Ordinary Consumption

Jukka Groncow, Alan Warde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415862967
• eBook ISBN: 9781136604928
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The sociology of consumption has concentrated unduly on the more spectacular and visual aspects of contemporary consumer behaviour, thereby constructing an unbalanced and misleading view. This collection emphasises ordinary rather than extraordinary items, routine and repetitive behaviour rather than conscious decision-making. It studies practical contexts of use rather than decisions to purchase and analyses collective identification rather than personal identity. Each essay argues one or more of these points, for the most part using new empirical material from several different national contexts.
The topics analysed include shopping in Taiwan, second-home ownership in France, environmental considerations concerning food choice in Denmark, the take up of new domestic technologies in Finland and kitchen design in England. Key concepts like tradition, routine and habit are clarified and new conceptual distinctions are made, with the book defending theoretical approaches deriving from Simmel, Weber, Durkheim and Bourdieu.
Ordinary Consumption promotes a distinctive approach to the understanding of the central practices of consumer society, it is a book with a controversial message, one which will be a source of debate about the appropriate agenda for future research.

Chapter 1

SOCIOLOGY, CONSUMPTION AND ROUTINE

Kaj Ilmonen

‘Paradoxically, we are trapped into the web of habit when we try to develop means of protection against routinized practices …’ Barbara A. Misztal (1996, 111).

There have been at least three phases in the sociology of consumption. The last of them began at the end of the 1970s, when Pierre Bourdieu published his seminal work, Distinction. Since then the sociology of consumption has not, however, mainly followed the path opened by Bourdieu. Rather it has become anchored in the Anglo-Saxon tradition where the most powerful conception has been the idea of agency, an idea well formulated in Anthony Giddens’ major work The Constitution of Society (1986 [1984]).

In this pathbreaking and influential book, Giddens writes about a reflexive agent who is doomed to making choices and who is also ‘able to do otherwise’ at any time. With this idea in mind, it is easy to understand why such a large part of the new sociology of consumption deals with questions of taste, style, and the construction of identity. These are, naturally, legitimate subjects. However, most types of consumption do not fit the idea of agency very well. When we are dealing with commodities, in the long run there will emerge consumption habits in the same way as all our other fields of activity are habitualized (Weber, 1964, 372). Through habits ‘we also in-habit the world. It becomes [with the help of them, KI] a home, and the home is a part of our every experience’ (Dewey, 1958, 104). It is not so easy to change this ‘home’ as agency theory claims. Therefore, it is appropriate to devote some attention to the forms of consumption that do not fit in with that theory. I call these forms ‘consumption routines’.

I begin by making a distinction between action and behaviour, because it is of great importance for our understanding of routines. Then I will discuss what routines are and how they have been interpreted in social theory. Thereafter, I will show how routine behaviour is connected with consumption. Finally, I will make some comments on the sociology of consumption from the viewpoint of consumption as a matter of routine.

ACTION AND BEHAVIOR

As noted above, the new paradigm of the sociology of consumption deals mainly with agency. This is understandable especially if we keep in mind that this paradigm has been a counter-reaction to the view, taken by earlier critical theory, of consumers as victims of production and mass-marketing. However, while the new paradigm stresses the importance of agency in consumption, it too often takes the actor’s power (to do otherwise) for granted. This is surprising, because the nature of the accomplishment of an action is in itself problematic. As Campbell puts it, ‘individuals do not always succeed in their attempts to implement their decisions’. Failures naturally happen due to opposition from other people and structural hindrances, but also because individuals simply do not manage to or want to ‘implement their will and therefore “to act”’ (Campbell, 1996a, 157).

Campbell thus clearly separates action from non-action. The former has to do with willing or will power and its practical implementation. This emphasis shows that action should be seen as voluntary and meaningful conduct (Campbell, 1996a, 25). Non-action, by contrast, is connected with involuntary reactions and conduct. It is governed by more or less unmotivated practices. They are repetitive and unreflected, following principles that are known neither to the individual nor to a larger public (see Bauman, 1990, 223). This latter type of conduct is called behaviour.

This distinction between action and behaviour was already made by Max Weber when he regarded the routinization of action as ‘one of the principal continually operating forces in everyday life’ (Weber, 1964, 372). However, he talked of the trichotomy of behaviour, action and social action. The difference between the second and third was that action did not orient itself according to the conduct of others, while social action did (88). This difference has important implications from the point of view of his action theory, but perhaps not so important as the distinction between action and behaviour later applied by Alfred Schutz, William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, among others.

Like all dichotomies, the distinction between action and behaviour is not absolute. Weber, too, pointed out that these modes of conduct are ideal types that include each other in reality. In practice, according to him, behaviour seems to ‘shade over’ into action (Weber, 1964, 116; see also Campbell, 1996b, 95). By this expression Weber wanted to stress that human conduct is always a mixture of behaviour and action. If this is accepted, one must conclude that in a strict sense categories such as ‘action’ do not exist at all. However, one does not have to take such a standpoint even when using Weberian action theory, because in the end behaviour consists of ‘merely “decayed” versions of earlier “true” actions’, as Campbell, echoing Durkheim’s formulations, puts it (Campbell, 1996a, 57; Durkheim, 1983, 38, 79, 83) and because only some behaviour is of this kind (e.g. ceremonies). In any case, it remains wise to distinguish, at least analytically, between these two categories of human conduct.

CIRCUMSTANCES AND FORMS OF BEHAVIOUR

If behavioural conduct starts as action and later becomes behaviour, it is necessary to ask two questions. First, it is useful to know what circumstances are most likely to promote this transformation of conduct. Second, it is necessary to know what form behavioural conduct takes as a consequence of this transformation.

In order to answer the first question, it is useful to contrast two situations. The first is where an ideal type of agency, (i.e. a decision maker who applies his/her will power and promotes his/her interests), prevails. The second concerns the circumstances in which a prototypical form of behaviour (i.e. a repetitive, ritualistic and unmotivated performance) governs people’s conduct. The former comes close to utilitarian and strategic reflective conduct (Camic, 1986, 1047). Micro-economic theory, and economics in general, rests mainly on the presumption of this ideal form of action, of rational decision making.¹ The second form involves conduct that is unmotivated, repetitive and largely ritualistic (Giddens, 1979, 218). Anthropology has dealt extensively with ritualistic behaviour (see e.g. Bell, 1993). It is useful to see what these two approaches offer with respect to understanding routine conduct.

According to economics, rational decision making is strictly bound by the epistemological aspects of probability, or in Giddens’s terms, to knowledgeability. John Maynard Keynes, for instance, held this view. According to him, in situations where the probability of a certain outcome is relatively high-in other words, where all relevant aspects of a decision are well known-it is possible to implement the model of the rational, willing decision maker and the individual has a good chance of being a real agent of his or her own future. However, when uncertainty increases and the probability is unknown, the situation changes in ways that are well reflected in capital investment decisions. How do investors make investment decisions under great uncertainty? In his General Theory, Keynes emphasizes the importance of ‘devices’ in making investment decisions in uncertain situations. According to him, such ‘devices’ include conventions, mimesis, fashion and habits. They allow behaviour that ‘saves our faces as rational, economic men’ (1964, 114–117, 152).

Anthropological theory draws our attention to ritualistic behaviour. It deals with ritualism in two different contexts. In the Durkheimian tradition ritualism is seen as proper conduct for strengthening group solidarity (Durkheim, 1912, 214; Douglas, 1982, 14), thereby creating social order out of disorder. When rituals succeed in this task, they decrease uncertainty and increase the predictability of the group’s action. This interpretation of the function of rituals brings us close to the second context in which rituals are used. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, rituals are common in magical thinking, which flourishes when an outcome is important but individuals have no control over that outcome (1948, 79–81). In other words, Malinowski assigns rituals (and other superstitions) the same role as Keynes assigns to ‘devices’. That is probably no accident, because Malinowski was strongly influenced by neo-classical economics. In other words, rituals are a way of coping with things in highly contingent circumstances. They are ‘devices’ that reduce the anxiety caused by decisions that have to be made in uncertain situations. This interpretation has also been made by anthropologists after Malinowski.

Rituals, of course, are not the only form of such devices. As already noted, Keynes also talks about fashion, habit, convention and mimesis. In making this list he was, however, not very analytical. Fashion and mimesis do not belong to the category of ‘device’, insofar as we understand them as forms of behaviour. In a sense, they are located between agency and behavioural forms. Old experiences can be recalled and utilized selectively in new situations (one can ‘do otherwise’). According to theories that stress the mass or imitative nature of fashions (Tarde, 1903; Simmel, 1957), fashion is followed blindly, but this is not always so. To follow fashion may also imply self-reflection on an individual level. This places the individual in the position of an agent. He or she must decide whether to put old experiences into practice and whether or not to follow fashion.

Habits and conventions, by contrast, have a different status in our conduct. They are followed without conscious reflection. We have to think about them only when we happen to get into extraordinary circumstances where we might face difficulties in applying our ‘devices’. When circumstances are again normalized we will return to our habits and conventions. They form, so to say, the nucleus of our behaviour (Durkheim, 1983, 83).

Rituals, habits and conventions are all social mechanisms designed to reduce uncertainty in complex decision situations, but they also differ from each other. Since Durkheim, rituals have been connected with the sacred part of our lives. They are a way of approaching sacred objects and ideas that are considered to belong to the ‘pure’ side of our reality (Durkheim, 1912, 209; Douglas, 1984, 8–9). They are also usually formal by nature, which makes them easy to control. Habits and conventions, by contrast, belong to the profane sphere of our behaviour. They both belong to the behavioural categories of routines that are part of the mundane mess of daily life. They are usually neither formalised nor closely reflected upon. They cannot be identified in terms of what is done, ‘but only in terms of how it is done’ as Campbell stresses (1996c, 161). The most striking point of difference between routines and rituals, however, is their relationship to rules.

In his highly innovative study How Societies Remember (1989, 30–34), Paul Connerton differentiates between rule-oriented and habitualized conduct. Rituals belong to the former category. They are forms of collective memory that follow relatively strict rules. A breach of these rules is interpreted by society as an offence against the sacred, and usually sanctions are imposed. The threat of sanctions reminds us that breaking the rules always involves risks, which helps maintain consciousness of the rules.

When we are carrying out our daily routines, our relationship to rules differs completely from that found in ritual behaviour. In order to understand this we must separate rules from their applications. This separation is fundamental to our understanding of learning processes. It is clear that knowledge of the grammar of a language is not a sufficient condition of its mastery. Only after exhaustive rule-following conduct, such as the use of a given language, has become habitualized can we cease to think about grammar, and our language use becomes automatic. This has its advantages. When we have ‘learned by doing’, we have no need to turn to grammar books any more. When this phase is reached, the pattern whereby a rule is followed by its application is turned upside down. The application starts to maintain the rule (Connerton, 1989, 34). At that stage we are conscious of the rule only in exceptional circumstances, for instance, when we get into trouble with language use.

Nor are we so aware of our routines. They are, in a sense, ‘our second nature’, too close to us. One reason for this closeness is that rule-supporting behaviour is incorporated in our daily gestures, ways of walking, the routes we choose, etc. In other words, habits are enduring features of our being—‘remembrances of the body’—which express our individuality. They are, however, not only individual, but also social features. They also reflect social categories (gender, age, etc.) and affective attitudes (aversion, liking, etc.), the individual totality of which Pierre Bourdieu named-borrowing a word from Latin (and Weber)—‘habitus’.

It would, however, be wrong to see our incorporated routines or habituses only as a cultural code of class, gender, etc., or as a form of individual staging. They also manifest the accumulated knowledge and mimesis in our bodies, appearing as the ‘armorization’ of our muscles and stiffness in our gestures. In this sense, routines are not only means of coping with contingent circumstances and easing our everyday lives. Transformed into habituses, they are means of giving ourselves a feeling of normality. This feeling is ‘the most common way in which we relate to the world surrounding us, and at the same time the most obvious frame of reference for attitudes of general trust’. Even in the most extreme circumstances, as in concentration camps, people try to maintain a state of ‘practical normality’ by repeating daily routines ‘as though nothing had happened’ (Misztal, 1996, 198). However, the feeling of normality is not achieved without cost. Routines are also impeding structures that narrow down our alternatives for action.

ROUTINES AND FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Routines have not attracted very much attention in the social sciences, although they play such a fundamental part in our everyday lives. In a way this is, however, not very surprising, considering the sociological tradition. True, the forefathers of sociology, like Durkheim, regarded habitual practices as ‘real forms that govern us’ (1956, 152), or as a matter of ‘automatic reaction’ (Weber, 1964, 116). They were, however, ‘intentionally expunged from the vocabulary of sociology’, not only because modern people were said to be less tradition-bound, but also because this step was considered necessary in order to gain distance from behaviourism and to establish sociology as a scientific discipline (Camic, 1986, 1061, 1077). Perhaps another reason for avoiding the concept of routine in sociology has been that it has been seen as a hybrid concept uniting controversial elements. Like habit, it is ‘at once mentalistic and observational’, individual and social (or historical). Moreover, it is at the same time causal and persistent (Turner, 1994, 16, 50).

In the last few years routines have, however, attracted some attention. Of the contemporary sociological masters Anthony Giddens and, to a lesser extent, Pierre Bourdieu have tried to get to grips with routines. In The Constitution of Society Giddens gives routines a notable status in his theorising.² He refuses to give priority to either agency or structure, referring instead to the ‘duality of structure’. By this, Giddens means that social structures are both creations of human activity and the means of shaping and directing this activity (Giddens, 1976, 121; 1979, 24). According to this view, every act by an agent not only influences the world but also reproduces it. This is true even when an action breaks existing social norms or conventions. Action is even then maintained by the structural features of society and by the existing social order and conventions. Giddens calls this relationship between the production and reproduction of the world the ‘recursive nature’ of social life (1986, 2).

The recursiveness of social life means several things in Giddens’s structuration theory. I can refer to only one of them here. Recursiveness is strictly connected to the ‘knowledgeability’of agents. According to Giddens, agents are (by their very nature) ‘knowledgeable subjects’. Giddens has taken this idea from ethnomethodology, and says that although action is not, in the strong sense of the word, conscious conduct, an agent still monitors the consequences of others’ and his or her own activity and tries to give an account of (‘rationalize’) it. This accountability of action means, in turn, that an agent has ‘theoretical knowledge’ that connects action to the prevailing conditions and helps to make it relevant from the viewpoint of external circumstances (Giddens, 1986, 4–5).

The term ‘theoretical knowledge’ has intentionally been put into quotation marks, because the reflective monitoring of one’s own activity is not so conscious an action that it could be presented in a discursive form, i.e. be explicated. This observation (or contention) forces Giddens to develop his own theory of consciousness. He criticizes Freud, and explains that to be ‘conscious’ means a variety of different things. According to him, it must be possible to separate these meanings: consciousness, as sensual awareness; memory, as the temporal constitution of consciousness; and ‘recall, as the means of recapitulating past experiences in such a way as to focus them on continuity of action’ (Giddens, 1986, 49).

Giddens ends up considering recall and its different modalities as the best means of differentiating the forms of consciousness. Two of them refer to the psychological mechanisms of recalling and one is outside the reach of direct recall (1986, 49). Giddens names the former two ‘discursive’ and ‘practical consciousness’. Like Freud, he calls the latter ‘unconscious’. Discursive consciousness refers to those modes of recall that can be expressed verbally. Practical consciousness is closely related to Husserl’s and Schutz’s concept of natural attitude, which refers to the frame of reference that is used in observing and interpreting the surrounding world. It is fundamental to note that, according to Schutz, an agent is not conscious of this framework of his or her observation and interpretation processes (Schutz, 1962, 299). Giddens echoes this conception by saying that practical consciousness refers to the recall that takes place in an agent such that he or she is unaware of it and unable to express it verbally (1986, 49).

Practical consciousness is perhaps the most central element in structuration theory, as Giddens himself acknowledges (1986, xxiii), because the reflexive monitoring of actions takes place at this level of consciousness. At the same time it is, according to Giddens, the most dominant mode of consciousness because it corresponds to the dominant mode of everyday action, namely routinized action, which is another cornerstone of the theory (op.cit., xxiii).

The expression ‘correspond to’ is actually somewhat imprecise. As a matter of fact, routines materialize practical consciousness. To have routines is, in effect, ‘to have a particular kind of mental cause operating’ (Turner, 1994, 16). They incorporate the contents of practical consciousness. It might be that Giddens does not accept this, but in my opinion Pierre Bourdieu’s views of sport fits in well with the analysis of the relationship between practical consciousness and routines. According to Bourdieu, training in sport is about the cultivation of the body. As a result of physical exercise, a sportsman/woman learns to ‘understand’ his or her body. Training is, in other words, nothing other than learning with the whole body, and an athletic performance is nothing more than the repetition of everything that has been learned (see Bourdieu, 1990, 166).³

The verb ‘understand’ has been put in quotation marks in order to emphasize that this understanding is not a conscious act, but a form of memory that is incorporated not only in our thoughts but also as steady features in our body language. As has already been said, this kind of understanding has great advantages. Routines are not only a means of reducing uncertainty (or, in Giddens’s words,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Sociology, Consumption and Routine
• 2 Routinisation or Reflexivity? Consumers and Normative Claims for Environmental Consideration
• 3 Ordinary Consumption and Extraordinary Relationships: Utilities and their Users
• 4 Working at Consumption: The Second Home and Daily Life
• 5 Extra-ordinary and Ordinary Consumption: Making Sense of Acquisition in Modern Taiwan
• 6 Tamed Hedonism: Choice, Desires and Deviant Pleasures
• 7 Mobile Communication as a Way of Urban Life
• 8 Ordinary Consumption and Personal Identity: Radio and the Middle Classes in the North West of England
• 9 By Car: Carrying Modern Society
• 10 Ordinary and Distinctive Consumption; or a Kitchen is a Kitchen is a Kitchen
• 11 The Role of States in the Creation of Consumption Norms
• 12 Smart Life, Version 3.0: Representations of Everyday Life in Future Studies
• 13 Epilogue: Conventional Consumption
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index