Retail and the Artifice of Social Change

Steven Miles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367869731
• eBook ISBN: 9781317691747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In Retail and Social Change Steven Miles, presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of the evolution of retail and how in both its material and virtual guises it has come to reframe our relationship with the social world. Retail has become increasingly influential in homogenising the urban experience. And yet in reacting to trends in virtual consumption retailers are also becoming more and more conscious of the need to engage with consumers in more sophisticated ways. Retail and Social Change will interest students and scholars in geography, cultural studies, sociology, marketing and business studies interested in how and why retail pervades both our physical and emotional lives in increasingly unexpected ways. It will provide a lively, comparative and thought-provoking contribution that interrogates the implications of retail change, for what it means to be a citizen of a consumer society in the twenty-first century.

1
Introduction

Retail and social change

Shopping is bad for you. Just admitting you are off to a shopping mall for the day for a large dose of ‘retail therapy’ is nothing less than an act of self-harm about which you should apparently be ashamed. Such a principle of appalled disdain applies to the shopper and the social scientist alike. It is simply anathema for a sociologist to undertake a serious academic investigation of shopping, or indeed, retail. For many, the shopper is simply deluded. They who shop are unaware of the emptiness and the morally questionable nature of their enterprise, while utterly unaware of the better, freer world that lies outside the constraints of the shopping experience (Bowlby, 2000). But such condemnation is itself worthy of further exploration insofar as it demonstrates that shopping agitates. Shopping is worthy of more considered reflection because although we don’t see it as significant we do reflect on its significance, as if the only culturally acceptable position is to be a self-aware and critically engaged shopper. But this tells less than half the story. In Retail and the Artifice of Social Change, I will explore the contention that retail constitutes one of the primary motors of social change in contemporary society. In doing so, I will argue that retail plays a deeply ideological role in reproducing a version of social change that shouts from the rooftops about its culturally, economically, technologically driven rapidity, and yet which in reality reproduces a status quo that is far more about continuity than it is about change and which is all the more disturbing for it.

Shopping: apparently, you love it or you hate it. Or as Shaw (2010) puts is, “shopping makes our lives more meaningful because it is both more and less than buying” (p. 2). For Shaw, given that it is the activity other than work and sleep upon which we spend most time, shopping provides us with the ideal lens through which we can begin to understand our own culture. Yes, shopping straddles the boundaries between work, leisure, production and consumption, as Shaw suggests. But I’d like to go one step further in these pages in arguing that the production of shopping actually makes our lives more and less meaningful at one and the same time, and it’s this paradox that lies at the heart of Retail and the Artifice of Social Change. In one respect this book constitutes one of the first self-consciously sociological accounts of the relationship between retail and social change. Authors have looked at shopping as being symptomatic of some of the key conditions of what it feels like to live in a later modern or even a postmodern world. We shop therefore we are. Yet despite a raft of publications that have tried to understand our connection to shopping both in the Social Sciences and the popular media (e.g. Bowlby, 2000; Falk and Campbell, 1997; Miller, 1998; Miller et al., 1998; Satterthwaite, 2001; Zukin, 2005; Underhill, 2000; Sorensen, 2009), it remains the case that the social role of retail remains a topic of marginal sociological significance. It is a sociological blind spot and the intention of this book is to begin to put this wrong right.

Those that have looked at retail as a sociological phenomenon have tended to understand shopping as a cultural arena within which we construct some kind of a ‘good life’; an escape perhaps (See Leong, 2001). But back in the early 2000s, de Châtel and Hunt recognised that what is particularly illuminating is the relationship between consumption and retail: specifically, how the consumer’s experience merges with efforts to construct that experience in such a way as to create a new kind of social realm. In a sense then, what de Châtel and Hunt call ‘retailization’ is the wrapping up of the retail/consumption experience in particular kinds of dreams or perceived realities, which serve to reproduce the ideological dominance of the consumer society in profound ways. But the point here is that as the means by which consumers appear to have become more controlled by the ideological power of consumption, their power as consumers has apparently simultaneously grown (de Châtel and Hunt, 2003). Consumers are apparently much more sophisticated and demanding than they were in the past, as are the forms of retail that apparently ‘control’ them. It’s this tension that is so fascinating and it is one that is further illuminated by the intervention of Sack (1992). Sack argued in the 1990s that the public world, the private world and the sense of self are in such a state of flux that the more the ‘authentic self’ seeks an anchor, the more the world of consumption which appears to offer that anchor serves to exacerbate these tensions.

For many then the world that retail promotes is a disorienting and alienating one. And herein lies the contradiction of commodities and the spaces in which they are presented. Such spaces are stimulating and exciting and even magical, but they are also superficial and inauthentic. The world of consumption is,

a world without constraints and without responsibility.… The consumer’s world portrays itself as a context without context, a front stage without a backstage.… The consumer’s world is… immoral, since it creates place out of geographic context and denies us the opportunity of knowing the consequences of his actions. Indeed it makes it appear as though there is no world supporting consumption, and therefore, no need to understand this world. Mass consumption thus fosters irresponsibility.

(Sack, 1992: 199–201)

This is a world that makes us feel that we all belong; that we are all equal. The sociological significance of retail thus lies in its ability to take us out of the familiarity of our everyday social context, placing us entirely in an apparently artificial environment, an environment that in its own ways feels equally familiar, where everything feels possible, but isn’t. Retail is sociologically significant precisely because it provides the spaces within which we enact the ideological imperatives of consumer capitalism.

Why retail?

At the risk of stretching a comparison, and without any intention of aggrandising the significance of this modest contribution, it’s worth briefly reflecting on the purpose of sociology. Emile Durkheim (2002) studied suicide because on the surface it represented the least social act imaginable. From a common-sense point of view, suicide was the ultimate act of the individual. And yet Durkheim demonstrated that suicide was indeed a deeply social act. In a similar vein shopping is from a superficial point of view purely economic and individualised. Although often we will shop with our friends or family, or alone, either way it is at least in some shape or form some kind of an individual-defining experience. But such an explanation doesn’t take us very far. Yes, ‘going shopping’ involves a person making his or her mark in the market(place). But the economic element of this is less than half the story. By ‘going shopping’ a whole range of social activities and social relations are implicated: those that take place in the space which shopping is located – such as public congregations, street entertainment and even protest – and those that are implicated by this physical act – such as what we buy to impress others and to establish our status in a social group, how we consume to make ourselves feel better about unsatisfactory elements of our life and how gender and class are reproduced through the goods that we buy (see, for example Leong, 2001; Scammell-Katz, 2012). One of the things that is so interesting about shopping, such an apparently trivial and inconsequential act, is that it is beneath the surface of the apparently least profound actions that the most significant of social processes occurs. This is a point well expressed in Fiske’s (1989) discussion of the sociological significance of jeans: “By wearing jeans we adopt the positions of subjects within that ideology, become complicit with it, and therefore give it material expression; we ‘live’ capitalism through its commodities, and, by living it, we validate and invigorate it” (p. 14). Shopping is from this point of view the enactment of an ideology; a process in which a way of thinking and behaving becomes naturalised and normal. By shopping we become citizens of a consumer society. By being citizens of a consumer society we provide that society with the legitimacy it needs to reproduce itself.

It’s sociology’s role, amongst other things, to problematise what feels to us to be ‘natural’ and to question the power relationships and imbalances that underpin what has become ‘normal’. And it’s normal because we take it for granted: “The familialism which is part of what draws us to shops, also leads us to assume that we can freely explore their interiors and contents, whether or not we buy anything and, while openly rubbishing them, remain confident that they will patiently survive” (Shaw, 2010: 135–136). Shaw argues that our relationship to shops has parallels with familial relationships insofar as they provide us with a place of safety and comfort. Shops offer us a kind of timeless respite. They represent a very physical manifestation of an ideology, and yet we ‘feel’ and think of them, at the same time, as an escape from those controls. For Shaw then what’s important about shops is not what they are, but what they represent and it’s in this quandary that the ideological power of retail lies.

Retail is the infrastructure that makes the enactment of ideology possible and it’s for this reason this is more of a book about retail than it is about shopping. If we can begin to understand what retail is deigned to achieve at an ideological level, we will be in a better position to understand how it is achieving that goal and more. If we accept that what we buy is an indicator of the ideological underpinnings of the society in which we live, then clearly retail, which is effectively a piece of machinery through which such an ideology is reproduced, becomes an arena worthy of serious sociological reflection. Shopping then is of course a means to an end, and is itself expressive of deeper ideological forces. Conrad Lodziak (2002) thus explores the ideological dimensions of consumerism and in doing so argues against the notion that consumers are freely motivated to secure consumer goods above and beyond those that are ‘needed’. For Lodziak, the practical manifestation of this ideology can be found in advertising, marketing and, of course, through the mass media which is itself preoccupied with selling audiences to advertisers. Meanwhile, Lodziak points out that some commentators have argued that the competitive individualism we associate with consumer culture (see Chapter 2) somehow served the purpose of replacing a sense of social solidarity and community spirit. It’s in this sense that retail can also tell us a lot about the nature of social change. The apparently individualised nature of our role as consumerist identity-seekers is not simply a demonstration of how consumerism affects our sense of self, but it also has something profound to say about how such a transition has a knock-on effect on other aspects of the way the individual engages with society. We behave in particular ways within the parameters that the world of retail provides for us. But those behaviours are far from meaningless; they express what it means to be a citizen of a consumer society.

The potential significance of consumption as an arbiter of the relationship between the individual and society and hence between structure and agency came into its own during the 1990s when a sociology of consumption came to gain a foothold. At this time, scholars began to explore the possibility that how, why and what we consumed was more than a mere trivial by-product of production. As far as shopping was concerned, it too gained increasing attention as an arena that seemed to reflect something of the zeitgeist, and specifically as a demonstration of a society that is underpinned by a shift from a focus on production to consumption (Falk and Campbell, 1997). But this notion of a shift to shopping as a potentially identity-forming act has indeed resulted in more of a discussion of shopping per se, rather than retail as a process that facilitates or promotes such an act. And this I would argue is a mistake insofar as it implies something of a neglect for the bridging mechanism that makes our experience as a shopper what it has become. In other words, retail not only reflects the nature of social change, it constitutes one of the key means by which the society in which we live is reproduced.

On a day-to-day level we are not usually conscious of the way these factors play out in our lives. We don’t think about them or express them explicitly. But the reality is, as Shaw (2010) proposes, shopping is both an expression and a reflection of cultural change. And in actual fact, it’s something much more than that. It is actually more than simply a ‘way of life’. Retail has an influential role to play in how social structures are being transformed in the everyday. More specifically, the argument to be presented throughout this book is that consumerism, and the path to the promises that shopping apparently provides, represents a bridge that links structure and agency. In other words, if we accept that consumerism is what Holland (1977) describes as a ‘mediation phenomena’ that exists in the disciplinary void situated between sociology and psychology, we can go on to surmise that shopping asserts our individuality and yet ties that individuality to social structures at one and the same time. Shopping arguably provides some kind of a conduit through which the individual, often at least, engages with the society in which he or she lives. However, shopping is merely a vehicle for the personal experience of this process. Structurally it is retail that plays such an important role underpinning the individual’s experience of social change. It is through innovation and change in the retail sector that some of the most important dimensions of social change are experienced. Shopping is in a constant state of reinvention in its efforts to keep up with and perhaps predispose subtle changes in society more broadly. But as Leong (2001) points out, this reflects a state of affairs in which shopping, like society itself perhaps, is subject to a high degree of uncertainty. Whether or not shopping flourishes economically is dependent on how far it taps into the public zeitgeist and how effective it is in responding to changes in that zeitgeist. Shopping thus has an important but tenuous place in the psyche of the post-industrial society.

The focus here on retail, as opposed to shopping, is then a deliberate choice. Analyses of shopping tend to focus on the act of purchase and its significance to the broader cultural context in which individuals live. Retail, at least for the purposes of this book, is more concerned with the structural nuances that have been put in place to maintain the orthodoxy of shopping and more broadly to retain consumerism as a key dimension of the relationship between structure and agency. The notion of retail is normally addressed in professional circles, as a process in which supply meets demand and in which demand is, in effect, artificially created (See de Châtel and Hunt, 2003). There is indeed a danger that we see ‘consumption’ and ‘retail’ as being at the opposite ends of a continuum, related but distant. In fact, retail is much more than about the sale of commodities: it is about the reproduction of a way of life. As I suggested above, shopping and retail are sociologically significant precisely because, on the surface, they appear to be sociologically insignificant. This for the sociologist represents both a problem and an opportunity. As a discipline, sociology has long been infatuated with the social relations implied by production. Classical social theorists such as Marx (1990) and Durkheim (2002) presented a notion of a totalitarian society. From their perspective consumption was of relatively minor significance as an arbiter of social relations. Furthermore, the cultural arena was not regarded as a primary driver of social change but as a reflection of it. This much changed towards the end of the twentieth century as scholars came to recognise that culture was worthy of understanding for its own sake. For the purposes of this book then, retail is defined as a significant cultural arena in which elements of social change are played out on a daily basis. Shopping doesn’t simply reflect our society back to us, it is our society, or rather it is a primary means by which our society is reproduced, and through which we understand how our society works. The key transitions with which this book is concerned are therefore as follows.

Economic – with the decline of industrial economies and with the knock-on effect of process for communities, there emerged a desperate need to find an alternative. This reached a crescendo towards the end of the twentieth century when service industries were catapulted up the economic agenda. So for example, cities that had previously depended on their industrial status in the UK, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, were busily looking to find an economic alternative. Retail became a core focus for a key economic strategy in which cities sought to attract visitors willing to spend money. And sure enough, the vitality or otherwise of the retail sector sits at the cutting edge of economic change. If there is an economic up-turn or down-turn, this will usually be felt in the retail sector first of all.

Technological – Retail is a test bed for technological change. It is at the fore-front of online innovation and the kinds of changes that are put in place by the retail sector, such as shopper surveillance, delivery systems and personalised shopping technologies, have much wider significance than the purely economic. Furthermore, retail’s influence reaches beyond the confines of its spatial effect in the form of the moral implications of CCTV, for example. Such technologies are indicative of the lengths our society is prepared to go to find out and store information about consumers, and use that information in a way in which the consumer’s sense of freedom is intensified; while, at the same time, the degree to which the individual is tied to a particular social system, as defined by the consumer society, is also intensified.

Territorial – Retail has come to have an increasingly significant impact on the nature of space. This is primarily demonstrated through the physical manifestation of retail such as shopping malls, supermarkets, edge-of-town retail developments, designer outlets and the like. These developments are significant insofar as they provide us with more opportunities to consume, but more importantly such developments represent statements of ideological intent: the fact that our society welcomes the apparent colonisation of retail tells us where the priorities of that society lies. It also has significant implications for how the individual engages with physical space. Our social experience is different as a result of the high profile that retail plays in the constitution of that space. Furthermore, the increasing influence of online retail intensifies a process of de-territorialisation, where our relationship with place becomes less significant in the past, reinforcing a process in which one place arguably becomes much like another.

Relational – The changing nature of retail has an influential impact on the changing nature of relationships. Our society is such that we arguably and increasingly see each other through the lens that consumption provides. We make hundreds of everyday judgments about people depending on what they wear for example. We define people by their material possessions and by the status that this confers. But at a deeper level, retail has come to redefine our relationships. In recent years for example, relationships have, allegedly at least, become more and more commodified. The point here is that the means by which they have become commodified are playing an increasing role in defining our social experience. Tinder, for example, swish left for yes and right for no, creates a situation where the commodification of others is more paramount in our lives than it was in the past. Retail plays a role in structuring some key dimensions of our social life.

Identity related – Many authors have debated the significance of consumption to the construction of our identities. Given the high economic and social currency that retail apparently has in our culture, it appears to provide an avenue through which we are able to find more and more alternative ways to construct some kind of a sen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: retail and social change
• 2 The individualised consumer
• 3 Shopping for identity
• 4 Whatever happened to the city?
• 5 The supermarket
• 6 Out-of-town retail
• 7 Experiential retail
• 8 Tourism and authenticity
• 9 Retail online
• 10 Conclusion: the artifice of social change
• References
• Index