Consuming Symbolic Goods

Identity and Commitment, Values and Economics

Wilfred Dolfsma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317991342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The phenomenon of consumption has increasingly drawn attention from economists. While the 'sole purpose of production is consumption', as Adam Smith has claimed, economists have up to recently generally ignored the topic.

This book brings together a range of different perspectives on the topic of consumption that will finally shed the necessary light on a largely neglected theme, such as

• Why is the consumption of symbolic goods different than that of goods that are not constitutive of individuals' identity?
• How does the consumption of symbolic goods affect social processes and economic phenomena?
• Will taking consumption (of symbolic goods) seriously impact economics itself?

The book discusses these issues theoretically, and, through analyses of such cases as food, religion, fashion, empirically as well. It also discusses the possible role in the future of consumption.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Review of Social Economy

Consuming Symbolic Goods: Identity & Commitment — Introduction

Wilfred Dolfsma

 

 

 

 

Only in recent times is attention from economists moving to the topic of consumption, even as Adam Smith claimed in his Wealth of Nations that consumption is the sole end of production. One reason for this increased attention may be that consumption patterns become increasingly fickle. Further, and in contrast to the intuition of economists, considerations about price, given people's budget constraints, seem to play a minor role for consumers in making decisions about what to buy. This seems especially true for what might be called “symbolic goods”, goods that people define themselves in terms of, goods the consumption and use of which helps constitute people's identity, goods that communicate the kinds of commitments people have.

Archaeologists and anthropologists claim that the use of symbols for purposes of communication with others indicates that complex use of language and (more) sophisticated thinking emerged in man, but they bicker about the exact timing for this emergence. What is important in terms of this special issue on the consumption of symbolic goods is that insights from outside of economic theory proper become increasingly relevant to properly understand such behavior. Social and Institutional economics, for which the Review of Social Economy is among the most influential outlets, is in a position to shed light on what it is that makes people consume. Ideas and concepts that are central in such analyses are the identity of individuals, and commitment to that identity. The active involvement of people in the things they consume is most evident when they consume what might be called “symbolic goods”. Symbolic goods may be defined as goods that people buy to signal their identity with. Obvious examples are clothes, cars and music, but food often is a symbolic good as well.

A bone of contention in the analysis of consumption that a focus on identity and commitment uncovers is if and how the social environment influences people in their consumption behavior. Contributors to this issue take different positions on this, as will be apparent when one studies the subsequent articles. What are the elements in the social environment that affect people's consumption behavior, and how should one understand the interaction between the individual and the environment? Some contributions in this special issue approach this matter in a more fundamental, almost philosophical way than others who focus more on empirical phenomena seemingly do. Nevertheless, even the articles that present more empirical content cannot and do not steer clear of theoretical issues at hand. What is more, an understanding of consumption behavior implicitly or explicitly informs economic theory beyond this field. Economists had better, one would be inclined to say, start paying more serious attention to consumption behavior lest their story unravels. Still other contributions focus more on the implications of specific consumption patterns for society at large.

As the editor for this issue is a contributor as well, taking a particular position in relation to these and other issues, it would not befit me, I believe, to write an extensive introduction, assessing and contrasting the articles. As contributors were asked to develop their perspectives in relatively short articles of up to 5000 words, it will, perhaps, not be asking too much of the reader to make their own judgement. The limit for the number of words authors could use obviously has advantages as well as disadvantages. The arguments are likely to be concise — the bare bones are presented — which might appeal. However, at times for an argument to be developed understandably and persuasively, the 5000 words do not suffice. Complying to this rule then necessitates authors to possibly cut corners and go out on a limb. I would like to ask the reader to bear with the authors in this issue, and at the same time would like to thank the anonymous referees for their contribution. The useful suggestions and comments offered by these referees have, I believe, helped to bring out the advantages of the word limit imposed.

Although social and institutional economics are well suited to address these issues, the efforts of such social and institutional economists have been thus far not come into focus. An emphasis on the identity expressed in people's consumption and people's commitments, could provide the focus required. This special issue for the Review of Social Economy might provide the platform and function as a useful focal point for attention of scholars that study consumption behavior, offering an array of views on consumption.

Lauding the Leisure Class: Symbolic Content and Conspicuous Consumption

Alan Shipman

Recognizing consumption's symbolic dimension rescues large areas of economic activity from the charge of being unproductive. Marketers, advertisers, customer advisors and the many others engaged in creating and preserving commercial imagery cease to represent an accretion of “transaction cost”, incurred in the attempt to move more material output. Instead, these become sources of added value in their own right — creating and continuing the symbolism that keeps expenditure rising once its purely functional purposes are achieved. Advertising professionals in mid-nineteenth century England and America were already proclaiming their active contribution to progress and prosperity (Turner 1965: 87–91). The ranks of “new cultural intermediaries” (Bourdieu 1984: Ch 2) have since expanded to include “those in media, design, fashion, advertising, and ‘para’ intellectual information occupations, whose jobs entail… the production, marketing and dissemination of symbolic goods” (Featherstone 1991: 19).

By the same (symbolic) token, expenditures that previously looked extravagant also regain a valid personal and social function. If the acts of buying and consuming yield utility in themselves, it may not matter if what is bought and consumed has little or no practical value. We may pay a premium for the company it puts us in, or rescues us from (Jaramiller et al. 2000). As, for example, do travellers who prefer a taxi to the (cheaper and equally fast) bus to their destination, or guardians who send children to a fee-paying school whose resources and record are matched by publicly provided alternatives. In a physical sense we are, still, what we eat, though even staple foods contain increasingly symbolic ingredients. In a cultural sense we are what we wear, hear, see, and otherwise sense or experience. The times and places at which we do these things, and the company in which we do them, also count towards an economic identity whose focus changes from the workplace to the marketplace, from how we earn to how we spend.

Symbolic consumption re-casts the distinction between “use value” and “exchange value”, or what a product provides in itself and what it offers through the procurement of other people's products and services (Kroker 1986). Whereas Marxists trace the displacement of exchange above use value to the supply side, as the source of economic profit for holders of physical and financial capital, later cultural commentators tend to relocate it to the demand side, as the source of social advantage for holders of cultural and social capital. This article considers the relationship of symbolic goods to older debates about “conspicuous” consumption, and the changing nature of capital. It examines the potential for extension, through mass marketing, of a symbolic social world previously shaped round elite consumers; and of a symbolic economic sphere previously confined to “industrial” nations. A concluding section assesses the contrasting implications of consumption's “symbolic shift” for the natural and social environment.

THE SYMBOLIC SHIFT IN CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

Social signalling through consumption, detached from any usefulness of the item consumed, begins almost as soon as subsistence is surmounted (Veblen (1899) 1994: Ch 4). Accomplishment's showground quickly shifts onto means of consumption, because of a shared interest in distancing and concealing means of production — old aristocrats because they no longer have any, new plutocrats because they do not want their wealth to be seen to depend on them, and rarely visit them once control is entrusted to specialist managers. Consumption need not be material to be visible, and visibility can serve social purposes other than ostentatious display (Douglas and Isherwood 1980: Ch 3, 4). But when affluence's accents and graces take time to acquire, its material basis must be seen to be believed. Denied respect for its origins, new fortune wins social status through its destinations, the shiniest of which are those where most can be blown without breaking the bank. Conspicuous waste becomes the instant measure of relative social standing. “The need of conspicuous waste, therefore, stands ready to absorb any increase in the community's efficiency or output of goods, after the most elementary physical wants are provided for” (Veblen 1994: 68).

When first observed, Conspicuous Consumption's (CC) main practitioners were new tycoons seeking to match the refinement of the longer-established rich. Veblen's account dwells ironically on the double sense of culture being wasted on materialistic consumers, and wasted by the act of purchasing purely for display. Those who have got rich quick have an understandably low tolerance for the time and tuition needed to gain cultural accomplishment. So they aim to let depth of pocket prevail over depth of discernment, and shift the battleground from unearned income to unashamed expenditure. However, “creative destruction” ensures that for every self-made magnate with a new fortune to flaunt, there are several whose flagging endowment gives them an interest in shifting battle from the showroom to the salon. When consumption moves to the symbolic realm, equally distinctive display can be made with less material requirement. Because it is detachable from, and more durable than, volatile market valuations of wealth, different vintages of rich find shared interest in shifting the contest to conspicuous taste.

Those long socialized into non-immediate preferences and pleasures try equally hard to retain these as criteria of accomplishment, emphasising culture's detachment from supporting wealth as this diminishes. Their continued ability to reverse the direction of conspicuous “consumer sovereignty”, with inherited wisdom rather than acquired wealth setting the standard, has attracted three main explanations. The “positionality” of symbolic products — their devaluation by multiplication — means that buying more means enjoying less. Early acquirers have a lasting first-mover advantage, which they can prolong by simple refusal to sell. Options for shifting demand onto equally valuable, more easily reproducible goods are limited because of the “U-shaped” trend in their ascribed valuation: initially rapid depreciation tends later to be reversed, for those versions that survive, because of increased rarity and the cultural revaluation over time, for everything from vintage cars to 1950s soup tins. Inheriting a standard of refinement from the elite they wish to join, the newly rich are forced to do battle on the cultural home ground of the old.

In consumption, no less than in production, new industrializers must play their way into the market by the old rules before these can change in their direction. Success in so doing makes them beneficiaries of those rules, reducing their incentive to change them. By adding to the abstraction and complexity of cultural products, and discussion about them, those with taste but no money can still keep a superior distance from those with money but (as yet) no matching taste. “High” culture involves waste only in the vague sense that it lacks the lower cultures' immediate connection to life and its everyday concerns. The distancing of art from life is just one among many facets of “bourgeois politeness, whose impeccable formalism is a permanent warning against the temptation of familiarity” (Bourdieu 1984: 34). The eclipse of “waste” by “taste” as the basis for CC is reinforced by three other features of economic growth and corresponding social structural change.

First, material excess has declining legitimacy. The desire to signal wealth through consumption depends on that wealth being viewed as legitimately held, admiration of the display requiring acceptance that effort and ability made it possible. Conspicuous consumption has traditionally been identified with the deservingly upwardly mobile (Veblen 1994). So shopping's symbolic value is greatest in societies where wealth and power inequalities are seen as justified, either by aristocracy that assigns high status by “natural” right, or by meritocracy that assigns it by effort and achievement. Where superior wealth is not so easily regarded as legitimate — through the sheer extent of its superiority, or perception of theft, luck or inheritance in its acquisition — the urge to display it can quickly subside. Luxury apartments lurk behind crumbling tenement facades, and smart cars are kept for moonlit spins on private roads.

Second, governments have taken over the worthier objects of individual indulgence — notably the patronage of arts and scientific research, and the duty of poverty relief. The state has also (with “Keynesian” help) usurped the idle rich's macroeconomic role, of stabilizing activity by consuming without producing when an over-thrifty populace stays too far within its means to furnish full-employment demand. Keynes (1936: 358), quoting Heckscher on mercantilism, shows that economists as far back as the late sixteenth century were finding intellectual justifications for “the deep-rooted belief in the utility of luxury and the evil of thrift”. But Keynes shows earlier that involuntary mass unemployment arises when those who can afford to save are too socially detached from those who wish to accumulate (1936: Ch 6, 7); and is best cured by public consumption or a “somewhat comprehensive” socialization of investment. Such public cures restore the traditionally negative connotation to private extravagance: as the squandering by the rich of resources which, if invested instead, could expand productive capacity to the benefit of the poor.

Third, as well as losing economic effectiveness and social acceptability, conspicuous consumption is increasingly vulnerable to financial attack. There have always been fiscal as well as social attractions in taxing products whose utility lies in ‘status’. It could improve social justice, to the extent that only affluent consumers are taxed. It could preserve economic efficiency, to the extent of deterring wasteful expenditures, especially those that spiral upwards as the rich compete for attention (Mason 2000, Fernando and Moizeau 2003). It should become easier to enforce, as elite spending shifts to items that are purely for display, more easily distinguished from those the less advantaged might still be buying for their intrinsic utility. Nor should a tax excite undue resistance from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Consuming Symbolic Goods: Identity & Commitment — Introduction
• 2. Lauding the Leisure Class: Symbolic Content and Conspicuous Consumption
• 3. Consumption, Identity, and the Sociocultural Constitution of “Preferences”: Reading Women's Magazines
• 4. You Are What You Eat: The Social Economy of the Slow Food Movement
• 5. Consuming Values and Contested Cultures: A Critical Analysis of the UK Strategy for Sustainable Consumption and Production
• 6. Religious Identity and Consumption
• 7. Paradoxes of Modernist Consumption — Reading Fashions
• 8. Are Unpreferred Preferences Weak in Symbolic Content?
• 9. The Gift Paradox: Complex Selves and Symbolic Good
• 10. Deriving the Engel Curve: Pierre Bourdieu and the Social Critique of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
• 11. The Post Affluent Society
• 12. Contributors
• Index