropriate study of use values as opposed to exchange value. It takes Haug's (1986) aesthetic illusion as point of departure. Haug argues that commodities tend to be degraded in their material properties in pursuit of profitability through cheaper production. To guarantee sale, this is veiled by endowing them with a sexual content thro...