Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture (3 Volume Set) [1-3] 9780872896017

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Entries
Reader’s Guide
About the Editor
Introduction
A
B
C
D
E
Volume 2
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
Volume 3
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
Index

Citation preview

Editorial Board Editor Dale Southerton University of Manchester

Advisory Board Diana Crane University of Pennsylvania

Frank Trentmann Birkbeck College

Karin Ekström University of Borås

Alan Warde University of Manchester

Peter Jackson University of Sheffield

Rick Wilk Indiana University

Copyright © 2011 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

FOR INFORMATION: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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London, EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India

Encyclopedia of consumer culture / edited by Dale Southerton.

SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 33 Pekin Street #02–01 Far East Square Singapore 048763

v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8728-9601-7 (cloth) Publisher: Rolf A. Janke Acquisitions Editor: Rolf A. Janke Editorial Assistant: Michele Thompson Developmental Editor: Carole Maurer Reference Systems Manager: Leticia Gutierrez Reference Systems Coordinator: Laura Notton

1. Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects—Encyclopedias. 2. Consumers—Encyclopedias. I. Southerton, Dale.

Production Editor: Jane Haenel Copy Editors: Colleen Brennan, Amy Freitag, Matt Sullivan, Patricia Sutton

HC79.C6E53 2011

Typesetter: Hurix Systems Pvt. Ltd. Proofreaders: Kristin Bergstad, Annie Lubinsky, Sandy Zilka

306.3—dc22

2011009422

Indexer: David Luljak Cover Designer: Gail Buschman Marketing Manager: Kristi Ward

11 12 13 14 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Volume 1 List of Entries vii Reader’s Guide xv About the Editor xxi Contributors xxii Introduction xxix Entries A B C

1 83 129

D E

421 483

Volume 2 List of Entries vii Entries F G H I J

567 623 695 753 821

K L M N O

827 833 883 1023 1049

Volume 3 List of Entries vii Entries P Q R S T

1075 1185 1193 1241 1427

U V W Y Z

Index 1557

1493 1501 1515 1547 1555

List of Entries Acculturation Actor-Network Theory Addiction Adornment Adorno, Theodor Advertising Aestheticization of Everyday Life Aesthetics Affluent Society Age and Aging Air and Rail Travel Alienation Alternative Consumption Alternative Medicine Althusser, Louis American Dream Americanization Anomie Anorexia Anthropology Antiques. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Material Culture; Nostalgia; Object Biographies; Reuse/ Recycling Appropriation Architecture Art and Cultural Worlds Asceticism Attitude Surveys Attitude Theory Audience Research Authenticity Autoethnography Automobiles

Baudrillard, Jean Beauty Myth Belonging Benjamin, Walter Bicycles Binge and Excess Body, The Body Shop, The Bollywood Bounded Rationality Bourdieu, Pierre Branding Braudel, Fernand Bricolage British Empire Broadcast Media Buzz Marketing. See Markets and Marketing Capitalism Car Cultures Carbon Trading Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets Caribbean and the Slave Trade Carnivals Celebrity Channels of Desire Charity Shops. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Reuse/ Recycling; Voluntary Associations Childhood Christianity Christmas Cinema Circuits of Culture/Consumption Citizenship Civil Society Civilizing Processes Clothing Consumption Clubbing

Bakhtin, Mikhail Barbie Dolls Barthes, Roland Bataille, Georges vii

viii

List of Entries

Coca-Cola Coffee Coffee Shops Cognitive Structures Cold War Collecting and Collectibles Collective Consumption Collective Identity Colonialism Comics Commercialization Commodification Commodities Commodity Fetishism. See Body Shop, The; Commodification; Commodities; Marxist Theories; Obsession; Philosophy; Reification; Simulacrum Communication Studies Companies as Consumers Comparing Consumer Cultures Confectionery Conspicuous Consumption Consumer Anxiety Consumer Apathy Consumer Behavior Consumer (Freedom of) Choice Consumer Co-Operatives Consumer Culture in Africa Consumer Culture in East Asia Consumer Culture in Latin America Consumer Culture in the USSR Consumer Demand Consumer Dissatisfaction Consumer Durables Consumer Education Consumer Expenditure Surveys Consumer Illnesses and Maladies Consumer Interviews Consumer Moods Consumer Nationalism Consumer Policy (China) Consumer Policy (European Union) Consumer Policy (Japan) Consumer Policy (United States) Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization) Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism Consumer Protest: Environment Consumer Protest: Water Consumer Regulation

Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain Consumer Rights and the Law Consumer Socialization Consumer Society Consumer Sovereignty Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies Consuming Nature. See Consuming the Environment; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption Consuming the Environment Consumption and Time Use Consumption in Postsocialist China Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War Consumption Patterns and Trends Content Analysis Convenience Convention Theory Conversation Analysis Cool Hunters Cosmetic Surgery Cosmetics Cosmopolitanism Counterfeited Goods Craft Consumer Craft Production Credit Cultural Capital Cultural Flows Cultural Fragmentation Cultural Intermediaries Cultural Omnivores Cultural Studies Cultural Turn Culture Industries Culture Jamming Culture-Ideology of Consumerism Cyborgs Cycles of Production and Consumption Dandyism Databases and Consumers de Certeau, Michel Debt Decommodification Delocalization Dematerialization Department Stores

List of Entries

Design Desire De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling Diaspora Diderot Effect Dieting Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down Dining Out Discount Stores Discourse Discourse Analysis Disney Disorganized Capitalism Disposal of Goods. See Reuse/Recycling; Waste Division of Labor Do-It-Yourself Domestic Division of Labor Domestic Services Domestic Technologies Douglas, Mary Downshifting Durkheim, Émile Eating Disorders. See Addiction; Anorexia; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies Eco-Labeling E-Commerce Econometrics Economic Indicators Economic Psychology Economic Sociology Economics Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) Electronic Video Gaming Elias, Norbert Elites Embodiment Emotional Labor Emotions Energy Consumption Engel’s Law Enlightenment Entrepreneurs Environmental Footprinting Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption Ethnicity/Race Ethnography Ethnology/Folklore Studies European Union

Experimental Economics Externalities Fair Trade False Consciousness/False Needs Families Family Meal Famine Fans Fascism. See Consumer Nationalism; Italian Fascism and Fashion Fashion Fashion Forecasters Fashion Industry Femininity Feminism and Women's Magazines Feminist Movement Financial Services. See Credit; Debt; Network Society Fine Arts Flaneur/euse Focus Groups Food Consumption Food Scares Franchising Freud, Sigmund Friendship Galbraith, John Kenneth Gambling Gardening Gender Gender Advertising Gender and the Media Gendering of Public and Private Space Generation Geography Ghettos Gifts and Reciprocity Glastonbury/Woodstock Global Cities Global Institutions Globalization Glocalization Goal-Directed Consumption Goffman, Erving Governmentality Gramsci, Antonio Grand Tour Great Depression (U.S.)

ix

x

List of Entries

Habits. See Habitus; Rituals; Routines and Habits; Theories of Practice Habitus Hair Care/Hairdressing Happiness Harried Leisure Class Health and Fitness. See Alternative Consumption; Body, The; Health Care; Leisure; Obesity; Recreation; Tamed Hedonism; Well-Being Health Care Hedonism Hegemony Hierarchy of Needs Higher Education Hinduism Hire-Purchase and Rental Goods Historical Analysis History History of Food Hobbyists and Amateurs Hollywood Home. See Appropriation; Architecture; Do-It-Yourself; Ethnology/Folklore Studies; Gardening; Gender; Gendering of Public and Private Space; Households; Souvenirs Home Computer Homogenization Versus Hybridization. See Americanization; Delocalization; Diaspora; Globalization; Glocalization; Japan as a Consumer Culture; Multiculturalism; Tourism Studies Homosexuality. See Pink Pounds/Dollars; Queer Theory; Sexuality Horkheimer, Max Household Budgets Households Hyperreality Identity Imaginative Hedonism Implicit Attitudes. See Attitude Surveys; Psychology Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions Income Individualization Industrial Society Inequalities Informal Economy Informalization Information Society

Information Technology Informational Capital Infrastructures and Utilities Inheritance Innovation Studies Internet Interpellation Inventing Tradition Islam Italian Fascism and Fashion Japan as a Consumer Culture Jeans Kant, Immanuel Keynes, John Maynard Keynesian Demand Management Kyrk, Hazel Labor Markets Lasch, Christopher Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix Lefebvre, Henri Leisure Leisure Studies Lévi-Strauss, Claude Licensing of Clothing Brands Life Course Life(style) Politics Lifestyle Lifestyle Typologies Likert Scales Liminality Linder, Staffan Burenstam Locality Longitudinal Studies Luxury and Luxuries Luxury Taxes Lyotard, Jean-François Mandeville, Bernard Marcuse, Herbert Marketing Diversity. See Markets and Marketing Marketing Social Change. See Markets and Marketing Markets and Marketing Marshall, Alfred Marx, Karl Marxist Theories Masculinity

List of Entries

Maslow, Abraham Mass Culture (Frankfurt School) Mass Observation Mass Production and Consumption Mass Tourism Material Culture Materialism and Postmaterialism Mauss, Marcel McDonaldization McLuhan, Marshall Mead, George Herbert Measuring Satisfaction Measuring Standards of Living Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption Media Convergence and Monopoly Medieval Consumption Memorials Memory Men’s Magazines Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture Methods of Market Research Metropole Metrosexual Migration Mimesis Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age Mobile Phones Modernization Theory Money Moral Economy Moral Geography Moralities Mortgages. See Credit; Debt; Economics Motivation Research Multiculturalism Multiple Correspondence Analysis Multisited Ethnography Multivariate Analysis Museums. See Collecting and Collectibles Narcissism National Cultures Needs and Wants Neo-Tribes Network Society Neuromarketing New Right Nostalgia Novelty

xi

Obesity Object Biographies Obsession Opinion Leaders Opinion Polls Opium Trade Ordinary Consumption Organ and Blood Donations Organic Food Orientalism Othering Outsourcing Packaging Participant Observation. See Anthropology; Autoethnography; Ethnography; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Methods of Market Research; Multisited Ethnography Patten, Simon Nelson Performing Arts/Performance Arts Personals/Personal Ads Philanthropy Philosophy Photography and Video Pink Pounds/Dollars Planned Obsolescence Pleasure. See Dining Out; Emotions; Happiness; Quality of Life; Seaside Resorts; Tamed Hedonism Political and Ethical Consumption Political Economy Political Science Popular Culture. See Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Popular Music Popular Music Porcelain Positional Goods Possession. See Appropriation; Collecting and Collectibles; Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions; Material Culture; Positional Goods Postcolonial Theory Post-Fordism Postindustrial Society Postmodernism Post-Structuralism Potlatch Poverty Preference Formation

xii

List of Entries

Price and Price Mechanisms Print Media Product Loss Leaders Product Placements Production of Culture Promotional Culture Prosumption Protestant Ethic Psychoanalysis Psychology Public Goods Public Sphere Pubs and Wine Bars Quality of Life Queer Theory Radio Rationalization Rationing Reality TV Reception Theory Recreation Reification Religion. See Christianity; Desire; Hinduism; Islam; Protestant Ethic; Sacred and Profane Renewable Resources Resistance Responsible Consumption Retirement Retro Reuse/Recycling Risk Society Rituals Romantic Love Rostow, Walt Whitman Routines and Habits Sacred and Profane Satiation Scarcity Science and Technology Studies. See ActorNetwork Theory; Electronic Video Gaming; Information Technology; Innovation Studies; Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age; Network Society; Social Shaping of Technology; Sociotechnical Systems Sears, Roebuck and Company Seaside Resorts Second Life

Secondhand Goods. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Material Culture; Reuse/Recycling; State Provisioning Seduced and Repressed Self-Interest Self-Presentation Self-Provisioning. See De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling; Do-It-Yourself; Outsourcing; Self-Service Economy; Systems of Provision Self-Reflexivity Self-Service Economy Semiotics Senses Service Industry Sex Sex Tourism Sexuality Shopping Silverstone, Roger Simmel, Georg Simulacrum Single-Person Households Slow Food Movement Smith, Adam Smuggling and Black Markets Sneakers/Trainers Soap Operas and Telenovelas Sociability Social and Economic Development Social Capital. See Civil Society; Informational Capital; Network Society; Sociability; Social Movements; Social Networks; Sociology Social Class Social Distinction Social Exclusion Social Mobility. See Social Class; Status Social Movements Social Network Analysis Social Networks Social Norms. See Acculturation; Anthropology; Sociology Social Shaping of Technology Socialism and Consumption Sociality. See Sociability Sociodemographic Trends. See Age and Aging; Consumption Patterns and Trends; SinglePerson Households Sociology Sociotechnical Systems Sombart, Werner

List of Entries

Souvenirs Spaces and Places Spaces of Shopping Spas Spatial Analysis Spectacles Spices Sports State Provisioning Status Store Loyalty Cards Structuralism Style Subaltern Subculture Suburbia Subversion Sugar Sumptuary Laws Supermarkets Supermodels Surplus Value Surrealism Surveys Symbolic Capital Symbolic Value Symbolic Violence Systems of Provision Taboo Tamed Hedonism Taste Tea Techniques of Persuasion. See Advertising; Channels of Desire; Desire; Markets and Marketing Teenage Magazines Telephones Television Temporalities. See Consumption and Time Use; Convenience; Harried Leisure Class; Linder, Staffan Burenstam; Time-Use Diaries; Work-and-Spend Cycle Textiles Textual Poachers Theories of Practice Theory of Planned Behavior Thrift Time-Use Diaries

Tobacco Totemism Tourism Studies Tourist Gaze Toys Trade Standards Trademarks Transaction Data. See Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS); Store Loyalty Cards Transgression. See Carnivals; Liminality; Obsession; Queer Theory; Resistance; Sexuality; Subversion Transnational Capitalism Trust T-Shirts Tupperware Typologies of Shoppers Urban Cultures Urbanization Value: Exchange and Use Value Veblen, Thorstein Bunde Vegetarianism. See Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare; Food Consumption; Organic Food Virtual Communities Visual Culture Voluntary Associations Voting Behaviors Walkmans and iPods Walmart Waste Weber, Max Weddings Welfare State. See Collective Consumption; Consumer Regulation; State Provisioning; Systems of Provision; Well-Being Well-Being Wine Women's Magazines Work-and-Spend Cycle World Exhibitions World-Systems Analysis Youth Culture Zoos and Wildlife Parks

xiii

Reader’s Guide The Reader’s Guide is provided to assist readers in locating articles on related topics. It classifies articles into nine general topical categories: Everyday Life; Geographies and Histories of Consumer Culture; Methods and Trends; Persons; Politics and Consumption; Production, Exchange, and Distribution; Social Divisions and Social Groups; Technology and Media; Theoretical Perspectives and Concepts.

Everyday Life

Dieting Dining Out Discount Stores Downshifting Emotions Family Meal Fans Fashion Food Consumption Gambling Gardening Glastonbury/Woodstock Hair Care/Hairdressing Happiness Harried Leisure Class Hedonism Higher Education Hobbyists and Amateurs Imaginative Hedonism Inventing Tradition Jeans Leisure Mass Tourism Memorials Memory Metrosexual Multiculturalism Nostalgia Obesity Organic Food Pubs and Wine Bars Recreation Retro Routines and Habits

Addiction Adornment Aestheticization of Everyday Life Aesthetics Alternative Medicine Americanization Anorexia Architecture Art and Cultural Worlds Asceticism Authenticity Barbie Dolls Body, The Body Shop, The Bricolage Car Cultures Childhood Cinema Civilizing Processes Clothing Consumption Clubbing Coffee Shops Collecting and Collectibles Consumer Dissatisfaction Consumer Illnesses and Maladies Consumer Socialization Convenience Cool Hunters Cosmetic Surgery Cosmetics Cultural Flows Dandyism Desire xv

xvi

Reader’s Guide

Satiation Seaside Resorts Senses Sex Sex Tourism Slow Food Movement Sociability Souvenirs Sports Style Supermodels Tamed Hedonism Taste Thrift Toys T-Shirts Typologies of Shoppers Waste Weddings Well-Being Work-and-Spend Cycle Youth Culture

Geographies and Histories of Consumer Culture Air and Rail Travel Automobiles Bicycles British Empire Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets Caribbean and the Slave Trade Carnivals Christianity Coffee Cold War Colonialism Confectionery Consumer Co-Operatives Consumer Culture in Africa Consumer Culture in East Asia Consumer Culture in Latin America Consumer Nationalism Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain Consumption in Postsocialist China Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War Delocalization Department Stores

Diaspora Disney Do-It-Yourself Enlightenment European Union Famine Flaneur/euse Franchising Gendering of Public and Private Space Ghettos Grand Tour Great Depression (U.S.) Hinduism History of Food Home Computer Islam Italian Fascism and Fashion Japan as a Consumer Culture Liminality Locality Medieval Consumption Metropole Moral Geography National Cultures Opium Trade Porcelain Radio Rationing Sears, Roebuck and Company Shopping Smuggling and Black Markets Socialism and Consumption Spaces and Places Spaces of Shopping Spas Spices Suburbia Sugar Tea Textiles Tobacco Tourist Gaze Transnational Capitalism Tupperware Urban Cultures Voluntary Associations Walmart Wine World Exhibitions Zoos and Wildlife Parks

Reader’s Guide

Methods and Trends Actor-Network Theory Attitude Surveys Autoethnography Comparing Consumer Cultures Consumer Expenditure Surveys Consumer Interviews Consumption and Time Use Consumption Patterns and Trends Content Analysis Conversation Analysis Databases and Consumers Discourse Analysis Econometrics Economic Indicators Ethnography Focus Groups Historical Analysis Lifestyle Typologies Likert Scales Longitudinal Studies Mass Observation Measuring Satisfaction Measuring Standards of Living Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture Methods of Market Research Motivation Research Multiple Correspondence Analysis Multisited Ethnography Multivariate Analysis Object Biographies Opinion Polls Production of Culture Social Network Analysis Spatial Analysis Surveys Time-Use Diaries

Persons Adorno, Theodor Althusser, Louis Bakhtin, Mikhail Barthes, Roland Bataille, Georges Baudrillard, Jean Benjamin, Walter Bourdieu, Pierre

Braudel, Fernand de Certeau, Michel Douglas, Mary Durkheim, Émile Elias, Norbert Freud, Sigmund Galbraith, John Kenneth Goffman, Erving Gramsci, Antonio Horkheimer, Max Kant, Immanuel Keynes, John Maynard Kyrk, Hazel Lasch, Christopher Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix Lefebvre, Henri Lévi-Strauss, Claude Linder, Staffan Burenstam Lyotard, Jean-François Mandeville, Bernard Marcuse, Herbert Marshall, Alfred Marx, Karl Maslow, Abraham Mauss, Marcel McLuhan, Marshall Mead, George Herbert Patten, Simon Nelson Rostow, Walt Whitman Silverstone, Roger Simmel, Georg Smith, Adam Sombart, Werner Veblen, Thorstein Bunde Weber, Max

Politics and Consumption Alternative Consumption Carbon Trading Citizenship Civil Society Consumer Apathy Consumer Culture in the USSR Consumer Policy (China) Consumer Policy (European Union) Consumer Policy (Japan) Consumer Policy (United States) Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization) Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism

xvii

xviii

Reader’s Guide

Consumer Protest: Environment Consumer Protest: Water Consumer Rights and the Law Culture Jamming Culture-Ideology of Consumerism Feminist Movement Food Scares Governmentality Inequalities Life(style) Politics Luxury Taxes New Right Organ and Blood Donations Philanthropy Political and Ethical Consumption Prosumption Public Goods Public Sphere Resistance Responsible Consumption Social Movements State Provisioning Subversion Voting Behaviors

Production, Exchange, and Distribution Advertising Branding Celebrity Channels of Desire Christmas Coca-Cola Collective Consumption Companies as Consumers Consumer Education Consumer Regulation Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies Counterfeited Goods Craft Production Credit Cultural Intermediaries Culture Industries Cycles of Production and Consumption Debt De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling Division of Labor Domestic Services Eco-Labeling E-Commerce Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) Emotional Labor

Energy Consumption Environmental Footprinting Fair Trade Fashion Forecasters Fashion Industry Global Cities Global Institutions Health Care Hire-Purchase and Rental Goods Household Budgets Industrial Society Informal Economy Information Society Informational Capital Infrastructures and Utilities Inheritance Innovation Studies Licensing of Clothing Brands Mass Production and Consumption Media Convergence and Monopoly Money Neuromarketing Opinion Leaders Outsourcing Packaging Pink Pounds/Dollars Post-Fordism Postindustrial Society Product Loss Leaders Product Placements Renewable Resources Reuse/Recycling Self-Service Economy Service Industry Sneakers/Trainers Social and Economic Development Store Loyalty Cards Sumptuary Laws Supermarkets Systems of Provision Trade Standards Trademarks

Social Divisions and Social Groups Age and Aging American Dream Belonging Binge and Excess Collective Identity Consumer Anxiety Cosmopolitanism

Reader’s Guide

Domestic Division of Labor Elites Ethnicity/Race Families Femininity Friendship Gender Generation Households Identity Interpellation Life Course Lifestyle Masculinity Migration Mimesis Moral Economy Othering Positional Goods Retirement Romantic Love Seduced and Repressed Self-Presentation Self-Reflexivity Sexuality Single-Person Households Social Class Social Exclusion Social Networks Status Subaltern Symbolic Violence

Technology and Media Audience Research Bollywood Broadcast Media Comics Cyborgs Domestic Technologies Electronic Video Gaming Feminism and Women's Magazines Fine Arts Gender Advertising Hollywood Information Technology Internet Men’s Magazines Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age Mobile Phones Performing Arts/Performance Arts

Personals/Personal Ads Photography and Video Planned Obsolescence Popular Music Print Media Reality TV Second Life Soap Operas and Telenovelas Social Shaping of Technology Sociotechnical Systems Teenage Magazines Telephones Television Textual Poachers Virtual Communities Walkmans and iPods Women's Magazines

Theoretical Perspectives and Concepts Acculturation Affluent Society Alienation Anomie Anthropology Appropriation Attitude Theory Beauty Myth Bounded Rationality Capitalism Circuits of Culture/Consumption Cognitive Structures Commercialization Commodification Commodities Communication Studies Conspicuous Consumption Consumer Behavior Consumer (Freedom of) Choice Consumer Demand Consumer Durables Consumer Moods Consumer Society Consumer Sovereignty Consuming the Environment Convention Theory Craft Consumer Cultural Capital Cultural Fragmentation Cultural Omnivores Cultural Studies Cultural Turn

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Reader’s Guide

Decommodification Dematerialization Design Diderot Effect Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down Discourse Disorganized Capitalism Economic Psychology Economic Sociology Economics Embodiment Engel's Law Entrepreneurs Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption Ethnology/Folklore Studies Experimental Economics Externalities False Consciousness/False Needs Gender and the Media Geography Gifts and Reciprocity Globalization Glocalization Goal-Directed Consumption Habitus Hegemony Hierarchy of Needs History Hyperreality Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions Income Individualization Informalization Keynesian Demand Management Labor Markets Leisure Studies Luxury and Luxuries Markets and Marketing Marxist Theories Mass Culture (Frankfurt School) Material Culture Materialism and Postmaterialism McDonaldization Modernization Theory Moralities Narcissism Need and Wants Neo-Tribes Network Society

Novelty Obsession Ordinary Consumption Orientalism Philosophy Political Economy Political Science Postcolonial Theory Postmodernism Post-Structuralism Potlatch Poverty Preference Formation Price and Price Mechanisms Promotional Culture Protestant Ethic Psychoanalysis Psychology Quality of Life Queer Theory Rationalization Reception Theory Reification Risk Society Rituals Sacred and Profane Scarcity Self-Interest Semiotics Simulacrum Social Distinction Sociology Spectacles Structuralism Subculture Surplus Value Surrealism Symbolic Capital Symbolic Value Taboo Theories of Practice Theory of Planned Behavior Totemism Tourism Studies Trust Urbanization Value: Exchange and Use Value Visual Culture World-Systems Analysis

About the Editor Dale Southerton is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He is Director of the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Sustainable Practices Research Group and a Professorial Fellow of the Sustainable Consumption Institute (also at the University of Manchester), a leading multidisciplinary research institute in the study of consumption, where he leads the research program on consumer behavior. He has conducted several influential studies in the field of consumption and consumer culture, including “The Diffusion of Cultures of

Consumption: A Comparative Analysis” (funded through the UK ESRC Cultures of Consumption Research Programme), “Sustainable Domestic Technologies,” and numerous projects on consumption and time. He has published extensively about consumption and consumer culture, with particular reference to time pressure and temporalities; sustainability; everyday life; identity and lifestyles; theories of social change; technologies, innovation, and material culture. Previous publications include Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of Changing Infrastructures of Provision (2004).

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Contributors Andrea Abbas University of Teesside

Anna Barford University of Sheffield

Chris R. Birchenhall University of Manchester

Lisa Adkins University of Newcastle, Australia

Mauro Barisione University of Milan

Megan K. Blake University of Sheffield

Robert Batchelor Georgia Southern University

Regina Lee Blaszczyk University of Pennsylvania

Janeen Baxter University of Queensland

Francesco Boldizzoni Bocconi University

Geoffrey Beattie University of Manchester

Federico Boni Universita degli Studi di Milano

Tawnya Adkins Covert Western Illinois University Marian Adolf Zeppelin University Richard Ahlström Mid Sweden University Graham Allan Keele University, UK Dee Amy-Chinn Oxford Brookes University Sandra Annunziata Roma Tre University Eric J. Arnould University of Wyoming Adam Arvidsson Universita di Milano Søren Askegaard University of Southern Denmark Patrik Aspers Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Gaynor Bagnall University of Salford Vida Bajc Queen’s University Sarah Elsie Baker Middlesex University

Ariel Beaujot University of Vermont Russell W. Belk York University Justin Bengry University of Saskatchewan Matthias Benzer Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation London School of Economics Arthur Asa Berger San Francisco State University Yvonne Bezrucka University of Verona Marina Bianchi University of Cassino Anders Biel University of Gothenburg Gwen Bingle Technical University of Munich Ferruccio Biolcati-Rinaldi Universita degli Studi di Milano xxii

Herman L. Boschken San Jose State University Jacqueline Botterill Brock University Dominique Bouchet University of Southern Denmark Alan Bradshaw Royal Holloway University of London Stuart Braye Teeside University Beth Breeze University of Kent John Broderick University of Manchester Bengt Brülde University of Gothenburg Jo Bryce University of Central Lancashire Michael Bull University of Sussex

Contributors

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Lyn Calcutt Griffith University

Irene Cieraad Delft University of Technology

Mario De Benedittis Universita degli Studi di Milano

Norah Campbell Trinity College Dublin

Simone Cinotto University of Gastronomic Sciences

Neil De Marchi Duke University

Eleanor Capper University of Liverpool Paolo Capuzzo Dipartmento di discipline Storiche Vince Carducci Independent Scholar

Alison J. Clarke University of Applied Arts Vienna David B. Clarke University of Wales Swansea Nick Clarke University of Southampton

Petra Deger University of Regensburg Cristina Demaria Dipartimento di Discipline delia Comunicazione Daphne Demetry Northwestern University

Matthew Cole University of Birmingham

Kimya N. Dennis North Carolina State University

Craig Carson University of Chicago

Benjamin Coles University of Sheffield

Rutledge M. Dennis George Mason University

Ellis Cashmore Staffordshire University

Davide Consoli University of Manchester

Stuart Derbyshire University of Birmingham

José Esteban Castro Newcastle University

Tim Cooper Nottingham Trent University

John Desmond St. Andrews University

Miriam Catterall The Queen’s University of Belfast

Diana Crane University of Pennsylvania

Nikhilesh Dholakia University of Rhode Island

Garry Crawford University of Salford

Paddy Dolan DIT Center for Consumption and Leisure Studies

Filipe Carreira da Silva Instituto de Ciencias Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa

Daniel Chaffee Flinders University Jasper Chalcraft University of Sussex Tak Wing Chan University of Oxford Siddharth Chandra Michigan State University Edward Chaney FMAS, Southampton Solent University

Chiara Cretella University of Bologna Nick Crossley University of Manchester Carolyn Folkman Curasi Georgia State University Jean-Pascal Daloz University of Oxford Tim Dant Lancaster University

Sophie Chauveau Universite de Lyon

Ranjana Das London School of Economics

Jessica Chelekis Indiana University

Noelle Davies Baylor University

Michael Chibnik University of Iowa

Deborah S. Davis Yale University

Lyndie Christensen Nebraska Wesleyan University

Mark Davis University of Leeds

Danny Dorling University of Sheffield Arne Dulsrud The National Institute for Consumer Research (SIFO) Robert S. DuPlessis Swarthmore College Gemma Edwards University of Manchester Karin Ekström University of Boras Fiona Ellis-Chadwick Open University Jonathan Elms University of Stirling Amber M. Epp University of Wisconsin– Madison

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Contributors

Bruce Epperson Bruce Epperson Associates

Sebastian Garman Brunel University

Leslie Haddon London School of Economics

Angelika Epple University of Bielefeld

Thomas Gencarelli Manhattan College

Henrik Hagtvedt Boston College

Thomas Hylland Eriksen University of Osio

James W. Gentry University of Nebraska

David Evans University of Manchester

Alexandra George University of New South Wales

Håkan Håkansson BI Norwegian School of Management

Michelle Everson University of London

Güliz Ger Bilkent University

Jonathan Everts Universität Bayreuth

Karl Gerth Merton College

William Farrell Birkbeck College, University of London

Rossella Ghigi Universita degli Studi di Bologna

Henry L. Feingold City University of New York Luke Ferretter Baylor University Gary Alan Fıne Northwestern University A. Fuat Fırat University of Texas–Pan American Christina Fjellström Uppsala University Francesca Forno Universita degli Studi di Bergamo

Tom Gibbons Teeside University Lucy Gibson University of Manchester David Gilbert University of London Gill Gillespie University of Northumbria Elizabeth Goldsmith Florida State University Kirsten Gram-Hanssen Aalborg University Michael Greenacre Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Marianna Fotaki University of Manchester

Nicky Gregson University of Sheffield

Aubrey R. Fowler Valdosta State University

Christian Greiffenhagen University of Manchester

Adrian Franklin University of Tasmania

Erik Grimmer-Solem Wesleyan University

Lars-Erik Gadde Chalmers University of Technology

Jukka Gronow University of Uppsala

Jie Gao Stony Brook University

Kolleen M. Guy University of Texas at San Antonio

Meryl Gardner University of Delaware

Wencke Gwozdz Copenhagen Business School

Steve Hall Northumbria University Thomas D. Hall DePauw University Benjamin Halligan University of Salford Alan Hallsworth University of Surrey Eugene Halton University of Notre Dame Ferenc Hammer Eotvos Lorand University Sam Han University of Dayton Martin Hand Queen’s University Robert L. Harrison Western Michigan University Anders Hayden Dalhousie University Alison Hearn University of Western Ontario Kevin Hetherington Open University Michael Higgins University of Strathclyde Ben Highmore University of Sussex Ronald Paul Hill Villanova School of Business Matthew Hilton University of Birmingham Russell Hitchings University College of London

Contributors

Torbjörn Hjort Lund University

Ron Johnston University of Bristol

Charles Lemert Wesleyan University

Peter H. Hoffenberg University of Hawaii, Manoa

Nathan Jurgenson University of Maryland

Roger Leong National Gallery of Victoria

Margaret K. Hogg Lancaster University Management School

Elihu Katz University of Pennsylvania

Nils Lindahl Elliot Independent Scholar

Inge Kaul Hertie School of Governance

James Livesey University of Sussex

Robin Kearns University of Auckland

Sonia Livingstone University of London

Sandra Keiser Mount Mary College

Omar Lizardo University of Notre Dame

Margit Keller University of Tartu

Orvar Löfgren University of Lund

Simon Kemp University of Canterbury

Brian Longhurst University of Salford

Unni Kjærnes The National Institute for Consumer Research (SIFO)

Amanda D. Lotz University of Michigan

Helen Holmes University of Sheffield Daniel Hourigan Griffith University Eric L. Hsu Flinders University Kim Humphery Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Orsi Husz Stockholm University Yousaf Ibrahim University of Manchester Sabine Ichikawa Independent Scholar Alastair Iles University of California, Berkeley Stefan Immerfall Padagogische Hochschule Schwabisch Gmund Soziologie/Politwissenschaft Mehita Iqani London School of Economics

Christian A. Klöckner Norwegian University of Science and Technology James Kneale University College London Mika Kortelainen University of Manchester Helmut Kuzmics University of Graz Martti Laaksonen University of Vaasa

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Peter Lunt Brunel University Pauline Maclaran Royal Holloway University of London Phil Macnaghten Durham University Paolo Magaudda University of Padova Shinobu Majima Gakushuin University Veronica Manlow Brooklyn College

Cynthia K. Isenhour University of Kentucky

Torben Huus Larsen University of Southern Denmark

Peter Jackson University of Sheffield

Jörgen Larsson University of Gothenburg

John Mathiason Syracuse University

Mikko Jalas Helsinki School of Economics

Steph Lawler Newcastle University

William Jankowiak University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Rebecca Leach Keele University

Chiara Mauri University of Bocconi Via Bocconi, 8

Paul H. Johnson University of Durham

Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen University of Helsinki

Juliana Mansvelt Massey University

Harvey May Queensland University of Technology

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Contributors

Vanessa May University of Manchester

Jonathan Morris University of Hertfordshire

Wendy Parkins University of Otago

Robert N. Mayer University of Utah

James C. Morrison Aaron River Communications

Caitlin Patrick University College Dublin

Anne McCants Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Pablo Muchnik Emerson College

Vanessa M. Patrick University of Houston

David Muggleton University of Chichester

Charles Pattie University of Sheffield

Stewart Muir University of Manchester

Eugenia Paulicelli City University of New York

Anne Murcott University of Nottingham

William Pawlett University of Wolverhampton

Claire Nally University of Northumbria

Ceri Peach University of Oxford

Michelle R. Nelson University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Anna Cristina Pertierra University of Queensland

Sara McDowell University of Ulster Liz McFall Open University Sue McGregor Mount Saint Vincent University Peter McNeil University of Technology, Sydney Lyla Mehta University of Sussex Stacey Menzel Baker University of Wyoming Steven C. Michael University of Illinois Michele Micheletti Stockholm University Ian Miles University of Manchester

Terry Newholm University of Manchester Mimi Nichter University of Arizona Katherine O’Doherty Jensen University of Copenhagen Nick Osbaldiston University of Melbourne

Magdalena Petersson McIntyre University of Gothenburg Cassi L. Pittman Harvard University Jeff Pooley Muhlenberg College Tiziano Raffaelli Universita di Pisa Nissa Ramsay University of Sheffield

Steven Miles University of Liverpool

Jacob Ostberg Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University of Business

Vincent Miller University of Dayton

Cele C. Otnes University of Illinois

Jibonayan Raychaudhuri Essex University

Barbara Misztal University of Leicester

Jan Pahl Kent University

Geof Rayner Brunel University

Sabine Moeller European Business School

R. E. Pahl Essex University

Arthur P. J. Mol Wageningen University

Mika Pantzar Helsinki School of Economics

Lucia A. Reisch Copenhagen Business School

Ryan Moore Florida Atlantic University

Luca A. Panzone University of Manchester

Emanuela Mora Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Nicholas Park Nebraska Wesleyan University

Mark Ramsden Kingston University

Gerda Reith University of Glasgow PJ Rey University of Maryland Oscar Ricci University of Milano–Bicocca

Contributors

Silvia Rief University of Innsbruck

Jensen Sass Yale University

Marco Solaroli University of Milan

Giorgio Riello University of Warwick

Roberta Sassatelli Universita Statale di Milano

Vincent Song University of Sheffield

George Ritzer University of Maryland

Mike Savage University of York

Dale Southerton University of Manchester

Lauren A. Rivera Northwestern University

Andrew Sayer Lancaster University

Gert Spaargaren Wageningen University

Ken Roberts University of Liverpool

Theodore R. Schatzki University of Kentucky

Mike Robinson Leeds Metropolitan University

Joachim Scholderer Aarhus University

Michelle Stack University of British Columbia

Mark Roodhouse University of York

Jonathan E. Schroeder Rochester Institute of Technology

Jutta Roosen Technische Universitat Munchen Inge Røpke Technical University of Denmark

Alan Scott University of Innsbruck Sue Scott Glasgow Caledonian University

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Robert A. Stebbins University of Calgary Nico Stehr Zeppelin University Jill Steward Northumbria University Joel Stillerman Grand Valley State University

Daniel Scroop University of Sheffield

Luca Storti Universita degli Studi di Torino

Åsa Rosenberg University of Gothenburg

Giovanni Semi University of Turin

Pekka Sulkunen University of Helsinki

Julia Rothenberg Queensborough Community College, City University of New York

Joanne Sharp University of Glasgow

Oriel Sullivan University of Oxford

Mimi Sheller Drexel University

Takeda Hiroko University of Tokyo

Malcolm Rutherford University of Victoria

Robert J. Shepherd The George Washington University

Berna Tarı TOBB Ekonomi ve Teknoloji Universitiesi

Jennifer M. Silva University of Virginia

Nicole Taylor RMC Research Corporation

Chris Simms University of Portsmouth

Tobias Thomas Helmut-Schmidt University

Leslie Sklair London School of Economics

Avinash Thombre University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Marta Rodrigues Vilar Rosales New University of Lisbon

Diego Saglia Universita degli Studi di Parma Laura Sale University of Manchester Jillet Sarah Sam University of Maryland Özlem Sandıkcı Bilkent University Kent Sandstrom University of Northern Iowa Marco Santoro Universita di Bologna

Greg Smith University of Salford Magnus Söderlund Stockholm School of Economics

Catherine Tosenberger University of Winnipeg Anna Lisa Tota University Rome III

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Contributors

Monica Truninger Universidade de Lisboa (ICS) Arnold Tukker Norwegian University of Science and Technology

John K. Walton University of the Basque Country, Leoia, Spain Alan Warde University of Manchester

Darach Turley Dublin City University

Barbara Wasner Universitat Passau

Rodanthi Tzanelli University of Leeds

Matthew Watson University of Sheffield

Ebru Ulusoy Akgun University of Texas–Pan American

Nick Webber Birmingham City University

Paul Upham University of Manchester Andries van den Broek Social and Cultural Planning Office of the Netherlands Koen van Eijck Erasmus University Rotterdam Bas J. M. van Vliet Wageningen University Phillip Vannini Royal Roads University Rohit Varman Indian Institute of Management–Calcutta Matthias Zick Varul University of Exeter, School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Heike Weber Technische Universität Berlin Dan Welch University of Manchester Ulrich Wengenroth Munich Center for the History of Science and Technology Frederick F. Wherry University of Michigan Harold Wilhite University of Oslo Richard Wilk Indiana University John Wilkinson Rural Federal University, Rio de Janeiro Colin C. Williams University of Sheffield

Terhi-Anna Wilska University of Jyväskylä Simon Winlow University of York, Wentworth College Elizabeth A. Wissinger City University of New York Kristina Wittkowski European Business School Ian Woodward Griffith University Kath Woodward Open University Tara Woodyer University of Exeter Susan L. Wortmann Nebraska Wesleyan University Cas Wouters Utrecht University Luke Yates University of Manchester Jane Zavisca University of Arizona Chao Zhang University of Manchester Detlev Zwick York University

Introduction Consumer culture is a term used widely to describe a generic set of practices in which the consumption of goods and services seems to take on everexpanding significance in contemporary societies. Because of its generic application, it is particularly tricky to define. This is not least because the key component of consumer culture—consumption—is equally difficult to pin down. Colin Campbell (1995, 101–102) notes that no single definition of consumption has gained widespread acceptance. Still, he suggests “a simple working definition, one that identifies consumption as involving the selection, purchase, use, maintenance, repair and disposal of any given product or service.” The more generic term of consumer culture reflects the growing visibility and importance of consumption—of how goods and services are acquired, used, wasted, and desired—and concerns about the ways in which it is organized, experienced, and understood in the everyday lives of people in rich and poor societies. In the course of debate, consumer culture has been derided as a reflection of alienation, wastefulness, and self-interested materialism as well as a source of political apathy. It has also been celebrated as offering new freedoms in the formation of identities, as critical to meaningful social relations between people, as a source of pleasure, and as a mechanism of political change. Consumer culture should not, however, be simply conflated with consumerism and materialism. Consumerism, according to Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang (1995), relates to moral evaluations of cultural values, refers to judgments of social status, can be adopted as public policy and used as a vehicle for economic development, and can be associated with a range of (pro- and anticonsumerist) social movements. Materialism, by contrast, is defined by Russell Belk (1985, 265) as “the importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions.” Such importance

might be entirely gratifying, leading to satisfaction and pleasure, or regarded as shallow, superficial, unsatisfying, and ultimately as generating forms of contentment that mask the inequalities and exploitation of capitalism. Both consumerism and materialism certainly capture key aspects of consumer culture, but they do not capture its entirety. Consumer culture also refers to a process of socioeconomic change that is widely held to characterize post–World War II affluent societies. A concise definition is provided by Don Slater (1997, 8), who suggests that “consumer culture [is] a social arrangement in which the relation between lived culture and social resources, between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, is mediated through markets.” This emphasis on markets reflects the significant growth of one particular way in which goods and services are provisioned in society. Other modes of provisioning goods and services are through the state (such as health care, education, and waste collection) and interpersonal networks (for example, friends and family who often provide goods and services through informal help and gift giving). This focus on markets as a principal means of provisioning goods and services warrants two further broad observations. The first relates to politics, economics, and ideology. The idea of consumer choice, exercised by informed citizens whose consumption decisions shape demand and form the bedrock of economic growth, has become a foundational ideology of societies where consumer culture is prominent. For scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman (1988), consumer culture presents new forms of freedom in which individuals can assemble their own identities by selecting from the wide array of lifestyles available within markets. This idea contrasts with earlier periods where

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people’s identities were defined more strongly by their relationship to production—through social class and social status, which was primarily derived from occupations. Such freedoms are, however, double-edged: people have no choice but to choose because even opting out of a consumer lifestyle is a lifestyle in itself! As consumption replaces production as the principal way in which people understand who they are and how they relate to other people (i.e., through consumer lifestyles rather than social class groupings), the sovereignty of the consumer becomes valorized, and consumer choice becomes an ideal to be protected and nourished— even though those choices can lead to significant global inequalities. A second set of observations relates to the circulation of meanings. Consumers are, according to Scott Ward, Thomas Robertson, and Daniel Wackman (1971), socialized into consumption. To be a competent consumer requires the acquisition of skills related to understanding the symbolic significance of goods, knowing how to consume skillfully by grasping the mechanics of price and budgeting, and making appropriate choices about which goods to purchase. In their book The World of Goods (1980), Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood present goods as an information system. From Thorstein Veblen’s (1899/1925) account of conspicuous consumption and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of social distinction—where status and identity are displayed through what people consume—to the rituals of more ordinary forms of consumption (such as sharing a meal), goods and services serve as a system of communication that make identities, relationships, and social differences meaningful. Around this system of communication, cultural industries—of advertising, branding, marketing, popular music, films, and the media more generally—have emerged that influence the way people understand the meaning of goods. For Marxist theorists, particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/2002), culture industries together with the mass production of goods and services only serve to standardize culture. In the process, cultural imagination, spontaneity, and creativity are obliterated, undermining critical thought and action and creating false needs that pacify the populace. Whatever the interpretation, the consensus remains that the constant circulation

of information about, and images of, goods and services are inescapable within consumer culture.

Historical Emergence of Consumer Culture While a market-driven view of consumer culture is useful for characterizing the contemporary period, it can lead to a perception that the seeds of consumer culture were planted in the late-nineteenth century and matured in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, dating the origins of consumer culture is also a difficult task. Historians continue to differ about its origins, some suggesting it took hold in the nineteenth century, citing the rise of the department store and its marketing functions (aided by innovations in print technology). Neil McKendrick (1982) locates its origins in the widespread consumption of china, tea, cotton, and other goods in the eighteenth century, pointing to the marketing strategies pioneered by Josiah Wedgewood (founder of the Wedgwood pottery company in England) as early examples of the emergence of advertising. Other scholars have dated features of consumer culture to the Renaissance period and even to the Middle Ages. Whatever its precise origins, the emergence of consumer culture is clearly locked into the broader social changes associated with the Enlightenment and Modernization periods. Among the most significant developments are the processes of capitalist industrialization and urbanization. The emergence of capitalist industrialization had profound implications for the ways in which people related to the goods from which the material world is comprised. For Karl Marx (1867/1976), industrial society transformed the meaning of goods. In contrast to methods of production in earlier societies, capitalist industrialization had the effect of distancing the labor involved in producing goods from the consumption of those goods. For Marx, the result was that the true value of goods, which is the human labor involved in their production, becomes invisible. The value of goods, as a consequence, is not simply tied to their use value but becomes increasingly defined according to their exchange value (i.e., what an object can be exchanged for). Once goods are understood in this way, they become free to take on a broader range of meanings and become subject to representation, mythologization, mystification, and promotion, which can increase their exchange value.

Introduction

Consider the premium paid (or exchanged in monetary terms) for designer-label clothing or antique furniture, where the use value remains the same as cheaper alternatives but the symbolic meanings and representations of these goods command a greater exchange value. Marx described this process as commodity fetishism, a process whereby goods take on particular types of symbolic meaning. In his classic essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Georg Simmel (1903/1970) examined how people responded to living in cities during the nineteenth century. Simmel interpreted life in modern cities as characterized by frequent interactions within crowds of strangers. As Jukka Gronow (1997) explains, within this large anonymous urban environment consumption was a way to stand out from the crowd and reassert a sense of individuality. This goal required a delicate balance of imitating others (in order not to stand out too much) but without simply copying what those others in the crowd were doing (which would provide for no sense of individuality at all). The way to achieve this balance was through the pursuit of fashion, which provided some guidance on what to wear but offered enough variety for a sense of individuality. The process of urbanization played a key role in the emerging significance of consumption for expressing to oneself and to others a sense of individuality. It was, however, the rapid spread of mass consumption after the 1950s that the notion of consumer culture really came to the fore. As the consumption of high-status goods became available to more members of advanced capitalist societies, the symbolic value of goods became an increasingly important way to distinguish between goods and social groups. Advertising and marketing developed to convince consumers that the various goods being offered by producers differed from each other (for example, that there is a significant difference between two brands of toothpaste), and consumers sought to create their personal styles of consumption that differed from that of the masses. Indeed, by the 1960s, youth cultures began to take mass-produced goods and give them new symbolic meanings to create their own collective styles of consumption (a subculture or lifestyle). By the end of the twentieth century, consumption became a defining feature of everyday lives, especially in affluent societies. It has become pivotal to identity formation, social group differentiation,

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economic growth and development, political and social movements, and, perhaps most profoundly, the core medium through which people relate to the world around them.

Key Features of Consumer Culture Given the diverse scope of consumer culture and its historical location in broad processes of social, economic, and cultural change, it is perhaps more useful to outline its key features than to provide a single definition. This is precisely what Celia Lury does in her book Consumer Culture (1996). She identifies the key features of consumer culture as the following: • The availability of a large (and constantly increasing) number and range of types of consumer goods • The tendency for more aspects of human exchange and interaction to be mediated by commercial markets • The expansion of shopping as a leisure pursuit • The increasing visibility of different forms of shopping (from secondhand bargains to designer goods) • The political organization by and of consumers (e.g., green consumers) • A growing visibility of the consumption of leisure practices and sports (including the reorganization of sports to suit the requirements of commercial sponsors) • Liberalization of consumer credit legislation and the rise of consumer debt, with people borrowing money to fuel their consumption, which in turn drives economic output • The increase of sites for purchase and consumption • The growing importance of packaging, promotion, and display of consumer goods in the production process • The pervasiveness of advertising, marketing, and branding • An increased emphasis on the style, design, and appearance of goods • The manipulation of time and space— simulations of past times and other spaces • The emergence of consumer crimes (fraud, etc.) • The impossibility of avoiding “making choices” in consumer markets

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• The increasing visibility of consumer illnesses and maladies (e.g., compulsive shopping) • Widespread interest in the collection of material goods

The above features of consumer culture are not restricted in application to advanced capitalist societies. Processes of globalization mean that some features of consumer culture are evident across the globe; products, lifestyle images and understandings of well-being, economic organization, and the political and cultural valuing of consumer choice all circulate across the globe in a diversity of ways. Consumer culture is also at the heart of many substantive challenges of the contemporary period, including climate change, political instability, inequality, economic growth and prosperity, and qualities of life. This encyclopedia covers the diverse range of topics associated with consumer culture over both time (historically) and space (geographically). It does so by drawing on a variety of disciplines that address the subject area, including anthropology, business studies, communications studies, cultural studies, economics, environmental sciences, history, geography, gender studies, innovation studies, leisure studies, marketing, media studies, philosophy, psychology, political science, social work, sociology, and science and technology studies.

Rationale, Content, and Organization of the Encyclopedia As the above suggests, consumer culture is the focus of a broad and varied field of intellectual inquiry that has received considerable attention from an array of disciplines that has produced extensive theories, a plethora of empirical studies, and a multitude of concepts. As a consequence, students and researchers face an overwhelming task of sorting through the existing literature and decoding its overlapping theories and concepts to gain a clear and thorough understanding of consumer culture and all its components. It was in this context that the idea for the encyclopedia was first formed. The need for such an encyclopedia had been identified by librarians and others who field questions about resources in this subject area. While dictionaries can provide some definitions of the ideas that often circulate

within the field of consumer culture, they also tend to provide only very short and basic descriptions that ignore the nuances and broader applications of the topics at hand. Alternatively, textbooks on consumer culture are usually discipline specific, and handbooks or “readers” on consumer culture reprint a number of detailed but subject-specific essays. Located between the short and concise dictionary and the more comprehensive but discipline/subject specificity of textbooks and handbooks, this encyclopedia is designed to be an introduction to the wide range of topics within the broad parameters of consumer culture. Entries have been written in clear, nontechnical, and succinct fashion to ensure accessibility and that the key ideas, arguments, perspectives, ways of researching consumption, and the empirical studies that bring the subject area to life are comprehensively explained. There are four “levels” of entry. Longer entries of between five thousand and six thousand words cover disciplinary perspectives and substantive subject matter. Entries of around three thousand words focus on core theories across disciplines, and shorter fifteen hundred–word entries focus upon particular topics. The final level incorporates posthumous biographies—providing a short overview of influential thinkers whose works have made major contributions to understandings of consumption and consumer culture. The purpose of this multilevel organization is to provide different entry points into the contents of the encyclopedia so that the reader can navigate through issues of interest according to his or her needs. Each entry also follows a familiar format: to define the scope of the subject matter; outline the historical and geographical applications of the topic; outline the key issues, interpretations, and scope of the topic; consider any methodological issues raised; and identify future directions in research, theory, and/or methodology related to the topic. Entries are organized alphabetically, but the content of the encyclopedia can be navigated in numerous ways. To help the reader browse the encyclopedia, a Reader’s Guide is provided that organizes the content into nine thematic categories: • Everyday Life • Geographies and Histories of Consumer Culture

Introduction

• • • • • • •

Methods and Trends Persons Politics and Consumption Production, Exchange, and Distribution Social Divisions and Social Groups Technology and Media Theoretical Perspectives and Concepts

Each entry contains a list of further readings and a set of cross-references to other entries within the encyclopedia. Such cross-references will be particularly useful to the reader who wishes to find out more about specific aspects of consumer culture. In this respect, there are a number of paths through which the encyclopedia can be browsed and read. Longer, more substantial entries provide a generic overview from which the reader can seek out further detail by following the cross-references to more specific concepts, issues, and methodologies. Likewise, the reader coming to the encyclopedia with a specific interest (for example, McDonaldization) can use the cross-references to explore a range of issues around that subject matter (such as Globalization, Rationalization, or Food Consumption). Finally, a full index to the volumes is provided so that readers can identify particular issues and explore how they connect and contrast across the different entries.

How the Encyclopedia Was Created The encyclopedia was developed in five basic steps: Step 1: Leading scholars in the field of consumer culture from across the world were approached to serve as members of the editorial board. Particular attention was given to ensure that the editorial board represented the wide and diverse range of disciplines that address consumer culture and provided expertise in both the geographical application and historical range of the subject areas. Fortunately, and as an indicator of the enthusiasm for this project, all the scholars approached accepted their invitation. Step 2: Following many long conversations and e-mail exchanges, a thematic categorization, a structure for different levels of entries, and the scope of each topic were agreed upon. At the same time, a very long list of potential entries was formulated. This list was then checked against publications in

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key academic journals to ensure a comprehensive coverage. The long list was then organized within the agreed-upon structure, and decisions were made about which variations of conceptual term or descriptive title would be used. From this process, the content and organization of the encyclopedia as described above was produced. Step 3: Each member of the editorial board identified leading scholars to receive invitations to contribute specific entries. We also consulted with our respective colleagues to ensure that each entry was outlined to the highest standard. It was particularly important that the contributors to the encyclopedia represent the disciplinary range of the subject matter as well as its geographical reach. The 343 contributors who provided the 549 entries are located in nineteen different countries from five continents. Step 4: Contributor guidelines were produced with particular emphasis placed on providing thorough descriptions of the subject matter using nontechnical and accessible language. Step 5: The editorial board reviewed all entries with attention focused on the content and coverage of each entry, returning entries to authors for revision and rejecting those that were felt not to cover the subject matter as required. This process was followed by a second round of editorial review by the developmental editor, concentrating on clarity and accessibility of language and style. Finally, all entries were copyedited and underwent final review by the editor before being proofread and finalized for publication.

Acknowledgments There are many people responsible for the existence and high quality of this encyclopedia. Andrew Boney, Reed Cooley, and Marc Segers (from CQ Press) played an important role in the early stages, helping to develop the structure and organization of the volumes. Those early stages were also greatly aided by the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council’s Cultures of Consumption Research Programme, which provided the critical mass of scholars and research necessary to convince all involved that such a reference work would be valuable, timely, and possible.

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I am also indebted to a huge number of supportive colleagues from across the world who have helped define and clarify the scope of individual entries, assisted with identifying authors, and provided the necessary enthusiasm and encouragement to push forward with this project. While it would be too long a list to thank everyone, I would like to single out Andrew McMeekin and Joshua Richards as well as my many colleagues at the University of Manchester who have all been incredibly supportive. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the hard work of the 343 contributors to the encyclopedia, all of whom have done an outstanding job with the task at hand. A number of authors, all of whom took on and wrote five or more entries to an exemplary standard, deserve special praise. These are Matthias Benzer, Arthur Berger, Tim Dant, David Evans, Rosella Ghigi, Ben Halligan, Ian Miles, Cele Otnes, Marco Santoro, Roberta Sassatelli, Colin Williams, and Ian Woodward. There have also been a number of people without whom this encyclopedia would not have materialized. The editorial board members—Diana Crane, Karin Ekström, Peter Jackson, Frank Trentmann, Alan Warde, and Rick Wilk—have worked tirelessly throughout this project, and it is their sound judgment and expertise that have shaped a truly excellent reference work. The SAGE team, including Rolf Janke, Kimie Renshaw, and the copyediting team of Jane Haenel, Colleen Brennan, Amy Frietag, Matthew Sullivan, and Patricia Sutton have made a major contribution to the production of this work. And, most important of all have been Carole Maurer and Laura Notton, whose expertise, efficiency, patience, wisdom, and humor have been essential throughout the process. On a personal level, I must also thank my wife, Kerry Southerton, and our three children, Charlie, Max, and Bella, whose support, interest in the encyclopedia, and endless capacity to put up with discussions about consumer culture and late-night e-mail exchanges with contributors and authors have been truly fantastic. Dale Southerton

Further Readings Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. First published 1944. Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1988. Belk, Russell. “Materialism: Trait Aspects of Living in the Material World.” Journal of Consumer Research 12, no. 3 (1985): 265–280. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Campbell, Colin. “The Sociology of Consumption.” In Acknowledging Consumption, edited by Daniel Miller, 96–126. London: Routledge, 1995. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Penguin, 1980. First published 1978. Gabriel, Yiannis, and Tim Lang. The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentation. London: Sage, 1995. Gronow, Jukka. The Sociology of Taste. London: Routledge, 1997. Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. London: Penguin, 1976. First published 1867. McKendrick, Neil. “Commercialization and the Economy.” In The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, 9–194. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In On Individuality and Social Form, edited by Donald Levine. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970. First published 1903. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Ward, Scott, Thomas Robertson, and Daniel Wackman. “Children’s Attention to Television Advertising.” In Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the Association for Consumer Research, 143–156. Association for Consumer Research, 1971. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Allen & Unwin, 1925. First published 1899.

A The Roman Empire was probably the first international state to regularize and standardize patterns of consumption because of the vastness of its territory. These patterns would come to denote consumptive patterns from the collapse of the empire, the evolution from feudalism to capitalism, transformation of the commodity markets from farming to manufacturing and industrial, and the transition from rural to urban life. For populations engaged in the process of cultural change and cultural acquisition, and whose lives might be changed in the process, E. Franklin Frazier’s insightful dual acculturation dichotomy would seem appropriate, though he intended the model to address the black culture in the South as it was shaped by the culture of Jim Crow. For Frazier, material acculturation involved the conveying of language and other cultural tools, whereas ideational acculturation involved the conveyance of morals and norms. This point made by Frazier with respect to black Southerners can be said to parallel the views and actions of many groups that must engage with larger, more dominant groups within specific political and demographical boundaries. The issue here is that individuals and groups may consciously decide to accept the language and visible cultural tools of a new or dominant culture without accepting and internalizing the morals and norms of that culture. In the modern era, the acculturation process was accelerated by the combination of the growth of cities, the continuing urbanization process, the scientific revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the intensification of European colonialism, which fostered the view that conquered colonies were

ACCULTURATION Acculturation, according to Melville Herskovits, is the process by which culture is transmitted from one group to another, and the process in which individuals learn the customs, norms, and values of the group. The acculturation process in a consumer culture is not completely dissimilar to acquisition of norms and values in nonconsumer societies. Indeed, this process can be traced back as far as the Roman Empire, where the center of the empire acculturated non-Romans and Romans alike into Rome’s cultural vortex, where extensive trading of consumer goods and services occurred. In both ancient and modern times, the acculturation process has been precipitated by warfare and invasions in which stronger societies overpowered weaker societies, thus forcing vanquished societies to adopt the victors’ languages, religions, and other cultural and societal attributes. The societal acculturation process can be seen most clearly by analyzing the central role of the city of Rome in socializing citizens from the far corners of the Roman Empire to Roman law, values, and customs. The acculturation process in which the non-Roman is subjected was aptly expressed in the slogan, “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Whether due to force, other types of coercion, or because they have accepted the customs and values that are different from their volition, acculturation as an ongoing procedure may itself be very limited, partial, or total, with the latter representing assimilation. 1

2

Acculturation

sources of goods that might be available for citizens of Western nations. The slave trade was a part of this goods-and-services process. However, until the midto late nineteenth century the acquisition of many goods and services was only possible for the rich and members of the upper class. The beginning of mass society in the late nineteenth century and concurrent rise of European and American capitalism was a perfect union of science, liberal democracies, and capitalism. Goods were being produced for the consumers, but even as consumerism and the consumer culture was taking hold, such thinkers as Thorstein Veblen sounded an alarm by asserting that it was not merely the consumption of goods that was a problem. Rather, the problem was “conspicuous consumption.” Veblen’s fear, however, did not dampen the engine of either capitalism or the businesses whose key aim was to convince citizens of the merits of their products and of the need to discard the old and to be in constant search for products and ideas that are new and modern. John Kenneth Galbraith cites a causal chain when he asserts a “direct link between production and wants [that] is provided by the institutions of modern advertising and salesmanship.” The latter, Galbraith claims, exist to “create desires—to bring into being wants that previously did not exist.” Though Galbraith is critical of those who create these desires, he does note that out of this constant striving has come societal competitiveness and the urge to “produce a high living standard” (1958, 155). There is a dialectical relationship between acculturation to consumer culture and the study of consumption. One side of the dialectic is mass society and the campaign to convince consumers that they should and must have certain items and must purchase these items. The other side, in a robust and innovative economy, is to encourage creators and innovators to embark on projects that would pay, when necessary, individuals and companies to continue to experiment, innovate, and create. Though he was skeptical of capitalism’s ability to survive over the long run, Joseph Schumpeter saw the great merit of those engaging in capitalist enterprise and expansion for the mass market as possessing “the ability to dream, the will to conquer, the joy of creating, and the psychic drive to build an economic kingdom” (1961, 93–94). The current heightened consumerism has, however, according to Lester C. Thurow, led to the

worship of instant gratification in which, especially on television, producers and creators have had to take a backseat to the hype in the marketplace. This acculturation to the ethos of consumerism has great implications for influencing and controlling human behavior, as billions of dollars are spent to advertise products on television, radio, magazines, and newspapers. Thurow, without doubt, refers to a pre–mass society when he notes that there was a time when qualities such as independence, self-control, and self-reliance prevailed among the American public. Echoing the general pessimism of Veblen and Schumpeter, Christopher Lasch writes that industrialism, combined with consumerism, has acculturated and resocialized the population to value dependence and passivity. Thus, according to Lasch, big business and advertising have conspired to emotionally enslave the population, and in so doing, provide the public with few options in the marketplace. Daniel Bell views this scenario as one of the major cultural contradictions of capitalism. Others have defined consumerism and the ethos of consumption differently and have approached both issues from the position of the choices provided to citizens in a mass society. Unlike those who view consumers as virtual slaves to the media’s creation of social “wants,” and to producers’ desires to force these wants on the population, these thinkers, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Michael Novak, and others, view consumers as the group most in charge of the producing and selling of goods and products. Mises, Hayek, Novak, and others believe that producers, entrepreneurs, and the media may indeed attempt to impose their will on the population, but in the end it is the consumer who decides. Today, the positions regarding the exploitation of the masses versus the freedom of individuals and groups to choose are played out in the question of globalization. Many third-world nations and their Western supporters criticize what they view as a Western (though primarily a U.S.) cultural, political, and economic assault on third- and fourth-world nations. These nations are perceived to be subjected to a barrage of media from the West, inducing them to purchase items that they often do not need or want but that they purchase in their quest for Westernization and Americanization. That some nations find themselves in heavy debt to Western nations is beyond a doubt, but antiglobalists view these developing nations as victims of well-planned strategies to put them in

Actor-Network Theory

debt in the same manner many view victims in mass society who are induced to purchase more than they can afford. Thus, according to Lasch, the love of the consumption of “things” and the importance placed in having these things as a representation of who we are and our value as human beings have been detrimental to individuals and nations. As the financial meltdown that began in 2008 is evolving, both nationally and internationally, we are learning that just as we have been acculturated to want certain products and services, we must now be reacculturated to not want these products and services and to set new purchasing priorities. But as Max Weber asserted, social life is predicated on patterns of habits developed by individuals and the larger society. He also noted that social and individual habits are unpredictable and changing. As the world is currently in the midst of radically revising the financial parameters that long governed and determined behavior, it is anyone’s guess as to the types of consumer culture, patterns of consumption, and the diverse mixture of economic systems with which we may be confronted in the future. Kimya N. Dennis and Rutledge M. Dennis See also Americanization; Conspicuous Consumption; Cultural Studies; Desire; Diaspora; Globalization; Markets and Marketing; Needs and Wants

Further Readings Balsdon, J. P. V. D. Rome: The Story of an Empire. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Cary, Max, and Howard Hayes Scullard. A History of Rome. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. Frazier, E. Franklin. Race and Cultural Contacts in the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Hayek, F. A. New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Herskovits, Melville. Man and His Works. New York: Knopf, 1950. Lasch, Christopher. The Minimal Self. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Mises, Ludwig von. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981.

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Novak, Michael. The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Schumpeter, Joseph. The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Starr, Chester. Civilization and the Caesars. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. Thurow, Lester C. The Future of Capitalism. New York: William Morrow, 1996. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Weber, Max. The City. New York: Free Press, 1958. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner, 1958.

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY Actor-network theory (ANT) is an approach originated in the field of the social study of science that aims to explain the interactive process though which forms of innovations emerge in society as networks composed of heterogeneous actors, objects, and representations. ANT emerged as a way to establish more sophisticated understandings of the interaction between social context, science, and material artifacts. Together with other technology approaches that have shaped social theory, it developed in contrast to more traditional perspectives to innovation, until then characterized by deterministic views and linear explanations. One of the main ANT assumptions is that social processes may be explained by considering not only actions of human social actors, but also the active role played by animals, objects, and even ideas, which are defined as nonhuman actors. ANT approaches and concepts have influenced consumer studies in the last decade and especially in connection with the study of the consumption of media and domestic technologies.

Origins and Framework ANT—which should be not mistaken for the totally different approach of network analysis—originated at the beginning of the 1980s, and its concepts and assumptions were originally developed at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation in Paris by Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law, with the aim of understanding processes of creation of scientific facts and material technologies. Its emphasis on the

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Actor-Network Theory

processual aspects and on the dynamic relations between human beings, things, and symbolic representations constitutes a theoretical linkage to the sociological traditions of ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. The importance devoted to the role of objects in society made ANT a relevant tool in those fields where materiality assumes a crucial role in social interaction, including sociology of culture and consumption studies. From the nineties onward, ANT became popular as a tool for analysis in a range of fields beyond science and technology studies, being applied in organizational analysis, anthropology, feminist studies, economics, and especially in sociology. The status of ANT is controversial: as the same authors explained, ANT is not exclusively a theory nor a defined methodology (i.e., Latour 2005), and today the authors tend to refer to this approach more in terms of the “after ANT” developments and growths. In fact, ANT does not represent a defined and standardized approach; the lack of orthodoxy in its appropriation by different scholars has caused it to be interpreted and used in a wide range of alternative and sometimes conflicting manners. One of the crucial arguments characterizing ANT’s arguments regards the way it interprets the process of the emergence and stabilization of innovation in society, which is commonly interpreted, in ANT’s terms, as a work of translations. Translation can be considered the core characterization of ANT, so much so that this approach is often also referred to as a sociology of translation and consists in a set of negotiations that contribute to the constitution of a network in which both human and nonhuman actors assume shapes and identities according to prevailing strategies of interaction. The process of translation is constituted by four steps, according to Callon. The first step of translation is problematization, occurring when a central actor defines the identities and interests of other actors, both human and nonhuman, and establishes itself as an “obligatory passage point,” thus becoming an indispensable node of the network that will be shaped in subsequent steps. The second step is interessement, which consists of getting actors to concern themselves with the constitution of the network. At this stage, the primary actor works to induce other actors to make themselves adequate for the roles it has defined for them. The third step is represented by the active enrollment of other actors, which happens

when these other actors accept the roles that have been defined for them and start to contribute to structuring the configuration of a relation in a way that is coherent with the perspective of the main actor. The fourth, and last, step is constituted by the mobilization of allies, which consist of the constitution relationships characterized by the delegation of the main actor as the representation of the whole configuration constituted by other actors.

Relevant Concepts and Influence in Consumption Studies Because ANT does not represent a stable and defined theory, it has been developed in other fields not only by the adoption of the full framework, but also by the appropriation of concepts and terminology. At least three main ANT concepts became common outside the distinctive field of science and technology studies. The first one is that of the black box, which is used to define a fact or artifact when the process of translation is complete and the efforts by different actors to establish a stable network are concluded and already inscribed into the artifact. At this stage, the actors and their strategies for establishing a network disappear and remain hidden, in this way avoiding the possibility of understanding the backstage area of the process of negotiation and struggle occurring during the emergence of facts and artifacts. Thus, the operation of the opening of the black box represents the work of reassembling the relationship between the heterogeneous element and the actors involved in the network and of discovering the actual development of the negotiation process that shapes both artifacts and actors involved in the translation. A second relevant ANT concept is that of heterogeneous engineering. In the ANT perspective, society as well as knowledge, objects, facts, and institutions are understood as the result of a process of heterogeneous engineering, during which a stable configuration emerges through the work of assembling the elements of different natures—material, social, cultural, and so on. The emphasis accorded to the heterogeneity of the materials involved in the process of engineering is at the base of the ability of ANT to account for the multiple factors that participate in the establishment of innovations and new facts and artifacts in society. A third and crucial concept in the ANT framework is the principle of generalized symmetry,

Addiction

stating that in the explanations of the relationships among the networks, humans, and objects, which are defined as nonhuman actors, is a request to be considered at the same level and thus in a symmetrical way. This conception clearly requires the ANT scholar to make the capacity of objects and things explicit between active agents in the process of the emergence of innovations. Indeed, with the principle of generalized symmetry, ANT assumes that all the elements in a network are also defined, with a semiotic vocabulary, as actants. The theoretical basis of this assumption is that the difference between human and nonhuman is not an a priori distinction on which it is possible to develop the explanation of the relationships. A canonical ANT example of generalized symmetry between human and nonhuman actors regards Callon’s analysis of the decline of scallops in the St. Brieuc Bay and the attempt by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy. In his analysis, scallops are described as having motivations and interests just as biologists and local fishermen, thus showing that, whether they be humans, animals, or things, all the actants may be considered symmetrically in the work of explanation of processes, facts, and innovations. Although the ANT idea that, to some degree, things share a part of agency in the definition of the network has been widely criticized, today it remains one of the most powerful references when discussing the role of objects in the social world and in more specific contexts. In the last decade, the ANT framework has also influenced some scholars in consumption studies, especially those who were faced with the forms of consumption involving sociotechnical systems and technical artifacts. One of the main examples of the influence of ANT in consumption studies is represented by the work of Elisabeth Shove on domestic technologies and the consumption of energy and water at home. Indeed, the author adopts some of the ANT assumptions to develop an interpretation of the regime of consumption of technology on the basis of the concept of coevolution. Thus, Shove shows how in the household the adoption of air conditioning machines contributed to creating boundaries between the external and the internal space of the home; the practice of consumption of air conditioning appears to be configured by technical aspects and international standards, therefore it directly

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influences the emergence of new consumption expectations and lifestyle habits. Paolo Magaudda See also Domestic Technologies; Innovation Studies; Material Culture; Network Society; Object Biographies; Social Shaping of Technology; Sociotechnical Systems

Further Readings Callon, Michel. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” In Power, Action and Belief, edited by John Law, 196–233. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1987. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Law, John. “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of the Portuguese Expansion.” In The Social Construction of Technical Systems, edited by W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. J. Pinch, 111–134. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Law, John, and John Hassard, eds. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

ADDICTION Addiction refers to a condition in which a person has difficulty abstaining from a habitual behavior even when recognizing that it causes problematic consequences for the addict and other people. Alternative terms commonly used are dependency syndrome (of alcohol), pathological behavior (gambling), or disorder (sexuality, eating). Addiction is often considered to occur frequently in consumer societies where possibilities for excess are easily available.

Etymology and History The original Latin words addicere (verb) and addictionem (noun) were legal terms that referred to sentencing someone to be a bond slave. In modern English, the term was commonly used to designate either a positive or a negative devotion to a belief or an activity. In the early nineteenth century, it gained a strongly negative meaning, first as excessive

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Addiction

attachment to drinking alcohol, then to other intoxicating substances. This is the dominant meaning still today, but in recent decades the common usage has come to cover a wide range of behaviors, including smoking, gambling and gaming, sexuality, eating, shopping, television viewing, sports and exercise, and so on. Typical characteristics of addiction (besides difficulty abstaining) are: withdrawal effects (ill-feeling caused by the absence of the substance from the body), tolerance (the need to increase dose to get the same effect), relapses (resuming the habit after even long periods of abstinence), and loss of control (incapacity to stop once begun, e.g., to take only one or two drinks of alcohol).

Realism and Constructivism There is no generally accepted scientific view of what addictions are or what causes addictive behaviors. Theories oscillate between biological dependency on a substance (realism) and social definitions of repetition as dependence (constructivism). Realistic theories seek causal explanations from neuroadaptations in the brain or from learning and other psychological processes. Rational choice theories explain addictive behaviors as elevated preference for immediate pleasure, whereas negative consequences lose their subjective importance (this is called hyperbolic discounting). Constructivist theories look at societal reactions not necessarily related to a specific substance. According to constructivism, similar behaviors may be labeled as addictions in some cultures but understood in different terms in other contexts. Many constructivists argue that the concept of addiction reflects a cultural shift from external control to self-discipline in modern societies, which means that problems are no longer defined in terms of sin, crime, or deviance but as a failure of self-control, that is, as a disease of the will. The nineteenth-century American physician Benjamin Rush was the founder of this view. The Scottish medical doctor Thomas Trotter and the Swedish clinician Magnus Huss emphasized physical damage caused by alcohol, as well as the social environment leading to excessive consumption. Temperance movements in North America adapted the Rushian understanding of alcohol as a mental poison, later incorporated into the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) movement. European temperance movements have stressed environmental factors in controlling the problem and the role of social assistance in recovery.

Current Medical Practice Current medical practice operates with a pragmatic syndrome theory. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), published by the World Health Organization, do not currently include the category addiction. Specific addictive behaviors are classified in other categories, for example, pathological gambling (PG) is included in the DSM-IV under the section Impulse Control Disorders. In ICD-10, it is included in the category Disorders of Adult Personality and Behaviour. Together with anorexia—the other “dependency” that does not involve an addictive substance— PG was first diagnosed in the 1970s and included in DSM-III in 1980. There is no etiological theory underlying the definition, and the diagnosis is based on a checklist of behavioral symptoms that together form a “dependency syndrome.” According to Jim Orford, most clinicians consider addiction to be a syndrome of varying degrees rather than as a typological (yes-or-no) condition, or as a behavioral pattern resulting from a combination of factors.

Practical Implications There is a great deal of practical and ideological controversy in the field. The dominant view among the treatment community, especially concerning alcoholism and drug use, is that addiction is a disease triggered by the substance, and it is also related to the patient’s personality and social environment. Other views deny the usefulness of this concept altogether, focusing instead on exposure (i.e., the availability of alcohol, other substances, or opportunities of behavior, e.g., gambling). Most authors today seem to agree that the disease concept of addiction is metaphoric at best. There is no known treatment, the neurobiological mechanisms are not known, behavioral addictions such as gambling may develop into fatal dependency but there is no substance involved, and the great majority of those who recover even from strongly neuroadaptive substances such as nicotine do so without professional or medical help. Clinical tests such as the Short-Form Alcohol Dependence Data Questionnaire (SADD) or Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) are lists of questions about the client’s alcohol behavior. Answers are given as points that are added up to

Adornment

a summary score that indicates the severity of the problem. The test results can be easily retrieved in nonclinical conditions, but they are only first indications for a possible need for help. Addictions, as well as recovery, depend on the beliefs of the addicts, on their social environment, and on the control system. Although these beliefs are always a matter of controversy and contradiction, they are nevertheless real facts to be accounted for. For example, the initiation of tobacco or drug use is strongly conditioned by beliefs about these substances. Another example is AA, with its strong belief that alcoholism is a disease, which, independent of its scientific status, undoubtedly helps many recover. Societal understandings of the nature of different types of addictions are critical in view of the possibilities of natural recovery.

Significance in Contemporary Societies Addictions are said to be a scourge of affluent consumer societies, indicated by the increasingly frequent usage of the term and in some cases (gambling, eating disorders) also by the growing number of diagnosed cases. British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1994, 71) for example, sees addiction, or dependence, as a symptom of post-traditional individualism. How the relationship between consumer society and addiction is explained depends on the epistemological starting point of the interpretation. From the realist perspective, we should look at factors such as exposure to substances (alcohol, tobacco, drugs) or behaviors (eating, gambling). Even shopping as such may become an obsession for some consumers. Addictive behaviors can be seen as genetic maladaptations of natural desires for pleasure, excitement, and feelings in a society where these desires are excessively easy to satisfy. From a constructivist perspective, we should look at diagnostic practices and cultural conceptions guiding them. Individualistic societies stress self-control and strong will and tend to interpret excessive behavior as failure to exercise them. Methodological problems in solving the issue are related to the measurement of addictions as well as to their definition. In future years, neurobiological research will, with certainty, acquire a much-improved understanding of the mechanisms that explain addictive behavior, but still we will not have objective knowledge on how many people are

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inflicted independent of social institutions that make the diagnoses. Pekka Sulkunen See also Anorexia; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Gambling; Hedonism; Individualization; Shopping

Further Readings Ainslie, George. Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Alexander, Bruce K. The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Elster, Jon. “Emotion and Addiction: Neurobiology, Culture, and Choice.” In Addiction: Entries and Exits, edited by Jon Elster, 239–276. New York: Russell Sage, 1999. Giddens, Anthony. “Living in a Post-Traditional Society.” In Reflexive Modernization, edited by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, 56–109. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Gusfield, Joseph. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963. Levine, Harry. “The Discovery of Addiction: Changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in America.” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 39, no. 1 (1978): 493–506. Orford, Jim. Excessive Appetites: A Psychological View of Addiction. 2nd rev. ed. Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2001. Valverde, Mariana. Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

ADORNMENT The body is a stable and predictable biological model; however, it is in many respects linked to societal values and cultural norms. This is why the physical appearance of a person is shaped not only by genetic factors that cannot be changed but also by practices of beautification. Body adornment is cultural to a great extent, as it is evident from different practices in different cultures, while the media remain powerful disseminators of beauty images and the ideal appearance. Adornment is a consumer-related

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Adornment

concept because consumers purchase items from the market, including both instruments to apply and images to select and adopt, and engage in discourses about physical appearance in different consumption contexts. Each person’s appearance might be different due to different consumption practices, and each culture might have different norms and ideals. Tribal people have typically been perceived as applying body art to decorate their bodies, where symbolism is evident, and to keep their cultural identity, involving such concepts as age, sex, religion, and position in the group, as well as more specific symbols like marital status, intimidation of the enemy, respect for dead members, and spiritual states. History is full of examples of people living in ancient times who were interested in changing their appearances. For example, the first tattooed man, discovered on a mountain between Austria and Italy, lived about 5,000 years ago, while body piercing featured prominently in Ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Indian cultures. Victorian females wore corsets to make their bodies into an hourglass shape. In other words, every historical era and each culture, including today’s consumer culture, has its own ideas about adornment. Adornment can be of three types: first, temporary adornment practices such as makeup; second, permanent adornment practices such as tattooing; and third, using accessories and other related ornaments to beautify the appearance. The first category involves reversible forms of body modification, including makeup, hairdressing, and body painting. Makeup is the application of lipstick, eye shadow, blush, mascara, skin care products, nail polish, and other cosmetic substances to enhance or protect the appearance. Makeup is a summary term that may not clearly distinguish between decorative and skin care cosmetics. Hairdressing includes coloring and styling of hair in different forms. Some people may prefer to use a more “natural” color, sometimes just to conceal gray or white hair; others may choose different and “unnatural” colors. Hair is considered one of the most powerful symbols of individual and group identity because it is extremely personal and public at the same time. Body painting, unlike permanent forms, is applied to the surface of the skin and hence temporary. For instance, it can be done with clay, as in tribal societies, or henna dye, as in India and the Middle East. It is also considered as a subcategory of performance arts, where artists attempt to make particular statements.

The second type of adornment involves permanent forms of body modification, including tattooing, piercing, and cosmetic surgery. Permanent decorative forms are associated with more enduring constructs, like gender, group affiliations, and cultural norms and notions of beauty. Tattooing and piercing are particular forms of body art, and the consumption of tattooing and piercing has become a mass-consumer phenomenon. Today’s consumers are getting a tattoo not only to pay attention to the symbolic (and many times subcultural) meaning, but also to beautify their bodies. Tattooing is commonly perceived as a creative extension of the self by many consumer behavior researchers. Piercing in the West is a way of self-expression, while it may denote social traditions and rites of passage in non-Western societies. Another permanent alteration of the body is cosmetic surgery, which, as an extreme form of consumption, refers to surgical operations that change, transform, reconstruct, reshape, and add or remove parts or organs of the body for aesthetic purposes. Minimally invasive procedures, such as injection of botulinum toxin, are less permanent and require periodic treatments, whereas surgical interventions, such as breast augmentation and rhinoplasty, involve riskier choices with longer-term consequences. The third type of adornment involves using accessories, including clothing and jewelry. Clothing and jewelry are particularly used for adornment purposes because they may influence physical attractiveness through the aesthetics of the items themselves. In this case, the adornment’s attractiveness is transferred to the user. Clothing is one domain where consumers can change perceptions about their appearances, such as by wearing vertical stripes or bright colors. Clothing, as other forms of adornment, is influenced to a great extent by culture and time period. Each community develops its own way of shaping and marking individual bodies to indicate status changes or demonstrate social value. Fashion is an important dialogical source for consumers as a kind of cultural capital required to understand and apply fashion codes. Personal adornment is one area that is evaluated on a social, rather than an individual, basis. The strong relationship between group membership and consumption is highly evident in appearance-related behavior. The aesthetic impulse is encouraged by consumer culture to construct identities by way of modifying the surface body. One of the “groups” that mark social differences has been theorized to be

Adorno, Theodor

the sex of a person. When we look at people around us, we can discern their sex from their appearances, such as from their body size and shape, clothes, and other adornments. According to several scholars, women have become the objects of consumerism as the beauty myth continues by influencing women to constantly monitor themselves and repair the flawed parts of their bodies. This myth actually shapes, reproduces, and intensifies the so-called cult of femininity. On the other hand, men became as much a part of consumerism as women. They, too, are now addressed as consumers of grooming, clothing, and accessory products. The term metrosexuality denotes a recent movement among men to value their appearance as important, just as women do. Today, many men are willing to shave unwanted hair, shape their bodies, style their eyebrows, wear makeup, and get manicures and pedicures. Berna Tarı See also Aesthetics; Appropriation; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Clothing Consumption; Cosmetic Surgery; Gender; Hair Care/Hairdressing; Identity; Metrosexual; Self-Presentation

Further Readings Bloch, Peter H. “Involvement with Adornments as Leisure Behavior: An Exploratory Study.” Journal of Leisure Research 25, no. 3 (1993): 245–262. Eco, Umberto. History of Beauty. New York: Rizzoli, 2004. Howson, Alexandra. The Body in Society: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Kjeldgaard, Dannie, and Anders Bengtsson. “Consuming the Fashion Tattoo.” Advances in Consumer Research 32 (2005): 172–177. Sirgy, Joseph. “Self-Concept in Consumer Behavior: A Critical Review.” Journal of Consumer Research 9 (December 1982): 287–300. Turner, Bryan S. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. London: Sage, 1996.

ADORNO, THEODOR (1903–1969) Theodor Adorno was a German philosopher, musicologist, aesthetic theorist, and sociologist. He was a proponent of critical theory and a leading member of the Frankfurt school. His thinking was shaped by Hegelian philosophy, Karl Marx’s social thought,

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psychoanalysis, and the works of Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin. Of Jewish descent, Adorno was forced into English and American exile during the reign of National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s. On his return, he became one of Germany’s most influential intellectuals. Adorno’s examinations of consumption are situated within his sociological analysis of twentieth-century capitalism. He scrutinizes the ramifications of capitalist social relations for consumer culture as well as the consequences of consumption for the individual and society. Capitalism, Adorno holds, is governed by commodity exchange relations. Humans are reduced to producers of fungible consumer goods and paying customers. Creative activity is largely in the service of generating profit for the ruling class; the satisfaction of individual needs is secondary. In fact, the consumption of capitalism’s mass products—notably of cultural commodities and advertising—levels the specific needs of subjects down to a common appetite for the same goods. The leisure industry’s success in transforming boredom into the widespread demand for “tents and dormobiles, plus huge quantities of extra equipment” (Adorno 1991, 190) testifies to this process. The industry, in turn, bows to the wants it has itself created. Manufactured for an increasingly uniform market, commodities are relentlessly homogenized. The social dictate of commercial viability permits only superficial, schematic variations, which feign novelty to sustain the sales momentum. The “detached family houses . . . of Old and New England” exemplify “standardized mass products which even standardize the claim of each one to be irreplaceably unique” (79). Adorno also investigates the contribution of consumption to the preservation of capitalist society. “‘Consumer culture,’” he argues, is “not a luxury but . . . the . . . extension of production” (1983, 26). Relaxation and entertainment after work restore the employees’ labor power for manufacturing commodities; sports keep individuals fit and disciplined for work and school them in entrepreneurially exploitable team play. Adorno particularly emphasizes the power of cultural commodities—cinema, television, radio, jazz, pop, magazines, and best sellers—to manipulate consumers’ consciousness and enlist them in the upkeep of the capitalist order. The culture industry’s incessant dissemination of the same conventional worldviews weakens people’s resistance to socially approved thought patterns. Its portrayal of conformist behavior and the status quo as normal

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Advertising

and right encourages consumers to conduct their lives in line with society’s requirements. Simultaneously, cultural commodities distort social reality and mask the suffering it generates. To illustrate this problem, Adorno cites an American television program about an authoritarian leader, his wife, and her noble lover. The program implies that dictatorship is simply a manifestation of the personal flaws of a “bad, pompous, . . . cowardly man,” and that the sole prerequisite for overthrowing totalitarianism is the “honesty, courage, and warmth” of the characters with whom audiences are meant to “identify.” The plot “distracts from [the] real social issues” underlying authoritarian tyranny and conceals “how the life of ordinary people is affected by terror” (1991, 172–173). Thus, television neutralizes the viewers’ yearning for social change and their political opposition. Cultural commodities, Adorno adds, depict life exclusively in its familiar everyday mundanity, paralyzing the consumers’ capacity to imagine a different existence. Sometimes the culture industry even dictates socially acceptable modes of living “according to a . . . logic of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’” (94). Individuals are led to give up on, and indeed shrink from, social transformation even where they still long for it. Trade unions and advances in production, Adorno highlights, have enabled workers to purchase more and more goods beyond the existential minimum. At the same time, working-class consciousness is deteriorating: workers’ subordination to the bourgeoisie is ever less obvious, and they become disinclined to contest a system that has significantly improved their living conditions compared to the 1800s. Thus, mass consumption recruits proletarians for maintaining the same capitalist class society that secretly continues to exploit them. Adorno’s analyses of consumption still attract much controversy. Many social scientists agree that Adorno was one of the pioneers of critical sociological inquiries into mass culture. Some even argue that his writings have gained relevance over the years due to the expansion of the culture industry and the nature of its commodities. Others deem Adorno’s account too sweeping. Critics claim that he ignored the subversive aspects of popular and subcultural artifacts and that he downplayed consumers’ capacity to enjoy and ironize mass culture without being manipulated by it. Matthias Benzer

See also Benjamin, Walter; Craft Consumer; Culture Industries; Horkheimer, Max; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Mass Production and Consumption; Production of Culture

Further Readings Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 1991. Adorno, Theodor W. Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

ADVERTISING The rising significance of consumption (or consumer culture) in contemporary societies is often associated with the impact of advertising—the circulation of information and product endorsements that attempt to persuade people to consume particular goods and services. This is especially the case in the United States, which for many is the society that epitomizes consumer culture. Indeed, the omnipresence of advertising is widely recognized as one of the defining features of consumer culture.

Role of Advertising Advertising is an integral part of every advanced country’s economy and culture, but as statistics suggest, advertising plays an unusually important role in the United States. Robert Coen, a leading authority on advertising expenditures, estimates that worldwide expenditures for advertising in 2007 were approximately $630 billion. That same year, expenditures for advertising in the United States were about $280 billion. Table 1 shows the relationship between advertising expenditures in the United States and other countries in 2007. It shows that the 6.3 billion people outside of the United States who are exposed to $350 billion worth of advertising, with $280 billion of advertising aimed at the 300 million people who populate the United States: people in the United States are exposed to about twenty times as much advertising as people in other countries. A considerable percentage of U.S. residents’ exposure to advertising takes the form of television

Advertising

Table 1

Population Advertising

Advertising Expenditures in the United States and Other Countries in 2007 United States

Rest of World

300 million $280 billion

6.3 billion $350 billion

commercials. A typical thirty-minute television show in the United States has seven minutes of commercials. Statistics indicate that Americans spend the equivalent of nine years of their life watching television and see two million commercials by the time they reach sixty-five years old. The average child in America sees 20,000 television commercials in a typical year. What these figures reveal is that television viewers in the United States watch an enormous number of television commercials. To these figures on television advertising we must add other forms of advertising, such as radio commercials, advertisements in print media such as newspapers and magazines, billboards, advertisements on the Internet, on mobile phones, logos on T-shirts, labels on grocery products, signs on storefronts, and advertisements of one kind or another on just about any flat surface that is available. Citizens of other countries don’t, as a rule, watch as much television as people in the United States and aren’t exposed to as many commercials. In many countries, there are also limits on the amount of time that can be devoted to commercials. In 2008, American media usage, as reported by the United States Census Bureau, reveals the following figures (projected):

Medium Television (broadcast and cable) Radio Internet Out of home media Consumer magazines Consumer books Video games Home videos Total

Hours Per Year 1,704 768 141 117 114 108 90 66 3,559

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These statistics on media use, most of which carry advertising, explain why U.S. residents have an incredible amount of product knowledge— information about the price and features of various products—even though some of them may not know very much about history, literature, the arts, and similar topics. That is because they spend a great deal of their leisure time watching television and being exposed to advertising, which, whatever else it may be, is a form of persuasion. The Latin root of the word advertising is advertere, which means “to turn one’s attention toward.” Advertising can be defined as mass-mediated communication that attempts to persuade people to purchase goods and services sold by the company or entity paying for the advertising. Advertising may inform us and it may entertain us, but its main concerns are to attract our attention, stimulate our desire for whatever is being advertised, and, finally and most important, to generate action—that is, to sell something to us.

Business of Advertising Advertising agencies are media businesses that are hired by companies with products and services they wish to sell. There are now huge, multiagency advertising conglomerates that dominate the industry. The typical agency is very bureaucratic, with many levels of administrators as well as secretaries, accountants, time buyers, technical experts, marketing departments, account executives, and highly important creative departments. It is the art directors and copy writers in the creative departments of agencies who actually make the advertisements. The advertising industry is competitive, and there is a great deal of pressure and little job security, because when agencies lose large, major accounts, they often have to fire large numbers of workers. The pay for entry-level workers in agencies is generally low, while those with years of experience are generally paid quite well. It is not unusual for creative directors in large agencies to earn salaries of several hundred thousand dollars a year, plus bonuses and stock options.

Advertising Techniques Advertising uses a number of different techniques to persuade consumers to purchase products and often exploits sexuality, showing images of scantily clothed women, generally voluptuous with beautiful

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Advertising

features, when selling products that men and women typically purchase. The “sexploitation” of women in advertising is a matter that many feminist critics have dealt with, and so far with little success. Many advertisements, especially in glossy-style magazines, still exploit women’s bodies. Now advertisers exploit men as well, in selling clothes, fragrances, and other lifestyle products. Some advertisements for men’s fragrances and other male or unisex products have a pronounced homoerotic significance. There are a variety of rhetorical techniques used by advertisers to persuade viewers of commercials to purchase products. Some commercials scare people, whereas others are humorous and amuse them. Advertisers were afraid of using humor for many years, because they thought that humor somehow devalued their products. In recent years, however, advertisers have been more positive about humor because they believe humorous ads make people feel good and those good feelings have a halo effect that can be used by companies to sell their products and services. Some advertisements use heroes, authority figures, and celebrities, hoping their status and fame will convince people to consume things. A French literary theorist, René Girard, argues that what we desire often imitates the desire of those we admire. In his book, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare, Girard claims that what he calls “mimetic desire” explains not only the behavior of characters in Shakespeare’s plays but also consumer behavior. In effect, Girard suggests that people purchase things to imitate the desire of others, especially movie stars, celebrities, and sports heroes they admire. Some advertisements use rhetorical techniques, such as comparison and contrast or list the positive attributes of products, and base their arguments for purchasing these products on logic and rationality. Some advertising promises success and the good life, holding out the likelihood of making a great deal of money and being able to afford to buy whatever one wants. Advertisements for products such as soft drinks and hamburgers are often based on the notion of rewarding oneself—“You deserve a break today,” from McDonald’s—or of being part of a community of young and attractive people—“We are the world,” for Coca-Cola. And some commercials have a confusing postmodern theme that doesn’t seem to make sense. As Jack Solomon writes in his book Signs of Our Times: The

Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, “In Calvin Klein’s postmodern campaign for Obsession perfume, it’s virtually impossible to tell just what is going on. A tormented woman seems to be torn between a young boy and an older man—or does the young boy represent a flashback to the older man’s youth?” (1990, 228, 229). A number of postmodern advertisements puzzle us in an attempt to get us to think about and remember the product being advertised. We can look at television commercials, the most powerful form of advertising, as minidramas— sometimes only fifteen seconds long, but generally thirty seconds and sometimes a minute or more in length. The cost of a typical thirty-second commercial made by an advertising agency is now around $400,000, an example of how those production costs typically break down is shown in the following table.

Medium $281,000 $45,000 $6,000 $1,000 $11,000 $1,000 $1,000 $16,000

Hours Per Year Television production Television editing and postproduction Music Sound effects, narration Talent fees (actors, extras, voice-overs) Legal clearances Shipping Agency travel, casting, callbacks, etc.

Most thirty-second commercials actually cost more than this to produce. This figure doesn’t cover the time purchased on networks and local television stations to broadcast commercials, which can amount to many millions of dollars. According to Norbert Wiley, one of the aims of advertising is to achieve “a willing suspension of disbelief” in people. This phrase comes from the nineteenth-century literary critic and writer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was describing what happens when people see dramas. They identify with the characters in the drama and willingly suspend their disbelief in the artificial nature of what they are observing. Wiley’s argument is that when customers experience a suspension of disbelief, it is possible to convince them to purchase something. Advertisers all face the problem of clutter and of people’s resistance to being manipulated or being told to do something; the

Advertising

notion that advertising helps generate the suspension of disbelief, or of resistance to being sold products, helps us understand better how advertising works. This suspension of disbelief is often aided by the aesthetic qualities of advertisements. The actors and actresses who are shown in commercials often use exaggerated facial expressions and body language as they gaze at us, pleading with us to purchase a particular brand of hamburger, medicine, soap powder, or whatever item they are selling. Through the use of techniques and special effects such as dissolves, fadeouts, quick cutting, sound effects, music, and camera movements such as extreme close-ups, the creators of commercials are often able to generate powerful emotional responses in viewers. In his book, Spots: The Popular Art of Television Commercials, Bruce Kurtz describes “Quick Cuts,” a television commercial created by Dan Nichols for McDonald’s that had “65 different scenes in 60 seconds” (1977, 94). One seven-second segment of this commercial had fourteen different scenes, and what is interesting, Kurtz adds, is that viewers were able to perceive all of these scenes, even if they appeared faster than viewers could count them when first seeing the commercial. What this quick cutting does, Kurtz explains is generate a sense of excitement in viewers. He writes, “Because of the sense of urgency and of presentness which the spots communicate, the viewer actually experiences the exciting lifestyle Nichols depicts rather than passively observing events which occur to someone else” (94). What Nichols does with this quick cutting is create feelings of excitement and pleasure in viewers of the commercial, which becomes connected in their minds with eating at McDonald’s. These commercials portray an appealing lifestyle that is associated with McDonald’s restaurants, which leads viewers to eat at McDonald’s to obtain the gratifications they desire. Technically speaking, the matter of associating excitement and pleasure with McDonald’s is a rhetorical device known as metonymy. Metonymy and metaphor are two of the main rhetorical devices used in advertising. Metonymy works by association, and metaphor works by analogy. Both can be expressed pictorially as well as verbally. For example, using a Rolls-Royce automobile in a commercial for Dijon mustard uses the link in our minds of this automobile with wealth and perhaps with attributes such as sophistication and good taste.

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Metaphor is a device that uses analogies and forms of the verb “to be.” Thus, an advertisement for Fidji perfume shows a fuzzy photograph of a nude woman and has the following metaphor for copy “Woman is an island.” We must realize that metaphors have logical implications, therefore accepting the notion that “woman is an island” leads to certain attitudes toward women. Metaphor and metonymy are efficient because they take advantage of information that viewers of the advertisements already have in their minds. Television commercials and other forms of advertising can have powerful effects on individuals and large numbers of people. Corporations do not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns unless they are effective in the long run and lead to increased sales. Advertising agencies often say they help “grow” companies. What this means is that they help increase the sales of products and services sold by these companies. When advertising campaigns fail, companies may fire the advertising agency responsible for the campaign and hire a different agency.

Criticism Although many people consider advertising to be little more than a nuisance and do what they can to avoid television commercials and other forms of advertising, it is one of the most important institutions in modern societies. Critics of advertising argue that it fosters materialism and privatism by directing our attention away from socially beneficial public investments to private consumption. Marxist critics maintain that if the manifest function of advertising is to sell goods, the latent function is to justify and support the capitalist political system that brings all these goods to people. Our lust for goods is, they argue, a function of the alienation that affects everyone in bourgeois capitalist societies, and advertising is the most important engine that helps generate that lust. Ethicists criticize advertising for manipulating people and for advertising some products—such as cigarettes, when cigarette advertising was allowed—that are harmful and dangerous. Advertisers often used celebrities to sell cigarettes, providing role models for young people to imitate. Ethicists ask whether people who work in advertising agencies should use their skills and abilities to sell harmful and, in the case of cigarette advertising, carcinogenic products. Ethicists

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Advertising

argue that not only is it unethical to make advertisements for such products, but asking writers and artists to do so creates personal ethical dilemmas for them. Given the amount of binge drinking in the United States and in other countries, there is a considerable amount of controversy about beer advertisements. They are often aimed at teenagers and may play a role in generating this serious social problem. There are also many criticisms of advertisements for food products and fast food directed at young children. Though the advertising industry is not directly responsible for the large numbers of obese children and adults in the United States and other countries, the advertisements for these products must be implicated in the growth of this medical epidemic.

Impact There is probably no area where advertising is more important than in politics in the United States. During American political campaigns, politicians and interest groups collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, mostly on television commercials. Advertising, by playing an important role in political campaigns, helps shape political order. Ironically, when advertising agencies testify before Congressional committees, they often argue that they cannot shape human behavior and have a relatively minor role in the decision making of consumers. But when they talk with companies that wish to hire them, the advertising agencies claim that they can sell large numbers of people just about anything. It may be true that advertising agencies cannot convince a certain individual to purchase a particular product, but collectively, if we look at the effects of advertising, we can see that these agencies can have a considerable impact on people. There are numerous scholarly journals, websites, and hundreds of books on the social and cultural impact of advertising. On the positive side, countries with well-developed advertising tend to be dynamic, democratic, and economically successful. So it may be that advertising, for better and for worse, is the price paid for a modern lifestyle. Advertising also has been used for many prosocial purposes, such as attacking racism and antiSemitism, so it can be a powerful force for good. Critics of advertising often suggest that something should be done to regulate advertising in various ways. They argue, for example, that government

should prevent young children, who are gullible and easily manipulated, from being exposed to advertising on television programs, and advertising should be prevented from selling certain kinds of products, such as cigarettes and prescription drugs, if the consequences of doing so are harmful. Many people are ambivalent about advertising, admiring its aesthetic qualities and yet feeling negative about its intrusive nature. Advertising remains a subject of considerable controversy and an industry that plays a significant role—for better or worse—in shaping the economies, the cultures, the political order, and the lifestyles of people everywhere. Arthur Asa Berger See also Branding; Broadcast Media; Celebrity; Communication Studies; Lifestyle; Markets and Marketing; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism

Further Readings Ansolobehere, Stephen, and Shanto Iyengar. Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate. New York: Free Press, 1995. Berger, Arthur Asa. Shop ’Til You Drop: Consumer Behavior and American Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Berger, Arthur Asa. Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Danesi, Marcel. Why It Sells: Decoding the Meanings of Brand Names, Logos, Ads, and Other Marketing and Advertising Ploys. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Frith, Katherine Toland, ed. Undressing the Ad: Reading Culture in Advertising. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Goldman, Robert, and Stephen Papson. Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York: Guilford, 1996. Kern, Montague. 30-Second Politics: Political Advertising in the Eighties. New York: Praeger, 1989. Kurtz, Bruce. Spots: The Popular Art of American Television Commercials. New York: Arts Communications, 1977. Messaris, Paul. Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.

Aestheticization of Everyday Life Myers, Greg. Ad Worlds: Brands, Media, Audiences. London: Arnold, 1999. Solomon, Jack. The Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life. New York: Perennial Library, 1990. Vestergard, Torben, and Kim Shroder. The Language of Advertising. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Williamson, Judith. Consuming Passions. London: Marion Boyars, 1985.

AESTHETICIZATION EVERYDAY LIFE

OF

The aestheticization of everyday life refers to the growing significance of aesthetic perception in processes of consumption and consuming. It points to the observations that increasingly more aspects of everyday activity are subject to the principles of aesthetics (the appreciation of beauty and art) and that even the most mundane forms of consumption can be expressive and playful. The emerging digital economies of the twenty-first century have exacerbated this shift, supporting Mike Featherstone’s claim that the “aestheticisation of everyday life” has arrived (cited in Flew 2002). The resulting consumption is part of an emerging “experience economy” (Rifkin 2000) where entertainment, information and communication technologies (ICTs), and lifestyle products and services combine to shape our identities in ways not seen in the modernist era of cultural consumption. Underlying this consumption is the commodification of personal identities through cultural production—an industrial and postindustrial segment that does not suffer from the usual constraints to growth of ecological cost and finite market opportunities. The implication of these defining features of digital capitalism is, namely, the accelerated commodification of culture and daily life itself.

The Everyday and Identity Early Marxists viewed consumption with a critical eye regarding its social, political, and cultural implications. Marxist ideology believed that consumption was based on the creation of false desires by the ruling captains of industry, which hindered the community as far as bettering living conditions and realizing an equitable society. The emergence of cultural studies relieved consumption from this onerous and dour thesis to explore how the everyday and consumption

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could in itself be the site of a more transgressive thesis. The everyday as a site of study seeks to examine the complex processes, both conscious and unconscious, that illuminate how the everyday is in fact not just “as it is” or an unproblematic given, but is bound up in questions of identity, status, creativity, beliefs, and ethics (to name just a few concerns) and need not be the site of an overly deterministic and unreflexive view of the everyday act of cultural consumption. Just as our work and position in life was once the defining motif of our identities in the industrial and modernist era, currently our consumption capacity and choices at a more multifaceted level are becoming important distinguishing factors in identity formation. In the middle and later years of the twentieth century, it was consumption on a mass scale, often of mass-produced items with branding in and by a few major corporations, that set trends and gathered people into shared identities and group recognition. This started out with products such as cars and domestic household items, for example. However, in more recent years, the marketplace for consumer goods has not only fragmented into nuances of subcultural meanings and expression, but the trend toward the service economy and digital artifacts allows cultural consumption to flare out into slivers of everyday life at the most micro and personal levels. Where once the aesthetics of consumption of a particular object were more easily disentangled from the everyday or mundane (the purchase of a car or expensive handbag being a performative and exceptional event)— now the aesthetics of consumption is the everyday. This is not to underestimate the traditional meanings still attached to the purchase of one’s home or car as major markers of cultural and social life. But even here, the complex array of what your car means and says about you is far more complex and touches on everything from alignment with a group to political membership (the green car) and issues of gender and class. In a sense, cultural consumption has shifted from a set of somewhat rigid classifications about who we are and what we consume to a fragmented and fluid state where consumption serves our identity formation in constantly changing social and cultural arenas. As far back as the 1980s, the cultural theorist Michel de Certeau wrote of the relationships between consumption and everyday life in his seminal The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau identified the role and relationships between the people who design, make,

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Aestheticization of Everyday Life

and market consumer goods—and the consumer. What was new in his writings was the notion that the consumer did not simply take on board the purpose, identity, and expectation of any consumer good, but rather, used consumer goods to fashion a sense of self, independent from the dominant discourse of the consumption machine. This approach to understanding consumer relationships flowed alongside identity politics of hybridity, media analysis, and postmodern discourses in cultural studies. The beginnings of mixn-match bricolage in everything from experimental film to architectural design began to be examined in the aestheticization of everyday life as well. However, the real era of cultural consumption in the everyday began many years after the analogous times of the 1980s, with the advent of the digital age.

Digital Capitalism This recent digital commercialization of cultural consumption comes via a combination of new technology (often evolved from more established technologies) plus service market opportunity plus cultural production (principally consumption and branding) and of course consumer desire. The depth of consumption into the everyday and the personal has developed into areas of life once considered private and immune to consumption. One example at the far end of this is the evolution of phone sex. The old technology of the telephone and the associated updated billing systems enabled a sophisticated network servicing infrastructure of astounding complexity to evolve to commodify masturbatory activity targeted at a mostly male market. So complex is this technology that it includes an internationally connected network of phone sex workers, which combines local telephony and adult-content businesses with complex international agreements on International Direct Dialing (IDD) reciprocal billings and telco revenue sharing between countries who handle the traffic (so even national phone carriers benefit from the flow of such traffic). While fully national services exist, it is still the case that callers from English-speaking countries may connect with offshore operations, routed to poorer nations, for example, where labor, technical support, and charging for calls is most profitable (this is not like offshore call centers for bank customers who pay only a local call price—the actual call cost in phone sex is

divided between several parties). Only recently, the India Daily reported how “the greed for easy money and material luxury is so high in modern India that educated girls are jumping into the phone sex profession knowing very well they will not be infected with sexual disease or HIV!” (Chaube 2005). Capitalism has, for some time, efficiently automated the processes that guarantee the physical survival of a majority of its members. That is, the bulk of the labor force is no longer employed in the primary sector but in the tertiary service sector; and markets in the primary and secondary sectors are mature and saturated—and require constant innovation and redefining to ensure continued growth. This may involve generating new efficiencies in the basic modes of production. Or, more tellingly, it involves generating new products and services at the everyday (and “now”) level. For example, 75 percent of Siemens AG revenue is based on products that were invented in the last five years. Another powerful example is the mobile phone, as carriers and handset developers continue to increase the “talk-plus” features of handsets, which inevitably leads to the requirement for increased network and carrier capabilities and continuous upgrades by both consumers and the related mobile digital communications industries alike. Even with the over-100-year-old technology of the bicycle, the bike manufacturer Giant is proud of its role in innovating bike frames through evolution from a steel frame to a chromoly frame to an aluminum frame to a carbon fiber frame and then to a carbon composite frame. Also consider two mature products that remain central to many people’s everyday lives, yet they perform essentially the same function as when first invented: the car and television. The motor car’s innovation has trickled down through the years for the cheap and cheerful features (with twin airbags, electric windows, power steering, CD and MP3 players for $14,990 drive away—features only available in the most expensive cars only twenty years ago). But what are the current desirable features that the top models need to delineate status: a driverprogrammable, easy-exit feature; adaptive cruise control; automatic ambient cabin lighting; satellite navigation; and fourteen-way, power-adjustable front seats; combined with a sharp focus on aesthetic difference in design. For the television, it has been the

Aestheticization of Everyday Life

final arrival of the wall-hanging, flat-screen, plasma (a constant in sci-fi movies for decades) television that helped boost the balance sheets of the last few years in many industrialized countries and reinvented television watching as a pastime once again. A core mechanism at play in digital capitalism and how consumption meshes into everyday life is the prevalence of externalities in product value. That is, a key component of the value of new products is their ability to connect, whether we are speaking of software, communications, or more abstractly— experience and knowledge, to participate in a taste/ aesthetic culture via enjoyment of a movie, song, or purchase of a lifestyle product or service. This is in contrast to the economic transaction of purely material goods in the modernist era, which are mostly valuable regardless of their precise relation to others. The term externality has been used by economists to describe situations where the value (or cost) of a product derives from anything outside the product itself. A fine example of network externalities is the telephone—its value increases with the number of connections it allows. Information externalities come into play when product choices are affected substantially by information outside the product (e.g., by observing other people’s choices about a movie) and having this influence our product choice. Coercive externalities are implied when we are persuaded into choices of products (or suppliers). Market externalities are operating when the value of a product increases in proportion to the number of people who use it (as in the earlier telephone example). Implied here is that the value lies in the ability of the product to connect us to others in both tangible and intangible ways. Because of this relatedness, the products with the largest market share have an advantage, which increases exponentially as more consumers join, because of their perceived universality. However, the niche product and market also play on some of these externalities, with the viral and social marketing of the web spreading the externalities of value into more focused and specialized markets. The growth in credit card issuing and associated branding is a three-way example of “externalities rule.” For example, Visa Card, Citibank, and American Express are vast international companies whose value is not in the physical plastic of the card itself but the network they open up and how this network is communicated to prospective and current

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cardholders (rewards, clubs, affiliated company offers, the Amex and Visa brands). Both companies, while they are examples of expansive networks, are nevertheless closed and offer no interoperability— thus making entry “a crucial issue” and coercion into their world a valuable tool in signing up new members (e.g., dinnertime telemarketing calls, street canvassing, and low-interest balance transfers). Like the telephone, as more members join the network, so increases the value of the network to members (“American Express Cards Accepted Here”) and so increases the intangible value of the card as a status and identity instrument.

Commodification Commodification also works by penetrating new geographical spaces with existing products or by innovative technologies that enable the consumption process to be applied in new social and geographical spaces. Commodification may thus involve innovations in technology or product. Equally, it may involve the deregulation of services and products that were formally mediated in other ways in previous decades. The essence of commodification is a belief in the superiority of monetary exchange as the basis for mediation between people in terms of the things and services that they exchange. Commodification is thus necessary for economies that are built around the process of consumption. Consumption now accounts for 60 to 70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in most industrialized countries; and continued growth of these economies depends primarily on continued commodification either via innovation, new social spaces being created for consumption, or deregulation. Commodification now more than before introduces the logic of the free market into all domains and all spheres of human and everyday activity. And it is the aestheticization of that consumption into more personal and everyday aspects of life that denotes it as somewhat remarkable. In effect, the culture begins to commodify itself. The commodification of all aspects of culture into the everyday is thus a feature of the developed, knowledge-based economies of today. Indeed, the central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption. Moreover, the expansion of consumption therefore depends on the

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Aestheticization of Everyday Life

construction of ever-more diverse and complex and fractured identities. Fueled by their ability to modify and process the building blocks of identity (images, visual codes, phrases, and ideas), our current mass media (including online media), via identity construction, have expanded consumption in advanced and less-advanced industrial societies. This style of consumption has increased with the emergence of digital media. The ability to provide individualized and fragmented identity construction commodities has made this self-construction process even more compelling. It can be expected under this trajectory that media that allow for individualization will spawn increased commodification and consumption. Because knowledge societies depend on the increasing commodification of culture and the everyday, the instrumentalization of many aspects of culture (e.g., values, identity, and social relationships) occurs (Hearn and Mandeville 1995). That is, as more and more aspects of lived experience (leisure, education, lifestyle services, media consumption) are opened for sale, their engagement becomes restricted to the act of consumption (Rifkin 2000). Consider recent ICTs as an example. As in the past, the introduction of innovative ICT products and services evoked changes to existing patterns of employment, family structures, leisure activities, concepts of time, existing societal values—such as privacy and notions of personal and public space— and even patterns of human settlement and education. Mobile phones find a distinct resonance with consumer culture given their affinity within both the work and leisure milieu—with fashion and media purposing—and as an expression of style and design. Their aesthetic value and meaning are intimately connected to and in many cases dominant to their practical application. Personalized devices such as mobile phones are showing similar trajectories in consumer culture but are, however, unique in that they penetrate geographical spaces with existing products and innovations that enable consumption and communication to be applied in new social, cultural, or psychological ways. Such products and services are typified by inputs based on knowledge, creativity, fragmentation, and differentiation. This technological and economist view fits neatly with the cultural studies view of postmodern culture as fragmented, discursive, grassroots, and nonlinear.

Nikhilesh Dholakia and Detlev Zwick (2003, 6), in supporting such a postmodern view of new technology, bring these themes together: With the advent and indeed rapid “insertion” of increasingly miniaturized technologies into our bodies and the fabric of the everyday, the technological aesthetic of modernism is displaced by a postmodern technological aesthetic.

The term insertion of technology into life is not being used in an invasive sense of the word by the authors, but in the sense of membership, fabric, and construction. This level of invisible insertion mirrors what Anne Galloway (2004) explores in the notion of ubiquitous computing as a “calm technology”— one that is so embedded, so pervasive, that it could be taken for granted. As digital consumption and its respective devices capture the “fleeting and unexpected” in the everyday, social sharing in spontaneous ways not recognizable with the past compartmentalization of media technologies will prevail. The immediate, ad hoc, and fluid state of postmodern digital consumption will continue to evolve. Using Henri Lefebvre’s theory of moments, Michael E. Gardiner (2004) sees moments as “partial totalities that reflect larger wholes.” Connecting the “fine grain of everyday life” with the “broader sweep of sociohistorical change,” Lefebvrean everyday moments, entwined with postmodern digital consumption, are reflected in the aesthetization and vital productivity of everyday life. Harvey May See also Bricolage; Cultural Studies; Identity; Individualization; Information Technology; Lifestyle; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism

Further Readings Chaube, P. “Outsourcing Phone Sex from Call Centers in India.” India Daily, January 29, 2005. Dholakia, Nikhilesh, and Detlev Zwick. “Mobile Spaces and Boundaryless Spaces: Slavish Lifestyles, Seductive Meanderings or Creative Empowerment?” The Networked Home and the Home of the Future. Irvine, CA, 2003. http://ritim.cba.uri.edu/wp2003/pdf_format/ HOIT-Mobility-Technology-Boundary-Paper-v06.pdf. Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Aesthetics Galloway, Anne. “Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City.” Cultural Studies 18, nos. 2/3 (2004): 384–408. Gardiner, Michael E. “Everyday Utopianism: Lefebvre and His Critics.” Cultural Studies 18, nos. 2/3 (2004): 228–254. Hearn, Greg, and Thomas Mandeville. “The Information Superhighway: The Commodification of Time or the Democratisation of Leisure?” Media Information Australia 75 (1995): 92–101. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-for Experience. New York: J. P. Tarcher, 2000.

AESTHETICS Aesthetics refers to the branch of philosophy that deals with questions of beauty, art, and perception. As far back as the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have discussed the social value and role of art. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century, however, that philosophy began to investigate aesthetic experience and judgment as discrete and independent categories of perception, grounded in the human subject. In the eighteenth century, aesthetic experience was associated with nonutilitarian objects like art and nature. Since the onset of consumer capitalism, however, qualities associated with aesthetic experience, such as beauty, form, and sensual pleasure, have become central to the marketing and consumption of consumer goods. During the eighteenth century, a period known as the Enlightenment, the social and ideological order of feudal society was put into question through the rising power of the merchant class. Enlightenment thinkers began to explore new ideas about the importance of human reason, as opposed to church doctrine and the divine rights of the aristocracy, in shaping and understanding the world around them. One of the most important philosophers of the period, Immanuel Kant, explained knowledge, reason, and morality in terms of universal categories of the human mind, rather than as reflections of an external divine will. Kant was one of the first philosophers to integrate aesthetics into a general philosophical system. In addition, he is credited with providing the groundwork for modern ideas about the unique and autonomous nature of aesthetic experience. In

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his 1790 work The Critique of Judgment, Kant discusses the special properties of aesthetic judgments that distinguish them from those we apply to objects of scientific or ethical knowledge. First of all, aesthetic judgments are made individually, based on an individual’s response to a particular experience. We can’t, like in science, apply concepts or laws developed through prior experience to help us make an aesthetic judgment. In addition, for Kant, beauty is not an immutable quality that belongs to an object. Instead, “beauty” refers to the kind of pleasure that people experience as a result of the “free play” between their faculties of imagination and understanding. Aesthetic judgments are made based on the subjective experience of individuals, according to Kant, and they also make claims to universal validity (everyone should come to the same conclusion). It is important to note that for Kant, in order for judgments to fall under the category of pure judgments of taste, they must occur in response to disinterested pleasure. In other words, the feelings of pleasure stimulated by objects that we deem beautiful are not related to the desire to possess the objects or to the object’s ability to satisfy some need (e.g., hunger, vanity) exterior to aesthetic pleasure. This last point is especially relevant for later art movements such as modernism, formalism, and “art for art’s sake.” The ideas put forth by these movements (see later in this entry), which came to dominance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, connected art’s distinction and quality with the degree to which it was autonomous from everyday concerns and practical values. Kant’s ideas about aesthetics were soon followed by those of the German idealist and Romantic philosophers. The Enlightenment and the rise of capitalist modernity were accompanied by an inevitable loss of tradition, community, and spiritual experience. The Romantics sought to privilege art and aesthetic reason as, in some sense, remedies for the Enlightenment’s disenchantment of the social and natural world. They wanted to emphasize the creative, autonomous, and spiritual dimensions of human experience awakened by the Enlightenment. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel believed that modern works of art embodied freedom and the human capacity for autonomous sensemaking and conceived of works of art as products of

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freedom—creations whose uniqueness and irreducibility should be understood as material expressions of our individuality. Idealists like Arthur Schopenhauer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also made important contributions to eighteenth-century aesthetics. Hegel, in particular, has been influential for many twentiethcentury thinkers, including György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Arthur Danto. With his dialectical method, Hegel argued that through the course of history, what he called Geist—the universal spirit and mind of humanity—would eventually become integrated and fully self-conscious. Hegel ultimately thought that Geist would reach full maturity through philosophy. Nonetheless, he gave aesthetic experience a central place in the mind’s or spirit’s journey toward self-consciousness. For Hegel, art helps human beings reach rational self-determination by allowing us to experience our own freedom, self-expression, and agency sensuously, through the creation and appreciation of beautiful objects. The ideas about art and aesthetics developed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers were influential, as the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas points out, in shaping a bourgeois cultural identity and public sphere at that time. It was during discussions of art and in culture in the salons and coffeehouses of this period that members of the emerging bourgeoisie developed forums and strategies for free communication and debate. These provided important models on which to fashion a democratic civil society. Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgment and the Romantic idea of artistic genius and expression were also key to the development of modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some strands of modernism stressed the formal properties of the arts (composition, color, etc.), rather than the use of the arts to tell a story or appeal to extra-artistic interests. The American critic Clement Greenberg, for example, championed the work of the abstract expressionist painters in the 1940s and 1950s by claiming that these artists had achieved an unmatched artistic purity by excluding subject matter and representational conventions from their work and by focusing solely on the physical properties and sensual experience unique to paint and the twodimensional surface. By the 1960s, many philosophers, art critics, and artists had begun to reject or at least rethink some of

the central ideas of much eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury aesthetics. Kant’s attempts to assert a universal basis for aesthetic judgments and his notion of aesthetic disinterest came under particular attack. One important contemporary philosopher of art, George Dickie, claimed that works of art should be understood not in terms of their particular properties, but in terms of their institutional location (if it is in a museum, it is a work of art). This strand of aesthetics drew on avant-garde strategies of artists like Marcel Duchamp, who revealed the importance of institutions in deciding what is art by exhibiting everyday objects like urinals and wine racks in art galleries. In Distinction (1987) the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that the aesthetic gaze, especially as defined through Kant’s category of disinterest, had an important ideological role to play in legitimating class hierarchies in capitalist societies. By the 1970s, many artists opposed the Kantian idea that pure aesthetic experience is unrelated to everyday life by purposely blurring the distinction between everyday life and art and between the work of art, the audience, and the artist. Various movements, including conceptual art, body art, earth art, and Arte Povera, combined everyday movements, activities, and settings to create new forms of art and new forms of social life. Aesthetic qualities are generally discussed in relation to works of art, whereas beauty, design, and craftsmanship have always had a role to play in the production of everyday items such as clothing, tools, and household objects. Access to and appreciation of beautifully crafted utilitarian items are important symbols of economic and social status in most developed societies. Increasingly sophisticated technologies were used for the reproduction of images, colors, patterns, and decoration when mass production developed in the early decades of the twentieth century. A whole range of aesthetic choices became available to consumers. As early as the 1910s and 1920s, the burgeoning advertising industry harnessed the language and tools of aesthetic experience to market a wide range of everyday and luxury items. Women, in particular, were urged to view their role as homemaker and consumer as imbued with important aesthetic responsibilities that required the development of taste. When consumption replaced production as the main engine of capitalist accumulation in industrialized nations in 1940s, the aesthetic qualities of

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consumer items distinguished one brand from the next, and consumers were encouraged to identify with particular brands based on aesthetic qualities, packaging, and logos that were in general quite removed from their actual use. An appeal to the senses, especially the visual sense, outstripped functionality as a selling point for automobiles, appliances, and a host of other products. By the 1960s, the United States and other industrialized nations became what media scholar Sut Jhally refers to as “image based” cultures (as advertising came to dominate the visual landscape). With the de-territorialization of production that marks the current era of global capitalism, companies can no longer rely on a local or national manufacturing base to maintain brand loyalty. Thus, corporations such as Nike, the Gap, Disney, and others rely on cultivating a sense of lifestyle identification among consumers cultivated through spectacular appeals to aesthetic experience launched through billboards, television, theme parks, playgrounds, and entertainment sponsorship. Today, the border between aesthetic experience rooted in nature or works of art and commercial consumption has been all but erased, as corporations sponsor art fairs and museum exhibitions and add their logos to a range of cultural events. Julia Rothenberg See also Aesthetization of Everyday Life; Art and Cultural Worlds; Design; Desire; Enlightenment; Kant, Immanuel; Social Distinction; Taste

Further Readings Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Danto, Arthur. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Danto, Arthur. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Dickie, George. “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude.” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 56–65. Ewen, Stuart. All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Gaut, Berys, and Dominic Lopes, eds. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2005. Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture. New York: Beacon Press, 1961. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Jhally, Sut. “Image Based Culture: Advertizing and Popular Culture.” The World and I (July 1990). http:// worldandilibrary.com. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: St. Martin, 1999. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Wu, Chin-Tao. Privatizing Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s. New York: Verso, 2002.

AFFLUENT SOCIETY The book The Affluent Society (1958) was written by the U.S. economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book is a coherent critique of the assumptions of classical economics, aspects of American culture, and conservative thinking in general. It is one of the most widely read and highest selling works within modern economics. As well as spawning a series of memorable phrases that entered the popular vocabulary, the book is an influential forerunner to contemporary social attitudes toward overconsumption, the problems associated with unfettered economic growth, and the growth of enclaves of private consumption in the Western world. The work consists of a number of interrelated theses, but The Affluent Society’s essential line of reasoning is found in its challenge to the orthodox assumption that the “problem of production,” referring to the capacity of an economy to produce enough goods and services, had been solved. Galbraith’s expression “the affluent society” is not a triumphalist endorsement of Western economic progress, but an ironic phrase meant to provoke, question, and challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the socially agreed meanings of economic progress. Thanks to modern economic progress, people in Western countries—here it is worth noting that Galbraith’s argument was mostly targeted at the United States but is applicable more widely—have an abundant supply of necessities and, of course, also a wide range of luxuries and nonessential banalities. Galbraith urges the reader

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not to consider such increased outputs as equating to affluence, wealth, or even happiness. Quite the contrary, the problem of what to do with such mighty economic capacity, what uses to put it, and how to distribute it more effectively remains a burning social question. Or, at least it should be a burning question, Galbraith argues. Yet, as he points out, such questions are never really considered by most people, institutions, or governments. Moreover, the disciplinary and scientific norms of economics do not allow such value-based questions to be part of its agenda. The reasons for not asking these questions relate in various ways to what Galbraith wryly and disparagingly referred to as “the conventional wisdom.” This was the gap between what was actually “right” and what society or a group of people considered merely “acceptable.” Reinforced by reward, propped up by ritual, and comforted by fitting in, most people are happy to believe what others and the “official” history teaches them to believe is acceptable. This happens not just to individuals who fall into regular patterns of work, lifestyle, and consumption, but to policymakers and academics alike. Perhaps most important, such an edifice of conventional wisdom dominates the scientific field of economics, sometimes labeled a “dismal science,” but also widely seen as the queen of the social sciences. Galbraith argues that this leads to an inherent conservatism in the discipline, a tolerance of calcifying ideas, which is supported by a reliance on increasingly arcane, abstract mathematical models. More important for Galbraith, the inherited wisdom of the neoclassical economic model found in David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Adam Smith still holds sway within the field. Although intellectually comforting and indeed unchallenged in explaining the functioning of market efficiencies, such models fail to adequately deal with the contingencies and problems of the modern economy. In fact, Galbraith argues, in not dealing with such matters and in favoring the mood of the markets above important social questions about economic security, they actually constitute a threat to continuing affluence. The baggage these anachronistic models carry with them are sets of ideas and habits about economic accumulation forged in an earlier era of modernity, a style of capitalism where markets dominated and unfettered growth, acquisition, credit expansion, and progress were all

unquestioned values. This intrinsic conservativeness was supported by the inertia and vested interests of large institutions, such as firms and government, who believed that economic security was reliant on ever-expanding production. Production, capital formation, and investment—the flip side of which was an empowered consumer whose wants were never really satisfied because they were essentially managed by the producers—became the paramount goal of the economy and its managers. What was lost from view was a pathway to alleviating poverty, which still existed but which most people chose to shut from their minds in favor of making their way up the status ladder. The result of this cultural and economic pattern is a stunted, perverse view of the value of different categories of economic goods. Galbraith points out that we value some of the most frivolous and trivial consumer objects with great pride and restless excitement. Others are more mundane, but much more important for the public good. The measurement of gross national product, and indeed the discipline of economics more broadly, makes no distinction about what is produced, it only asks “how much” and affirms “the more the better.” Moreover, intrinsic value tends to be placed on private-sector production. Galbraith argues that public goods are thought of as, at best, necessary evils; at worst, they are a malign tendency that quietly suppresses the vitality of private-sector production. Within this realization lies the birth of another of The Affluent Society’s signature phrases, “private affluence and public squalor.” Galbraith gives a memorable example. We set great store by the increase in private wealth but regret the added outlays for the police force by which it is protected. Vacuum cleaners to ensure clean houses are praiseworthy and essential in our standard of living. Street cleaners to ensure clean streets are an unfortunate expense. (1984, 130)

The supreme position given to private production in the modern economy is such that it has achieved the power to fill a void it itself creates. Herein, we have one of the master theses of The Affluent Society. Galbraith argues that the urgency for more esoteric and marginal consumer goods arises not from within the consumer him- or herself, but is created out of the interests of production. Higher levels of production, institutionally and systemically valued as a goal in

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itself, inaugurate higher levels of want creation through advertising and emulative processes, necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction, requiring even higher levels of production. Such a circular systemic economic logic was labeled by Galbraith as “the dependence effect”—referring to the generation of new consumer wants that depends on the process by which they are satisfied; and their satisfaction, a temporary satiation only, institutes a restlessness for more, which stimulates even further production. Galbraith’s point is that in “the affluent society,” we end up with an economy that is output and production oriented, but with a set of social values gone adrift, and not much more. Part of the solution is a system of progressive taxation, redistributing some wealth to the poorest. This would maintain the integrity of productive capitalism but allow for an expanded cache of public spending programs that would partially compensate for institutionalized social inequalities. Galbraith’s arguments appear cogent and powerful, his writing effervescent with unique insight and erudition. Yet, in an era of unprecedentedly high levels of private wealth and within an ideological foundation that discouraged criticism of free enterprise, ideologically linked as it was with personal liberties, Galbraith’s ideas attracted praise by those who would broadly identify as liberal, or left leaning, and by those members of the middle class with an educated conscience. For others, Galbraith became a target. Economists were divided about his ideas. The more technical and mathematical czars of the economics discipline shunned his work as generalizing, politically motivated, and bereft of scientific detail. From a contemporary consumer studies perspective, his ideas on the consumer and consumption are indeed relatively unsophisticated though not wholly wrong, reliant as they are on a logic largely inspired by Thorstein Veblen. Conservative politicians demonized him for betraying capitalist ideals. The popularity of the book with the public and elements of the social science profession remained strong, as they do today. A contemporary reader will notice the charm of Galbraith’s writing; its wit and verve reflect a set of apparently extraordinary personal characteristics and skills. One may also notice in his writing a Romantic yearning for simpler times, a type of nostalgia wholly consistent with Galbraith’s passion for spending holiday time on his

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“unfarmed farm” in Vermont, a state still famous to this day for its radical agrarian politics and liberal social values. What should stand out to the contemporary reader, however, is how Galbraith was an important forerunner of current ideas, manifested in the rise of “green” social movements and consumer values, for example, about overconsumption, waste, and the real costs of economic progress. The system Galbraith dissected so cogently in The Affluent Society in largely still in place. Yet, his book and others that appeared through the 1960s and 1970s, such as those by E. F. Schumacher, Rachel Carson, or even Erich Fromm, were part of Western society’s slow awakening to the problems such a system creates and to the personal and economic costs it manifests. For this reason, Galbraith’s The Affluent Society endures as a vital rendering of the economic, institutional, cultural, and ideological bases of the growth-oriented modern economy and the consumer society it fashions. Ian Woodward See also Capitalism; Economics; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Galbraith, John Kenneth; Happiness; Veblen, Thorstein Bunde; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings Friedman, Milton. From Galbraith to Economic Freedom. Occasional paper 49, Centre for Economic Policy Research. London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1977. Galbraith, John Kenneth. A Life in Our Times: Memoirs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984. First published 1958. Hession, Charles H. Galbraith and His Critics. New York: New American Library, 1972a. Hession, Charles H. John Kenneth Galbraith and His Critics. New York: New American Library, 1972b. Lamson, Peggy. Speaking of Galbraith: A Personal Portrait. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991. McFadzean, Frank. The Economics of John Kenneth Galbraith: A Study in Fantasy. London: Centre for Policy Studies, 1977. Noble, Holcomb B., and Douglas Martino. “John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society.” The New York Times, April 30, 2006.

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Parker, Richard. John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Sharpe, Myron E. “The Veblen-Commons Award: John Kenneth Galbraith.” Journal of Economic Issues 11, no. 2 (June 1977): 185–188.

AGE

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AGING

Until relatively recently, the older consumer has been almost invisible to the wider world. In Western countries, older people have typically been poorer than the rest of the population, and they have been much less engaged in the consumer revolutions of the twentieth century. As a consequence, they have often been ignored by marketers as well, or at least placed into categories that simply define them as old, poor, and uninterested in consuming. The social and cultural studies of consumer culture that have emerged over the last few decades have also neglected engaging with age except in two key areas: the concern over children’s consumption and the dominance of studies of youth subcultural consumption. Old age, however, has been virtually absent, in terms of volume of work, as a relevant area of study in the proliferation of work on consumer cultures. Similarly, the human sciences that address aging have also neglected the notion of consumption as relevant for understanding older people’s experiences for a number of reasons, some of which are discussed in this entry—including implicit ageism in society as a whole, explicit ageism within disciplinary approaches, and gerontology’s resistance to engaging with cultures of consumption until relatively recently. However, this appears to be changing, as generation and age work alongside broader social changes to bring new experiences of old age into view and as more complex models of social life impact on policy-focused work on aging. This entry explores the patterning of consumption in later life, the challenges raised by the rethinking of old age, and the implications that generational change are having on our model of what it is to be an older consumer and—in turn—what impact older people are having on models of consumption.

The Significance of Age to Consumer Culture One might argue that age—or rather “old age”— is a modern social question. Although older people

have always formed part of society, improvements in mortality and life expectancy—and crucially, healthy life expectancy—in the twentieth century in Western nations have led to greater survival rates into older and older ages. On the whole, in richer countries, people are living longer, and they are living into later life in larger numbers and with greater levels of health and fitness than ever before. In the 1950s, only around 8 percent of the global population was over sixty, but in 2000, it was 10 percent; and by 2050 it is projected to reach over 20 percent, comprising two billion older people (Harper 2006). In addition, there is also a proportionately higher growth in the “oldest old”—those who live beyond their eighties, but who often also need support and care in later life. Sarah Harper suggests that this age group is the fastest of all, with annual growth of 3.9 percent (9). Demographers suggest the “pyramid” shape of the population will gradually spread into more of a rectangle, as larger numbers of people live longer, until sharply tapering off at a point closer to the age of one hundred. Although the growth in life expectancy is not quite as marked in developing countries, there has, nevertheless, been a general increase, with some exceptions (e.g., in Eastern Europe); and although the speed of change is slower than in developed countries, the aging population will be proportionately larger and arguably a greater social “problem” than in developed countries because of less-developed economic well-being. In the West, older people can (mostly) look forward to being wealthier and healthier than previous cohorts and therefore able to “use” consumption as a social strategy; however, in developing countries this will be very different. On its own, this demographic change requires a rethinking of the place of aging in consumer culture—since a larger aging population by default spends more money, uses more services, and uses them in different ways than previously. In policy circles and in the eyes of the public, how to deal with the “bulges” of demographic change causes some social and political concern, for example, on the issue of dependency ratios (the ratio of working to nonworking citizens, to maintain taxation and welfare) and on intergenerational resource allocation. In the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2010, the outcomes of recession and global financial restructuring are likely to have a big impact on intergenerational conflict over resources and,

Age and Aging

ultimately, consumption patterns. Concerns arise over access to public health services as the population ages, state pension and welfare provision costs increase, and intergenerational conflict begins to emerge over the perceptions of older groups’ relative wealth in Western countries in relation to younger cohorts who—in the popular view at least—perceive themselves as less well-off. This is reflected, for example, by a recent glut of popular publications “blaming” the baby boom generation for many social ills, including press reports of boomers’ excessive consumption and contribution to global warming. Apart from a small number of studies, there is little sustained social research into the current consumption patterns of boomers and other midlife/older generations. In the current climate, financial strain is certainly restricting access to public services and shrinking private resources in Western European states, potentially leading to scapegoating of particular age groups, such as baby boomers, who appear to have benefited from the twentieth-century expansion of the welfare state. However, the global financial crisis may also have lasting and unknown impacts on general consumption patterns, including those of older people, as welfare states shrink, as unemployment looms, and as pensions contract. Nor is it clear that the baby boomers (or any other older generation) are straightforwardly “wealthy”—class, gender, and ethnic divisions impact over and above generational and cohort influences here as in other groups. Moreover, it is not yet known to what extent older age groups will shift toward greater intergenerational support, forgoing their own consumption to transfer resources to their families. When how the aging population interacts with consumption more explicitly in social and cultural terms is explored, one can see that both the study of aging and the study of consumption may need to rethink these assumptions to better address the challenges of demographic change. A key example given by Harper is the assumptions that currently link policy and markets in the United Kingdom: it is assumed (and much evidence suggests that this has been the case) that older people retire and shift their consumption patterns from household goods to leisure activities. It is further assumed that there is a direct link between age and use of public health care services, and in a simplified public concern about demography, that there will be increased “pressure” on the

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economy caused by this drop in consumer spending, and rise in service provision, as the bulges in population work through. However, a more complex reading of the data suggests that more nuanced readings of consumer behavior in older groups are needed. Evidence suggests that many older age groups prefer to remain economically active, and indeed in the United Kingdom, the government is encouraging this to fend off dependency ratio issues. This, in turn, may lead to the continuation of spending on household items (e.g., it is widely predicted that the gradual increase in the compulsory retirement age will lead to a parallel increase in the length of mortgage terms), as people continue to need to replace essentials and feel able to provide luxuries, and will reduce time for leisure. Moreover, higher numbers of people over age sixty-five are enjoying better health than older cohorts did at the same age—one argument about pressures on service provision suggests the increased demand on care and health services will mostly come from the oldest old; and among the youngest older groups, the balance between public and private provision of services and products will more likely mirror the pattern seen among working adults in general. Finally, much of the inherent ageism in employment—which puts a threshold at age fifty, as an invisible barrier beyond which productivity is assumed to decrease—is now challenged by demographic changes and anti-ageist legislation. What this demographic shift means—in Western countries at least—is the apparent growth of a new generation of, as David Metz and Michael Underwood put it, older, richer, fitter workerconsumers who cannot simply be written off as nonconsumers or addressed only within the context of social policy and care. Age is not a simple category. At face value, it is the gradual change in human capacity and identity wrought by biological changes due to the passing of time. In this respect, age forms an important everyday social category that is used to classify people: infant, young, middle-aged, and old work as ordinary labels that have meaning in social settings. However, like many biological categories, the notion of age becomes more problematic when its social characteristics are examined in more depth. The biologically driven model of age relies on a notion of a human life cycle that forms a common pattern for all human organisms (distinct from other

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organisms). There is, of course, much variety and disagreement in the biological explanation of aging processes; however, it is a reasonable summary to suggest that various gradual changes in the “organism” are at the heart of the process, although different causes of change may be proposed. The notion of age as a (solely) biological, linear process, marked by the apparent growth in capacity and physical prowess, peaking in mid-adulthood, and then declining until death, is challenged by psychologists and social scientists. The psychological models of aging straddle the bio- and socio- models, suggesting various cognitive and emotional mechanisms with which individuals manage change, relationships, and shifting capacities as aging progresses. Further, the social science model suggests aging does not have a singular form that is marked by inevitable physical and associated psychological and social consequences. Rather, the biological process is only the background context for what are socially variable processes. The discipline of social gerontology has challenged simplistic notions of age, arguing that many aspects of life shape the aging process: work, retirement and pension patterns, medical and cultural stereotypes, social networks, and raw inequalities around gender, class, ethnicity, and wealth. The most dominant framework for understanding aging in the social and psychological sciences is captured in the notion of life course, which suggests that age is linked to social contexts that construct transitions and positions, rather than having a fixed pattern. This notion of socially embedded aging is important for understanding consumer culture in a number of ways. The first important link between aging and consumption is found in the critique of a deficit model of old age. The assumption (resting in biological assumptions of loss of function) of inevitable, predictable decline as the dominant characteristic of aging has been heavily criticized in social and psychological studies. Although the human body cannot escape its ultimate fate, the pathway to get there is highly variable and, crucially, affected by social context. The deficit model of aging, however, has, until recently, shaped many of the assumptions about aging consumers in marketing and advertising, in social policy and in the minds of the public at large. As discussed next, this is true for both younger and older consumers.

Early Ages The broadest link between consumption and aging is the assumption that aging has different effects on cognitive processing and that this, in turn, affects people’s abilities to make decisions about consumption. This model is built into marketing segmentation approaches, which use demographic, psychographic, and modeling techniques to unpick age-related consumption. So, on the basis of biological and lifecourse assumptions, a notion of changing preferences according to age might be constructed. Very young children, in the first instance, are consumers-by-proxy, in which parents consume for them. As children age, independent preference formation and access to money and decision making gradually increase their engagement in the consumer process. The earliest social “conflict” over age and consumption comes in the struggles over choice in the parent-child relationship. Recently configured under the term pester power, parents perceive consumption and age as a problem in which the apparently persuasive powers of advertising seek to encourage consumption and, in turn, parents develop strategies to resist and manage information being passed on to their children. On the marketing behavior side, the analysis moves across different conceptualizations of children’s beliefs and behavior to gain further market share and to recognize how far power and agency are exercised within families and by children themselves. On the sociological side, the parent-child relationship is examined to explore relative agency and relations of domination; and the notion of persuasion is critically examined. Children are under “threat” from consumer culture in some interpretations—Juliet Schor’s “born to buy” child is a case in point. However, this model of childhood consumption has parallels with wider debates on the hypodermic model of culture in which children are seen as the vessel into which culture is “put.” As with the model of older age as a deficit (see later), this model of the child consumer configures children as vessels for adult decisions and persuasive advertising rather than beings in their own right who can make competent choices. Beyond early childhood, the teenager has become a particularly important reference point for understanding the consumption of the young. The “birth of the teenager” (Osgerby 1998) is widely seen as concurrent with the expansion of consumerism in the postwar period. In the 1950s, new employment

Age and Aging

opportunities and a sense of optimistic cultural openness came hand-in-hand with new opportunities for personal expression. Music, fashion, food and drink, and cultural forms such as film and magazines become central to the experience of being a teenager. It is hard to say that age shaped this experience as a causal factor: more significant is that the particular age category of teenager was forged alongside consumption. In this respect, the emergence of definitions of consumption is coterminous with the emergence of youth consumption, and this default position has affected attempts to provide more complex agerelated understandings. This is a problem for the analysis at large: certain kinds of consumption have been seen as so defining of age (but in particular “one” age) that it is impossible to separate them. If young people are being expressive, creative, and selfdetermining (rather than duped) in their consumption, then by implication older people must not be. This is because youth consumption was defined in debates on subcultures as deliberately resistant to parental cultures (both parents as “older” and parents as “a different generation”).

Aging and Old Age Age has typically been conceived within marketing literature as a form of demographic stratification that can be slotted into an explanation about differential consumer behavior based on numerical age. The assumption is that ability, agency, capacity, preference, and so on, can be “read off” from age, and that those of a similar age will have more similarities than differences. The focus here is on fairly commonsense notions of generation intertwined with life-stage: that formative experiences at particular ages link up with key life moments at the same time in any cohort. Further, this feeds into characterizations of typologies of age, usually clustered around easily graspable labels that can be used in marketing analysis to derive particular preferences and needs—such as “postfamily,” “affluent grays,” or “silver surfers.” Recent market research (Datamonitor 2006, for example) describes market segments by age, such as Generation X (from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book of this name), roughly born between 1965 and 1979, contrasted with older groups, such as baby boomers (1945–1964) and the over-sixty-five swing generation (named for their attachment to swing

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music). Forecasts and trends are organized around such age-related classifications, with global mapping of purchases, for example, identifying improved disposable incomes among both groups compared to previous generations and associated rises in discretionary spending on functional food products, such as vitamin drinks for the swing generation or digital imaging technology for the baby boomers. While “age patterns” can be ascertained in consumer behavior, it is now no longer the case that age can be understood as simply a matter of biological changes. It is interesting that age only categorizes definitively at the extreme ends of the life-course scale—children and older people are defined as consumers by their age, whereas age itself is a noncategory when it comes to explaining the rest of adult consumption. Adults between twenty-four and sixty-five are the default model in consumer marketing, explained and segmented by other things— preferences, job, income levels, and cultural capital but not, particularly, by age. In this respect, if we see the denigration of the age category—as it is assumed to have biological properties—as a direct link between cognitive and physical ability and agency or will, then it only has to apply to and be analytically relevant for those apparently deficient in that agency (because they are too young or too old). Yet, alternative models of aging and age itself bring questions to bear on the overly simplistic notion of age-driven consumption—if the category age itself has to be problematized, then the consumption that derives from it also has to be seen as more complex. The major issue relating to age and consumption, however, is not about age or aging per se, it is about old age. The marketing literature has seen old age as a period of cognitive and physical decline. Older people are assumed to be more rigid in their decision making, to be less able to process information, and to be unchanging in their preferences. The corollary of the model that “fixes” consumption choices at the definitive moment in people’s youth also assumes that they remain fixed in later life. This idea does not necessarily argue that people maintain the same cultural preferences throughout life, but more that innovation is not associated with increasing age: so older people are perceived to be less adaptive, whereas younger people are assumed to be influenced by newness. Evidence from the marketing literature has traditionally suggested that “careful” marketing to older people needs to reflect their lower cognitive abilities

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and their more rigid decision making. This is broadly reflective of wider age stereotyping, in which, according to social gerontological approaches, relies on a “warm but incompetent” model (Cuddy, Fiske, and Glick 2007) of older people. This intrinsic ageism has come under challenge in recent years from a number of developments. Perhaps the most significant challenge is generational or cohort change. Under pressure from those who grew up as mass consumers, the model of age inherent in the consumer world is shifting. The deficit model of old age has built within it assumptions that older people may be the slowest to access innovation and new consumer products; however, some research suggests that the baby boom generation was typically the first consumer generation, exposed to the expansion of mass consumerism in the postwar era. Moreover, research by Ian Rees Jones and colleagues (2008) suggests that successive cohorts of older people are increasingly familiar with consumer goods as they “carry” their early consumption experiences with them. As such, the assumptions about aging being an inevitable decline, including the decline into nonconsumption or flawed consumption, become more complex. If the research is correct, the baby boom generation is the ultimate consumers—the first youth cultural consumers, the first global travelers, and in large part the first early adopters of some technology. The impact of the expansion of this consumer cohort as they themselves age is not fully known— not least because the analysis of age is difficult. For one thing, the intersection of age, generation/cohort, and period (the “identification” problem) is difficult to unravel. It is impossible to say for any set of social phenomena whether it is each, any, or all of these three factors that has generated the change. For example, although researchers can surmise that generation/cohort is important to describe what baby boomers do, they cannot truly be sure it isn’t the case that everyone behaves in the same way because society has changed (a period effect) or that they do what they do because they are a particular age.

Aging: Connecting Youth with Old Age One of the key features of the identification of youth consumption as the only form of radical consumption is in its growing older. As the cohort defined as subcultural consumers has itself aged, and as youth (as a cultural practice) has apparently shifted upward to encompass older groups, as Chris Gilleard puts it,

“middle age became the new cultural battleground as a ‘post-youth’ transformation of consumer culture began to gather momentum” (2005, 158). Focused on staying young, the emergence of new consumer territories, such as a fitness culture and antiaging products, began to challenge the notion that only youth cultures were consumer cultures. Gradually, since the expansion of consumption in the 1980s, older age groups have increasingly engaged in consumer cultures, in which the consuming body expanded its repertoire of not only youth fashions but fashion for wider market segments, in which home consumption became a key feature of expressive lifestyle, in which leisure travel become normalized, and in which the body became a consumer battleground for wider age groups. More recently, the apparent health and wealth of the baby boom generation has led to an increase in addressing the middle-aged and older consumers because of their perceived purchasing power. In attempts to better understand their interests, preferences, and practices, greater attention has been paid to a more complex segmentation of the over-fifty age group. This is not without its own problems. The perception of the baby boom generation as uniformly wealthy and able to consume requires qualification, not least because of the variance in size of the postwar boom in different countries. While it is clear that cohort size will almost certainly have an impact where there is a large and sustained boom in the birthrate—such as in the United States and Canada—it is less evident in the United Kingdom and northern European countries, where the demographics are less definitive. This apparent generational effect, in concert with the gradual colonization of age as a consumer market, has led to a distinct double bind for older people in relation to consumer cultures. As Gilleard puts it, “old age has become an outcome acknowledged primarily through actions designed to refute its presence” (2005, 159). What is meant here is the new ghettoization of age within a model of successful aging: consumer products that stave off age or present it as part of a lifestyle choice abound. So, for example, the controversial but widely admired Dove Pro-Age campaign is a recent, more progressive version of addressing older women in the market, even though it serves to remind older women that they may “only” be old within the normal standards of beauty and slimness and “ordinary” models of the

Age and Aging

aging body are not permissible. In many advanced capitalist countries, the insurance and travel industries recognize mid- and later-life consumers as key targets, and so their message is often another model of successful aging: the active, fit, cosmopolitan, and wealthy consumers who make the most of their retirement by traveling, snowboarding, or engaging in other lifestyle pursuits. On the one hand, older people have been neglected in the field of consumer culture, suffering stereotypical forms of address or simply complete invisibility. On the other, to engage with consumer culture, the demands of aging require conformity to particular models of consumer agency. This notion of successful consumption and its corollary—the failed or flawed consumer—can be found in Zygmunt Bauman’s work. If consumption is—as Bauman suggests—part of what it means to participate in the modern world, then failure to do so renders people “outside” of normal life. This intertwines with ideologies of successful aging, which demand older people not only age, but do so gracefully, beautifully, and healthily—or at least without displaying any infirmities to the outside world. The successful aging model has become the new dominant stereotype, contrasting with the isolated, poor, sick, older stereotype. Recently, social gerontologists frame this popular view of aging as a major problem. It provides a double jeopardy for all older people: not only do they face the varied challenges of aging and the social exclusions and inequalities that emerge, they also face increasing pressure to hide all signs of aging or indications that it might be in any way difficult. In the context of consumption, this double jeopardy is telling: on the one hand, consumers have the right to be addressed fairly and appropriately and not to have their consumer identities subsumed under a deficit model; and yet in doing so, there becomes no imaginary alternative to the form of address and what remains is a tyrannical (Blaikie 1999; Katz 2005) model of positive aging. For women in consumer cultures, one might argue there is, therefore, a triple jeopardy. Older women are already outside any model of successful social participation, suffering the double inequality of age and gender (Woodward 1999). So the successful aging demand in consumption terms requires impossible contortions. Some of the more helpful contributions attempting to integrate age and consumption analysis have come from cultural gerontologists, such as Stephen

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Katz, Andrew Blaikie, Chris Gilleard, and Ian Rees Jones and his colleagues, who have attempted to move beyond a structured dependency model. This model places lack of access to work as the driving force of economic, social, and cultural ageism, and renders consumption as a by-product of capitalist structures. As they point out, this model neglects the work on consumer cultures and identities that has developed in the later part of the twentieth century, in which alternative frames of consumption as social exchange, as symbolic capital, as cultural text, and as identity formation all provide counterpoints to the notion of aging driven by simplistic notions of economic necessity. Although it is a controversial idea, notions of lifestyle have been developed in the context of older people to partially explain their identifications, agency, and communities. Peter Laslett’s notion of the third age is probably the most lasting and influential version of this type of analysis, in which the label of old age is moved away from a focus on aging as a social problem requiring policy solutions and toward conceiving of it more as a collection of demographic, cultural, and individual characteristics that allow new lifestyles to emerge. This fluid notion of a new old age is based on the idea of stages of life, but contrary to earlier accounts, these stages are not fixed or dependent on biological aging. If childhood and youth are the first age, and economically active, parenting adulthood is the second age (although cultural gerontologists are at pains to stress the rejection of the third age simply being defined by retirement), then the third age is the age of new opportunities wrought by the demographic changes discussed earlier, in concert with consumer notions of social engagement. There is also a further debate about the emergence of a fourth age of physical decline, economic, and social withdrawal, and dependency, sometimes couched in terms of the oldest old, since increasingly the age at which such dependency emerges is getting later. However, the recognition of—and arguably expansion in—the third age is central to understanding the role of consumption. In particular, consumption as lifestyle plays a part in shaping the choices and opportunities in the third age, in which greater continuities are thought to exist between the lives of older people and younger cohorts. In contrast to models of the older consumer as isolated, making faulty or rigid decisions, and consuming niche products, instead, third age thinking

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Age and Aging

reminds us of the consumer agency used in precisely the same socially embedded ways as used by younger groups. What Laslett and later commentators such as Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth, Bryan Turner, and Jenny Hockey and Allison James are identifying is the intrinsic link between the emergence of consumption as a central process in late or second modernity and therefore the reconfiguring of old age in the light of this is necessary. One of the key contributions to the debate linking age and consumer culture has come from Featherstone and Hepworth, whose work has highlighted not only the significance of modern consumer practices in the social construction of the aging identity and body, but in turn, the potential “critical turn” in consumer culture that allows such constructions— as in other fields—to be both dominating and the source of social agency simultaneously. By reminding researchers that consumer culture dominates almost all sectors of late modern life, and by introducing notions of consumer culture to aging studies, their work has provided a starting point for recognizing that older groups are not simply disengaged from consumer culture but heavily defined by it. In particular, they have used ideas of cultural capital and symbolic identities to debates on aging, in ways that have led to new research agendas—for example, on the significance of the birthday industry and holiday marketing to the discourse of aging.

Conclusion While the broader sociological questions of the relationship between age and consumption are now emerging in research, there is more work to do exploring the material cultures of older people and transformations within midlife. There is some research exploring the material cultures of older people, which might be seen to blend into questions of consumer culture—since much of the material culture we surround ourselves with is, by default, made up of consumer objects. In the context of older people, some work has been done on the relationship between home and aging in this light—for example, Jean-Sébastien Marcoux’s work on the casser maison (French for broken home), in which older residents who downsize dispose of objects in various meaningful ways, which links to David Ekerdt’s work on similar themes. Further, broader work on the meaning of home in later life highlights the ways

in which material cultural dynamics around home ownership, possessions, and investments in material notions of home construct the environment of being an older person. Further research might include the adaptation of quality of life research found in policy circles to explore whether consumption investments/ divestments are central in older groups—for example, further considering the role of material goods (collections, disposal of memorabilia and display) in the aging process. The area with least engagement is the notion of older people’s consumer identity: there is scope for the adaptation of consumer research to fully explore the worlds of older people, uncovering their richness and the salience of cultural communities via symbolic consumption and material culture. Rebecca Leach See also Childhood; Generation; Leisure; Life Course; Markets and Marketing; Retirement; Single-Person Households; Youth Culture

Further Readings Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckinghamshire, UK: Open University Press, 2004. Blaikie, Andrew. Ageing and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cuddy, Amy J. C., Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick. “The BIAS Map: Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (2007): 631–648. Datamonitor. “Evolving Consumer Landscapes: Key Socio-Demographic Trends Driving Consumer Choices.” Social Sciences Report, 2006. Evandrou, Maria. Baby Boomers: Ageing in the 21st Century. London: Age Concern Books, 1997. Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. “Images of Positive Ageing.” In Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, edited by Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, 29–47. London: Routledge, 1995. Gilleard, Chris. “Cultural Approaches to the Ageing Body.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing, edited by Malcolm Johnson, 156–164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Harper, Sarah. Ageing Societies. London: Hodder Education, 2006. Hockey, Jenny, and Allison James. Social Identities across the Lifecourse. London: Palgrave, 2002. Johnson, Malcolm, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Air and Rail Travel Jones, Ian Rees, Paul Higgs, and David J. Ekerdt. Consumption and Generational Change: The Rise of Consumer Lifestyles. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Jones, Ian Rees, Martin Hyde, Christina Victor, Richard Wiggins, Chris Gilleard, and Paul Higgs. Ageing in a Consumer Society: From Passive to Active Consumption in Britain. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Katz, Stephen. Cultural Aging. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005. Laslett, Peter. A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. Marcoux, Jean-Sébastien. “The ‘Casser Maison’ Ritual: Constructing the Self by Emptying the Home.” Journal of Material Culture 6, no. 2 (2001): 213–235. Metz, David, and Michael Underwood. Older, Richer, Fitter: Identifying the Customer Needs of Britain’s Ageing Population. London: Age Concern, 2005. Osgerby, Bill. Youth in Britain since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Schor, Juliet. Born to Buy. New York: Scribner, 2004. Turner, Bryan. “Ageing and Identity.” In Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, edited by Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, 245–262. London: Routledge, 1995. Woodward, Kathleen. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

AIR

AND

RAIL TRAVEL

Air and rail travel matter deeply to the development of consumer culture. Often forgotten as engines of social change, air and rail travel—together with marine and road transportation—play a key role in the system of distribution of commodities. Moreover, air and rail travel—together with other forms of mobility—serve as media through which personal travel for work, leisure, and shopping takes place. And perhaps more insightfully, air and rail travel work not only as transportation conduits, or in other words as means for getting from point A to point B, but also as important places in and of themselves. Rail travel, for example, is often promoted as a more comfortable way to travel—compared to air and automobile transportation—and even as a destination in itself. As historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has noted, the history of rail travel runs in parallel tracks with the history of Western modernity. Not only

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was the train a driving engine of modernization—by allowing for the quick distribution of raw and manufactured goods, by allowing workers to commute to industrial centers, and by providing for an enormous amount of jobs—but it was also a potent symbol of the new way of life it brought forth. Traveling by train allowed for an individual’s sphere of interests to expand significantly from one’s hometown outward to both neighboring and distant hamlets and cities. It also allowed for ways of life, different groups of people, and traditions to come into closer contact. And perhaps more significantly, as Schivelbusch captures, it allowed for a new pace of life to characterize modern existence. The transition to the higher speeds afforded by rail travel did not come easy, however. The first few rail travelers made their fears and anxieties well known, and this created a wave of panic about the health and psychological side effects of traveling at the then-warp speed of thirty to forty miles per hour. Traveling by rail also opened up the train compartment as a new space for consumption practices (such as reading) and production (such as doing work on the move). If rail travel epitomizes modernization, air travel is clearly symbolic of the transition of modern societies and cultures to a postmodern period characterized by speed, as Paul Virilio and Marc Augé have noted. Few icons symbolize postmodernity better than the international airport—with its endless flow of travelers from the four corners of the world, with its limitless possibilities for leisure and experimentation, with its uniform architecture and hybridized opportunities for consumption, with its preoccupation for panoptic social control, and with its fearful regulation of the migratory movements of passengers originating from underprivileged countries, as Peter Frank Peters has argued. International air travel, however, was not always marked by ultrasonic speeds, luxurious dutyfree merchandise, customer service with a smile, and the feeling of placelessness shared with urban shopping malls and department stores. Early air travel was extremely demanding of passengers, though perhaps also more rewarding. For instance, as Lucy Budd writes, the famous Batavia service operated by Dutch Airlines from Holland to Indonesia would take anywhere from one to two weeks, if all proceeded smoothly. But even possibilities for much shorter flights, such as flightseeing trips, began to appeal to Western consumers as fears of flight slowly faded.

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Air and Rail Travel

Soon enough, airlines realized the potential of expanding their service and infrastructures, and with the increase in personal financial leisure means and the ever-growing lure of the journey abroad and perhaps across the country, the travel industry became the world’s largest industry of any kind in terms of financial transaction volume, as John Urry reminds us. At the same time that aeromobility continued to grow and diversify, rail travel began a slow but constant decline. In North America, for example, in spite of the greatly significant role that it played in the unification of both Canada and the United States as truly continental nations—as opposed to unicoastal entities—rail travel was seen to afford less convenience than the automobile for short travel, and much less speed than the airplane for regional or national travel. With the exception of a few commuter corridors in central Canada and in the eastern United States, rail travel in North America today is viewed almost entirely as either a countercultural practice against the environmentally irresponsible consumerism typical of the system of automobility (given the lower amount of emissions rail travel generates) or as a leisurely paced way to gaze at the countryside while surrounded by comfort, luxurious dinners, and safety. Elsewhere in the world, rail travel provides consumers with commuting options but also with the promise of glorious tourist escapes through romanticized landscapes. Train services, such as the famous Orient Express, are iconic of rail travel’s seductive power, a power that is consumed directly through tourism and indirectly through representation in film and travel writing. On the other hand, air travel has now become a staple of everyday life in the West for at least the majority of middle-class people, as Mark Gottdiener describes. Aeromobility is indeed so important to the development of a globally interconnected society, that its very distinguishing characteristic—that of movement—is believed to be also the distinguishing characteristic of contemporary culture and society. Sociologist John Urry finds that mobility is now more important as a concept than that of society, and that different forms of mobility can account for more social change than previous sedentary metaphors and concepts, such as structure, systems, and stratification. To live a mobile existence in a mobile world means to embrace, or at least cope with, the flows, the ever-changing features, and the processes of change typical of an interaction order that is in constant flux.

As industry predictions for the year 2011 range around the figure of 2.75 billion passengers, and as China, India, the Middle East, and Brazil continue to grow economically, air travel will likely continue to generate the conditions necessary for an everexpanding global village. With an increase in both offer and demand, it is only logical to expect that the cultural consequences of air travel will continue to magnify as well. The speedy of diffusion of products, ideas, and cultures may very well continue to be the distinguishing characteristic of an aeromobilitydependent consumer society for years to come. However, as the availability of cheap fuel shrinks, and awareness about the deleterious environmental effects of air travel grows, the air industry may also find itself at the forefront of a global movement to reduce the global interdependence of peoples and countries. Such movement is already obvious as rising airfares make trends such as “staycations” (or stay-at-home vacations) or “100-mile diets” (based on eating products grown, processed, and distributed locally without use of air transportation) more practical and popular. The air travel industry, however, may soon become a victim of its own success. As air travel continues to become habitual and even routine for more and more people all over the globe, new routes and new airlines continue to appear in the market. As governments make space for these new business ventures through the deregulation of airline ownership, new and more discount airlines in particular enter and then begin to shape the market. Discount airlines’ remarkable grow in popularity is due to affordable fares and the growing appeal of fuss-free services, yet the quality of their service—and the quality of older, more traditional airlines that now need to compete with discount airlines on low fares—threatens to deteriorate. As more airlines continue to cut ancillary services to save on costs and thus reduce the convenience of the travel experience (e.g., some airlines now serve lukewarm water to save on refrigeration, whereas others have greatly reduced the amount of soft drinks offered on flight to reduce the weighty volume of toilet water used by passengers), more or more people view the experience of air travel as less of an escape from the ordinary and more like an experience described by George Orwell of being suspended somewhere in between sheer horror and utter boredom. These trends deeply contrast with the promises of luxury and exotic escape—often

Alienation

combined with veiled, tantalizing hints at the sexual promiscuousness of flight attendants—made by the airline industry in not-so-distant days, when air travel was exclusive to the so-called jet set. In contrast to jet travel and international aviation, more limited knowledge exists on the cultural and social significance of domestic, regional travel. In large countries such as the United States and Canada—where rail travel is impractical because of the large distances—domestic regional travel continues to grow as a trend, enabling weekend travel, short-term migration, second-home ownership, and the displacement of families (as couples may work and live in different cities but rely on domestic air travel to spend weekends together). The significance of seaplane and helicopter travel—whose relevance is enormous in remote communities and the latter increasingly for the elite business executive class—is also deserving of greater scrutiny. Phillip Vannini See also Consumer Dissatisfaction; Cycles of Production and Consumption; Globalization; Leisure; Modernization Theory; Postmodernism; Spaces and Places; Spaces of Shopping; Tourism Studies; Tourist Gaze

Further Readings Augé, Marc. Non-Places. London: Verso, 1995. Budd, Lucy. “The View from the Air: The Cultural Geographies of Flight.” In The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities: Routes Less Traveled, edited by Phillip Vannini, 71–90. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Gottdiener, Mark. Life in the Air. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Peters, Peter Frank. Time, Innovation, and Mobilities. New York: Routledge, 2006. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Blackwell, 1986. Urry, John. Sociology beyond Societies. London: Routledge, 2000. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.

ALIENATION Alienation is a Marxist concept used to describe the severance of individuals from their productive

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activity, their social relationships, and their essential humanity. Although Marxists have mostly invoked it with reference to work and wage labor, alienation can also shed light on consumers’ experiences of passivity, indifference, and disconnection in their leisure time. Henri Lefebvre, for instance, wrote that “there can be alienation in leisure just as in work,” and observed that production and consumption were related in a totality in which “we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work” (1991, 39–40, italics in original). Likewise, Erich Fromm observed, “the process of consumption is as alienated as the process of production” (1955, 120, italics in original). Karl Marx’s notion of alienation was developed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which engaged Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy to conceptualize how human powers and social creations appear to take an objective form that enchains and seems to rule over the people who have collectively produced them. Fromm traces the history of this notion of alienation back to the Old Testament and its condemnation of idolatry, which leads people to worship idols that they themselves have created. The experience of alienation severs the individual from society, unjustly appropriates the products of human labor, and puts people at the mercy of social forces they cannot control or change. Marx argued that under capitalism, people are alienated in four relationships that he deemed fundamental to human existence: in relation to the products of their labor and social activity, in relation to productive activity itself, in relation to their essential humanity or “species being,” and in their social relations with other people. Marx contended that in each of these four relations, people living under capitalism are stripped of their essential human needs and capacities for creative work and social connection. All labor involves objectification, but in a capitalist society, “the alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power” (Marx 1961, 96). As the products of labor are expropriated and assume an alien objectivity that confronts and enslaves humanity, people also become alienated from their creative power for productive activity, which Marx believed was essential to human nature. In the form

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Alienation

of wage labor, work becomes merely a means of survival where the worker “does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased” (98). People lose touch with the abilities that distinguish humanity from the other animals, and are thus alienated from what Marx called “species being.” Finally, people become alienated from one another in the relationships that comprise the social world, as the relations between humanity, nature, and labor are replicated in the competitive rather than cooperative relations between people in society. “Thus,” Marx wrote, “in the relationship of alienated labor every man regards other men according to the standards and relationships in which he finds himself placed as a worker” (103). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where Marx developed the concept of alienation, was not published until 1932. Shortly before then, however, György Lukács was able to excavate the centrality of alienation in Marx’s thought by reading Marx’s 1867 work Capital through the prism of Hegelian philosophy. Lukács’s reinterpretation of Marx and the publication of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts allowed subsequent Marxist theorists to further utilize the concept of alienation in their critiques of capitalist societies during the twentieth century. Alienation was an especially important concept for the “Western Marxists,” so called because of their concentration in Western Europe and North America and because of their opposition to the “orthodox” Marxism of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, who undertook many efforts to censor and diminish the role of alienation in Marxist thought (Jay 1984). Alienation, and its related concepts of reification and commodity fetishism, was vital to the critical theory that developed from the Frankfurt school in the decades before and after World War II. Thus, Max Horkheimer’s critical theory and philosophy developed as a critique of intellectual fragmentation and objectification, Theodor Adorno’s condemnation of popular music and the culture industry focused on the extension of alienation from work to leisure time, and Herbert Marcuse lambasted a one-dimensional society where alienation is evident in everything from the creation of false needs to the instrumental reason of technocratic thinking.

With the triumph of consumer capitalism after World War II, the concept of alienation began to be used to critique the social processes of consumption along with production. In the realm of consumption, people continue to be dominated by a world of things that appear beyond their control, as Erich Fromm put it: “we consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; we live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or continue them” (1955, 122). Fromm maintained that “the act of consumption should be a concrete human act, in which our senses, bodily needs, our aesthetic taste . . . are involved”; he followed Marx’s conception of human nature in arguing that “the act of consumption should be a meaningful, human, productive experience” (122). In reality, however, Fromm found little of that sort of spontaneous productive activity, as he described the predominant social character of his time in terms of “receptive” and “marketing” orientations. For the receptive orientation, “the aim is to receive, to ‘drink in,’ to have something new all the time, to live with a continuously open mouth, as it were”; Fromm thus considered a tourist with a camera to be “an outstanding example of an alienated relationship to the world” (124–125). In the marketing orientation, people experience themselves not as acting, thinking, and loving individuals, but as “a thing to be employed successfully on the market,” such that “qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of ‘the personality package,’ conducive to a higher price on the personality market” (129). In the advanced forms of capitalism dominated by service labor, the workers’ own personalities become alien objects outside of themselves that must be sold to consume the means of survival. Alienation also figured prominently in Henri Lefebvre’s three volumes of The Critique of Everyday Life, published between 1947 and 1981. However, while Fromm and other German intellectuals linked to the Frankfurt school expressed a deep pessimism about postwar society and the consumer culture, Lefebvre used alienation in dialectical movement with “disalienation,” which presented new possibilities for revolution in everyday life. As Lefebvre wrote in the second volume, “absolute alienation and absolute disalienation are equally inconceivable. Real alienation can be thought of and determined

Alternative Consumption

only in terms of a possible disalienation” (2002, 207). This dialectical conception allows one to theorize the struggle and resistance that occurs within the processes of consumption, as consumers may seek to overcome alienation by turning consumption into creative activity and/or a basis for social relationships. But Lefebvre recognized that the consumer’s quest for disalienation could also create “an even greater alienation”: “leisure activities ‘disalienate’ from the effects of fragmented labour; however, when they are entertainments and distractions, they contain their own alienations” (207–208). Theorizing in this dialectical and “relativized” fashion, Lefebvre comprehends alienation and disalienation as contradictions that “characterize concrete situations, taken in movement and not considered in a motionless way along fixed structural lines” (208). The concept of alienation depends on a certain view of human nature and, as Lefebvre reminds us, the prospect that humanity can become “disalienated.” After a wave of intellectual interest in the humanism of the young Marx that accompanied the New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of alienation has largely been abandoned in cultural theory. But as an array of psychological disorders continue to increase as the consumer culture becomes more entrenched and pervasive, it is conceivable that the critique of alienation may prove useful once again. Ryan Moore See also Consumer Culture in the USSR; False Consciousness/False Needs; Horkheimer, Max; Lefebvre, Henri; Markets and Marketing; Marx, Karl; Marxist Theories; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)

Further Readings Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. New York: Fawcett, 1955. Fromm, Erich. Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961. Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Lefebvre, Henri. The Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. New York: Verso, 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. The Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 2. New York: Verso, 2002. Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.” In Marx’s Concept of Man, edited by Erich Fromm, 90–196. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961.

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Mészáros, István. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin, 1970. Ollman, Bertell. Alienation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

ALTERNATIVE CONSUMPTION Alternative or critical consumption refers to a varied set of consumer practices that critically address contemporary consumer culture. It both indicates alternative, ethically coded products, such as Fair Trade goods or organic produce, and networks of provision and consumption alternative to mainstream, massmarket relations, such as farmers’ markets or box schemes. These phenomena have been steadily on the rise for nearly two decades in advanced economies, at times with remarkable rates of growth—such as Fair Trade coffee growing 67% per year in the U.S. market (Arnould 2007; Harrison, Newholm, and Shaw 2005; Lyon and Moberg 2010). More broadly, the European Social Survey has shown that approximately one-third of Europeans have boycotted certain goods or/and have bought goods for political and ethical reasons. With the new millennium, new social movements of an alternative-global variety have resorted to the whole spectrum of consumer actions (e.g., boycotts, naming and blaming, ethical merchandising) to widen the repertoire of political participation and address global issues. A variety of collective actors—oriented toward pleasure and responsibility such as Slow Food or toward solidarity and sustainability such as most Fair Trade nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)— are contributing to shaping alternative views of the market. This variety is reflected in the many nuances of the discourses about the role of the “critical consumer,” their uneven resonance, and the varying economic and political effectiveness of attempts to approach commodities as bearers of environmental, ethical, and political concerns. However, an overarching cultural theme in alternative consumption initiatives can be identified, according to Roberta Sassatelli: that consumer choice is portrayed as neither universally good nor a private issue but as a matter of responsibility with political potential. Most forms of alternative consumption share some interest in environmental issues, some address redistribution concerns, and many confront the increased disentanglement between production and consumption. People as

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consumers are asked to consume better as they feature as the prime motor of desired changes. As a source of power, consumption is not to be given up altogether, it has to be reformed. Consumer choice is framed as a practice with momentous consequences, expressing consumer sovereignty only if consumers take full responsibility for the environmental, social, and political effects of their preferences and are ready to reconsider their consuming life. Three themes in particular seem to emerge in varying degrees and combinations: a civic view of markets as chains interdependent among equals, the value of collective goods, and the pleasures of frugality. Civic notions contend that market relations thrive among equals, and in fact to realize the market’s social potential, we need it to be a fair social space, which places value on initiatives for the redistribution of economic power. Likewise, goods that transcend individual, exclusive enjoyment (in particular, the environment and biodiversity) are conceived of as the essence for consumers’ quality of life, but are all too often neglected by capitalist market relations: consumer choice is thus a way to internalize environmental factors. Finally, the classic liberal view of the relationship between consumption and happiness is regarded as simplistic. This matches a growing body of literature in philosophy and the social sciences that argues that people’s well-being might be understood in terms other than their expenditure and that starts from notions of “quality of life” that add environmental or communitarian depth to a shortterm, individualist, and private vision of individual choice. This may even imply some form of “voluntary simplicity,” “sobriety,” or “downshifting” in consumption, rejecting upscale spending and long working hours, and living a simpler, more relaxed life to discover new pleasures and enhance personal satisfaction, as well as to further socioeconomic equality and environmental awareness. Having said this, it would be mistaken to systematically attribute a deliberately political intention to all consumer choices that appear as an alternative or critical variety. Many of the practices that come under the umbrella of alternative consumption may be conducted by consumers who have in mind meanings and objectives other than strictly political ones. For example, Colin C. Williams and Christopher Paddock found that alternative distribution networks, including

second-hand shops, not only respond to a politically conscious middle-class consumer, but also attract disadvantaged urban groups who may not be able to afford to shop via formal channels. Likewise, Stewart Lockie and Kristen Lyons found that the demand for organically grown vegetables typically mixes private health concerns with some degree of environmental consciousness, and comes from diverse sources, including a large vegetarian movement as well as health-conscious or gourmet carnivores. And Sassatelli and Federica Davolio report that a large proportion of those who buy Fair Trade goods in supermarkets, for example, do so because they “like” the products, consider them “better quality,” or got it just “by chance.” Indeed, in the case of high quality, traditional, and local food, alternative consumption has been considered another positional option, the consumption of lost simplicity on luxury grounds. More broadly, alternative consumer practices can easily be absorbed by the market. The marketing and advertising industries are well aware of the interest in ecological, ethical, and political themes among a certain strata of Western populations and have long started to promote their own versions of the “greening of demand.” This brings up the question of effectiveness of alternative consumer choices on market relations, effectiveness being conceived of in terms of public resonance, corporate change, and ultimately political-economic change. As Fair Trade has gone mainstream, it has had its difficulties in always keeping its promises to help producers in developing countries. Works on global anti-sweatshop campaigns by Michelle Micheletti and Dietlind Stolle and Jo Little and Liz Moor’s account of their appropriation by the U.S. company American Apparel seems to point to the fact that wide public resonance, and even commercial success, may not always correspond to a real improvement in the working life of garment workers. The institutionalization of a dialogue between consumerist and environmental organizations and large multinational commercial companies may also have ambiguous effects. Codes for ethical business and for socially responsible management are becoming widespread, yet they are typically self-administered by industry itself. In response to boycotts and consumer choices in pursuit of specific causes, a variety of labeling

Alternative Consumption

schemes, often set up by ad hoc organizations variously linked with either business or political institutions, is playing a crucial role. This suggests that agencies that, as cultural and economic mediators, mediate between ethical or critical consumers and producers have a crucial role that may boost or twist the critical potential of alternative products and networks. Nevertheless, alternative ways of consuming cannot be reduced to an ideological move on the part of capitalism to appropriate resistance, notes Kate Soper. For example, Sassatelli reports that there is evidence that ethical claims cannot easily be used in a purely instrumental fashion, for ethically oriented consumers may demand proof of standards and may push companies much farther than expected. Furthermore, according to Michael Schudson, even though it may appear as a highly individualized option, shopping ethically may enable consumers to make choices that matter to them in ways that political voting may not, because these choices matter in themselves, empowering consumers in everyday life, rather than for their expressive potential or possible larger effects on macrorealities. All in all, alternative consumption initiatives are not guaranteed, per se, to provide grounds for economic and cultural change. In particular, the reaching of global markets may imply an emphasis on efficiency and promotion that can transform alternative, green, and Fair Trade products into fetishes. Markets are institutions that can be organized differently, and they can thus be put to many different ends. The antinomy between commercial aims and ethical aims may indeed work as a dialectical resource to modify views of markets and ultimately capitalism. This is a fundamental dynamic of value creation and change within the Fair Trade field. Fair Trade activists, for example, often stress the importance of keeping these divergent values in synergy if Fair Trade is to be made viable and meaningful; they use this antinomy as the basis for distinguishing between “real” critical consumers (“activists” and those who are “committed”), and “lifestyle” or “fashion-oriented” consumers, who are ready to jump on the bandwagon of what appears as a trendy option. Their challenge is to consider that while there is no easy road to alternative market relations, capitalist profit-driven markets can be transformed to take into account collective goods such as the environment, promote

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a fairer redistribution of resources, avoid economic polarization, and stress a new set of pleasures. Roberta Sassatelli See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Lifestyle; Political and Ethical Consumption; Self-Reflexivity; Social Movements; Well-Being; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings Arnould, Erik J. “Should Consumer Citizens Escape the Market?” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611 (May 2007): 96–111. Barnett, Clive, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke, and Alice Malpass. Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2011. Harrison, Rob, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw. The Ethical Consumer. London: Sage, 2005. Littler, Jo, and Liz Moor. “Fourth Worlds and Neo-Fordism: American Apparel and the Cultural Economy of Consumer Anxiety.” Cultural Studies 22 (2008): 5–6. Lockie, Stewart, and Kristen Lyons. “Eating Green.” Sociologia Ruralis 42, no. 1 (2002): 23–40. Lyon, Sarah, and Mark Moberg. Fair Trade and Social Justice: Global Ethnographies. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Micheletti, Michele, and Dietlind Stolle. “Mobilizing Consumers to Take Responsibility for Global Social Justice.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611 (2007): 157–175. Sassatelli, Roberta. “Virtue, Responsibility and Consumer Choice: Framing Critical Consumerism.” In Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives, edited by John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, 219–250. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Sassatelli, Roberta. “Representing Consumers: Contesting Claims and Agendas.” In The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently: Better Than Shopping, edited by Kate Soper, Martin Ryle, and Lyn Thomas, 25–42. London: Palgrave, 2009. Sassatelli, Roberta, and Federica Davolio. “Consumption, Pleasure and Politics: Slow-Food and the Politico-Aesthetic Problematization of Food.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 2 (2010): 1–31. Schudson, Michael. “Citizens, Consumers and the Good Society.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611 (2007): 236–249. Soper, Kate. “Re-Thinking the ‘Good Life’: The Citizenship Dimension of Consumer Disaffection with Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7, no. 2 (2007): 205–229.

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Alternative Medicine

Williams, Colin C., and Christopher Paddock. “The Meaning of Alternative Consumption Practices.” Cities 20, no. 5 (2003): 311–319.

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE The term alternative medicine designates a wide range of healing practices that are in some sense opposed to—or excluded by—mainstream modern Western medicine. The proliferation of such practices in contemporary Western societies exemplifies the way in which consumer choice relates to people’s entire “lifestyles”—such that even the selection of health care expresses the logic of social distinction. The epithet alternative must be treated cautiously, however. Although it is meant to connote something that is an equally acceptable alternative to that in general use or sanctioned by the establishment, the near-synonym complementary medicine is often regarded as preferable. This nomenclature radically diminishes the implication that different healing practices are necessarily strict alternatives, suggesting a less oppositional stance vis-à-vis the medical orthodoxy. The catch-all term complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is increasingly common and includes such varied practices as acupuncture, aromatherapy, Ayurveda, chiropractic, crystal healing, herbalism, homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, radionics, reflexology, Reiki, spiritual healing, and traditional Chinese medicine. Though the status of such practices remains, to varying degrees, contested by much of the scientific medical establishment, the designation CAM implies subservience to a hegemonic orthodoxy, connotes a misleading sense of unity, and fails to acknowledge that the remit of the practices it includes often extends beyond the narrow confines of medicine. It is notable that what Western society designates as “alternative” or “complementary” medicine remains, for much of the world, the predominant form of health care. Indeed, many forms of CAM have their basis in traditional forms of treatment—as do many aspects of orthodox medicine. The growth in CAM in the West in the last few decades of the twentieth century—after a period when it had been all but eclipsed by modern medicine—is the result of numerous factors, but the kind of “reanimation” of tradition that it expresses is characteristic of the recognition that modernity, despite presenting itself as

the solution to society’s ills, may be part of the problem, which Ulrich Beck, Antony Giddens, and Scott Lash (1994) frame in terms of “reflexive modernity.” Modern medicine, by seeking to impose a single rational, expert-based model of health care, may indeed be generating ambivalence to that model, resulting in a resurgence of the systems of belief, knowledge, and practice that it sought to suppress. For example, despite the advances of modern medicine, there are concerns that its intrusive methods introduce new problems alongside the solutions it offers. Famously, Ivan Illich (1976) spoke of iatrogenesis (referring to adverse effects induced by established medical interventions) not simply in clinical terms but as a systemic, sociocultural phenomenon. Though reflexive modernity may call forth further modernization to address modernity’s self-generated problems, it may equally provoke an opposite reaction, in terms of alternatives that self-consciously invoke “tradition.” The growth in CAM in part stems from growing acceptance of values that are opposed to the impersonal nature of scientific medicine, which reserves an entirely passive role for patients who must trust in the authority of the medical expert and adhere to prescribed treatment regimes. The rising popularity of CAM expresses a desire for more “holistic” healing. As Mary Douglas suggests, preferences for particular types of health care, like all consumer preferences, express deep-rooted sets of beliefs and understandings of the world, which typically distance consumers from the kind of person they would not wish to be. Preference for holistic treatments not only reflects dissatisfaction with orthodox medicine; it also expresses a positioning of oneself against others, such as unthinking individuals who have a blind faith in science or who fail to see that connections between big business (the pharmaceutical industry) and medical science may distort medical endeavor or who have repressed more spiritual values. The notion of “health (or medical) consumerism” stresses the active role of patients as consumers rather than as passive recipients of health expertise. Consumers of CAM seem to fit the mold of Alvin Toffler’s prosumers (a portmanteau word combining the prefix from producer or professional with the stem of consumer): at the limit, they may selfdiagnose, research, and select the appropriate remedy, as well as undergo the treatment. Yet while the

Althusser, Louis

consumption of CAM may take place independent of practitioners (e.g., the purchase of over-the-counter herbal and homeopathic remedies), many forms of CAM necessarily involve practitioners. The fact that CAM practitioners are increasingly subject to professionalization and regulation often erodes the distinctiveness of the patient experience (with standardized practices replacing idiosyncratic, virtuosic performances), whereas orthodox health care has simultaneously become increasingly patient centered. In this light, it is significant that CAM researchers have stressed the importance of understanding the consumer, rather than focusing single-mindedly on clinical effectivity. The notion of empowered prosumers may, however, romanticize CAM. In areas of the world without adequate state-provided health care, the relative cost of CAM and scientific medicine has a determinate effect on patterns of uptake—and is partly responsible for CAM’s increasingly global presence. Likewise, the growth of CAM in the West has been seen as symptomatic of a culture of anxiety, itself emanating from consumerism (increasing choice means increasing uncertainty, provoking a ready demand for expert solutions and therapeutic balms). Whatever CAM may have to offer, the widespread “de-differentiation” of health care and consumerism—the erosion of any firm demarcation between the two—will undoubtedly form the context for its future development. David B. Clarke See also Alternative Consumption; Body, The; Health Care; Lifestyle; Modernization Theory; Postmodernism; Prosumption; Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings Beck, Ulrich, Antony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Doel, Marcus A., and Jeremy Segrott. “Beyond Belief? Consumer Culture, Complementary Medicine, and the Dis-Ease of Everyday Life.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 6 (2003): 739–759. Douglas, Mary. “The Choice between Gross and Spiritual: Some Medical Preferences.” In Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste, 21–49. London: Sage, 1996. Furedi, Frank. Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Anxious Age. London: Routledge, 2003. Heller, Tom, Geraldine Lee-Treweek, Jeanne Katz, Julie Stone, and Sue Spurr, eds. Perspectives on

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Complementary and Alternative Medicine. London: Routledge, 2005. Illich, Ivan. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. New York: Pantheon, 1976. Jennings, Michael. “Chinese Medicine and Medical Pluralism in Dar es Salaam: Globalisation or Glocalisation?” International Relations 19, no. 4 (2005): 457–474. Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York: Bantam Books, 1980.

ALTHUSSER, LOUIS (1918–1990) Louis Althusser was a Marxist philosopher. After spending most of World War II in a German prison camp, he became a tutor in philosophy at France’s elite École normale supérieure, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1948, he joined the Communist Party. Influenced in part by the structuralist movement, which dominated French thought in the 1960s, he published a series of highly influential studies of the philosophy of Karl Marx. Althusser suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his life. In 1980, he killed his wife, who had been his companion for thirty years. He was declared unfit to plead to the crime on grounds of mental irresponsibility. It is Althusser’s theories of ideology that have proved most influential in the study of consumer culture. In Marxist tradition, ideology is the name given to all those discourses that misrepresent the reality of the exploitative economic relationships in which we live. It has traditionally been described as false consciousness of this reality. Althusser, however, argues that ideology is primarily an unconscious phenomenon. As he puts it in his 1963 essay, “Marxism and Humanism,” ideology is the “lived” relationship between human beings and their world. That is, as a person goes about his or her everyday life, he or she assumes and takes for granted all kinds of ideas, images, and narratives about the way the world is and how to act in it, which the person does not subject to critical reflection. These ideas, images, and narratives are what constitute the ideology in which he or she lives. Since consumer culture produces so many of the discourses that build up this pre-reflective sense of one’s “world,” Althusser’s theory of ideology has been used to study that culture. Take advertisements as an example. In ordinary life, we are surrounded by messages from advertisements that tell

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American Dream

us about how to look, talk, dress, behave, buy, work, spend leisure time, relate to others, and so on. From Althusser’s view, these messages are ideological. They contribute to people’s sense that the world is a different kind of place than Marxism, with its analysis of the exploitative economic relationships by which society is constituted, shows that in reality it is. They contribute thereby to maintaining those exploitative relationships. In a later essay published in 1969, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser develops his theory of ideology. Marxist tradition has always regarded the modern state as an institution that serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. It defends these interests with what Althusser calls the “repressive state apparatus”—the police, the army, the courts, the prisons, and other forms of ultimately physical force. The state also perpetuates the rule of the bourgeoisie, however, by ideology as well as by force. It does so, Althusser argues, in “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs), such as the church, the education system, the legal system, the media, television, the cinema, sports, and other institutions that function primarily by means of discourse. Indeed, Althusser stresses in this later essay, ideology exists only in the material practices and rituals of which membership in an ISA consists. So according to Althusser, ISAs are institutions of consumer culture, such as the news media, the cinema, the music business, or television; and participation in their practices—whether reading the news, listening to one’s football coach, or downloading music from iTunes—perpetuates discourse that serves to keep the ruling economic class in power. Althusser has a very specific concept of the way ideology functions. He argues that it “hails or interpellates individuals as subjects” (1971, 175). By this, he means that ideology calls out to individuals, telling them that they are “subjects.” The word subject has two meanings here. First, it means a person is considered as the origin or agent of his or her own thoughts and actions. By saying that ideology tells people that they are subjects, Althusser means that it gives us the illusion that we are free and autonomous agents. In reality, as Marxism tells us, we are objects of the capitalist mode of production. The word subject has a second sense, moreover, that of a person subjected to the authority of another. This is no accident, for Althusser. By deluding us that we are subjects in the first sense, ideology ensures that in

fact we remain subjects in the second sense, subjected to the authority of the ruling economic class. Luke Ferretter See also Advertising; Broadcast Media; Capitalism; Culture-Ideology of Consumerism; Interpellation; Leisure; Marxist Theories; Structuralism

Further Readings Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Verso, 1969. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Montag, Warren. Louis Althusser. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

AMERICAN DREAM The American Dream is a central symbol of the American experience, based on the premise that, through individual agency, success and happiness are realistically attainable goals for anyone regardless of class, gender, race, or religion. The dream has proven so powerful an influence on American life and culture that it is sometimes referred to as part of a civil religion, in which the widespread association of success with the accumulation of material wealth has increasingly turned consumer products into status symbols through which consumers seek to position themselves socially. Credit for coining the term is usually given to American historian James Truslow Adams, who used it in his one-volume interpretive history of the nation, The Epic of America, published in 1931. To Adams, the dream signified a general potential for a life “better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement” (404). It was evocative of new beginnings and the reinvention of self so inextricably tied to American history and culture. The Puritans’ search for freedom from religious persecution, the poor immigrant’s pursuit of economic opportunity and abundant land, or the desire of early nationalists to create a republic away from the rigid social and political structures of Europe can all be seen as early versions of the dream. Inherently relativistic, the American Dream is constantly renegotiated and invested with new meanings. Historically, the inclusive definition of

American Dream

that better, richer, and happier life has simultaneously made for a sense of national unity by setting a goal for which everyone ideally can strive, while allowing for several contradictory and even conflicting interpretations of that goal. For example, nineteenth-century settlers rushing into the trans-Mississippi West to dig for gold or to secure land for themselves and their families caused an often violent disruption of Native American lives and customs. Similarly, the exploitation of labor in early textile mills and other industries saw the desires of owners and workers collide, and the basic premise of the dream has continually been countered and problematized by the historic exclusion of minorities. In spite of its capaciousness, however, the dominant interpretation of the dream has been in terms of economic security and home ownership. Firmly rooted in the nation’s political culture through the Declaration of Independence, a common manifestation of the dream was the story of the self-made man who rises from rags to riches. Benjamin Franklin, the archetypal self-made American, popularized that narrative when he extolled the virtues of industry and courage as the answers to his own success. A century later, that theme was endlessly reiterated in Horatio Alger’s many books about poor boys who became wealthy through hard work and honesty. Although formulaic in plot and structure, Alger’s stories became remarkably popular and, by the end of the century, had found their way into many homes and libraries. By the 1890s, shorter work weeks, higher wages, and an increase in white-collar jobs combined with technological advancements and improvements in production and transportation helped make possible a culture of spending that political economist Thorstein Veblen characterized as one of conspicuous consumption. As Americans ventured out into the new electrically illuminated city streets, they had more money to spend than ever before and more products to spend it on. So powerful had the link between affluence and success become that the immigrant letters, which half a century earlier had tended to focus on the availability of inexpensive land, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revolved around themes such as the comparatively high wages of the American factory worker and the refinements of modern society. Even though socially conscious exposés and muckraking journalist efforts such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives

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(1890) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) did much to question the American Dream, to many impoverished immigrants, America remained a land of social opportunity. With the economic boom of the 1920s, another generation of consumers, spurred on by the availability of new products and the explosive use of advertising, recalibrated the dream to increasingly revolve around the wonders of the marketplace. But as Americans spent increasing amounts of money, earned or borrowed, on consumer items, intellectuals sought to expose the human casualties of a culture that so fervently insisted on equating happiness with affluence. In Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) the new consumer society became linked to a crisis of modernity, and in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the protagonist Jay Gatsby, who reinvents himself to be close to the woman he loves, fails in his search for happiness in spite of having achieved the materialistic definition of success. Similarly, in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), the tragic old salesman Willy Loman is increasingly frustrated by his and his sons’ lack of corporate success; a frustration that threatens to tear his family apart. Yet Willy is ultimately unable to let go of that dream that is both his and America’s, and as the play ends, unresolved, his dissatisfaction with a life where everything is measured up against financial success is passed on to his two sons, a poignant example of the devastation and infectiousness of the unfulfilled dream. Although temporarily dampened by a decade and a half of the Depression and wartime rationing, by the late 1940s and 1950s, consumption once again picked up, serving both as a relief valve for pent-up consumer desires and as a strategy to ensure continued economic growth. The availability of easy credit and a host of new products helped reinvigorate the consumerism that had blossomed in the 1920s; and the suburban home, an important signifier of upward social mobility, became the true object of desire. Consequently, in the 1950s, millions of Americans moved to the new suburbs. Many of the new suburbanites were aided by legislative efforts, such as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill of Rights), which helped provide cheap loans and education, but the mass production of affordable homes, like the very popular Levittowns, also put the suburban dream within the economic reach of many families.

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Yet the predominantly white flight to the suburbs also increasingly segmented American society along racial and class lines and left urban centers to deteriorate. Not only did the new suburbs quickly become divided according to hierarchies of class, but racial and ethnic minorities were kept out from fear of depreciating property values. In part, civil protests of the time had their roots in such exclusionary practices. Since African Americans were barred from public accommodations, education, and suburban life, sit-ins and boycotts became directed at prying open the gates to the new consumer heaven. During violent riots, some looters acted out consumer desires by taking what they felt they had been denied for too long. In the 1960s and 1970s, the worsening economic crisis along with frustrations over issues such as discrimination and the escalating war in Vietnam meant that many young Americans rejected the materialism and conformity that had become cornerstones of earlier interpretations of happiness and success. Meanwhile, the early songs of Bruce Springsteen chronicled the loss of jobs and of faith in what had always been considered an indisputable and uniquely American potential. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, in his so-called malaise speech, went on television to remind Americans that material goods could not invest an existence with purpose or meaning. Although the dominant American Dream has remained one of affluence (as expressed in the turnof-the-century popularity of get-rich-quick, self-help books or television shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), concerns over spiraling consumption has led overworked and overspent Americans to look for a better life elsewhere. In the 1990s, a minority group, so-called downshifters, has opted for lives of less work and less money, and many of them claim to have found happiness away from the pressures of the marketplace. A more recent group, such as the Center for a New American Dream, has made it its mission to help Americans consume more responsibly to protect the environment while enhancing their quality of life and promoting social justice. Torben Huus Larsen See also Advertising; Affluent Society; Capitalism; Consumer Society; Material Culture; Reality TV; Suburbia; Veblen, Thorstein Bunde; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1931. Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Cullen, Jim. The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Heinze, Andrew. Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Hochschild, Jennifer L. Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.

AMERICANIZATION In today’s terms, Americanization stands for the dominant influence of the United States on other countries. According to a strict view of Americanization, a culture would be substituted by American culture through time. Americanization suggests that consumer culture is essentially American culture, which comes to dominate other cultures in the world. This happens by the driving force of the United States through consumption (i.e., consuming Americanmade products and services and/or consuming them in ways that American people consume). In the early 1900s, foreign-born residents of the United States planned for full citizenship. Americanization in this period reflected a commitment to the principles of the American way of living and working, in an attempt to assist immigrants in the process of adjusting to American society. The term melting pot was used to symbolize the prosperity and potential that these immigrants bring to the country, and the resulting superior blend of different people. After World War I, however, the definition of a typical American started to become vague, making

Americanization

it harder to use the phrase to reflect something harmonious and useful. Americanization came to be associated with nationalism and usage of coercive ways to assimilate immigrants into American culture, where individuals were assumed to become linearly acculturated to the American culture. The minority group, according to this perspective, gradually adapts to the prevailing dominant culture by shifting previous meanings, perceptions, practices, and norms. In a consumption context, assimilation is associated with adaptation to a new consumer environment by way of purchasing and consuming new goods and learning the meanings attached to them. In today’s usage of the term, Americanization is defined as globalization of the world by the United States. The connection between globalization and Americanization is therefore at a point where all global forces become centered at the United States and everything becomes the “American way.” Although one might define globalization as internationalization (increasing relations among different countries), liberalization (removal of government-imposed restrictions on trade movements, leading to “borderless economies”), universalization (worldwide usage of various systems, such as calendars and even brands), Westernization (becoming more like a Westerner in terms of production and consumption), or modernization (resembling “modern” counterparts in the Western world), the term Americanization here refers to the process of becoming more and more like an American, which can penetrate many spheres of life. One of the most important driving forces of Americanization is the actual movement of people from their country to the United States. By this way, people get accustomed to the new culture through consumption and may end up assimilating into the American way of living. The forces of American globalization, and hence Americanization, may also come from increasing levels of international trade and intensified cultural exchange, through such mechanisms as penetration of American companies into foreign local markets and introduction of commercial, cable, and satellite television. It does not have to involve people who migrated from another country. American-based companies integrate their facilities among different countries. If people in other cultures prefer to use and adopt American products and brands, this is also considered as Americanization. Brands are important because they represent a certain way of living. Many brands are positioned

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as “signs” of membership in global and American consumer culture. For example, Coca-Cola is often viewed as a symbol of the United States. Merging the name Coca-Cola with colonization, the term coca-colonization refers to the importation of American goods and American values into a local culture. Similarly, fast food is another symbol for Americanization because it represents the efficient and dominant influence of American production systems. Companies such as Starbucks, Burger King, and McDonald’s are examples of Americanbased outlets that have franchises all around the world. Many people express the homogenization of all tastes in a single pattern through the term McDonaldization, which implies a society with the characteristics of a fast-food restaurant, including efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Even jobs at McDonald’s (called McJobs) are quite available, usually performed by students, women, and immigrants in the area. The characteristics of Americanization and the idea of having one single standard around the world presents the idea of a “McWorld,” a homogenized place “that demand(s) integration and uniformity and that mesmerize(s) the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s” (Waters 2001, 222). Americanization in this regard introduces a single world culture centered on consumerism, mass media, and the English language. Many commentators have argued that the process brings a worldwide “cultural synchronization,” where a global culture is being formed through the economic, political, and cultural domination of the United States, which pursues its hegemonic culture into all parts of the world. On the other hand, anyone in the world can be “Americanized” through the media, because media itself is one tool where global meanings and practices are being circulated. It has been argued that the spread of American media, including television, film, and music industries, has been the main component of Americanization in recent years. People can now easily see what people in the United States are doing, what they are consuming, and how they are consuming. Consumption is a very significant area, as it offers the possibility of both attaining American products in local markets and disseminating American values and norms. One problem with the homogenization thesis is that it misses the ways in which different cultures

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respond to the same phenomena in different ways. Many scholars argue that only a few of the globalized systems are truly hegemonic in the sense of having been universally accepted. It may not be possible for a person to totally change and adopt the American culture, unless he or she is born and socialized into this culture. Other diagnoses link Americanization with enduring and even increased cultural diversity. According to this perspective, the global situation is not singly dominated, but interactive, so the United States would remain only as a single node in a complex, transnational construction of imaginary landscapes. Each culture and each individual has agency in responding to cultural flows of ideas and goods in different ways. Rejecting the idea of a one-way, linear process of Americanization, many accounts support the idea that local consumptionscapes are influenced by a variety of forces in complex and multidirectional ways. Some researchers argue for creolization, where new meanings are assigned to foreign influences in the form of goods or ideas. In this process, local participants select particular elements from the American culture, assign different meanings, selectively change specific parts, and create new forms. This kind of recontextualization of American goods and ideas in mixed and complex ways can be called hybridization, which concerns a desire to embrace elements of a global American culture and integrate them into the local culture. Hybridization can also involve a process of resistance and contestation, where new meanings challenge the American meanings. There is growing evidence that globalization brings resistance, selectivity, and agency in non-Western societies. This is also true at the level of the individual, as one can feel and show different aspects of self through the use of different products and services, as well as facilitate identity change, such as discarding an aspect of identity, such as ethnicity, by changing one’s appearance. It is argued that after the intensification and exchange among different societies and a realization of differences, what follows is a transformation with changes emerging at the level of the local system. These changes occur over and above the heads of nation-states; and nationally determined actors play a lesser role in this new world society. Fragmentation is increasing and, as discussed earlier, there is creolization and hybridization of cultures, languages, and lifestyles. The world is one place not because it is homogenized, but because it is a melting pot

of social differentiation, not geographical differentiation. Therefore, realized differences are not interpreted in the same way, even for the same individual. Hybridization presumes an active consumer who negotiates his or her own consumption process. The dynamics at work in this nonhomogenizing Americanization process are called relativization by many researchers, reflecting a social process in which people reflexively think and act and compare themselves to Westerners, or more specifically, Americans, on a global basis. Therefore, not every corner of the world has to resemble the United States, but the process is always in reference to the United States. The expansion of communication media has made people all over the world more conscious of people in other places and of the world as a whole, rather than the United States alone. The process of Americanization, even in relativization terms, may not necessarily suggest positive connotations, as it might lead to a commodified rationalization of life in which American products and services are automatically perceived as good and desirable. Some scholars argue that Americanization brings division by increasing social inequality, class polarization, consumer frustration, and threats to health and environment. Some people may admire the United States for its power, efficiency, personal freedom, innovation, and popular culture; some may oppose its values and what it stands for. It can be argued that Americanization may have a negative connotation when encountered unwillingly; and it may have a positive connotation when sought voluntarily. Berna Tarı See also American Dream; Broadcast Media; Consumer Society; Disney; Globalization; Glocalization; Hollywood; McDonaldization; Modernization Theory

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7, nos. 2/3 (1990): 295–310. Barber, Benjamin. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Featherstone, Mike, and Scott Lash, eds. Global Modernities. London: Sage, 1995. Ger, Güliz, and Russell W. Belk. “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke: Consumptionscapes in a Less Affluent World.” Journal of Consumer Policy 17 (1996): 271–304.

Anomie Hartmann, E. G. The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant. New York: AMS Press, 1967. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993. Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Waters, Malcolm. Globalization. London: Routledge, 2001.

ANOMIE If the world of consumer culture strikes the reader as one of perpetual flux and indeterminate movement, a world that has lost the moorings that bound traditional civil society to conventional morality, or a world in which there appears to be no consensus on behavioral norms or foundational values, then it might seem reasonable to suggest that contemporary consumer culture is anomic, that it is without norms, and that it inspires in the subject a profound sense of dislocation and disorientation. This concept of anomie, used in many interesting and innovative ways throughout our intellectual history (see Orru 1987), is primarily associated with the rather bleak but highly perceptive writing of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, whose work at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries enabled sociology to break free from other disciplines in the humanities and establish itself as a peculiarly “modern” area of study. Durkheim died at the age of 59 in 1917, but the passage of time has not rendered his work obsolete, and his influence can still be detected in many cutting-edge areas of contemporary sociological inquiry. His work on individuality, social solidarity and historical change is once again salient as we find ourselves locked in an era that has seen an upsurge in individualism and egoism and a marked decline in forms of community and collectivism. Indeed, cast against our postmodern and depoliticized academic landscape, some of Durkheim’s writings seem oddly radical and decidedly out of sync with the dominant ethic of “freedom” and individualism that shapes contemporary social life in the West. The emphasis he places on social solidarity and the harmful effects of unrestrained individualism are once again beginning to find significant intellectual support, and this is particularly true of his work on anomie. It is far easier to define anomie etymologically than semantically. Anomie comes from the Greek anomia,

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which means the absence of rules or norms (see Orru 1987). Sociologists tend to define the concept as “normlessness,” but in Durkheim’s original work, the concept is deployed in a much more ambiguous way. According to Stjepan Mestrovic and Helene Brown (1985), it is worth noting that Durkheim may have used anomie as a means of communicating “derangement” rather than “normlessness,” a far more provocative form of social implosion that can be linked directly to immorality and suffering. By analyzing contextual discussion, we can, however, identify key themes in Durkheim’s use of the concept of anomie. In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim is concerned with the crucial historical shift from mechanical to organic solidarity as industrialized mass production and an increasingly complex division of labor began to transform economy and society. In these times of social upheaval, it became increasingly difficult for the individual to be successfully incorporated into collective forms of moral and behavioral regulation; and, as the capitalist project continued, anomie became a feature of a mass society struggling to maintain forms of social solidarity and restrain the problematic forms of individualism that it inevitably produced. In Suicide, Durkheim uses the concept in a similar vein to convey a sense of dislocation from the collective norms and values of industrial society. This dislocation threatened the well-being of the individual and challenged society’s ability to reproduce itself in a productive and positive manner. For Durkheim, the industrial society of organic solidarity was failing to ensure that individuals felt committed to the collective consciousness and that they saw themselves as active and productive constituents of that society. A lack of consensus on norms and values leads to ineffectual moral and behavioral regulation of what Durkheim believed was the insatiable nature of human wants and desires. While Durkheim was primarily concerned with the moral crises of a rapidly industrializing Europe, Robert K. Merton (1938) extended his analysis of anomie to the new world of liberal America. Merton began by focusing on the structure of American society and the huge gulf that existed between cultural goals and the legitimate means of achieving them. The American Dream that drew millions of immigrants to the United States in search of a better life claimed that anybody can achieve great success in American

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society if they display the necessary fortitude, endurance, and talent. The American Dream also placed great emphasis on material success and the accumulation of social status as demonstrable proof of social value. However, this American Dream bears no relation to the actual structures of American social and economic life that continue to be characterized by huge gaps between rich and poor. Nonetheless, the American consciousness was shaped by the compelling image of possible rapid social advancement and material prosperity. Following Durkheim, Merton believed that the gap between the reality of American society and the great cultural emphasis placed on “success” created significant “social strain” that could lead to various forms of deviance. Merton’s work had a huge impact on the development of criminological theory, where it continues to exert a powerful influence. Merton’s work should not, however, be restricted to criminological applications and can offer us a number of interesting starting points in the analysis of contemporary consumer culture. For example, the huge cultural importance allocated to the lifestyles of the rich and famous offer us a useful means of grasping elements of social strain in contemporary culture. One only has to watch an episode of The X Factor or American Idol to be reminded of the huge importance many people place on achieving celebrity in an increasingly mediatized and consumerized world. However, few achieve real distinction, and the psychological repercussions of attempting to achieve cultural significance by engaging in these commodified forms of public humiliation can be considerable.

Consumerism and the Malady of Infinite Aspirations Perhaps the most important aspect of Durkheim’s work on anomie is its connection to what he called the “malady of infinite aspirations.” It is here that we can see the relevance of his work to contemporary consumer culture most clearly. The inability of society to regulate human desire produces a malady of infinite aspirations that sustains contemporary consumer markets in the West. The application of seductive symbolism to material consumer goods generates consumer desire and drives the contemporary capitalist economy forward. Consumers apply positive sentiments to particular brands and often believe that buying particular items will make them happy or elevate their

social position in some way. Research reveals that the satisfaction we feel after making our purchases is fleeting and that consumer desire is constantly regenerated amid the spectacle of popular consumer culture. Western consumerism is therefore not simply a matter of creating consumer desire to allow liberal capitalism to continue its solipsistic and environmentally destructive dance. Consumer desire must be endlessly recreated; the endpoint must never be reached. One of the subtle psychosocial drivers that sustain consumer culture in its present form is the insistent desire to demonstrate cultural relevance and socioeconomic success to others and the self (see Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008). But as desire is constantly regenerated, the position of social success is not a fixed destination but an inherently insecure terrain that compels the individual to engage in a ceaseless battle to demonstrate social status and cultural significance. One might therefore consider Durkheim’s depiction of a socially destructive malady of infinite aspirations to be more relevant in the twenty-first century than at the end of the nineteenth century, when Durkheim cast a critical eye over an increasingly complex society that was unable to restrain human desire and bind the instrumental individual to collective norms and values. It seems that in contemporary consumer culture, our “aspirations” are indeed “infinite,” as there is no definitive end point that allows the individual to abdicate responsibility for consumerized self-definition. Capitalism’s winner/loser ethic ensures that consumer culture produces problematic forms of insecurity and social competition that appear to drive the individual forever forward in the battle to demonstrate one’s social, cultural, and economic success. It is also worth noting that the ideological triumph of liberalism has ensured that “individualism” is increasingly seen as a necessary good and the precursor to a freer, more civilized, and respectful age. According to Alain Badiou (2002), the contemporary ideological universe appears to be all about the language of formal liberty in the absence of any real sense of collective identity or destiny. In contemporary liberal democratic societies, “the collective” is believed to stifle individual expression and is therefore something to escape from rather than cultivate, as we seek to define ourselves as aloof and endlessly creative individuals. While Durkheim linked anomie to the corrosion of collective norms, one might suggest that contemporary collective norms have been

Anorexia

systematically and deliberately relaxed to ensure that capitalism’s ideological project continues to benefit from the growth of narcissistic individualism. Taking all of this into account, one can conclude that Durkheim’s concept of anomie continues to provide a useful platform to launch a range of critical readings of contemporary consumer culture. Simon Winlow See also American Dream; Capitalism; Durkheim, Émile; Industrial Society; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)

Further Readings Badiou, Alain. Ethics. London: Verso, 2002. Hall, Steve, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum. Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. Cullompton, UK: Willan, 2008. Merton, Robert K. “Social Structure and Anomie.” American Sociological Review 3, no. 5 (1938): 672–682. Mestrovic, Stjepan, and Helene Brown. “Durkheim’s Concept of Anomie as Dereglement.” Social Problems 33, no.2 (1985): 81–99. Orru, Marco. Anomie: History and Meanings. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Thompson, K. Emile Durkheim. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1982.

ANOREXIA As used today, anorexia is an abbreviation of anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized by severe weight loss mainly brought about by restricting one’s intake of food to a level much below that required to maintain body weight that is normal for one’s height, age, and sex. Formerly, anorexia meant loss of appetite and was defined as such in nineteenth-century medical dictionaries. It was acknowledged as a symptom of a range of physical illnesses, rather than as constituting an illness in its own right. Anorexia was also observed to occur among the mentally ill, and forced feeding of severely underweight patients was practiced in mental asylums. During the later decades of the nineteenth century, an interest in the classification of mental illnesses developed apace with the idea that asylums should have a therapeutic function. By the 1870s, the fasting practices of some young women had been identified in France as constituting a morbid condition termed

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l’anorexie hysterique, and anorexia nervosa—which became the term of preference—had been introduced to medical circles in Great Britain (Brumberg 1988). Severe fasting practices among young women were thereafter seen as constituting an unusual and morbid illness in its own right. Anorexia and other eating disorders are often taken to be symptomatic of consumer maladies, in this case a consequence of idealized mass media representations and celebrations of “thin bodies” in contemporary consumer culture. Anorexia nervosa is poorly named, since loss of appetite is not among the symptoms of people now classified as suffering from this disorder. Rather, they generally report feelings of hunger and of the need to control appetite, self-starvation being the practice that distinguishes them. Until the mid-twentieth century, anorexia nervosa was generally thought to be a relatively rare illness, mainly affecting young women from middle- or upper-class families. Research reports largely focused on case presentations, diagnoses, treatments, and discussion of its causes, there being little indication that the incidence of this disorder was rising.

A Clinical Disorder Although anorexia nervosa is classified today as a psychiatric disorder and distinguished from other eating disorders, diagnostic criteria are currently under revision and appropriate treatments are contested among clinicians in the fields of medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology. Diagnostic criteria currently recognized by both International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) classifications are as follows: body weight at least 15 percent below the minimum normal level, body image distortion, and, among women, amenorrhea. ICD criteria specify that weight loss is self-induced by means of dietary restriction, supplemented either by the use of self-induced purging or by excessive exercising. DSM criteria specify an intense fear of gaining weight or of obesity and distinguish types of anorexia—“binging/ purging” or “restrictive”—according to whether or not binge eating and self-induced purging are features of a current episode of anorexia nervosa. Severe weight loss is not a feature of bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder with which anorexia nervosa is frequently contrasted. Atypical or subclinical forms of both disorders are recognized insofar as people meet some but

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not all diagnostic criteria. Anorexia nervosa is viewed as a serious disorder: mortality rates are estimated between 5 and 20 percent (American Psychiatric Association 2000), and the prognosis for full recovery is less than 50 percent of diagnosed cases. People diagnosed as suffering from anorexia nervosa present a wide variety of physical and psychological symptoms, some of which may be secondary effects of malnutrition or due to comorbid conditions, including depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or personality disorder. This variety of symptoms contributes to the complexity of ongoing discussion of the causes of this disorder. These remain unclear and are not only discussed among members of the so-called “psy” disciplines, but are also discussed within the fields of biology, including evolutionary theory, genetics, and neurology, as well as epidemiology, sociology, and anthropology.

A Growing Epidemic It has been widely noted that anorexia nervosa tends to occur in societies in which food is plentiful and in which a slim body signifies that appetite control has been exercised, not that access to food is limited. Estimates of the prevalence of anorexia nervosa among women in industrialized societies range from 0.5 to 3.7 percent, while the incidence of subclinical forms is estimated as being 5 to 10 times as high. The view that this disorder occurs exclusively among women has been revised. More recent estimates of female to male ratio range between 10 to 1 and 6 to 1. The emergence of validated questionnaires since the late 1970s has facilitated estimates of the incidence of anorexia nervosa also in less industrialized societies. Since the 1980s, this work has supported the view that the incidence of this disorder is rising sharply and is spreading beyond the geographical, social class, and gender boundaries within which it was earlier thought to occur (Gordon 2000). The distribution of this disorder in diverse populations has been widely attributed to the influence of idealized mass media images of thin women in Western and Westernized consumer cultures, and has underlain the view that social and cultural factors must account at least in part for its incidence.

Sociocultural Perspectives Some researchers have pursued the view that anorexia nervosa should be regarded as a “culture

bound” syndrome, largely based on epidemiological evidence (Nasser 1997). Others have sought to redefine it as a cultural product rather than as a pathological disorder of individuals. More recent social scientific research has focused on elucidating the character of institutional contexts that foster interest in anorexic practices among young people. Feminist theorists brought sociocultural perspectives to bear on the understanding of anorexia nervosa in the course of the 1980s and 1990s by seeking to account for anorexic practices from the viewpoint of the anorexic subject and by interpreting these meanings as discursive constructions. Anorexic practices were seen as constituting a protest against oppression (Orbach 1986), as expressing resistance to a destiny of domestic femininity (Bordo 1993), or as taking some other form of active response to the dictates of patriarchal culture. These practices tended to be located within a continuum of more usual responses to given sociocultural conditions on the part of women and were not seen as constituting a merely passive response to media influences. More recent contributors to this field continue to draw on feminist insights regarding gender, power, the body, and contextual features of anorexic practices, but the earlier idea that cultural analysis would invalidate the view that anorexia nervosa is a pathological disorder suffered by individuals is no longer apparent. The hypothesis that health professionals are implicated in the rising incidence of anorexic practices and its subclinical forms is under discussion. It has been suggested, for example, that interest in these practices is an unintended effect of interventions designed to address the “obesity epidemic” (Allen 2008). Particular attention has been given to the unintended effects of health discourses in educational institutions, especially in the form of “healthism,” which focuses on the moral responsibility of individuals to make correct choices with respect to food and fitness, the body being the medium that renders “good” and “bad” choices detectable (Rich and Evans 2005; Halse, Honey, and Boughtwood 2007).

Interdisciplinary Challenges Sociocultural studies of the body, gender, and social institutions, largely inspired by post-structuralism, have revealed a number of ways in which psychological and sociocultural accounts of anorexic practices might find common ground. For instance, competitiveness, overcompliance, or perfectionism

Anthropology

can be viewed as personality traits that are acted out by vulnerable individuals and can also be viewed as comprising discursive ideals of contemporary institutions. Sociologists of consumption have contributed much to the understanding of symbolic meanings of food practices and the role of food in the family, but, as yet, they have contributed relatively little to research in this field (Sobal and Maurer 1999). Among the challenges facing current consumer research in this area is development of the theory of symbolic meanings of food practices that are not verbalized but that take the forms of fasting, restricting diet, craving, binging, or habitual overeating. Much interdisciplinary research is required to elucidate the character of the practices and processes involved. Katherine O’Doherty Jensen See also Beauty Myth; Body, The; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Dieting; Food Consumption; Gender Advertising; Gender and the Media; Post-Structuralism

Further Readings Allen, Jodie T. “The Spectacularization of the Anorexic Subject Position.” Current Sociology 56, no. 4 (2008): 587–603. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR). 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Press, 2000. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Brumberg, Joan J. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Gordon, Richard A. Eating Disorders: Anatomy of a Social Epidemic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Halse, Christine, Anne Honey, and Desiree Boughtwood. “The Paradox of Virtue: (Re)Thinking Deviance, Anorexia and Schooling.” Gender and Education 19, no. 2 (2007): 219–235. Nasser, Mervat. Culture and Weight Consciousness. London: Routledge, 1997. Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. Rich, Emma, and John Evans. “Making Sense of Eating Disorders in Schools.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 26, no. 2 (2005): 247–262. Sobal, Jeffery, and Donna Maurer, eds. Weighty Issues: Fatness and Thinness as Social Problems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999.

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World Health Organization. International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10). 10th rev. ed. Geneva: World Health Organization, 1992.

ANTHROPOLOGY Anthropology is the study of human life, societies, and cultures. Anthropologists have especially contributed to the study of consumer culture by exploring the social construction of needs and desires, the relationships of humans to material goods, and the cross-cultural diversity of consumer practices. Several anthropologists of consumption have challenged economic research by demonstrating that social context is the key factor that determines why people consume, how they consume, and why there are differences within and across consumer groups. Qualitative ethnographic methods typically used by anthropologists have become increasingly influential in cross-disciplinary and nonacademic research. Consumption has been a growing area of explicit interest in anthropology since the 1980s. The array of anthropological research on consumption that has developed since that time has expanded, rather than narrowed, the definitions of consumer culture, and at times anthropologists have positioned their work as critiques of other disciplinary approaches to consumption, in particular that of economics. Anthropological approaches to consumer culture are deliberately broad and diverse. For example, although some anthropologists of consumption focus heavily on the importance of material culture, other anthropological studies have considered nonmaterial forms of consumption, such as the consumption of energy or of mass media and information technology. Nevertheless, anthropological definitions of consumption can be said to emphasize consumption as a social process; one brought about by people through differing beliefs and practices differentially over time and across space. Anthropologists have argued that to understand consumer cultures, we must explore the social processes that determine demand for certain kinds of consumption and study the variable practices, beliefs, and responses that humans attach to their objects of consumption.

Critique of Economics Several of the most prominent anthropologists to write about consumption have specifically criticized

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economists’ and political economists’ approaches to consumption. Whereas economic approaches to consumer culture take as their starting point the assumption that people want to consume, anthropologists have preferred to ask why people want to consume. The World of Goods, published in 1978 by anthropologist Mary Douglas and econometrician Baron Isherwood, was an early example of anthropologists arguing against economic views of consumption. Douglas and Isherwood focused on understanding the human motivations that lie behind consumption, arguing that people feel compelled to acquire consumer goods because these goods are ways of communicating to others by signifying one’s status and identity. The use of consumption practices to communicate status was also taken up by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction. Distinction, while not strictly ethnographic, is very influential in anthropology for at least two reasons: Bourdieu’s arguments deal with the anthropological perspective that consumer practices are actually a reflection of broader underlying social structures, and his theoretical positions are drawn from empirical research into practices of everyday life. Other anthropologists have followed Douglas and Bourdieu in arguing that many people engage in consumption for reasons much more complex and diverse than dominant definitions of market economics would imagine. Such arguments critique the assumption of economics that consumers’ behavior is universal and predictable by emphasizing that contemporary market economies are only one historically and culturally specific context in which consumption takes place. Further, although economists hold that consumers will behave in consistently self-interested ways, much anthropological research has shown the many apparently “non-rational” motives can inform consumption practices. Daniel Miller has argued that the self-interested consumer is a myth, and that “rational” behavior is at best a partial explanation of how and why people consume; he uses the example of the stereotypical housewife, a figure who is frequently the center of most domestic consumption, but whose shopping practices are largely an altruistic act of caring for other family members. Participating in consumer culture is therefore not only an economic calculation, but can also be a proclamation of status, a communicator of relationships, a political or moral statement, a tedious task of domestic reproduction, or all of these things at once. In emphasizing the connections between acts of

consumption and broader social processes, anthropologists have further demonstrated that although purchasing mass-produced goods does represent a predominant kind of consumption in contemporary cultures, many other forms of consumption continue to exist as well. For example, people consume goods and services provided by the state, they receive gifts, engage in free labor in return for goods, and at times produce their own commodities, even when massproduced alternatives are available. Historically, cross-culturally, and even in today’s consumer cultures, many nonmarket forms of consumption take place, even when a market economy is dominant.

Contrasts to Philosophy and Cultural Studies In considering consumer culture rather than consumption in general, anthropologists have also taken a position that is quite distinct from that of some philosophers, sociologists, and cultural theorists. For example, the famous theorist Jean Baudrillard’s discussions of consumer culture present the modern obsession with consumption as a loss of authentic meaning; in seeing consumer culture as lacking in authenticity, he follows a number of philosophers, including Theodor Adorno and even Karl Marx, who both saw the development of mass consumption in capitalist societies as preventing humans from living in a fulfilling way. Sociologists ranging from John Kenneth Galbraith to George Ritzer have in their own ways emphasized the deterministic and hegemonic qualities of the modern economies that fuel consumer culture. As discussed later, many anthropologists would resist declaring consumer culture to be universally “bad” or “inauthentic” in comparison to other times and places. Although their close attention to the lives of often-marginalized groups urges many anthropologists to document the restrictive and oppressive effects that global capital can have on consumers in poor or developing communities, most contemporary anthropologists would argue that any culture—consumerist or otherwise—should be taken on its own terms and respected as valid and authentic. Some anthropologists, Jonathan Friedman and Daniel Miller among them, have argued that the critical positions that theorists who have taken against consumer culture, engage in a form of snobbery or social judgment in which “mass” or mainstream popular culture is devalued due to the personal and cultural preferences of academic elites. In slight

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contrast, other anthropologists, such as Richard Wilk, have encouraged their colleagues within anthropology to connect their consumption studies to the problems of inequity and injustice that result from mass consumption. While respecting the values of the consumers being studied, anthropologists can and should recognize that they themselves hold moral or political positions about the benefits and damages of consumer culture. In philosophy and cultural studies, scholars often focus on the consumer activities that represent the new, the extreme, and the hedonistic; for example, shopping is often discussed in such circles as an activity of fantasy and excess. Some well-known anthropological studies have looked at noteworthy displays of conspicuous consumption; examples of this include the much-discussed rituals of potlatch among indigenous communities of the U.S. Pacific Northwest and the religiously inspired hoarding practices known as cargo cults found across Melanesia in the twentieth century, although this hoarding can be seen as a deferment of consumption inasmuch as it is a spectacle of conspicuous consumption. Some ethnographic studies have focused on the excitement that surrounds new opportunities to consume, to be discussed later. But anthropologists have also emphasized the centrality of ordinary consumption to the practices of everyday life. It is often the unthinking, mundane actions we undertake, those taken-for-granted preferences and activities, that actually shape the majority of consumer activities. It is precisely in these trivial acts of consumption that we can find the answers to the most fundamental questions about how modern societies operate. For example, Mary Weismantel’s work on cooking and food consumption in Andean households highlights how everyday practices such as provisioning, preparing food, and cooking meals for a household are an activity around which the most important constituents of gender identity are built for Andean women. In addition to the importance of cooking as a gendered practice, Weismantel illustrates the class hierarchies that are associated with the different foods that families can afford within the community and the impact that economic and political events beyond the Andean region have had on even the most intimate cooking and eating practices within the households studied. Unlike some theorists of postmodernity, most anthropologists reject the idea that modern consumer

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cultures are an entirely new kind of existence; all over the world, for centuries, people have always consumed, and the production and consumption of material goods has always been tremendously important. While historical and economic shifts in the modern age have transformed the degree to which many consumers engage in global networks of mass production and mass consumption, the human needs that have given rise to these shifts are essentially the same, even while these human needs are manifested in an ever-changing variety of ways.

Economic Anthropology, Theories of Exchange, and Material Culture Studies Humans have basic consumption needs that seem universal, such as shelter, food, and clothing. But even meeting these apparently “basic needs” involves practices and beliefs that lie beyond mere survival: building a new house protects one from the elements but can also be a marker of social success. Cooking meals keeps one nourished but can also communicate love to (or exert control over) family members who are kept fed. Clothing consumption may keep a body warm in hostile environments but is also a form of artistic expression through body decoration. Understanding how needs are valued and the processes by which they are fulfilled requires us to understand how social relationships are formed and how identities are defined through the consumption of a wide variety of objects. None of these are new topics of study for anthropology, even if the traditionally imagined locations for anthropological fieldwork (such as highland tribes or remote villages) seem quite different environments from the locations of consumer research in other disciplines. Many contemporary anthropologists working on consumer culture draw from preexisting traditions in social anthropology, such as economic anthropology, theories of exchange, and material culture studies. Economic anthropologists study how people’s livelihoods are constituted; in some societies people primarily produce goods for their own use, while in other societies most of the goods an individual uses are acquired through exchanges for money (purchasing), services (labor), or other kinds of goods (barter). Economic anthropologists often examine how resources are distributed within a community and within households; such examinations show how political, economic, or

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religious beliefs can greatly affect who has the most (or least) goods within a community. Such studies are tremendously useful for scholars of consumer culture, and anthropologists such as James G. Carrier and Josiah McC. Heyman work on contemporary consumption within an economic anthropological framework. Rather than focusing on the symbolic significance of material goods, they consider how consumers work to maintain or improve their material well-being within political, economic, and environmental contexts that are often inequitable and unpredictable. For many people, consumption is not primarily a hedonistic celebration of conspicuous consumption but is actually a process of simply assuring economic survival—and this is true not only in remote or “traditional” communities, but for many members of affluent consumer societies, such as the United States. Pooling household resources, stretching meager wages to keep up food supplies, or changing from agricultural to industrial forms of employment are all examples of practices that economic anthropologists have long studied and that directly shape the presence (or absence) of consumer goods in the everyday lives of people around the world.

Material Culture, Exchange, and Value Many anthropologists have tried to understand mass consumption by studying the roles of objects within societies, and in the United Kingdom, the anthropology of consumption has been particularly linked to the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies. The work of Daniel Miller has been especially influential in this regard. His body of research has covered most of the themes considered in this entry, but perhaps the work in which his theoretical position on consumption is most extensively developed is in the 1987 book Material Culture and Mass Consumption, in which Miller argues that it is through this constant relationship between people and material goods that social relations are manifested. Moving beyond the specific tradition of material culture studies, anthropologists have long been interested in the variable relationships that are developed between people and objects, and in the comparative conditions of alienable and inalienable goods that seem to lie at the heart of any investigation into production, consumption, or distribution. Early influential anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski (with his study of kula rituals in which shells are

exchanged in a circular fashion between Melanesian island communities) and Marcel Mauss (in his work on the gift) marked out as early as the 1920s an interest in how people use objects to reproduce social processes. Theories of exchange, of the gift, and of the role of commodities, though sometimes developed with reference to societies not known for their consumerism, have often asked questions very similar to those more recently considered by anthropologists working on mass consumption in large-scale market economies: how are relationships between people expressed and negotiated through the transfer of goods? And how is the conception of oneself and one’s society informed by the understanding and use of material forms? A 1986 collection edited by Arjun Appadurai is one well-known example of connecting anthropology’s longstanding interest in exchange with more recent increases in the global incorporation of commodities into daily life. Appadurai points out that commodities are understood very differently at different moments in their life cycle; at times they are precious, while at other times they become rubbish. What makes the difference is how consumers perceive them. Appadurai argues that a good becomes a commodity when it is valued for its potential for exchange; in this sense he opposes them to gifts. Following Mauss, gifts can be seen as goods that are valued because of the personal relationship between the giver and the receiver; indeed, many of our most cherished gifts may have very little economic value and are cherished because of the personal relationships they embody. In contrast, commodities are expected to hold some sort of economic value beyond their personal history; for Appadurai a commodity is any object whose primary characteristic at a given time is its exchangeability. Clearly, sometimes gifts become commodities and vice versa. We can imagine this applied to the example of an original artwork, whose economic value varies tremendously according to the changing tastes and perceptions of the audience. A beloved painting inalienable from the owner and kept until his or her death might subsequently be ignored in an attic, until being rescued by someone with a knowledge of the art market and sold at a tremendous profit to someone who bought it as an investment. In an era of globalization, the movement of commodities across radically different societies has frequently resulted in commodities shifting between very different regimes

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of value. There are often radical differences between how the producers of commodities value their output and the values attached to those same commodities by consumers in an entirely different place.

Globalization and Consumer Culture Although anthropologists have shown that the importance of consumption is by no means restricted to contemporary capitalism, they do not deny that we currently live in a world in which the opportunities to consume are on an unprecedented scale. Developments in mass production and global distribution have allowed an exponential rise in the quantity and diversity of commodities available not only to the average Western capitalist, but to many (but of course not all) people around the world. Mass consumption has changed domestic routines, eating habits, health, and fitness. It has transformed rural and urban landscapes. But changing how people live also transforms how they think; buying and owning consumer goods is not only possible, it has also become important in a way it couldn’t be before. Anthropologists have increasingly brought the techniques and perspectives they traditionally applied to non-Western societies to examine how consumerism is the dominant form of organizing society in what is commonly called the West, and a dominant form of organizing society in many other places. Frequently, such research adds to the understanding of how consumerism and capitalism combine to have particular impacts on social identity. For example, Elizabeth Chin’s study of African American youth demonstrates how important shopping and consumption are to their lives, while at the same time these very shopping and consumption practices are often experiences of marginalization. Other anthropologists have shown that the cultural consequences of industrialized consumption have been equally important in socialist and postsocialist economies, again suggesting that capitalism is but one socioeconomic framework within which consumer culture can be seen.

Responses to Consumer Culture Rather than dealing with large-scale measures of generalized behavior that model aggregate consumption, anthropologists typically draw their analyses from the specificities of actual behavior at the ground level of individuals, households, or neighborhoods,

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which makes evident the extent to which the patterns and motivations of consumer behavior are diverse and uneven. The “aggregate consumer” does not exist in real life, and anthropological data reveal how different people consume very different goods in very different ways, according to age group, ethnicity, gender, and a whole host of other factors. Anthropologists have become known for examining the diversity of consumption by studying consumption in non-Western or noncapitalist societies (or in recently Westernized and recently capitalist societies), due to the history of anthropology as a specifically cross-cultural enterprise. Traditionally, anthropologists were supposed to choose the most far-flung, so-called primitive society they could find to do fieldwork, but as the previous section suggested, over the past thirty years communities with urban, industrialized, and/or transnational characteristics have increasingly been championed as legitimate venues for ethnographic study. At the same time, many communities that were characterized as “traditional,” “noncapitalist,” or “remote” when studied thirty or more years ago, have themselves become more urbanized, industrialized, and involved in transnational networks. A significant body of work has therefore emerged in which anthropologists consider how communities seemingly at the periphery of global commerce come to terms with the increasing penetration of mass consumption. This body of work can be identified by three major themes: those of hegemony, resistance, and creolization. Before the boom in the anthropology of consumption, many ethnographic studies emphasized the negative effects of globalization; the erasure of traditional goods and practices suggested that the growing penetration of Western consumer goods was a powerful new form of cultural imperialism. Anthropologists working across the world have documented this disappearance of many cultural forms in the face of mass consumption. Hand-woven textiles, manual farming practices, locally produced food, and artistic forms including traditional theater and folk dances have, in many places, been supplanted by store-bought clothes, tractors, imported snacks, television sets, and karaoke machines. These transformations can create social problems between older and younger generations, can make vulnerable low-income consumers dependant on multinational businesses, and can lead to the forgetting of centuries of local history.

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Yet anthropologists have also documented how in the face of the arrival of mass commodities, not all communities have enthusiastically embraced consumer goods. On the contrary, in some contexts, they may seem to entirely reject such practices. Alfred Gell argued this was the case among the Muria Gonds in India in the 1980s (Gell’s paper appears in the book The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai). Consumption in this community is deeply motivated by ideals of egalitarianism, humility, and group interest. There are certain forms of hedonistic consumption that are encouraged, but these are communal events, such as feasts. Although some members of the community were actually wealthy enough by the 1980s to consume a wide array of mass-produced goods, their response to such a change in economic capacity was not to differentiate themselves from others in the community but rather to go to great lengths to demonstrate their continued traditional forms of consumption. Rather than buying televisions or radios, money would be spent on more traditional goods, such as ceremonial ceramics. From a local’s perspective, new access to mass consumption need not signify the arrival of unfettered global capitalism, or a positive path to future economic and material development. When faced with rapid economic changes that enable mass consumption, communities may enforce stringent controls as to how consumption can be managed. In other contexts, mass consumption may come to represent ideals and philosophies that seem entirely antithetical to commercial capitalism, as in the case of cargo cults, in which mass consumption becomes reconfigured as religious practice. Much of religion, whether located in institutionalized churches or in less-formally organized groups, involves the constraining of some consumption (such as through taboos or sins) and the elevation or transformation of other goods and substances (in worshipping relics, building shrines, in the use of blessed or purified goods). Well before the field of consumption studies became identifiable, anthropologists had established a tradition of studying such relationships between religious practices, spiritual beliefs, and the circulation of goods, as well as more broadly studying the social mechanisms that constrain consumption or “tame” material goods. Mary Douglas’s pioneering interpretation of the Book of Leviticus to explain food taboos has been a

prominent example of the long-standing association between religious doctrine and consumption practices (1966/2002). Controlling consumption through religion or spiritual belief can also be identified in the long tradition of studying witchcraft and sorcery in West Africa (among other places). Scholars of witchcraft in that region have found that, far from being a “primitive” belief, allegations of witchcraft have flourished precisely under conditions of African postcolonial modernity. People who consume too conspicuously or who prosper too quickly in commerce may be accused of invoking witchcraft to build their success, whereas those who experience failure in business or are unable to achieve their desired consumption may fear the workings of witchcraft on them. In other cases, religion may be used to support certain forms of consumption while acknowledging the temptations that consumer culture present. Birgit Meyer’s research on Ghanaian Pentecostalist attitudes to consumption discusses the common practices of praying over newly bought consumer goods before bringing them into a house to neutralize any potential dangers within them. In acknowledging the havoc that consumer goods can wreak, but also having processes to tame those goods, Meyer argues that Pentecostalist consumption discourses present “a dialectic of being possessed and possessing,” offering another example of how people come to terms with the moral ambiguities of yearning for goods. Anthropologists therefore are critical of research that assumes the simple presence of consumer goods means that every non-Western consumer has embraced the tenets of liberal capitalism. On the other hand, much ethnographic research has emerged that documents how some consumers have very enthusiastically embraced such practices and do see the introduction of consumer goods as representing positive economic development and greater efficiency. In some cases, there are preexisting social norms that mesh well with the incorporation of capitalist mass commodities into local life. Jonathan Friedman’s study of Congolese men moving between Paris and Bacongo exemplifies how local traditional beliefs and globalized modern practices need not be antithetical; Congolese migrants working in Paris save up to buy designer clothes to parade them back at home, because wearing Parisian labels purchases entry into local hierarchies of power that can be traced to colonial and precolonial roots.

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An even more enthusiastic adoption of imported consumer practices can be found in Richard Wilk’s ethnographies of Belize, where Wilk argues that most people are keen to consume in as Americanized a way as possible. Most Belizeans explicitly associate progress and modernity with the consumption of imported goods, which are very strongly preferred over more economical local alternatives. Although anthropologists advocate against using the penetration of mass consumption as a measure of cultural superiority, cases such as the Belizean one show the need to study how in some communities, the consumers themselves do adopt discourses of “modernity” and “development” as something to be worked toward. In the vast majority of cases, cross-cultural consumption can be seen as a combination of, on the one hand, incorporating imported goods into local life, while on the other hand, appropriating these imported goods to meet local needs and perspectives. The consumption of imported goods is neither entirely determined by global economies nor entirely created by local contexts, but it is an inherently hybrid activity that is at once globalized and localized. This hybrid process is sometimes referred to as “creolization,” following approaches pioneered by anthropologist Ulf Hannerz that consider how cultural effects of globalization are simultaneously global and local. The term creolization denotes a mixing of different cultural forces to produce something new that is drawn equally from the interplay between one influence and another. Just one example of a globalized/localized consumption practice, that of drinking Coca-Cola, has been studied by anthropologists in Trinidad, Argentina, and Papua New Guinea, among other places. In each of these different societies, people have categorized Coca-Cola within local hierarchies of goods, in some cases even regarding it as a specific symbol of local or national identity. Anthropologists are particularly keen advocates of this kind of approach, which synthesizes hegemonic tendencies of global consumption with the local articulations of cultural practices, because it takes the emphasis of study away from the assumed “centers” of world capitalism, such as the United States or Western Europe, and examines the experiences of people who are often portrayed as being at the “periphery” of world systems. Understanding the experiences of consumers in these seemingly exotic or peripheral

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locales is extremely useful in understanding things such as global economies and world capitalism, because they are precisely those markets in which growth seems most substantial. With the growth in recent decades of enormous consumer markets across Asia and Latin America, such creolized forms of consumption have become an increasingly typical picture of what contemporary consumption looks like. Anthropologists have played an important role in shifting the emphasis of consumer research away from the specific areas of North America and Western Europe. In doing so, they have also highlighted that the historical processes of globalization have always involved interplays and exchanges between Western and non-Western, rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped economies. Sidney W. Mintz’s groundbreaking work on the history of sugar in the nineteenth century is one of the studies that has made the greatest impact on anthropological and historical thought since its publication in 1986. Mintz uses the case study of sugar production in the West Indies and its consumption in the United Kingdom to show how even the earliest examples of capitalist industry relied on transnational relationships. The Industrial Revolution of nineteenth-century England was literally fueled by poor urban communities’ reliance on sugar, depending on faraway regions including the Caribbean (where sugar was grown) and West Africa (from which slave laborers were transported). Mintz’s study is also an early example of the burgeoning body of scholarship on commodity chains, discussed later.

Ethnographic Method Perhaps the single most identifiable quality that anthropologists bring to consumer research is their methodological approach, that of ethnography. Ethnographies are written accounts of the findings that anthropologists develop from typically extended periods of fieldwork, in which they live among the community they are studying. Traditionally, anthropologists highly value long-standing and in-depth relations with the individuals and communities they study, as this privileged access improves their ability to contextualize the data collected for analysis. Anthropologists stress the importance of understanding social events in context. In the case of consumption research, this would mean that rather than presenting a formal questionnaire about consumer

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practices, anthropologists would accompany their informants about their everyday business of shopping, cooking, doing housework, going out for entertainment, or consuming media technologies in the home. Through seeing the contexts in which consumer activities take place, they add more complex understandings to their written account, an ethnography.

Applied Anthropology and Consumer Research A significant number of anthropologists working on consumption today are not based in universities, but rather in commercial, state-sponsored, or nongovernmental environments. Since the 1990s, ethnographic research methods have become increasingly popular tools in market research—typically ethnographic methods will supplement other qualitative research methods, such as interviews and surveys, to provide commercial clients with a more nuanced and contextual view of consumers’ practices and beliefs. Particularly in the industries of health care, technology, and design, the past fifteen years have also seen a growth in the employment of anthropologists as part of product design processes, and many large successful companies employ teams of in-house anthropologists to study current consumer experiences and predict future responses to new technologies. The research conducted by anthropologists involved in industry can range from being specifically applied pieces of market research to being much more speculative “blue sky” projects, the findings of which may not immediately increase the profits of a company. Although there are several national professional bodies that offer membership and networks to both academic and commercial anthropologists, in general there remains a significant distance between anthropologists of consumer culture working in universities and those working in applied industries. Since many anthropological studies of consumption have critiqued the dominance of economic and marketcapitalist perspectives, applied anthropologists can come under attack for joining, rather than criticizing, the business world. Increasingly, “applied anthropology” is understood to involve much shorter, specific data collection phases than the in-depth, long-term fieldwork that academic anthropologists demand to produce highly credible research. For their part, despite some successful collaborations between academics and industry, anthropologists working in applied consumer research are often marginalized by colleagues from business and marketing

backgrounds because of their unusual methods, whereas anthropologists from academia shun closer collaboration, even when this could provide exciting and viable career paths for future anthropology graduates. In both academia and industry, anthropologists working on consumer culture often find themselves balancing two difficult roles of promoting the value of anthropological perspectives to consumer research, while protecting the good name of anthropology and ethnography from misuse and encroachment by marketers, businesspeople, state policymakers, and others.

Future Directions The call by anthropologists from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s to critically recover the importance of consumption to social theory has by now largely been accomplished. Whereas thirty years ago consumption was entirely overshadowed by a much heavier analysis of production and labor, today the anthropology of consumption is a thriving subfield at the forefront of many of the most important debates in the discipline, including discussions of globalization, class, race, and migration. When consumption as a topic was still largely ignored, it was important for studies to analyze it separately from other social processes to elevate it as a valuable arena for serious research. But now that the task of promoting consumption as a topic is effectively complete, anthropologists are increasingly working to reconnect their studies with the other processes of which consumption forms a part. One example of such reconnection can be seen in the growing literature on commodity chains, which connects consumer experiences to the various stages of a commodity’s production. For example, Robert J. Foster’s study of “Coca-Globalization” integrates his ethnography of soft drink consumers in rural Papua New Guinea with research on advertisers and bottlers elsewhere in the nation, as well as shareholders and employees of the company Coca-Cola Amatil based in Australia and the United States. Studies such as Foster’s investigate the relationships between different moments in the life cycle of a commodity, while also demonstrating that within each moment it is the practices and ideas of people, in their diverse circumstances and with their diverse motivations, that make those commodities meaningful. While trying to move on from arguments that were polarized between positions that were simplistically

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“proconsumption” or “anticonsumption,” anthropologists have also remained involved in discussions about the ethical, political, and developmental consequences of consumer cultures. Anthropologists have had to balance their advocacy for the rights of marginalized peoples to increased control over consumption choices, against their observations of the detrimental impact that consumer markets can have on environments, local economies, and health indicators. One potential future direction in which this balancing act can be played out is through a deeper ethnographic analysis of the politics of distribution in contemporary economies. It is in the distribution of resources (which is clearly connected to the distribution of power) that the balance between the benefits of modern mass consumption can most effectively be measured against the damages, and it is in the distribution of consumption opportunities that people’s satisfaction levels seem to be most affected. While “rich” consumers have not been demonstrated to be significantly happier than “poor” consumers, there is ample evidence from the anthropology of consumption to show that the least-satisfied consumers are those who feel that access to consumption is unfairly distributed within their community. For anthropologists who seek to engage in political and ethical discussions about consumer culture, reconnecting with an analysis of distribution also allows the reconnection of the anthropology of consumption with broader discussions of sustainability, environmental science, development research, and political economy. Amid the many different positions and perspectives that anthropologists take when studying consumption, some sort of common agenda can be deciphered. First, anthropologists remain committed to empirically investigating all the many social conditions through which consumption occurs. And second, anthropologists draw from these empirical investigations to formulate theories of consumption that are flexible enough to accommodate diversity but rigorous enough to provide accounts of societal structures that go beyond specific case studies and give insight into the human condition. Anna Cristina Pertierra See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Commodities; Comparing Consumer Cultures; Douglas, Mary; Ethnography; Globalization; Material Culture; Ordinary Consumption; Potlatch

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Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1984. Carrier, James, and Josiah McC. Heyman. “Consumption and Political Economy.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3, no. 2 (1997): 355–373. Chin, Elizabeth. Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge, 2002. First published 1966. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Penguin, 1980. First published 1978. Foster, Robert J. Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Friedman, Jonathan, ed. Consumption and Identity. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. Howes, David, ed. Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities. London: Routledge, 1996. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. First published 1922. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge, 1990. First published 1954. Meyer, Birgit. “Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana.” Development and Change 21 (1998): 751–776. Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Miller, Daniel, ed. Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies. London: Routledge, 1995. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Orlove, Benjamin, ed. The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Patico, Jennifer, and Melissa Caldwell. “Consumers Exiting Socialism: Ethnographic Perspectives on Daily Life in Post-Communist Europe.” Ethnos 67, no. 3 (2002): 285–294. Sunderland, Patricia L., and Rita M. Denny. Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

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Weismantel, Mary J. Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Wilk, Richard. “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Structures of Common Difference.” In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, edited by Daniel Miller, 110–133. London: Routledge, 1995. Wilk, Richard. “Consuming Morality.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1, no. 2 (2001): 245–260.

ANTIQUES See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Material Culture; Nostalgia; Object Biographies; Reuse/Recycling

APPROPRIATION Appropriation, in its most basic sense, is the process of taking possession. Its potential meanings within the study of consumption are therefore diverse: from the first principles of production, where the economy appropriates natural resources; through the appropriation of labor by capital; and through uses of “exotic” cultural resources to sell commodities; to the processes through which generic commodities and advanced technologies are actively assimilated to specific locales, frameworks of meaning, and patterns of everyday life. Because it is about taking possession, the concept of appropriation can illuminate relationships throughout the processes that converge in moments of consumption. The relations of production that result in consumer products and services can be seen to have their roots first in the appropriation of natural resources. The concept has long been applied to processes of bringing unowned resources, particularly of land or minerals, into private ownership for the purposes of exploitation. Today, this understanding of appropriation finds fresh resonance in the fundamental definition of ecological footprint as “appropriated carrying capacity.” Appropriation has also long been deployed in relation to the labor relations through which products and services are produced. For Karl Marx, the appropriation by capital of surplus labor forms the groundwork for the system of capitalism.

These conceptualizations of appropriation as part of the foundational processes of production establish the inextricability of appropriation from relations of power. Appropriation here is both an expression of and means to power on the part of the entity that is taking possession. This sense of appropriation being part of an unequal relationship extends to classic accounts of cultural appropriation. Edward Said’s account of Orientalism and the uses made of the “other” provides a ready frame for critique of Western corporations’ appropriation of the “exotic” to produce, market, and sell products, from ethnic fashions to jars of curry sauce. The corporate appropriation of cultural resources can be framed as a continuation of colonial power. Such uses of appropriation maintain a strong negative charge for the concept, aligning acts of appropriation with the acts of the relatively powerful over the relatively powerless. However, the dominant uses of the term in contemporary studies of consumer culture contest any such straightforward alignment of appropriation with simple attributions of power and powerlessness. Rather, the concept of appropriation has become a framing through which more subtle expressions of power and agency in acts of consumption can be explored. The reformulation of concepts of appropriation in relation to consumption happened from the 1980s, simultaneously as part of the development of material culture approaches to consumption and in the emergent field of social shaping of technology (SST). From material culture, Danny Miller’s work was instrumental in the reworking of appropriation. For example, his 1987 study of tenants on a London council estate presents appropriation as the process of de-alienation, or resocialization, of the industrial artifactual environment. As tenants in state-provided flats, Miller’s respondents clearly had limited ability to create the spaces of their home environment. To turn these generic spaces into homes therefore required material and semiotic acts of appropriation. Thus, the study was about the ways in which tenants took possession of their state-owned flats, from superficial decoration to wholesale replacement of the provided fitted kitchens. This study signals a fundamental reworking of the concept of appropriation as a means for people, including the relatively disadvantaged, to express and build power at the level of lived experience in relation to the power of the state and the market.

Appropriation

Miller’s 1998 study of Coca-Cola in Trinidad similarly contests established views of power in relation to consumption. Miller presents a story of cultural appropriation, but not one of the globally powerful taking possession of the things, knowledge, or meanings of distant and relatively powerless others. Rather, it is the cultural appropriation of the quintessential global consumer product of Coca-Cola, with its powerful associations with the United States, to the specificities of ethnically differentiated ways of drinking and living in Trinidad. Within SST, the concept of appropriation was similarly being refigured to contest established discourses of power in relation to consumption. Hughie MacKay and Gareth Gillespie (1992) deployed the concept of appropriation to contest the implicit lack of agency of users in SST accounts, which concentrated on processes of design, development, and production. In such accounts, people using technologies figured as passive, malleable dupes submitting to technology and the market. Through their acts of appropriation, people demonstrate their activity and creativity through the ways in which they redefine technologies, sometimes in ways entirely counter to the meanings and purposes invested in them by their designers and makers. Technologies continue to be socially shaped through the semiotic and practical ways in which they are appropriated to contexts of use. This was empirically developed in relation to the rapidly shifting social location of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a volume edited by Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch (1992). Contributors to the volume consider different dimensions through which ICTs and associated media outputs are “domesticated” to the established spaces, rhythms, and routines of the home. So, by the early 1990s, the concept of appropriation had been thoroughly appropriated, given new meaning and application, by scholars concerned with consumption. As reconfigured, the concept carries a range of potential implications that have kept it a key concept in studies of consumption. First, it provides a means to approach the ways in which people use mass-produced commodities in creative ways to produce meaning and perform affective social relations. Second, by paying attention to how technologies and other commodities are assimilated to contexts of practice, studies through the frame of appropriation emphasize how the object of consumption is not

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stabilized at the point of sale. In its meanings, uses, and potentially even in its physical form, a product can continue to be shaped and reshaped as it is assimilated and integrated to existing networks of things, relationships, and practices. So, for example, technologies can find uses beyond what was envisaged for them in their design, production, and marketing. Third, studies of appropriation can serve to emphasize the agency of consumers in relation to what appear as powerful forces. Consumers, it is shown, are not entirely dupes of market capitalism or slaves of techno-industrialism. Rather, they engage with these systems and their products with the creativity necessary to usefully integrate them to the complexity of existing everyday life and turn them to useful effect. Fourth, by opening up the continued reshaping of products as they passed into ownership and use, the concept of appropriation reveals a crucial missing link in understanding processes of product evolution. Rather than a one-way process of product innovation appearing as if from nowhere to reshape products to pass on to consumers, paying attention to appropriation enables recognition of how consumers’ creativity in finding meanings and uses for things can reshape the future development of a product. In histories of now-ubiquitous consumer products, including cars, telephones, and computers, prominent figures in their development have signally failed to envisage how they would be appropriated to use and so be subject to cycles of innovation in both technology and consumer practice such that they would reach a dominant role in society and in everyday life. The idea of appropriation still has application to situations where the powerful take from the powerless. Land, resources, labor, knowledge, meaning, and value are appropriated by potent economic actors as much today as ever before. However, conceptualizations of appropriation have developed in new directions in studies of consumer culture since the 1980s. Appropriation now also provides a lens on the more subtle plays of power and agency as people take possession of commodities to turn them into useful, meaningful objects or services. Given the usefulness of the concept of appropriation for illuminating key debates and concerns, it is little wonder that it continues to have currency in studies of consumer culture. Primarily through qualitative inquiry, the concept provides a framing for understanding social processes in relation to all manner

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of commodities, technologies, and media outputs, perhaps most visibly the digital technologies whose rapid development has reworked so many aspects of everyday social life. Whether the agency to assimilate and transform commodities as revealed by studies of appropriation are understood as the power of the individual in the face of a techno-industrial economic system or as an expression of the ineluctable power of capitalism to subtly insinuate itself to every detail of lived experience, remains a matter for debate. Matthew Watson See also Capitalism; Coca-Cola; Environmental Footprinting; Marx, Karl; Material Culture; Orientalism; Silverstone, Roger; Social Shaping of Technology

Further Readings Mackay, Hughie, and Gareth Gillespie. “Extending the Social Shaping of Technology Approach: Ideology and Appropriation.” Social Studies of Science 22 (4) (1992): 685–716. Miller, Danny. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Miller, Danny. “Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad.” In Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, edited by Danny Miller, 169–187. London: UCL Press, 1998. Silverstone, Roger, and Eric Hirsch, eds. Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. London: Routledge, 1992.

ARCHITECTURE Western architecture literally shaped the now-distinct public domains of consumption and production by designing buildings for specific purposes, so-called building types. There is a whole range of consumptionrelated building types, like the shop, department store, shopping mall, café, and bar. The factory, however, is the only production-related building type. In the age of the Industrial Revolution, the factory as a building type was developed to house machines and laborers for the mechanical mass production of goods. Although the first factory buildings referred in their scale and shape to older building types, such as the mansion, castle, or even the church, they gradually developed into the iconic building type of the factory, with a high chimney and highly pitched or

slanted roof as its main architectural characteristics. The domains have grown apart territorially as well; consumption-related public buildings have been mainly erected in city centers, whereas factories were first built in the countryside, later on the outskirts of town, and are now concentrated within the confines of industrial zones. Over time, this has resulted in the present geographical imbalance in the main zones of production in our global economy. A large part of Western consumer products are produced elsewhere, mainly in Asian countries that are profiting from an economic boom but are also paying the price of environmental pollution due to the concentration of production, mining, and heavy industry. The divide between the domains of consumption and production has been the result of an age-old process, characteristic of not only Western civilizations but civilizations worldwide. In the twentieth century, the process was more or less completed, witnessed in the distinct domains of production and consumption as the dominant spheres of our global economy. If, in some remote corner of this world, an isolated, selfsufficient community still exists that produces all it needs for its collective consumption, be it food, cloth, or shelter, it will most certainly be on the verge of extinction. However, the desire for and the illusion of self-sufficiency is very much alive today, especially in the West among citizens who criticize the waste of resources and the social evils of a consumer society. They long for an autarchic lifestyle in the splendid isolation of the countryside, growing their own food and collecting solar power to fuel their electric consumer products. However, even in primordial times, most selfsufficient communities depended on barter and trade for their survival to get essential foodstuffs, such as salt and water. Barter and trade are at the root of all civilizations, for they imply traffic and meeting, which eventually resulted in roads and marketplaces. As such, they mark the beginning of the age-old process of diverging domains of production and consumption. This process was paralleled by a development toward specialization in the domain of production: for instance, the blacksmith did not need to grow his own food anymore, the farmer did not need to forge his tools, and both traded their products in the market. Specialization in production, however, created not only interdependency between producers and consumers for the necessary exchange of products but also social hierarchy and brutal exploitation of

Architecture

farmers and wage laborers, as witnessed in the social turmoil of nineteenth-century industrial society. It was no coincidence, for that matter, that nineteenthcentury utopian movements idealized self-sufficient egalitarian communities. The following sections focus on the emerging commercial building types in relation to the urban history and the concomitant architectural development of the town house. The growing territorial divide between the domains of consumption and production was not only mirrored in the architecture of the town house, but also in the rise of domesticity and privacy when the production-related workshop was no longer part of the house. In due time, households changed from collaborating domestic units into caring homes of nuclear families as units of private consumption. The historic case of the Dutch town house will illustrate how the domains of public production and private consumption have been mediated in a changing urban context.

The Architecture of Urban Food Supply Marketplaces to facilitate trade and barter initially developed at crossings of trails and along roads and rivers, and they gave rise to fortified settlements inhabited by a population of specialized producers. Within the confined but secure spaces of fortified castles and settlements, the characteristic hustle and bustle of city life emerged. The dense city centers of Europe’s medieval towns pay tribute to not only their fortified past but also to the progressive expulsion of livestock and farmers from the confines of the walled city. Actually, farmers were the first producers to abide by the modern territorial divide between the domains of production and consumption by bringing their cultivated produce into town and onto the marketplace. Townspeople in their turn depended for their food consumption on the farmers’ produce and as such gave rise to the modern class of urban consumers. In other words, the history of the European city is the breeding ground of modern consumer culture in mirroring the territorial divide and its related building types. From the simple medieval market stall made of a few shelves on trestles, often covered by a canvas roof to protect the raw produce from the sun, rain, and wind, the construction of the market hall was developed to offer better protection for the sale of delicate products, such as fish, meat, and butter. Initially the

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market hall was only a roof over an open-air market of individual stalls. Since medieval times, towns all over Europe, but especially in Holland, Flanders, England, and Italy, featured multifunctional buildings that were combinations of market, exchange, guild, and city hall. In the course of the seventeenth century, however, the Dutch developed the architectural building type of the market hall, specifically designed for the sale of meat, fish, or butter. Especially meat halls were prominent buildings with high-placed windows. Located near or adjacent to the town’s central square or harbor, the building type of the market hall took shape all over Europe. In Holland and Germany, however, market halls were constructed along with another characteristic commercial building, the so-called weigh house, where local officials weighed and certified the foodstuffs before trading. The Dutch weigh house was not only copied in Britain, but also across the ocean in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, now known as New York. Weigh houses and market halls were prominent buildings at the market squares, and they were the first public buildings designed solely for commerce. However, in the nineteenth century, at the very same time when the monumental seventeenth-century market halls in northern and western European cities lost their function, modern market halls with cast-iron supports were erected in southern and eastern European cities. These market halls have retained their retail function in the daily provisioning of the urban population to the present day. One of the outstanding interior characteristics of most nineteenth-century market halls was, apart from their elegant glass-fitted roofs, an upper floor with open galleries. In the late nineteenth century, large complexes of market halls and slaughterhouses were erected on the edge of town of the capitals of Western Europe and North America, however, not to supply individual customers but local retailers, such as greengrocers and butchers who sold the fruit, vegetables, and meat in their neighborhood shops. For a short period, the shop was the dominant commercial building type for the retail of food before it was superseded by the supermarket. By their peripheral location and wholesale function, the market hall and slaughterhouse complexes illustrated not only the growing divide between the domains of consumption and production, but also the ever-lengthening chain between producer and consumer in the twentieth century.

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Although present-day supermarkets function in the same way as market halls, their architecture did not result in a similar monumentality. The suburban roots and North American origin of the supermarket may explain its low profile and plain architecture. To compensate for their unobtrusive looks, supermarkets are sign-posted by flags and billboards to capture the public’s attention. Initially built along main suburban roads in the early 1920s, the supermarket was designed to facilitate a car-driving public, whereas the urban building type of the market hall was designed for a strolling public. In the late 1960s, the supermarket’s tribute to the building type of the market hall became evident when stalls with fresh products for sale were reintroduced, even though the stalls meant an infringement on the supermarket’s efficient ideology of prepackaged products and self-serving customers. In spite of its unobtrusive architecture, however, the supermarket has become the dominant commercial building type since the second half of the twentieth century, not only in the Western hemisphere but all over the world. Especially the supermarket’s architectural plainness has encouraged architects to design a new type of market hall for city centers. At present, a spectacular design of a tube-shaped market hall has been erected in the center of the Dutch city of Rotterdam. The hall’s curved shell, which consists of numerous dwellings, is eye catching, and the glass facades that close off the tubelike space of the market hall give the space a great air of transparency. The now distinct domains of consumption and production presuppose a number of related commercial building types, such as warehouses, cold stores, distribution centers, and regional slaughterhouses, which tie the domains together on a regional, national, and even international level. They are erected near or adjacent to highways, because transportation has become the link in an ever-lengthening chain between production and consumption. Although of crucial importance in the logistics of our present-day consumer society, their architectural presence is seldom noticed. Distribution centers with numerous truck docks may be the exception to the rule, although their scale is more impressive than their architecture. The architectural neglect seems part of a commercial strategy to foster a popular illusion of consumer culture where the sole focus is on shopping and display at the disregard of environmental

costs of transportation, distribution, and freezing, let alone production.

The Architecture of Retail Since the seventeenth century, the sale of precious and delicate goods like medicine, books, clocks, and cloth was more and more housed in distinct shop spaces. The baker’s house was one of the few food-related workshop spaces that early on developed shop characteristics, such as an unglazed window with horizontal wooden shutters of which the upper shutter functioned at daytime as an awning and the lower shutter as a counter and display area. Still, most of the early shop spaces were more like stone-built stalls that protected the merchant and his merchandise (but not so much the customer) from the weather. In medieval Italy, stall-like shops were built on bridges, while in sixteenth-century Holland, this early type of shop was constructed at the outer walls of churches. Characterized by a counter and a display window, the shop evolved from a workshop space within the domestic domain of the house into a distinct urban building type for the sole purpose of retail trade. The living quarters of the shopkeeper and his family were placed out of sight at the back or above the shop. As the shop’s merchandise was originally produced by the related workshop branch specificity, as reflected in the window display, the particular type of merchandise sold remained the dominant shop characteristic throughout history. The shop’s branch specificity contrasted with the wider variety of factory-produced products sold in nineteenthcentury stores, which were by definition not workshop but storage related. However, the counter as a trading zone came to signify all commercial relations within the public domain of consumption in the West, not only the sale of food and drink but of products in general. Also consumption-related public buildings had emerged, like pubs and coffee houses, which first appeared in commercial capitals, such as late seventeenth-century London, Amsterdam, and Paris. Designed for its specific commercial purpose of selling beverages, these public venues responded to the need of a male mercantile clientele for a comfortable place to socialize, exchange information, read newspapers, and talk business. As such, it paralleled an emerging female domesticity and family privacy within the merchants’ homes. More

Architecture

than their exterior architecture, the interior of public houses and coffeehouses differed from the residential interior of traditional taverns and inns in the focal position of a bar counter for orders and payments. The prominent feature of the bar counter referred to the stall-like origin of most commercial buildings in the West. Coffeehouses and pubs were popularized in the nineteenth century and developed into the familiar urban building types of the café and the bar, where the counter remains the characteristic interior feature. The arcade as a covered alley or passage lined with shops was first designed in late eighteenthcentury Paris with the comfort of the customer in mind. Its comfort was highly appreciated, for it induced several construction waves of arcades during the nineteenth century in cities all over Europe, and especially in the United Kingdom. Arcades were safe, clean, controlled, and dry environments that allowed for a relaxed stroll of the visiting public in all weather. The architecture of the arcade, such as its splendor of materials, glass-fitted roofs and domes, and the fairylike lighting in the evening, initiated the modern consumer behavior of window shopping as a leisure activity. In consumer experience, the arcade preceded the late nineteenth-century department store, which was in a way an architectural multiplier of the arcade on several floors. However, instead of branch-specific shops with display windows, the department stores created departments of branch-related goods displayed in appealing settings referring to exotic ambiances and would-be atmospheres. The department stores offered especially upper-class women a secure daytime leisure environment of indoor shopping, reading rooms, restaurants, and cafés, which turned these consumption palaces into the proverbial women’s paradise. Only accommodation was not provided. By introducing fantasy, imagination, and experience to the act of shopping, the consumer’s mind became less and less occupied with the laborers and craftsmen who had produced the goods. As such, the department store completed the mental split between consumption and production. In the twentieth century, new variations of the building type of the shop, the arcade, and the department store emerged, such as the shopping center, the shopping mall, and more recently the outlet village. Shopping centers were part of the reigning urban planning philosophy of new towns in the 1950s and 1960s

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to cluster all commercial facilities in the center of an all-residential area and to separate the business world of commerce from the residential world of care. Initially, shopping centers consisted of clusters of one-story shop spaces in an open-air pedestrian zone. However, after closing time, these centers became desolate, no-go areas and breeding grounds for illegal activities. The safety problems propelled a radical change in the architecture of shopping centers. Since the 1970s, most of the older shopping centers have been renovated, not only covered, gated, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveilled, but also topped by apartment blocks to create a more lively atmosphere in the evening after closing time. The latest version of the shopping center is the shopping mall, which did not originate in Europe but in North America. Architect Victor Gruen, an Austrian immigrant, is the founding father of the American shopping mall. Although the mall is considered the most modern commercial building type, it is in fact an updated version of the department store in the ideology of offering suburban women an indoor leisure environment in combination with shops. Like nineteenth-century department stores, shopping malls outdo one another in creating the most fantastic interior worlds with exotic trees, waterfalls, and trophy facilities, such as roller coasters and tropical water parks. The huge scale of the first American shopping malls built in the late 1950s warranted a location on the outskirts of town with sufficient parking space for its many visitors. Its success as a commercial building type is copied worldwide. Especially in Asian cities, climate-controlled shopping malls have become the new standard for leisure spaces, which may even include a skating rink, like the shopping mall in the Indonesian capital Jakarta. As of 2011, the world’s largest shopping malls are located in China, the Philippines, Canada, Malaysia, and the United States. However, since the late 1960s, there has been a reverse trend in the appreciation of the small shop. Small but trendy boutiques popped up in old neighborhoods, converting former grocery shops into fashionable spaces. The image of the fashion boutique initiated the revival of the building type of the branch-specific shop. Presently, the so-called flagship stores of top-market brands, such as, for instance, Louis Vuitton shops in the city centers of New York and Tokyo, have been designed by different architects of some renown to foster the illusion of unique shops

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instead of similar chain stores worldwide. This clever strategy not only revived the age-old building type of the shop, but also turned the shop’s architectural prominence into a first-class marketing instrument. It also stimulated global shopping tourism in the urge to visit all the shops of their favorite brand. Despite the globalization of Western commercial relations, a seemingly mundane architectural feature such as the counter turns out to be a culture-specific object of the West in its representation of straightforward commercial relations. In Asia, for instance, there is more prudence in commerce. For that matter, it is improper to position the cash counter in view of other customers. Also, the traditional Arab bazaar, or souk, lacked the shop characteristics of counters and display windows. Their omission signified totally different commercial relations in the Middle East, where selling and buying was and often still is a lengthy bargain ritual performed by males while socializing over a cup of tea or coffee. However, the success of the shopping mall in an Arab country such as Dubai illustrates that the core ideology of the department store in offering upper-class women a safe and secluded leisure space is still a highly profitable commercial strategy.

Civic Architecture Urbanization initiated the disintegration of household consumption and production and resulted in the building type of the civic town house. Because urban households did not produce their own food, they depended on suppliers and food markets. Cellars and attics for that matter were quintessential spaces in medieval town houses, like the main living space with its fireplace for cooking and heating. In the sixteenth century, when a separate cooking space was introduced in well-to-do urban households, kitchens degraded into back zones for servants. The architecture of eighteenth-century gentlemen’s town houses mirrored the class divide in the creation of separate spaces and entrances for servants and suppliers alike. Its spatial hierarchy became a model for town houses of the middle classes. The architectural relation between public and private domains of consumption is best illustrated by the Dutch case. Initiated not only by reigning class distinctions but also by a class-conscious female domesticity, upper-class women refrained from visiting public market halls. The decline of customers was

one of the reasons why Dutch market halls lost their retail function in the nineteenth century. Daily doorstep delivery became the dominant system of provisioning for both upper- and middle-class households. Because working-class households were not served, open-air food markets sprang up in working-class districts. These markets still exist and serve a growing public of supermarket haters, while nowadays smallscale organic food markets cater to a class-conscious public of slow food lovers. Till the 1960s, Dutch middle-class housewives spent most of their time answering the door to suppliers, going back and forth from the kitchen in the back to the front door. This very traditional spatial hierarchy changed radically in the 1970s and 1980s, when the kitchen space was integrated into the open plan living and often promoted to the front zone. In a nationwide DIY-mania, older houses were also completely restructured to adhere to the kitchen’s new status. One of the main social forces that propelled the spatial restructuring of the domestic domain was initiated by the rising labor participation of married women in the 1970s, for whom a weekly visit to the supermarket became more time-efficient than daily doorstep delivery. This also explains the late supremacy of the supermarket in the Netherlands. The development of the townhouse in the West illustrates not only that households decreasingly produced the goods that they consumed, but also the rise of the domestic domain as the exclusive site of private, family consumption. In due time, it contributed to the present mental split where the domestic domain is isolated from the cold-hearted world of commerce and perceived to be dominated by the moral economy of love and care instead. Money as the currency of commerce is exchanged outside the domestic domain in shops and supermarkets, like price tags are removed from consumer products when introduced into the home. This charade is an integral part of Western consumer culture, in which houses and their architectural features are involved too. Authentic architectural features have become high-priced assets in real estate transactions, which are paid for dearly by new homeowners, who in contrast stress the property’s emotional value. Irene Cieraad See also Food Consumption; Gendering of Public and Private Space; Globalization; History; Industrial Society; Spaces of Shopping; Supermarkets; Urbanization

Art and Cultural Worlds

Further Readings Adburgham, Alison. Shopping in Style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian Elegance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Calabi, Donatella. The Market and the City: Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Cieraad, Irene. “The Milkman Always Rings Twice . . . The Effects of Changed Provisioning on Dutch Domestic Architecture.” In Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited by David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby, 163–181. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey, eds. Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. New York: Routledge, 2007. Hardwick, M. Jeffrey. Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Longstreth, Richard. The Drive-in, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Maitland, Barry. Shopping Malls: Planning and Design. London: Construction Press, 1985. Pevsner, Nikolaus. A History of Building Types. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Stobart, Jon, Andrew Hann, and Victoria Morgan. Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c. 1680–1830. New York: Routledge, 2007. Vernet, David, and Leontine de Wit, eds. Boutiques and Other Retail Spaces: The Architecture of Seduction. New York: Routledge, 2007.

ART

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CULTURAL WORLDS

The seminal sociologist and exponent of the Chicago school of interactionists, Howard S. Becker, frames an art world as a “network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that (the) art world is noted for” (1982, x). Hence, the analysis of art and cultural worlds proposed by Becker provides a framework that avoids considering the aesthetic value of cultural objects and instead systematically explores the implications of art as a collective activity that takes place within art worlds. Becker’s framework is an approach that does not distinguish between high and popular culture but rather is applied to all forms of

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culture. His framework stands in marked contrast to conventional analyses of art and cultural worlds that are driven by the output of leading artists, and it is also distinct from such frameworks as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s culture industry thesis, which are grounded in a conceptualization of aesthetics. An art world includes a broad range of activities; for example, when considering a symphony orchestra concert, Becker examines not just the performance on the night but the wider range of precursory activities, such as the invention, manufacture, and maintenance of the musical instruments; the devising, composing, teaching, and learning of notated music; the various rehearsals that had to be organized; the advertisements for the event; and so forth. Becker argues that art worlds integrate artistic production and consumption into institutional practices, and it is within these frameworks that aesthetic judgment takes place. Hence the question of whether or not an object can be regarded as a work of art is determined by the degree to which it is accepted as such by recognized art world gatekeepers; so, for example, if a piece is exhibited in a leading gallery and reviewed in leading art magazines, then it may be regarded as part of the art world. By contrast, alternative forms of art, for example what Becker refers to as naive artists, such as country women who make quilts for county fairs, may well be excluded from the same art world. Therefore, a work of art exists inasmuch as an art world is able to recognize it as such, rather than in any inherent aspect of the work itself. In this way, Becker’s conceptualization deliberately avoids aesthetic judgments but rather treats the production of art as a form of work with a specific type of occupational culture and hence considers the content of culture within the context of its social circumstances of its production. An art world creates institutional limitations and an expectation that all artistic work will conform to its conventions, especially when substantial expenditure is required. As Becker (1991) argues, this creates different categories of artists that can be understood in terms of how they negotiate these limitations. Integrated artists who work within the constraints and limitations of their field are the most commercially successful, although they are also most likely to be regarded by their peers as hacks. Maverick artists produce art outside of the conventions and norms of an art world without the benefit of normal support;

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they have greater scope for innovation and distinction. Becker indicates that their chances of obtaining distinction are exceedingly small, although they typically struggle to produce work that is financially viable. Building on this categorization, Michael Farrell explores how the presence of such limitations and of gatekeepers creates tension for artists on the margins and how the formation of creative circles emerges as a viable solution for some. Creative circles form following the intention to rebel against power structures through collective action. The French impressionists are proposed by Farrell as a prototypical example of creative circles. Excluded from the Académie des Beaux-Arts, they formed a creative circle in which their interactions and merging of minds led to creative innovation as well as their organization of group exhibitions that launched their careers. Farrell provides case studies of other creative circles that emerged in a similar way, including the Fugitive poets, the circle of Ultras, and the early psychoanalytic circle. Therefore, while art worlds contain a certain space for innovation, significant innovation often requires artists who transform the market or create a new context for their work. Despite this grounded framing of artistic practice, Becker acknowledges the elevated regard for artistic production and consumption, noting how artists are commonly regarded as possessing “a mysterious gift setting him apart from all other people” (1991, 85). Indeed Becker’s (1991) empirical research into jazz musicians noted how this self-consciousness, linked with irregular working hours and practices, creates community among musicians based on bohemian identities and is often accompanied by notionally deviant practices, such as drug consumption. Moreover, a tension is produced between artistic communities and their bohemian identities and a more mainstream “square” lifestyle. This tension can result in resentment of mainstream audiences who may be unable to appreciate the more progressive and experimental music that the musicians prefer to play and instead demand easily recognizable popular tunes. Hence, the public can be understood as partly responsible for restraining their creative possibilities. This tension is mirrored in a discomfort with “going commercial”: abandoning ideals of artistic value in the pursuit of commercial rewards. In this context, art and cultural worlds can be identified as performing an ironic role within consumer

culture as they are understood to embody anticommercial discourses. This can create a tense balancing act for artists who are forced to negotiate between the commercial reality of needing to earn money and their commitment to creative freedom, which rejects the commercial imperative. As evidenced by Stephen Cottrell’s 2004 study of professional musicians, this tension can create complex social networks via the practice of deputizing—simply, the process through which contracted musicians arrange for colleagues to stand in for them while they pursue other opportunities—through which musicians can engage in more artistically challenging yet financially modest projects without having to surrender their normal paying work, for example, as a pit musician in a stage musical. A further clarification is added by Peter Martin, who notes that not all activities are seen as conforming to a set pattern or that the wide range of involvement results in a type of democratic forum in which everyone has an equal voice. With such concerns in mind, Martin provides an analysis of three different forums of musical production and reveals the distinctive occupational cultures across different genres, which also contain fundamentally significant similarities. In extreme cases, the need for artists to establish themselves as authentically committed to rejecting the “square” mainstream lifestyle has led to the adoption of self-destructive lifestyles, often including drug abuse. Recent art history reveals a plethora of artists who died at early ages, according to Alan Bradshaw and Morris Holbrook. Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s 1987 study of rock history exemplifies these tensions as they reveal a preponderance of art school graduates within British rock music, each attempting to use their music and constructed star personas to register artistic discourses of creativity, subjectivity, and authenticity, ironically within commercial frameworks and a context of mass consumption. Alan Bradshaw See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Circuits of Culture/Consumption; Culture Industries; Lifestyle; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Popular Music; Production of Culture; Taste

Further Readings Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Becker, Howard S. Outsiders. New York: Free Press, 1991.

Asceticism Bradshaw, Alan, and Morris Holbrook. “Remembering Chet: Theorising the Mythology of the Self-Destructive Bohemian Artist as Self-Producer and Self-Consumer in the Market for Romanticism.” Marketing Theory 7, no. 2 (2007): 115–136. Cottrell, Stephen. Professional Music-Making in London—Ethnography and Experience. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Farrell, Michael. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Frith, Simon, and Howard Horne. Art into Pop. London: Methuen, 1987. Martin, Peter. “Musician’s World: Music-Making as a Collaborative Activity.” Symbolic Interaction 29, no. 1 (2005): 95–107.

ASCETICISM Asceticism refers to the methodical performance of practices that aim to transform the body and the self in relation to religious or secular moral values and are characterized by an attitude of self-criticism. Examples of ascetic practices include the renunciation of the following: material wealth, all or some sexual behaviors or sexual desire itself, particular types of food and drink, conventional social arrangements (such as family life), or various norms of social behavior. Ascetic practices tend to be embodied critiques of opposed behaviors and values within the same culture and therefore seek to be morally transformative of the surrounding culture as well as of the person. In the context of contemporary consumer culture, asceticism often takes the form of rejection of the ideology of consumerism and hedonistic forms of consumption. Asceticism has played an enduring and significant part in the history of religion and philosophy for over 2,500 years in both Eastern and Western cultures and has more recently emerged in secular forms, especially in opposition to Western consumer culture. The term asceticism is derived from the Greek aske¯sis, which originally referred to exercise and the training of athletes in ancient Greece. Ascetic practices played an important role in ancient Greek religion and philosophy. For instance, the Pythagorean tradition, alongside sexual abstention and the renunciation of wealth, favored a vegetarian diet, which was related to a belief in the transmigration of human souls to

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other animals. Cynicism rejected material wealth and flouted social convention, for example, through public sexual acts, which were intended to embody a return to a more “natural” life stripped of the trappings of society. Asceticism has a central place in religious traditions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, and Judaism, and according to Gavin Flood, the ascetic self is esteemed as the ideal form of human being in the Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist scriptural traditions. This esteem is related to the association of asceticism with enhancing the spiritual quality of human life and with transcendence of the material world. For instance, Christian asceticism in the first three centuries after the crucifixion included varieties of dietary, sexual, and social abstinence, which were practiced to purify the soul and facilitate the contemplation of God, and which laid the foundations for monasticism. Asceticism has endured within religious traditions and, more recently, in secular forms, though the specificity of ascetic practices and the meaning and wider social significance of asceticism varies according to the cultural context. The most influential account of the social significance of asceticism is found in sociologist Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1997). Weber argues that Christian asceticism developed a novel “this worldly” form during the sixteenth-century Reformation, as opposed to “other worldly” types of religious asceticism that aimed toward the transcendence of the material world. This-worldly asceticism differed by aiming not just at the living of a morally exemplary life but also toward the transformation of the material world. This-worldly asceticism developed as a result of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: the belief that God preordained who is destined for salvation or damnation at the moment of creation. Predestination, combined with the virtue of fulfilling God’s will through diligent labor in one’s calling or vocation, produced paradoxical effects. Rather than a fatalistic resignation from worldly affairs, Weber argued that believers sought to interpret material success in one’s calling as a sign of salvation, despite Calvin’s insistence that foreknowledge of salvation or damnation was impossible. This religious endorsement of laboring for the purpose of material accumulation was accompanied by a rejection of material consumption, which had the

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potential to divert the faithful from labor in the calling and tempt them into faithless lives of indolent luxury. Weber famously argued that the scene had thereby been set for modern capitalism: material accumulation, saving, and reinvestment became the hallmarks of ascetic practice. Weber further argued that Protestant asceticism gradually lost significance in the face of the self-secularizing power of wealth, so that capitalism remains as a self-perpetuating system, ironically dependent on the ceaseless stimulation of consumption to reproduce itself. In the void left by the fading of Protestant asceticism, new forms of asceticism have emerged that reframe opposition to the corrupting influence of individual consumption. For example, socialist thought has tended to privilege collective forms of consumption, such as public buildings that concretize the moral value of collective effort over the individualism of consumer capitalism. Socialism therefore has an affinity with personal asceticism in the form of moderating material desires for the sake of community prosperity and cohesion. The environmental movement similarly enjoins personal asceticism in the form of “ethical consumption” and a re-moralized relationship with the natural world. Another example of anticonsumerist asceticism is straight edge, which emerged from North American punk subcultures in the early 1980s. Straight edge is characterized by the rejection of what are perceived as corrupting bodily vices that inhibit clear thinking, such as smoking, consuming alcohol or other drugs, consuming animal products, or promiscuous sexual activity. These ascetic practices are oriented toward bodily purity, selfawareness, self-control, and self-protection from risks associated with hedonistic youth culture, such as addiction and ill health. Michael Atkinson compares the commitment of straight edge asceticism to Weber’s characterization of Calvinism, emphasizing resistance to bodily temptation and a collective commitment to the “calling” of straight edge, which functions as an example to the community as a whole of an uplifting moral alternative to the argued destructiveness and immorality of mainstream consumer culture. Alongside these kinds of secular asceticism, religious asceticism remains relevant, especially in relation to consumer culture. For instance, Hossein Godazgar describes the contemporary Iranian Islamic state as exemplifying an ideology of other-worldly

asceticism, through policies such as the outlawing of satellite television, in opposition to the perceived corrupting influence of Western consumerism and hedonism. Conversely, Chandrima Chakraborty interprets televised teaching of yoga in contemporary India as a development of Hindu inner-worldly asceticism, oriented toward encouraging bodily practices that can “decolonize Indian bodies and minds” (2007, 1179) and thereby contribute to a resurgent Indian nationalism, based in part on rejecting the consumption of Western medicines. The collective and oppositional character of these examples of contemporary asceticism may be contrasted with individualistic bodily disciplines, which reproduce, rather than resist, the dominant values of consumer culture. Dietary or fitness regimes that aim to conform the body to cultural norms typically depend on consumption, for instance, purchasing books, DVDs, special equipment, or a gym membership. Asceticism itself has a marketable value that can be appropriated to reproduce consumer culture. Harri Sarpavaara, in a 2007 study of Finnish television advertising, argues that representations of ascetic bodies are as prevalent as those of hedonistic bodies, depending on the types of product that are being marketed. However, the image of the ascetic body reproduced in dietary fads or in advertising hollows out the transformative and oppositional content of asceticism, reducing it to an optional consumer lifestyle choice. The susceptibility of asceticism to appropriation in this way also illustrates how its meaning can be manipulated to reinforce the status quo. For example, the renunciation of animal foods typically symbolizes a challenge to the established social order in ascetic practice. For early Christian ascetics, refusing to consume other animals represented the rejection of a violent social hierarchy symbolized by meat, rather than abstention from pleasurable foods as an exercise in self-control. Similarly, modern veganism is based on the refusal to participate in exploitative and violent relations with other animals and has no necessary relation with forgoing pleasurable eating practices. However, veganism is often trivialized as an abstemious dietary fad in popular culture, which defuses the ethical challenge it contains to reorder conventional human relationships with other animals. Despite this tendency for asceticism to be appropriated by consumerist ideologies, it is likely to endure

Attitude Surveys

and reemerge in novel forms, not least because of the opportunity it offers to embody ethical critique and resistance to consumer culture itself. Matthew Cole See also Christianity; Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare; Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest: Environment; Hedonism; Protestant Ethic; Thrift; Weber, Max

Further Readings Atkinson, Michael. “Straightedge Bodies and Civilizing Processes.” Body and Society 12, no. 1 (2006): 69–95. Chakraborty, Chandrima. “The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor: Reviving Faith in Yoga.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 24, no. 9 (2007): 1172–1186. Cole, Matthew. “Asceticism and Hedonism in Research Discourses of Veg*anism.” British Food Journal 110, no. 7 (2008): 706–716. Flood, Gavin. The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory and Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Godazgar, Hossein. “Islam versus Consumerism and Postmodernism in the Context of Iran.” Social Compass 54, no. 1 (2007): 389–418. Shepherd, Nicole. “Anarcho-Environmentalists: Ascetics of Late Modernity.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 31, no. 2 (2002): 135–157. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1997.

ATTITUDE SURVEYS Attitude surveys are a questionnaire-based methodology for assessing attitudes in a target population, for example, attitudes toward consumer products (consumer surveys), evaluations of past experiences with products or services (customer satisfaction surveys), evaluations of policies and institutions (public opinion surveys), or evaluations of the state of the economy (consumer confidence surveys). Most attitude surveys consist of several sets of stimuli. Typically, these are questionnaire items that ask a participant to evaluate one or more attitude objects in terms of one or more evaluative dimensions. After responses have been collected from a sample of participants, scaling methods are applied to the data to obtain quantitative measures of attitude.

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History Throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, the Thurstone scaling methods dominated the field of attitude measurement, including the method of equal-appearing intervals, the method of successive intervals, and the general paired-comparison methodology that was at the time known under the name “law of comparative judgment.” From the perspective of modern psychometric theory, the Thurstone scaling methods can be understood as early probabilistic item response theory models for the scaling of attitudinally relevant stimuli. The first methods that simultaneously scaled stimuli and people emerged in the mid-twentieth century, including the Guttman scalogram analysis and the Coombs unfolding model. Although their initial formulations were deterministic, probabilistic versions such as the Rasch twoparameter logistic model were soon developed. A common characteristic of all these early methods is that they were based on stringent psychometric models that allowed for goodness-of-fit tests and checks of the resulting level of measurement. However, they often involved complex computations and could become quite onerous at a time when computers were still rare and costly. The Likert method of summated ratings was originally developed as a quickand-easy alternative to Thurstone methods. The Likert method omitted all stimulus scaling and only scaled people, treating the items in an attitude scale as equivalent and assuming a priori that the resulting person score would have interval-scale level.

Current State of the Art Likert scales are still the dominant method of attitude measurement. Their construction is simple and involves four steps. In the first step, the researcher generates a pool of items that indicate either a positive or a negative evaluation of the attitude object. In the second step, responses to these items are collected in an attitude survey, using a rating-scale response format (between five and eleven response categories, with the extreme categories labeled “strongly disagree” and “strongly agree”). In the third step, the resulting data are subjected to item and scale analysis in the tradition of classical test theory. This involves assessment of scale dimensionality by means of factor analysis, selection of items with high discrimination and medium difficulty, elimination of ambiguous and nondiscriminating items, and assessment of the

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reliability and validity of the resulting scale. All items are assumed to have a linear relationship with the underlying attitude dimension. In the fourth step, person scores are computed for each participant. A participant’s score is the sum of her or his responses to the items in the final scale. The person score is assumed to be continuous and to have an interval-scale level of measurement. An important special case of the Likert method is the semantic differential. In addition to a vignette that describes the attitude object, a semantic differential consists of bipolar Likert items in which the extreme categories are labeled with evaluative opposites. Very often, the labels “bad-good,” “unpleasant-pleasant,” “unfavorable-favorable,” and “negative-positive” are used. The semantic differential is the most popular way of measuring attitudes.

Further Readings Himmelfarb, Samuel. “The Measurement of Attitudes.” In The Psychology of Attitudes, edited by Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, 23–87. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. Seijtsma, Klaas, and Brian W. Junker. “Item Response Theory: Past Performance, Present Developments, and Future Expectations.” Behaviormetrika 33 (2006): 75–102. Sudman, Seymour, Norman M. Bradburn, and Norbert Schwarz. Thinking about Answers: The Application of Cognitive Processes to Survey Methodology. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1996. Wittenbrink, Bernd, and Norbert Schwarz, eds. Implicit Measures of Attitudes: Procedures and Controversies. New York: Guilford Press, 2007.

Future Directions Context factors can have a large impact on the responses collected in attitude surveys. Although attitude researchers have always been very conscious of this problem, a major breakthrough was achieved when researchers began to subject the process of responding to survey questions to elaborate cognitive analysis. Modern online survey technology can alleviate many of these problems by offering advanced randomization, branching, and split-ballot options, allowing the researcher to control the survey procedure to a degree that would otherwise only be possible in laboratory settings. Social desirability bias is another problem that has always plagued attitude researchers. A new generation of measurement procedures was developed in the last two decades that aims to isolate the affective, automatic, and associative component of attitude (implicit measures of attitude), circumventing the problem of social desirability bias. Research on implicit attitude measurement is currently one of the most dynamic topics in social psychology. Although most of these procedures are based on reaction times and were therefore originally developed for the laboratory, online versions exist now that allow the integration of implicit attitude measurement into traditional attitude surveys. Joachim Scholderer See also Attitude Theory; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Dissatisfaction; Likert Scales; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Psychology; Surveys; Theory of Planned Behavior

ATTITUDE THEORY Attitude theory is a branch of social psychology that studies how people evaluate. An attitude can be defined as an individual’s tendency to evaluate an object as positive or negative. Consumer researchers are mainly interested in attitude objects of two classes: products and services, including their functional properties (attributes), hedonic consequences (affect, utility, value), and their symbolic (brands, package designs, advertisements) and social representations (manufacturers, service staff, other consumers or users, reference groups).

History Attitude theory emerged in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. Until the 1960s, the field was dominated by consistency theories of attitude, a family of theories that share the basic motivational assumption that people strive for consistency. The most important ones are dissonance theory (Festinger 1957), balance theory (Heider 1958), and social judgment theory (also referred to as assimilation and contrast theory; Sherif and Hovland 1961). All consistency theories are dynamic and process-oriented, focusing on the mechanisms by which people achieve coherence between their cognitions, affective experiences, and behavior. In the 1960s, a competing family of theories emerged that was closely related to economic models of rational choice and expectancy-value models of

Attitude Theory

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motivation: multiattribute theories of attitude. The historically most important one is Martin Fishbein’s multi-attribute model, including its extended versions, the theories of reasoned action (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975) and planned behavior (Ajzen 1991). Most multiattribute theories are static and structureoriented, focusing on the weights people assign to the different attributes of an attitude object when they form an overall evaluation of the object. The theories of reasoned action and planned behavior go a step farther, attempting to describe how beliefs about, and evaluations of, the outcomes of behaviors motivate intentions and actions. Since the 1980s, social cognition theories of attitude have dominated the field. The most important ones are Russell Fazio’s theory of object-evaluation associations (Fazio 1995), Eliot Smith’s connectionist models of social cognition (Conrey and Smith 1997) and several integrative dual-process models of attitude and attitude change, for example the associativepropositional model of evaluation (Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2006). Common to all social cognition models is that they are formulated in the language of experimental psychology, a clear break with the “particularist” tradition of theorizing that was characteristic of social psychology until the 1980s.

newer, processes information in a slow, deliberate, and serial manner, is limited by working memory capacity, is able to learn flexibly, and evaluates by means of “cold” propositional reasoning processes. Unlike earlier approaches, contemporary theories of attitude have a much stronger emphasis on the operations of the associative system. Attitudes are thought to be cognitively represented as patterns of activation in a connectionist system (Conrey and Smith 1997). These patterns are relatively fleeting, depending to a large extent on the situational context in which attitudes are activated. Stable attitudes can only be expected when the attitude has relatively frequently or recently been activated in a similar situation. Hence, contemporary theories understand attitudes as states of mind, not traits of persons. Elaborate methods based on reaction time measurement have been developed to capture the fast, automatic operations of the associative system. The most popular procedure for measuring such implicit attitudes is the implicit association test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998). Traditional measures of attitude such as those based on semantic differential scales, Likert scales, and Thurstone scales are viewed as measures of explicit attitudes, capturing the results of the reasoning system.

Current State of the Art

Future Directions

Contemporary attitude theory provides generic models of how attitudes are formed and changed (through learning and reasoning mechanisms), how they are cognitively represented (in terms of memory structures and activation patterns), and how they relate to other psychological processes (perception, motivation, behavior). Many current approaches are based on a dual-system view of the human mind. The associative-propositional model distinguishes two systems. The associative system is evolutionarily older, operates quickly, automatically and without conscious effort, processes information in a parallel manner, is closely linked to the perceptual apparatus, learns relatively slowly by means of contiguity learning mechanisms, classical conditioning, and instrumental conditioning, and evaluates by means of “hot” affects. On confrontation with the attitude object, the object-evaluation associations stored in this system are automatically activated, manifesting themselves in immediate affective responses to the attitude object. The reasoning system is evolutionarily

It has been traditional practice in consumer research to simply adopt attitude theory as it developed in social psychology, including the measurement methods that were historically associated with the different approaches. Specific “consumer theories” of attitude do not exist, and they do not appear to be developing either. It is regrettable, though, that the adoption of theoretical and methodological advances came to a halt in the 1980s. The social cognition paradigm never gained a foothold among consumer researchers; with few exceptions, consumer researchers still apply the concepts and methods that were considered state of the art in social psychology before the rise of social cognition but are nowadays merely of historical interest. The reaction-time based measures that are so central to contemporary attitude theory are rarely applied in consumer research, and connectionist models of consumer cognition are equally rare. Perhaps this state of affairs will change in the near future. If it does not, attitude research as conducted in the consumer research

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community may be at risk of becoming theoretically and methodologically antiquated. Joachim Scholderer See also Attitude Surveys; Cognitive Structures; Consumer Behavior; Economic Psychology; Psychology; Semiotics; Theory of Planned Behavior; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings Ajzen, Icek. “The Theory of Planned Behavior.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50 (1991): 179–211. Conrey, Frederica R., and Eliot R. Smith. “Attitude Representation: Attitudes as Patterns in a Distributed, Connectionist Representational System.” Social Cognition 25 (2007): 718–735. Fazio, Russell H. “Attitudes as Object-Evaluation Associations: Determinants, Consequences, and Correlates of Attitude Accessibility.” In Attitude Strength: Antecedents and Consequences, edited by Richard E. Petty and Jon A. Krosnick, 247–282. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1957. Fishbein, Martin A., and Icek Ajzen. Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975. Gawronski, Bertram, and Galen V. Bodenhausen. “Associative and Propositional Processes in Evaluation: An Integrative Review of Implicit and Explicit Attitude Change.” Psychological Bulletin 132 (2006): 692–731. Greenwald, Anthony G., Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz. “Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 1464–1480. Heider, Fritz. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: John Wiley, 1958. Sherif, Muzafer, and Carl I. Hovland. Social Judgment: Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Communication and Attitude Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961.

AUDIENCE RESEARCH An audience is a group of people before whom a performance takes place. A common distinction is between the simple and direct audience experience of the theater or a live sporting event and that of being a

member of the audience for a performance mediated through television, radio, or film. Understanding how audiences react to what they are watching or consuming is of interest to business and the commercial producers of media, as well as academics. Research into audiences has a long history and has broadly taken quantitative (e.g., surveys and statistical measures of how people consume) or qualitative (e.g., observation or small group discussions) forms. In democratic societies such as the United States, radio was part of the rise of a consumer society or culture and was used to advertise and sell goods, such as laundry detergent. It was important for those selling products to have knowledge about consumer tastes. The desire for such knowledge led to the development of forms of market research, which mainly used quantitative methods. Such methods were also used by pioneering sociologists, such as Paul Lazarsfeld, who sought to measure and understand the audience for academic purposes. The rise of mass-mediated forms of communication in the twentieth century led to concerns about effects on society and individuals. In its early days, radio was thought to potentially be a tool in the hands of political propagandists (especially in the totalitarian states of the USSR and Nazi Germany). Messages would be determined by political elites, and audiences would be brainwashed. From the early days of discussion about audiences, in democratic and nondemocratic societies, there has been concern about and research into political manipulation and the wider effects of the control of media messages by those possessing political power and control over economic production. Marxist analysts and researchers (such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) were particularly exercised by such ideas. Such concern, which emphasizes manipulation and control, is familiar from common sense and media discourse. Anxiety is expressed about the way in which individuals, values, or behavior are affected by the messages contained in the media. Particular worry is expressed about vulnerable members of society (especially children or the socially isolated) and about the way in which a society or a culture is degraded by the power of media forms. The media are regarded as stimuli that provoke certain reactions on the part of individuals or that lead to social states akin to being drugged. The media are seen to influence or affect audience behavior through such mechanisms. Such ideas were often based in journalistic

Audience Research

accounts of society and culture or were derived from experimental research on audience members carried out in the psychology laboratory. A problem with the latter was that they tended to decontextualize the media experience from aspects of lived social life. Research on effects was criticized by the academic uses and gratifications approach to the study of audiences, which studied the way that individuals use the media to gratify wants or needs. Much consumer and market research also derives from assumptions about consumers satisfying individual needs through their purchases. Uses and gratification studies also tended to isolate such individual needs from influences by family, friends, colleagues, and so on. Marxists have often criticized approaches that impute individualized effects or wants or that simply characterize consumption by aggregated individuals. In particular, in groundbreaking work in the 1980s, Stuart Hall suggested that such paradigms were unable to understand the complex operation of ideology in contemporary societies. On the basis of a sophisticated Marxism derived from Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, Hall argued for a revolution in the way that audiences were researched. For Hall, the audience is structured by social class, gender, race, and age. The media message is not a stimulus or a satisfier of needs but a complexly structured text that requires decoding by the analyst using tools derived from semiotics and by members of the audience according to their social position. The media contribute to the way in which an unequal society is reproduced by encouraging dominated groups to accept their domination. However, cultural forms can also be generated, even from within the capitalistdominated culture industries that resist the dominant forms. Alternatively, resistance can be derived from the ways in which certain texts are understood or redefined in particular types of use. The consideration of ideological incorporation and resistance dominated leading academic social science research on audiences. The best example is David Morley’s study of the British television program, Nationwide. Morley argued that social background and context affect the way in which television is decoded. He showed examples of the early evening magazine program, Nationwide, to different groups of people, each of which represented a different social position. These groups then discussed the program within the group. Morley classified the interpretations produced by the groups into three

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types (in accord with Hall’s theorization of these categories). Some groups gave dominant readings, which reproduced the values, beliefs, and attitudes that are dominant in society. Oppositional or critical readings were given by groups that opposed the dominant values and beliefs. Some groups produced negotiated readings, which used a meaning system that contained dominant values without truly believing or endorsing them. This study was influential not just in its findings but in the way that it encouraged academics to use focus groups to research the audience. Such techniques are also used in more commercially oriented market research on how audiences think of a range of consumer products. Focus group techniques have also been deployed in research on voters’ beliefs and intentions. The influence and success of the Nationwide study led to the identification of some problems. In particular, concern has been expressed about (a) the tendency to divide society into somewhat statically antagonistic social groups, rather than see it as a complex and fluid interaction between individuals and groups; (b) the conceptualization of the complexities of the contemporary media as discrete texts; and (c) the reading of diverse practices and interpretations within a framework of incorporation and resistance. As these problems emerged, a new approach to academic audience research began to cohere. This emphasizes how audiences are socially constructed and reconstructed through their interactions with a variety of media. In societies in which a variety of media have taken on increased importance, social life is seen as bound up with interactions fueled by media resources. Such interactions rely on the ways in which people present themselves or “perform” in everyday life, which increasingly draw on the “spectacular” styles, images, and modes of behavior offered by the media. The media are seen as constituting a mediascape, which is negotiated by the audience in the way that a traveler moves through a landscape. Of particular importance is the way in which media contribute to the development and reformation of identity and conceptions of self. The picture that emerges here is one of fluidity and contingency, where individuals use media in multiple ways in everyday life. The increased significance of social media contributes to the redefinition of what it means to be the member of an audience and to

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the complexity of how such audiences need to be researched. Concern with issues of audiences and how they are researched gets to the heart of social life. There is scope for research on “simple” audiences—people attending a live event such as a concert, for instance. This might count the number of people, identify their age, class, and gender, and so on. Likewise, the behavior of members of mass audiences watching mass-mediated and reproduced media can be studied through studies of the television audience. However, these processes are increasingly patterned by the interactions of everyday life, or by what can be called the “diffused” audience, in which being an audience member is constitutive of everyday life in advanced capitalist societies. This suggests that a more effective approach to the study of an audience is needed. This is where a range of different aspects of everyday life are examined to see how they intertwine in the production of a wide range of interacting audience behaviors. In social science, there have been a number of studies by authors such as Pierre Bourdieu (in France) and Herbert Gans and Richard Peterson (in the United States) that seek to understand some of these complexities through the changing nature of audience tastes. These studies have used a variety of quantitative and qualitative data. Research into audiences continues to use quantitative methods, especially in market-oriented consumer research. Such methods are also used in social science by researchers such as Peterson. The aim is to produce valid and reliable data by asking questions of a sample of people. Electronic recording devices can also be used to research television viewing, for example. The results of such studies may be useful in explaining the number of people watching a program or the degree to which they like it, but they are not able to address the deeper questions of how an audience interprets a program. This has usually been researched through a more qualitative methodology, often through small discussion groups (e.g., focus groups) or through the direct observation of audiences. There are many such studies and it is likely that this is an area of research that will continue to grow in importance. Debate continues over the effects of media consumption and the constitution of audiences. Although these issues remain intensely controversial, it is increasingly recognized that understanding the impact of complexity of global media and cultures

on audiences requires multiple research methods and sophisticated theories. Brian Longhurst See also Advertising; Broadcast Media; Cultural Studies; Culture-Ideology of Consumerism; Focus Groups; Marxist Theories; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

Further Readings Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian Longhurst. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London: Sage, 1998. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–138. London: Hutchinson, 1980. Hall, Stuart. “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies.” In Culture, Society and the Media, edited by Tony Bennett, James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Wollacott, 56–90. London: Methuen, 1982. Longhurst, Brian. Popular Music and Society. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Longhurst, Brian. Cultural Change and Ordinary Life: Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2007. Willis, Paul. Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1990.

AUTHENTICITY Authenticity is an important concept in the study of consumer culture, especially with regard to tourism, culinary culture, and popular culture (esp. music) studies. The concept of authenticity refers to at least three ideas: factuality, originality, and sincerity. These three denotations are quite distinct from one another, and as a result of such polysemy, the use of the term authenticity in the social scientific literature can be rather eclectic at best and unscrupulous at worst. This entry briefly examines these three denotations. First, authenticity can be understand to be synonymous with factuality, that is, with substantive truth. Therefore, when a fact, a claim, or an event is believed to be authentic, there ought to exist convincing evidence that this is the case. Second, authenticity is associated with originality. An art piece, for

Authenticity

example, is either authentic or inauthentic in terms of its professed origin or authorship. Third, authenticity can refer to personal behavior. One can be authentic by being truthful to others, and thus demonstrate sincerity. One can also be authentic by being coherent to oneself, and thus demonstrate consistency, integrity, and personal authenticity. In spite of this rather simple categorization, discerning whether it is one case of authenticity or another that one is dealing with can be troublesome. Moreover, verifying whether something or someone is actually authentic or inauthentic can be even more difficult. For these reasons, the concept of authenticity has suffered from an excess of ideologizing, speculation, divisive debate, and paucity of systematic empirical research. To get a better grasp of the concept, value, and ideal of authenticity, this discussion must be situated in a precise historical and geographic context. In Western societies and cultures, authenticity cannot be separated from questions of reality and truth writ large. Thus, perspectives on authenticity are generally split along the classical philosophical schism between realism and essentialism on one side, and nominalism and constructionism on the other. According to the former, something or someone is either authentic or not on the basis of objectively verifiable evidence and/or on the basis of essential properties of that something itself. The court system, for example, relies on realist definitions of authenticity (and truth and sincerity). According to the latter perspective instead, authenticity and inauthenticity are but ideas that people construct while interacting with one another, and authenticity is but a claim, a judgment, an ideal, or an experience that inevitably falls along a continuum between absolute (and unachievable) authenticity and absolute inauthenticity. Much of the interpretive cultural sciences and humanities, these days, are dominated by proponents of the latter approach. This entry now examines authenticity through an example drawn from the realm of consumption. In their book titled Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, James Gilmore and Joseph Pine argue that contemporary societies are being commodified and virtualized, with everyday life becoming saturated with “toxic levels of inauthenticity” (2007, 43). Their numerous examples have an underlying theme rooted in technology and consumerism: namely, contemporary shifts in mediated reality are pushing consumer populations to yearn for authenticity. Gilmore

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and Pine’s critique betrays a rather simplistic essentialist and realist understanding of authenticity. Their vision pits the authentic against replicas, pretense, and posing. Their definition of authenticity shares with the popular understanding of this concept a key problem: that of reification. Authenticity, according to them, is an inherent quality of an object, person, claim, or event that is neither negotiable nor achievable. Authenticity cannot be stripped away, nor can it be appropriated. In short, something or someone is either authentic or is not, regardless of judgment. Simplistic understandings like this open up more questions than they offer answers. More discerning studies can be found in the expanding field of cultural studies and cultural sociology. Classic ethnographic accounts of music-based subcultures and lifestyle enclaves (e.g., Frith 1981) have shown that concerns with authenticity lie at the roots of group membership, identity, values, and status. Furthermore, the very existence of subcultures and the great diversity of contemporary lifestyles is evidence of the widespread preoccupation with individual self-realization, choice, self-expression, and connectedness with like-minded and like-hearted others, typical of late modern culture and society, according to Alessandro Ferrara. Ironically, contemporary culture industries, which countercultural movements generally reject, invest great amounts of creative and financial resources in producing the very authenticity they claim cannot be manufactured. In Creating Country Music, Richard Peterson, for example, dissects decades of popular music to explore the processes of fabrication of authenticity by profit seekers. Peterson examines the modern myth of authenticity and then deconstructs that myth by arguing that authenticity is a socially constructed phenomenon that shifts across time and space. His study leads us to realize that authenticity is “ultimately an evaluative concept, however methodical and value-free many of the methods for establishing it may be” (Van Leeuwen 2003, 392). In light of the previous example, most of the recent empirical and theoretical interventions on authenticity take a fluid, processual, and constructionist approach. Recent edited collections, for example, the one by Phillip Vannini and Patrick Williams, incorporate symbolic interactionism, dramaturgy, and pragmatism—and perhaps most important—utilize original empirical research to show how authenticity comes to be, rather than speculate on what is

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authentic. Notably, within this volume Jorn Lamla tackles the possibility of authentication within the context of contemporary capitalism and consumer culture. Lamla focuses in particular on the dynamics of authenticity claims by outlining four ideal types: a cohesive one based on the co-optation of authenticity, one based on the segmentation and diversification of authenticity, one in which dynamics between culture and the economy are coupled but relatively independent, and a final one in which the economy’s dependency on cultural dynamics results in a moralization of the former. Lamla’s reflection on authenticity and consumption are to be read against the background of a large body of literature that has surveyed the (im)possibility of achieving authenticity within the context of capitalist production and consumption. Dating as far back as the classic arguments of critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, much of this literature is marked by (at best) a strong skepticism toward the idea of the culture industry producing authentic products of any kind. Another important area of research on authenticity in the context of consumer culture is that of tourism. The topics of tourists’ experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity, of travel as a quest for the authentic, and of the authenticity of cultural expressions, rituals, and artifacts produced for tourists have been a staple of research and debates in the interdisciplinary field of travel and tourism studies. Explorations of authenticity in this field can hardly come into their own without taking into account Dean MacCannell’s classic work on the dramaturgy of tourists’ encounters with “natives.” MacCannell’s approach, as forming as it has been, has however undergone the criticism of those who find authenticity to be a less rigid concept than he did at the time. For example, Didia DeLyser has convincingly shown how authenticity is not an end result or a premise of travel, but instead a pragmatic vehicle through which visitors and tourism workers engage in narrativization, interaction, and acquaintanceship with one another and the tourist site. To further appreciate the complexity of the topic of the experience of authenticity in the realm of consumption, one has to be mindful of Edward Bruner’s important contribution to the study of authenticity. Openly critical of simplistic approaches that write out both the pragmatic relevance and the historical rootedness of authenticity in performative practices,

Bruner embraces—rather than dismisses—the contradictions evoked by “authentic reproductions” (1994, 398), such as the Abraham Lincoln commemorative tourist site in New Salem, Illinois. Authentic reproductions derive their authenticity from practice, rather than ideal, and from different meanings of the expression “authentic.” As oxymoronic as it may sound, interaction with authentic reproductions of myths that were perhaps never true—such as theme-park-like historic sites—directly constructs meaning in several ways. Making authenticity meaningful, rather than the scrutiny of where something is authentic or not—is a key emerging notion in the field: a notion that has made realist conceptualizations of authenticity inadequate to capture the complexity of the topic. Phillip Vannini See also Alternative Consumption; Commodification; Cultural Studies; Lifestyle; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; Promotional Culture; Tourism Studies

Further Readings Bruner, Edward. “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction.” American Anthropologist 96 (1994): 397–415. DeLyser, Didia. “Authenticity on the Ground: Engaging the Past in a California Ghost Town.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (1999): 602–632. Ferrara, Alessandro. Reflective Authenticity. London: Routledge, 1998. Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Gilmore, James H., and B. Joseph Pine. Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007. Lamla, Jorn. “Consuming Authenticity: A Paradoxical Dynamic in Contemporary Capitalism.” In Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society, edited by Phillip Vannini and J. Patrick Williams, 171–185. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. MacCannell, Dean. “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings.” American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973): 589–603. Peterson, Richard. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Van Leeuwen, Theo. “What Is Authenticity.” Discourse Studies 3 (2003): 392–397.

Autoethnography Vannini, Phillip, and J. Patrick Williams, eds. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Wang, Ning. “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 26 (1999): 349–370.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Autoethnography is a research method that utilizes the researcher’s own experiences as ethnographic data. The term autoethnography denotes both a research method and the resulting text that is produced by the researcher. The term derives from the Greek auto, which means self, ethno meaning culture, and graphy meaning the research process. Each of these three elements can be differently emphasized by different researchers. As a method, autoethnography generally entails the study of the researcher’s own experiences to make sense of social reality. It is a relatively new method; the earliest use of the term is from the 1970s, and the popularity of the method has increased since the turn of the millennium, although despite its potential it has yet to be widely used in the study of consumer culture. Autoethnography is a method mainly used by anthropologists and sociologists. There exist, broadly speaking, two uses of the term. In its original form, autoethnography was defined as a form of autoanthropology, where the researcher researches his or her “home” society, culture, or group. In later usage, the term has come to also mean self-observational research, where the researcher’s own biography, experiences, and emotions constitute data that are analyzed in relation to the broader social context. Autoethnography has its roots in a long tradition of qualitative social science research where individual experiences are studied to make sense of broader social or cultural phenomena. It is furthermore not uncommon for social scientists to study either the settings and groups of which they themselves are members or experiences they are personally familiar with, though this is not always explicitly discussed by the researcher, as it is in autoethnography. Autoethnography can also be seen as part of the recent narrative turn in the social sciences. Autoethnographies are told in narrative form, and autoethnographers highlight the role that narratives play in our understanding of the world. People

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employ narratives to make sense of their experiences and surroundings, for example, when constructing a coherent sense of self or when creating causal explanations of why something happened. While some critics would argue that such personal narratives are idiosyncratic and biased, and therefore of little scientific use, autoethnographers maintain that all knowledge is from a point of view. In other words, a “God’s eye view” or value-free knowledge is impossible, while understanding subjective experience is valuable. Autoethnography is thus also related to the postmodern turn in the social sciences, which has led to a “crisis in representation,” where the researcher’s ability to represent the “other” has been questioned. Autoethnographers argue that the researcher has best access to his or her own inner life, that is, his or her own thoughts and feelings, and that these are valid sources of knowledge. At the most extreme, it has been argued that we can only know and study ourselves. Furthermore, as part of the postmodern turn, the ability of researchers to represent the world in a “truthful” manner has come under criticism, with some suggesting a need to find alternatives to the traditional criteria for judging social science research, such as objectivity, validity, reliability, representativeness, and generalizability. Autoethnography is a controversial method and remains in the margins of the social sciences. This marginality is largely due to its unconventional definition of what constitutes social science knowledge. Researchers who employ autoethnography are generally critical of the idea that social science is a “science” and of utilizing one single paradigm for deciding what constitutes knowledge. Instead, they aim to find multiple new ways of evaluating social science research. The principles behind autoethnography go to the heart of many social science debates over epistemology: how social reality can be known, how many cases are enough to produce “credible” findings, and the issues of the general versus the particular and subjective versus objective. Autoethnography has been criticized for being subjective navel-gazing, the findings of which are produced on the basis of one person’s experiences and therefore of little or no scientific value. Responses to such criticisms vary among autoethnographers. Some autoethnographers have responded by questioning the use of representativeness as the gold standard of social science knowledge and by further arguing that

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the aim of autoethnography is not generalizability but rather narrative truth to the subjective experience. Other autoethnographers have maintained that there is a difference between the type of confessional autobiographical writing that is employed by a number of researchers, whom they would argue are not autoethnographers, and the type of analysis of one’s autobiography that constitutes autoethnography. They argue that autoethnography focuses on personal experiences not for therapeutic reasons, but rather for their ability to speak about collective social processes beyond the individual experience. In autoethnographic writing, the researcher is highly visible in the written text (as opposed to classic ethnography where the ethnographer was largely invisible and the text appeared as produced by an outside “objective” observer). Autoethnographers highlight the role of reflexivity in research, whereby the researcher is not viewed as an objective observer gathering facts but as the research instrument, whose personal background and values will shape the knowledge created. Thus, autoethnography, as any type of social science knowledge, has to be viewed as historically and culturally situated. Autoethnographers often utilize creative and explorative ways of communicating their research, for example, in the form of evocative writing or performance ethnography. The aesthetics of the text are, by many autoethnographers, deemed as important as its social science impact. One form of writing that has become popular among autoethnographers is that of vulnerable writing, where the researcher reveals something about himself or herself without hiding behind the abstract and de-personal language of traditional social science. The reader of autoethnographic texts is seen as something more than a passive consumer. With the stories that they tell, autoethnographers aim to have an impact on the reader, to make the reader feel connected to the issue at hand, and to understand someone else’s experiences. These narratives are meant to be springboards for new understanding and action toward a more compassionate and equal society. Illness, grief, and times of personal crisis have been the subject matter of much autoethnographic work. Other work has focused on issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and difference. The method has been used only to a limited extent to study consumption practices, such as shopping, relationship to possessions, and the use of leisure spaces. It is worth noting

that Zygmunt Bauman’s influential account of the consumer attitude is illustrated through his biographical account of using razors. While this is not autoethnography in a strict sense, Bauman is using his own personal experience as a means of explanation. Researchers of material culture may also find autoethnography a suitable method, given that they tend to already involve themselves in the material culture in question. In the future, autoethnography can prove useful in further exploring issues such as embodiment, identity, and desires in relation to consumption and material culture. Vanessa May See also Anthropology; Desire; Embodiment; Ethnography; Identity; Material Culture; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Postmodernism; Seduced and Repressed; Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings Anderson, Leon. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (August 2006): 373–395. Bauman, Zygmunt. Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Bochner, Arthur P., and Carolyn Ellis, eds. Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature and Aesthetics. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2001. Denzin, Norman K. Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the Twenty-First Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997. Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Newbury Park, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. Krieger, Susan. Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Reed-Danahay, Deborah E., ed. Auto/Ethnography. Oxford: Berg, 1997. Wacquant, Loïc. Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

AUTOMOBILES The automobile, as a self-propelling vehicle for private passenger transport, made its first appearance at the end of the nineteenth century. The automobile

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is intimately related to consumer culture, partly because of its high capital cost, partly because of its exponential growth, and largely because its significance has radically transcended its utility value (mobility) to become symbolic of identity, status, and lifestyle. In addition, the automobile captures some of the contradictions of consumer culture in terms of inequalities in its distribution and the health and environmental implications of mass consumption. There had been steam-driven buses competing with railways in the early nineteenth century, and steam tractors were widely used in farming since the mid-nineteenth century. But it was only from the 1890s—beginning in France—that automobiles were used regularly for private passenger transport. Steam engines, electric motors, and internal combustion engines had an approximately equal share in early automobility. In the United States, “steamers” were sold well into the 1920s before internal combustion motors swept the field. The term automobile, literally meaning self-mover, had been coined by the Académie Française in 1875 and was very successfully imported into most European languages with the initial exception of English. In the United States, the first automobiles were known as “horseless carriages,” and the most widely read journal covering the new frenzy was titled The Horseless Age. In 1909, the latter changed its name to The Automobile, thus ending more than a decade of linguistic independence. The United Kingdom resisted the French “automobile” and stuck to the “motor car.” Colloquially today, the “auto,” the “car,” or just the “machine” have been adopted by most languages. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had become the biggest market for automobiles and has remained so ever since, both in terms of absolute numbers and in the number of automobiles per capita. At the onset of World War II, the United States was leading with 4.8 people per every car, and the United Kingdom and France shared the second place with 24 people per car, while all other major countries fell far behind. By comparison, as early as 1925, one car catered to just 1.8 inhabitants in Los Angeles, a figure that dropped to 1.4 at the eve of World War II. If the automobile ever had a home, it was California. What automobility meant and how it could transform everyday life was therefore invented in California and popularized by Hollywood. Widespread automobility in the Western world, however, was only part of post-WWII mass

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consumption, when the family car became a standard household good. Whereas early automobiles had been toys for the urban rich, very soon their most enthusiastic owners lived in the countryside, in small towns, and in suburbs. And this pattern held worldwide throughout the twentieth century. In affluent societies, the highest share of households that can do without an automobile is to be found in densely populated big cities. In some major European cities like Paris or Berlin, only half of all households own an automobile. In the United States, only New York City comes close to this percentage. In the countryside, where the automobile proved most successful, it ended the isolation of farm life. In metropolitan areas, it was a powerful enabler of suburbanization. The stressfulness of daily commuting was mollified by the fact that most people actually like to drive. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, when automobilization experienced its greatest surge in the Western world, driving for pleasure ranked among the five most favored pastimes. Suburbs and exurbs, with their low population density that does not allow for profitable public transport, consolidated a pathdependency on automobility for many societies, but people did not really mind. The automobile is a highly individualistic consumption good. Average occupancy is typically below two and mostly just a lone driver. This is reflected in car design. While early automobiles had been designed to provide the greatest comfort to passengers in the backseat, from the 1920s onward, everything was built around and for the driver. At the same time, open runabouts and convertibles were replaced by closed bodies, insulating and protecting the driver from the outside world and allowing for all-weather use and better control of both drivers’ and passengers’ outer appearance. Autos are mobile extensions of the private home, removing commuters from accidental contact with others while the outer shell acts as a social filter providing information about status and values. With the increase of travel time, autos have assumed ever more functions, such as eating, drinking, entertaining, working, sex, and so on, transforming them into temporary homes. Moreover, during daily commuting, closed autos temporarily liberate individuals from social control— be it at the workplace, in public, or within the family. They encourage activities that are otherwise shamefully avoided in company, such as singing or talking to oneself or one’s imaginary friend. They also enable

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various acts of physical relaxation. Hence, the individually experienced freedom offered by the automobile goes far beyond the freedom of travel. More than just mediating social interaction, autos can also perform as fully functional social actors themselves: whether drivers address them with praise, anger, and orders as coachmen did with their horses, or when they are being yelled at and insulted as a symbol of their unidentifiable and often invisible drivers. As potent signifiers of status and values, autos are perfect examples of myths as conceived by Roland Barthes. Among their most important semiotic achievements is the provision of respect and acceptance for their owners and/or drivers built on widely shared “characterologies” (Boltanski 1975) of brands and models. Being the most starkly displayed item of consumption next to clothing, there is no semiotically innocent car. The great span of what counts as a “sensible automobile” in various societies or among social groups always betrays cultural specificities of rational judgment on autos. A further indication of the exceptional importance of automobiles for the bricolage of a socially respected way of life is the unusual tolerance of a great number of fatal injuries and serious mutilations due to accidents. No other consumption good is granted a comparable rate of human sacrifice. Apart from being a hefty and powerful device, the sheer momentum of which is already very menacing, the auto lends itself to road rage, a specific kind of social aggressiveness. Road rage is a competition for space around and especially in front of the protective capsule of the automobile. In translating the want for social distance into an entitlement for spatial distance, road rage extends the claim for a private sphere beyond private possession. Drivers tacitly embody their car and experience their lived body as being cut off or constrained by other road users. Since communication between embodied artifacts is inevitably restricted and less sophisticated than among unmediated people, levels of aggression rise much more easily than in public transport or pedestrian traffic. The automobile is space hungry, socially as well as physically. Many environmental and health concerns about automobility have been answered through technical fixes—from catalytic converters to safety belts. Social fixes, however, have proved less successful. The privacy of the lone driver is as hard to substitute as is status-generating engine power and body size. As is

the case for many consumption goods, the technical potential of the automobile is heavily underutilized in everyday use, while its semiotic potential is usually much better exploited. Average commuting speed has not benefited from multiplying engine power, and ridership has not grown with size, but potentially or just assumably fast cars carry much more prestige than ordinary cars, even when both deliver the same factual travel time. Since engine power, weight, and status are symbolically interrelated, attempts to separate energy consumption from semiotic performance have failed so far. This has serious consequences for global competition over carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Fully motorized societies propose to limit the growth of these emissions by freezing car ownership in developing countries at a low level, thus defending global inequality and social distance. It seems unlikely, however, that newly prospering societies will voluntarily forgo the status-enhancing and individualizing effect of car ownership enjoyed by the Western world. The automobile is the first consumption good where the intended unequal distribution has become an issue of conflicting global policies. Remarkably, it is the first example of Western policy trying to prevent the spread of Western lifestyle and material culture. Next to the air-conditioning of voluminous housing, individually moving about in large, lowefficiency containers is the second-most-important source of global warming. Although it is technologically relatively easy to reduce energy consumption for transport, culturally it is not. Ulrich Wengenroth See also Affluent Society; Barthes, Roland; Globalization; Identity; Individualization; Modernization Theory; Status; Urbanization

Further Readings Bell, Jonathan. Carchitecture: When the Car and the City Collide. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2001. Boltanski, Luc. “Les usages sociaux de l’automobile: concurrence pour l’espace et accidents” [The social uses of the automobile: Competition for space and accidents]. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales [Proceedings of the social science research] 1, no. 2 (1975): 25–49. Floch, Jean-Marie. “‘I Love, I Love, I Love . . . ’: Automotive Advertising and Consumer Value Systems.” In Semiotics, Marketing and Communication: Beneath

Automobiles the Signs, the Strategies, edited by Jean-Marie Floch, 108–137. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001. Katz, Jack. “Pissed Off in L.A.” In How Emotions Work, edited by Jack Katz, 18–86. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

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McCarthy, Tom. Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Vanderbilt, Tom. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says about Us). New York: Knopf, 2008.

B As traditionally powerful languages attempt to retain and extend their control, subordinate languages attempt to avoid or subvert this power. Bakhtin called the interaction between these languages dialogism. A skilled novelist can use these interactions to create mood, drive the narrative forward, or structure the reader’s interpretation of characters, and for Bakhtin, it is the job of the literary critic to identify these dialogic meanings in their full complexity. Bakhtin also uses dialogism to make sense of human speech and interaction by essentially suggesting that our everyday speech is structured in response to things that have been said and things that might be said in the future. Our speech is thus dynamic, reliant on context, and reflects structures of power and the interaction of speech forms that possess varying degrees of power. Bakhtin’s most noted work, Rabelais and His World, was not published in English until 1968, but the originality of his thought and the emphasis Bakhtin placed on language, subversion, and discursive meanings quickly found favor with the Western liberal intelligentsia as they embarked on a cultural turn away from the metanarrative and toward postmodernism, a new, fluid world of infinite variability and divergent meanings, a world that could no longer be explained by macrolevel political economy or deterministic structural analysis. Bakhtin may have been writing in postrevolution Soviet Russia, but his work was quickly recontextualized as a means of grasping the essence of a Western world in which the old certainties of modernism had collapsed.

BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL (1895–1975) For the vast majority of his life, the Russian philosopher, linguist, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin failed to find the intellectual celebrity that many in the humanities now feel he deserves. His major works were not immediately published in Russian and, for the most part, were not published in English until after his death. It was only in the final third of the twentieth century, a time of immense social, cultural, and economic upheaval, that Bakhtin’s work was plucked from relative obscurity to help explain the brave new world of global consumer culture and shed light on the relationship between consumer symbolism, ideology, and human subjectivity. Bakhtin was primarily interested in language and the interaction that takes place between different forms of language. He used the term heteroglossia to identify a system of different and competing languages, and his work on this area underlies much of contemporary Bakhtinian analysis. For Bakhtin (see 1984a, 1987), language is organized into different stratified subgroups, each with their own associations, dialects, jargon, and contextual meanings. Much of Bakhtin’s writing on heteroglossia relates to the transference of language into literature. For example, novels often incorporate many different voices. For Bakhtin, it is the interaction and conflict between these voices that gives the novel its power, as the normative hierarchy of language has the potential to shift as the text evolves.

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In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin attempts to reread the work of French Renaissance scholar Francois Rabelais, whose humorous novels addressed aspects of conventionality and the absurd. Bakhtin was particularly taken with the social transformations that occur during times of carnival. For Bakhtin, the carnival essentially offered “a time out of time” in which the populous could revel in the grotesque and embrace sexuality and carnality. The specific context of carnival required individuals to suspend their normative identity and become part of a collective in which the traditional social order was suspended, partially inverted, and mocked. Since the publication of this work, liberal cultural scholars have attempted to identify contemporary manifestations of the carnivalesque throughout consumer culture. In some cases, this deployment of the carnivalesque has been useful in shedding light on our engagement with consumerism, in others cases less so. Many of these writers use the framework of the carnivalesque to articulate forms of resistance to consumer capitalism and what they see as the stultifying uniformity of its cultural forms (e.g., Presdee 2000). In doing so, they indirectly endorse the idea of the rational, calculative, and politicized subject who “naturally understands” capitalism and its injustices and structures his or her social action in opposition to the prevailing order. This optimism, that individuals are essentially politicized and resistant to domination, can be countered by the more pessimistic suggestion that many forms of cultural resistance are themselves commodified and, despite the appearance of resistance and carnival, remain inextricably connected to the logic of capital. Many liberal cultural scholars who deploy the idea of the carnivalesque thus tend to marginalize what for Bakhtin was a central concern: the suspension and inversion of the established hierarchy and the ideology that sustains it. According to Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, large-scale music concerts, 1830s-style holidays, and Western binge-drinking cultures may revel in carnality and offer the individual the chance to suspend his or her normative identity, but they are also commodified and driven by a profit motive that recognizes the attractiveness of the carnivalesque experience to consumers. Similarly, apparently carnivalesque forms of political action (see Kates and Belk 2001) can be easily accommodated within the framework of liberal democracy and do not fundamentally undermine

the dominant politico-ideological system of liberal capitalism. Simon Winlow See also Capitalism; Carnivals; Consumer Culture in the USSR; Cultural Studies; Discourse; Liminality; Postmodernism; Subversion

Further Readings Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984a. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984b. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Kates, Steven M., and Russell W. Belk. “The Meanings of Lesbian and Gay Pride Day: Consumption through Resistance and Resistance to Consumption.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Special Issue on Marketing, Consumer Behavior, and Ethnography 30, no. 4 (2001): 392–429. Presdee, Mike. Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime. London: Routledge, 2000. Winlow, Simon, and Steve Hall. Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

BARBIE DOLLS Barbie (full name Barbara Millicent Roberts) is a doll manufactured by the toy company Mattel and was launched on March 9, 1959, at the American International Toy Fair in New York. The original Barbie was derived from a German doll named Bild Lilli (who was developed from a German cartoon), for which Mattel bought the rights and patents in 1964. Her creator, Ruth Handler, is the cofounder of Mattel and named the doll after her daughter. Handler’s son, Ken, was to provide the name for Barbie’s perennial boyfriend, who was launched in 1961. The first Barbie doll sold for around $3.00, and since her inception, the blonde glamour girl has held a number of careers—including astronaut (1965), doctor (1988), presidential candidate (1992, 2000, 2004, and 2008), and NASCAR racing driver (1998). A military series of Barbie dolls (army, navy, air force, and marine corps) successfully underwent an approval process with the Pentagon in the 1980s, and a Summit Barbie was also produced to

Barbie Dolls

commemorate the end of the cold war. She has owned over forty-three pets, as well as over one billion outfits and pairs of shoes specifically designed for her. In terms of sales, over a billion Barbies have been sold in the United States since 1959, and the typical American girl owns eight of the dolls. The Barbie phenomenon has become a “lifestyle brand”—with interests in publishing, TV, film, and clothing and accessories—and has yearly retail sales of $3.3 billion. As an icon of consumer culture, the doll is marketed as a teenager who has an implausibly large disposable income, providing an aspirational example for young female children that parents and society often find worrisome. The fact that she initially emerged during a time of evolving consumer credit among the middle classes means she also epitomizes the consumerist values of postwar society, and this association between Barbie and commodity culture continues to this day. In her luxury dreamworld, selfhood or daily ills can be easily dispelled by an investment in beauty products, shopping, fitness, dieting, or a radical change of image. Part of the controversy surrounding Barbie is the heavy feminist critique leveled at the doll: her pink Corvette, idyllic lifestyle, self-centered vanity, and extensive wardrobe changes portray a negative stereotype of feminine behavior. The Teen Talk Barbie, on the market in 1992, voiced numerous expressions, including “Will we ever have enough clothes?” “I love shopping!” and “Math class is tough,” the latter phrase prompting protest from the American Association of University Women. Eventually, Mattel offered an exchange for anyone who had purchased the doll. More prominently, Barbie is criticized for portraying an unhealthy and unattainable vision of the female body—her statistics (bust 36 inches, waist 18 inches, and hips 33 inches) are viewed as being unrealistic at best and, at worst, having implications for public health, such as conditioning young girls to desire an unnaturally slender form. In 1965, a Slumber Party Barbie was sold with pink weighing scales and a small book titled How to Lose Weight, which counseled “Don’t eat.” In 1997, Barbie’s body mold was redesigned with a smaller bust and a wider waist in an attempt to answer some of the concerns voiced by the feminist community. In a bid to remarket the doll for the new millennium, Mattel explored a new stage and screen presence for Barbie. In 2006, she was contracted by Universal Studios to create live action feature films

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and TV shows, and in a theater production, Barbie: Live in Fairytopia, she went on international tour in 2006. Mattel’s marketing of the doll has more recently focused on the currently untapped market of the People’s Republic of China. In 2009, a six-story megastore dedicated to the doll opened in Shanghai, featuring pink escalators and customized dolls available to order from an onsite factory. The store also offered mother-daughter facials, a restaurant, and a themed ice-cream parlor. Most extravagantly, the store offers a Barbie-sized Vera Wang wedding dress, priced at $15,000. As an icon of Western capitalism, commodity culture, and consumer desire, Barbie has been featured in numerous parodies, as well the occasional goodnatured homage. She had a cameo in Toy Story 2 (1999) and is satirized in the cartoon, The Simpsons, as Malibu Stacy. The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada (also known for its Hugh Hefner penthouse), has a Barbie suite with pink decor, Barbie pictures, chairs, wallpaper, and a “sunburst” mirror composed of sixty-five Barbie dolls, and, for her fiftieth birthday celebrations in 2009, Bloomingdale’s dressed their windows in New York with Barbie dolls. She was also the subject of a 1997 pop hit titled “Barbie Girl,” performed by the Danish group Aqua. The double entendres and sexual undertones of the lyrics led Mattel to sue the band’s label, MCA, for defamation and copyright and trademark infringement. In 2002, the court dismissed the case, with the judge unusually suggesting “the parties are advised to chill.” In August 2009, Mattel seemed to embrace this recommendation, as the company adopted the song for their Barbie advertising. With amended lyrics, the song was accompanied by a dance called “The Barbie,” tailored to the marketing of the “Barbie Fashionistas,” six new dolls in the line, which have twelve points of movement and are therefore more supple than their predecessors. Therefore, Barbie’s celebrity status in toy stores and popular culture across the world is more than assured: she will undoubtedly remodel her image in accordance with the zeitgeist, seeking to answer her detractors as much as foster a new generation of child (and adult) aficionados. Claire Nally See also American Dream; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Childhood; Consumer Socialization; Cosmetic Surgery; Femininity; Gender; Toys

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Further Readings Attfield, Judy. “Barbie and Action Man: Adult Toys for Girls and Boys 1959–93.” In The Gendered Object, edited by Pat Kirkham, 81–88. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996. Delahoyde, Michael, and Susan C. Despenich. “Toys for Girls: The New Sexism, ‘We Girls Can Do Anything, Right Barbie?’” Popular Culture Review 4, no. 2 (1993): 23–36. Gerber, Robin. Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her. New York: Harper Business, 2009. Lord, M. G. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. New York: Walker, 1994. McDonough, Yona Zeldia, ed. The Barbie Chronicles. New York: Touchstone, 1999. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. “‘And I Want to Thank-You, Barbie’: Barbie as a Site of Cultural Interrogation.” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/ Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (1995): 143–156. Peers, Juliette. The Fashion Doll: From Bebe Jumeau to Barbie. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Rand, Erica. Barbie’s Queer Accessories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Rogers, Mary F. Barbie Culture. London: Sage, 1998. Weissman, Kristin Noelle. Barbie: The Icon, the Image, the Ideal—An Analytical Interpretation of the Barbie Doll in Popular Culture. Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers.

BARTHES, ROLAND (1915–1980) Roland Barthes was a French cultural critic associated with both structuralism and post-structuralism who, even more than most other French intellectuals, resisted disciplinary categorization. Barthes spent his early career teaching, convalescing from tuberculosis, and writing for left-wing literary journals. After his iconoclastic argument in Writing Degree Zero (1967b) that no writing could stand apart from and comment on culture because it was always part of it, he went on to write about history, film, photography, language, art, music, and theater, as well as poetry and literature. Many of these themes crop up in the work for which he is most well known, Mythologies (1972). This slim volume, which started life as a series of brief essays published in French magazines, has had an enduring appeal because it brings together a

groundbreaking set of ideas about culture, politics, and modernity. Beautifully and sparsely written, Barthes’ essays tell of a culture in transition from an elite, academic, hidebound set of ideas about the “arts” to an emerging popular, mass, everyday, and familiar consumer culture. He took seriously the “low culture” of wrestling, striptease, Hollywood films and actors, and the mundane everyday culture of margarine, children’s toys, plastic objects, and steak and fries. Often a response to something in the news, his essays, like the one on the new luxury car in 1957, the Citroën DS (Déesse—“The Goddess”), heralded a new cultural mode: the mass consumption of multiple copies of designed artifacts that had once been consumed en masse in a singular religious form, such as the cathedral. At the end of Mythologies is a longer essay, titled “Myth Today,” that introduces the idea of semiology (the study of signs and their meaning) to a new audience. In it, Barthes reformulates Ferdinand de Saussure’s study of signs to give it an ideological and political edge. He argues that in addition to a system of linguistic signs, there is a second order of cultural signification, which he calls “myth,” that distorts meaning. At a second, less obvious, level of meaning, signifying systems such as writing or photography confirm a set of bourgeois cultural values as if they were beyond question. “Myth” makes the results of human history appear as natural and inevitable, as in the example of a magazine picture simply depicting a black French soldier saluting, in which Barthes finds a mythical interpretation: “The French Empire? It’s just a fact: look at this good Negro soldier who salutes like one of our own boys” (1972, 124, italics in original). The essay raises the possibility of a systematic analysis of cultural artifacts using semiology that can reveal how motives are read as reasons, history is treated as nature, and bourgeois ideology is presented as universal truth. Actually, the power of Barthes’ analyses in Mythologies derives not so much from systematic technique as from his critical capacity to situate the stuff of ordinary culture in a broader historical and political context; spotting the significance of social class in the form of marriages or the mythical connotations of a man with a jet-pack “going faster than speed.” In Elements of Semiology (1967a) and The Fashion System (1985), Barthes attempted to follow through on both the theoretical and applied dimensions of cultural semiology, but he eventually accepted that

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it was less a systematic and more an interpretative method in S/Z (1975), his analysis of a short story by Honoré de Balzac. There he showed how the layers of meaning created by multiple cultural codes undermined any possibility of a “true,” hidden meaning being revealed by the cultural analyst. As well as his analysis of written texts, consumer objects, and cultural events, Barthes was innovative in treating photographs not as direct representation but as signifying texts with cultural meanings. In his essay, “The Photographic Message” (1977a), he pointed out how even in news photographs trick effects, pose, objects, the use of light, aesthetic references, and the syntactical arrangement of images all work as cultural signs. And then, in his analysis of a single advertisement for Panzani pasta, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” he drew together the impact of both visual and textual codes, showing how “Italianicity” and “freshness” are used as mythical signifiers to sell a French industrially produced food. A later return to the study of photographs, Camera Lucida (1981), revealed an underlying emotional sensitivity that was always there, even in his most systematic attempts to make sense of culture. His work as a whole shows that things mean more than they appear to; everything in culture, even the most trivial and insignificant item of consumer culture, has something to say to us about the society in which we live. Tim Dant See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Cultural Studies; Discourse; Mass Production and Consumption; Material Culture; Photography and Video; Postmodernism; Semiotics

Further Readings Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. London: Cape 1967a. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. London: Cape, 1967b. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Cape, 1972. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. London: Cape, 1975. Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” In Image, Music, Text, 15–31. London: Fontana Press, 1977a. Barthes, Roland. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image, Music, Text, 32–51. London: Fontana Press, 1977b. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. London: Cape, 1985.

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BATAILLE, GEORGES (1897–1962) Georges Bataille was born in Billom, Puy-de-Dome, France, “of peasant stock” (Bataille 1989, 217). He considered himself to have suffered an extremely painful and disturbed childhood, possibly including sexual abuse by his father. Yet it is unclear whether this actually occurred or existed only in Bataille’s imagination (see Surya 2001). In 1914, Bataille and his mother abandoned his blind and syphilitic father, fleeing the advancing German army. This abandonment of a feared yet revered father seemed to have a decisive influence on Bataille’s thought and life, concerned as it is with the sacred, violence, loss, eroticism, consumerism, excess, and death. Bataille’s earliest intellectual interests were medieval history, languages, and philosophy. Formally converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1914, Bataille seriously considered joining the priesthood. After spending several months with Benedictine monks at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight in 1920, Bataille’s faith faded, seemingly due as much to sexual experiences as to his avid reading of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. In 1922, Bataille graduated from the École des Chartres in Paris and became a fellow of the School of Advanced Spanish Studies in Madrid. Developing a taste for bullfights, Bataille witnessed the horrific death of a famous matador, Manuel Granero, whose skull was penetrated through the eye by a bull’s horns. This event fed into Bataille’s best-known fictional work, The Story of the Eye. Indeed, the interweaving of fact and fiction, thought and life, eroticism and philosophy is characteristic of Bataille’s work. Bataille worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris from 1922 until 1942, when forced to retire due to ill health. In 1946, Bataille founded the influential journal Critique, which published early works by Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, and later in his career published systematic treatments of his major ideas, including the influential study The Accursed Share. This work elaborates Bataille’s fundamental “law of General economy”: The living organism . . . ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no

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longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically. (Bataille 1988, 21)

Excess cannot be accumulated indefinitely: ancient societies expended excess wealth and energy through festivals and sacrificial rites. The European Industrial Revolution made possible an immense growth of wealth and energy and relative peace between 1815 and 1914, but inevitably, according to Bataille, the excess production was turned to catastrophic ends: “The two world wars organised the greatest orgies of wealth—and of human beings—that history has recorded” (37). Bataille feared that the postwar emergence of an American superpower would threaten the entire globe unless its wealth could be expended through peaceful rather than warlike means. He advocated an extension of the Marshall Plan to redistribute “excess” American wealth to the war-shattered European economies. Such an ethics of generosity would protect the world from unplanned and uncontrolled internal convulsions of violent squandering. For Bataille, such an ethics might constitute “consumption for the other,” which he contrasted with the dominant capitalist mode of consumerism for individual or selfish ends, such as profit, reinvestment, or prestige (69). During the 1930s, Bataille was involved in revolutionary politics, setting up a succession of radical groups that attempted to oppose both capitalism and fascism. Bataille sought a new “mythic” order insisting on the vital role of ritual sacrifice and the orgiastic erotic squandering of energy, even offering himself as a potential sacrificial victim. During the German occupation of the 1940s, Bataille turned to an introspective, textual exploration of excess, producing two elliptical collections: Summa Atheologica and the unfinished Divinus Deus. These idiosyncratic works fuse philosophy, eroticism, and spirituality, combining notes on yoga and meditation with semiautobiographical erotic fiction and descriptions of illness and suffering with Bataille’s atheistic yet “ferociously religious” philosophy. Bataille’s goal was an “impossible” interior state beyond individuality and “without shape or form” that would express intimacy with all life on earth. Critical evaluations of Bataille’s work are conflicting. Jean-Paul Sartre labeled him a mystic; some

feminists have denounced his work as pornographic, whereas others have embraced its destabilizing effects. Bataille’s influence on the post-structuralist thought of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard has now been documented. Bataille’s demand that we rethink ethical relations in affluent, consumer societies still has much to offer. His work provides singular ways of theorizing social discontent, transgressive behavior, and violent rejections of the global world order, such as terrorism. In his insistence that self-interested individual, charitable, or corporate acts of generosity are unable to generate social equilibrium, Bataille, as ultraleftist, advocated fundamental political restructuring based on the suspension or destruction of individualism. Yet he retained a relatively simple desire: the redistribution of wealth and “raising the living standard” (Bataille 1988, 41). William Pawlett See also Affluent Society; Binge and Excess; Capitalism; Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War; Hedonism; History; Post-Structuralism; Sexuality

Further Readings Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Vol. 1, Consumption. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Bataille, Georges. My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man. New York: Marion Boyars, 1989. Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso, 2001.

BAUDRILLARD, JEAN (1923–2007) Jean Baudrillard was a French post-structuralist theorist. From his initial engagement with sociological thought in the 1960s—studying under and later working alongside Henri Lefebvre at the Université de Paris X, Nanterre—he later emerged as one of the most formidable thinkers of his age. Much of Baudrillard’s early work concerned consumption and the media. His later, more abstract work bore the imprint of this early focus, as he sought to understand the way in which the modern zeal for order, rationality, and (supposedly) solid, reliable reality has “turned back” on itself. Everything modernity sought to repress—the imaginary, fate, illusion, destiny—has returned to haunt it, generating a world of

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uncertainty and paradox that is infinitely far from the world the architects of modernity envisaged. Baudrillard’s earliest books—The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970)— focused on the peculiarities of an affluent society; drawing on and transforming the theoretical apparatus of Marxism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Yet this theoretical edifice was increasingly taken to task by Baudrillard, culminating in a thoroughgoing critique of Western modernity from the vantage point of “symbolic exchange.” In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), the “symbolic” is pitched against the opposition between the (supposedly reliable) “real” and the (supposedly duplicitous) “imaginary.” Although this opposition is by now second nature to us, its imposition on the world is a truly modern affair. Earlier human engagements with the world were governed not by a rational calculus of exchange (analogous to commodity exchange) but by an agonistic logic of challenge (analogous to the “primitive” gift exchange and sacrifice practiced to appease neighboring clans and the gods). Baudrillard’s refusal to take “reality” at face value amounts to a recognition that reality is a human concept projected onto the world, rather than something the world itself would recognize. Only with modernity did the “reality principle” seek to oust humanity’s “symbolic” relations with the world. This basic insight suffuses Baudrillard’s subsequent work in a variety of guises—“seduction,” “reversibility,” “fatality,” “evil,” “impossible exchange”— all of which are intended to reveal the way in which modernity committed itself to the reality principle, thereby repressing the “symbolic.” The upshot is a world characterized by too much reality—a “hyperreal” world. In and of itself, the world is enigmatic and ambivalent. If it is forced to accord to the logic of equivalence, it is transformed into a “simulation” of itself. Baudrillard’s substantive focus on consumerism, the media, and contemporary events (or mediatized “nonevents”) thus belies a more profound concern with the reality principle and its excluded other. Baudrillard saw his early engagement with consumption as paralleling Karl Marx’s transformation of the understanding of production: Whereas the classical economists spoke of a natural philosophy of wealth and exchange, Marx came along and spoke of production, of productivity and

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mode of production. . . . The same later with the theory of consumption: whereas the ideologists of consumption spoke of human needs and pure commodities, we began to speak of consumption as a structural and differential logic of signs. This was something radically different, and initiated a totally new analysis. (Baudrillard 2008, 15)

Baudrillard theorized consumer objects as constituting a structural system, after the fashion of langue as conceived by Ferdinand de Saussure. The implications include the idea that commodities consist not simply of use-values and exchange-values (à la Marx) but also of sign-values: that is to say, commodities convey meanings and communicate much as words do. These meanings do not belong to anyone but are “predetermined” by the system. Thus, the designer shirt I wear does not expresses “who I am” beyond signifying that “I’m the kind of person who wears designer shirts.” Consequently, the subjectivity of the consumer does not stand outside the commoditysign system (a consumer endowed with needs that are capable of satisfaction by the right choice of useful objects) but is constituted within the system (to paraphrase Martin Heidegger: commodities speak us). Although Baudrillard regarded The Consumer Society as unrepresentative of his intellectual trajectory—it was commissioned by a publisher—it nonetheless pointed toward his future “fatal” (as opposed to critical) theory. Many commentators mistake Baudrillard’s “symbolic” as referring to the “communicative” aspect (sign-value) of commodities. The distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic is, however, crucial. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s and Georges Bataille’s theory of the gift, Baudrillard’s symbolic implies an enigmatic form that is opposed to unequivocal modern “semiotic” forms (value, meaning, etc.). Modernity’s attempt to force the world to submit to such unequivocal forms ensures that modernity remains haunted by everything it disavows. This is evident in the anomalies thrown up by a consumer society that intends to leave nothing outside itself, to become coincident with reality, and to constitute the world in its entirety. Thus, resistance to consumerism is all too easily co-opted into a system that feeds off such apparent opposition. Co-optation is, indeed, endemic to consumerism, which routinely embraces contradictions without fear of dialectical resolution. Consumerism promises satisfaction via indulgence

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and self-restraint (cookbooks and diet books simultaneously top the best-sellers lists). The same pattern repeats itself in dual forms that reflect common underlying symptoms, whether in relation to consumption disorders (anorexia/obesity) or responses to consumerism (passive acceptance/active resistance). Hence, Baudrillard proposes that passive resistance (boredom, fatigue) and active acceptance (hyperconformity, senseless acts of violence) ultimately pose a greater threat to the system. Such are the “fatal strategies” spontaneously pursued by the “silent majority”: “You want us to consume?—OK, let’s consume, always more and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose” (Baudrillard 1983, 46). On the same basis, Baudrillard’s work progressively sided with the object in its fatality, rather than the “sign-object” issuing from consumerism’s differential system of objects. David B. Clarke See also Consumer Society; Hyperreality; Marxist Theories; Postmodernism; Post-Structuralism; Semiotics; Simulacrum; Symbolic Value

Further Readings Baudrillard, Jean. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or The End of the Social and Other Essays. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 1993. First published in French in 1976 by Les Éditions Gallimard. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 1996. First published in French in 1968 by Les Éditions Gallimard. Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage, 1998. First published in French in 1970 by Les Éditions Denoël. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Vanishing Point of Communication.” In Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories, edited by David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, William Merrin, and Richard G. Smith, 15–23. London: Routledge, 2008.

BEAUTY MYTH In her eponymous book, Naomi Wolf defines The Beauty Myth as “a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement” (1991, 9).

The beauty myth ties a woman’s value and power to how attractive she is, and promises that if she can just attain “beauty,” then she will be happy. For Wolf, this promise is patently false, a political weapon used against women to keep them in their place. While this myth is as old as patriarchy, Wolf traces its most recent incarnation to the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was born out of the Industrial Revolution, built on the male breadwinner/submissive female helpmate dyad, supporting new capitalist work arrangements. Since then, the myth has flourished whenever “material constraints on women are dangerously loosened” (11). With each surge in women’s public power, each victory in the battle over female bodily control, came a corresponding backlash of idealized images that become slimmer with every decade. Thus, winning the vote in the early 1900s gave rise to a new ideal embodied by the boyish figure of the 1920s flapper. The stick thin model Twiggy rose to fame in the wake of new freedom wrought by the birth control pill in the 1960s. In this view, women’s increased corporate and political leadership in the 1990s inversely reflects the “waif” and size zero fashion models’ shrinking dimensions, currently in fashion. Wolf’s The Beauty Myth encapsulated ideas advanced by feminists over the last several decades. Susie Orbach’s famous 1970s proclamation that “Fat is a feminist issue!” led to Wolf’s trenchant observation: “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one” (187). She cites 1980s feminist Sandra Bartky’s take on Michel Foucault, who linked the idea that “docile bodies” implicitly include “disciplines that produce a modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine,” citing bodily practices that limit the size of women’s bodies, their shape, the amount of space they take up, and how they are displayed as examples (1998, 27). The beauty myth evinces the idea that women are controlled in ways that men are not, when it comes to the size, shape, and meaning of their bodies. It claims women live under what Kim Chernin (1981) called a “tyranny of slenderness” that keeps them distracted by dieting and exercise, too obedient and weakened to fight for their right to better pay, equal rights, and a life free from widespread violence against women. Susan Bordo nuanced and developed this claim in her incisive examination of advertising’s strong messages about gender, arguing that men are not the enemy

Belonging

but rather the enemy is a contemporary system of diet and exercise disciplines that “train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands” (1993, 27). The beauty myth is closely tied to consumerism, fueling a constant desire for beauty, dieting, and fitness products. Feminists note that the booming American weight loss, dieting, and cosmetic industries are built on the backs of women struggling to attain impossible goals of physical perfection. They claim that ideals promoted by the fashion and beauty industries, supported by extensive advertising campaigns, have a long history of creating unnecessary “needs” for whiter teeth, shinier hair, or stylish clothes to stimulate consumption. The general contention is the more women’s power in the workplace, in politics, and domestic life grows, the more idealized images of her body shrink. Many cite the shrinking measurements of Miss America pageant winners, fashion models, and Playboy centerfolds over the years, such as the finding that “25% of fashion models now meet the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa” (Hesse-Biber 2007, 5). When diet and exercise fail, some argue the beauty myth pushes growing numbers of women to seek cosmetic surgery, maxing out credit cards or tying themselves to crippling installment plans to pay for these procedures in the process. According to the American Society of Plastic surgeons, since 1992, the number of breast augmentations has increased by 657% and liposuctions by 412%. The Beauty Myth was published at the beginning of what some have dubbed the “postfeminist” era. It started when the equal rights amendment touting “bra burning” second wave feminism of the 1970s (as opposed to the first wave of suffragettes in the early part of the century) was met by an angry backlash, chronicled by writers like Wolf, and her contemporary Susan Faludi in her aptly titled 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. In the evolving relations of power between the sexes, a younger generation of third wave feminists has emerged. This movement includes self-proclaimed riot grrrls, a feminist punk movement that bubbled up from the underground music and zine scene in the 1990s. Third wave feminism promotes ideas running directly counter to the beauty myth, claiming that female empowerment and beauty represent a more complex picture than

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second wave feminists allow. The new thinking holds that plastic surgery can be a right of self expression, pornography and sex work can sometimes be forms of female empowerment, and women who engage in and enjoy “girl” culture are not dupes of the patriarchal power structure, but are allowing themselves to enjoy their femininity. Nonetheless, the beauty myth retains currency as a key idea for uncovering the conflicts and hypocrisy that surround women’s gender roles in American life. Elizabeth A. Wissinger See also Advertising; Anorexia; Body, The; Cosmetics; Fashion Industry; Feminism and Women’s Magazines; Gender; Gender and the Media

Further Readings Bartky, Sandra. L. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behavior, edited by Rose Weitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Chernin, Kim. The Obsession. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy. The Cult of Thinness. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. 3rd ed. New York: Arrow Books, 1998. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: William Morrow, 1991.

Websites American Society of Plastic Surgeons. http://www .plasticsurgery.org.

BELONGING Belonging has dual, related meanings. First, it refers to a personal object or possession (e.g., the chair was his favorite belonging). Alternatively, the term refers to a sense of inclusion in a social category or group (e.g., club activities promote a strong sense of belonging). In English usage, the verb “to belong” was first recorded in 1340, meaning “to be along or relate to.” The first recorded use of the noun dates

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to 1817, meaning “goods or effects.” However, the concept of belonging predates the English usage of the word. A belonging implies ownership of a tangible object, specifically for personal use and satisfaction. The archaeological record suggests that prehistorical societies, even those with a seemingly egalitarian social structure and communitarian resource distribution, had some notion of personal belongings. Such effects are often found buried with human remains. Research with more contemporary egalitarian societies corroborates these findings, illustrating that although access to the means and yield of production may be shared and there is a sense of social equality, some objects come to be associated with an individual, including tools, items of personal adornment, and clothing. However, with growing social complexity, a stronger division of labor, alienation, and the introduction of capitalist economic and social relations, the concept of personal property becomes increasingly relevant. Yet there remains significant cultural diversity in the conceptualization of belongings. While some societies have formal and standardized laws pertaining to personal and private property, others have a dynamic, less formal vision. Further, some societies associate the accumulation of personal belongings with prestige, while others attribute more prestige to those who eschew material wealth or work to redistribute it within the group. In its second usage, belonging refers to a sense of inclusion. This concept also has deeper historical roots than the word’s etymology suggests. Humans are social beings, organized into dependent and cooperative social groups. For much of human history, an individual’s sense of belonging was determined by one’s relations, descent line, or clan. These relations continue to provide an important category for social organization and a sense of belonging among family members. However, in societies characterized by large populations, social complexity, mobility, and multiculturalism, non-kin means of social organization become increasingly important. In such circumstances, individuals are situated within the confluence of myriad social categories and simultaneously maintain membership in multiple social groups. Regardless of whether an individual feels the greatest connection to a small kin-based group, a church-based community, a generation, a racial group, or a combination thereof, humans are naturally social creatures. We seek out others to whom

we can relate, who share our values, and whom we can trust. These groups provide validation, acceptance, and support. It is widely agreed that a sense of belonging is essential to human psychological and emotional well-being. The two uses of the term belonging previously described are interconnected and highly relevant to the study of consumer culture. An individual’s belongings help to determine an individual’s sense of belonging. Social theorists from Karl Marx to Jean Baudrillard and Mary Douglas have drawn our attention to the symbolic nature of objects. Personal belongings are valuable not only for their practical utility, exchange value, or the labor and resources embodied within, but also because they play an essential role in the communicative framework of society. Within any social group, material objects become symbols of implicit values and ideals. When individuals choose personal belongings, they are simultaneously choosing the people with whom they wish to relate. Thus, individuals choose personal possessions that are consistent with their preferences. However, those preferences, whether acknowledged or not, are heavily influenced by the norms of the groups to which an individual wishes to belong. From this perspective, personal possessions are symbols of belonging, conformity, and acceptance. Yet individualism is a key cultural construct with growing relevance in many market-based societies. Where free markets are advocated and neoclassical economics are dominant, personal belongings are often envisioned as a reflection of individual preferences and values rather than any sort of group logic. Further, in a multicultural, highly mobile, and globalized world, identities are increasingly composed at the intersection of many different groups and are thus fragmented and unique. Thus, personal possessions come to more adequately reflect the individual’s unique location within the social structure than their belonging to any one specific group. So while individuals in some societies might choose belongings that help to mask their individuality and signal loyalty to the group, many scholars have argued that in class-based societies, the selection of belongings is increasingly tied to the assertion of difference. This is not to say that a sense of belonging is less important to citizens in class-based societies, but rather that status and prestige become increasingly linked to one’s ability to acquire belongings that are socially rare, helping to differentiate their owners from the masses.

Benjamin, Walter

Belonging is determined in part by an individual’s commitment to the consumption ethos of the group. However, the ability to signal conformity through the possession of normative belongings is also dependent on access. Not all individuals, regardless of their social aspirations and group loyalties, can conform. Some face economic barriers, whereas others lack sufficient social and cultural capital. Thus, personal belongings not only help to define the individual and the group, but they also help to define group boundaries and class distinctions. Mass production has helped to democratize consumption, making goods that were once exclusive and expensive available to larger segments of society. Yet as the consumption patterns of the elite are emulated, the culture industry continuously reinvents fashionable, prestigious, and socially scarce goods. Class-based tensions are exacerbated by this ongoing struggle between inclusion and exclusion. From this perspective, belongings are not only symbols of belonging, but they also work to reproduce existing social structures. The concept of belonging is particularly relevant given the recent focus on sustainability in consumption research. As the consequences of global consumption practices become more apparent, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the factors that motivate consumption, as well as potential strategies to reduce waste, inefficiencies, pollution, and the consumption of nonrenewable resources. The need to belong certainly motivates consumption as individuals try to keep up with socially determined consumption norms and ratcheted standards of comfort. Yet research indicates that improvements in the standard of living and growing material abundance do not necessarily make people happier. Once basic needs have been met, people report the most satisfaction when they are able to consume at or slightly above the consumption levels of their peers. These findings illustrate the importance of a sense of belonging and suggest that welfare and satisfaction hinge more on the maintenance of social cohesion and relative equality than the continual accumulation of personal belongings. Cynthia K. Isenhour See also Conspicuous Consumption; Identity; Individualization; Lifestyle; Mass Production and Consumption; Sociability; Social Distinction; Symbolic Value

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Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Signs. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 1996. Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Orlove, Benjamin S., and Henry J. Rutz. The Social Economy of Consumption. New York: University Press of America, 1989.

BENJAMIN, WALTER (1892–1940) Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher, historian, literary critic, language theorist, and translator. After the National Socialist takeover in Germany in 1933, he emigrated to Paris. In 1940, attempting to flee the German invasion of France, Benjamin committed suicide near the French-Spanish border. Benjamin’s “configurative” writings draw concepts, citations, and other materials from a wide range of sources. These include European philosophy, Judaic theology, romantic aesthetics, Marxist theories, critical theory, and the literature of the baroque, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, surrealism, Franz Kafka, and Bertold Brecht. Benjamin’s work comprises analyses of modernity’s commodity world, examinations of transformations in the structure of individual and collective experience in the realms of capitalist production and consumption, and explorations of the subversive dimensions of mass culture (notably of photography and film). Benjamin’s most extensive inquiries into consumer culture form part of his uncompleted Arcades Project (late 1920s–1930s). The Arcades Project examines themes such as fashion, advertising, exhibitions, architecture, prostitution, gambling, idleness, and boredom in the framework of a historiography of the Paris shopping arcades. Benjamin’s objective is to offer new perspectives of the socioeconomic conditions of the nineteenth century and to foreground their significance for contemporary capitalism: to “telescop[e] . . . the past through the present” (1999a, 471).

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Benjamin’s endeavor hinges on critical analyses of historical “treasures” that allow him to unearth the “anonymous toil” and subjugation generated by the society in which they were produced. Adamantly rejecting assertions of historical progress, Benjamin insists on showing that this “tradition of the oppressed” is continuing (2003, 391–392). Simultaneously, he seeks to distill from historical materials sediments of past generations’ unsatisfied utopian desires. Historians must spotlight these “wish-images,” which remain unfulfilled in the present social conditions, and amplify their “claim” to realization through “our . . . weak messianic power” (390, emphasis in original). The aim of establishing connections between “what-has-been” and “now” (1999a, 462) is to heighten the political awareness of the historian’s contemporaries: to stimulate their social resistance, so that they take “the first revolutionary measure” (474), and to kindle their yearning for fulfillment, so that they “complete . . . the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden” (2003, 394). Benjamin’s acclaimed essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1930s) supports this radical project. Traditionally, Benjamin argues, an artwork was bound to the sphere of ritual. As “cult-value,” the aesthetic object inhabited a specific spatial-temporal position and was scarcely accessible to the public. The work retained its “aura”: its “unique appearance . . . of distance, no matter how close it may be” (1999b, 518). Such “cult-values” attracted the subject’s focused, submerged contemplation and even adoration. “Technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from . . . ritual” (2003, 256). Reproducible artifacts such as film can be replicated and disseminated at different times in different conditions. The work is lifted from its specific here and now, loses its aura, and gains “exhibition value.” As the artwork enters several contexts, the number of spectators increases while its distance from them is reduced. The masses’ reception is “distracted.” They “absorb the work of art” (268), substituting veneration with enjoyment and critical assessment. Film, emphasizes Benjamin, employs a technical apparatus that allows it to capture objects from various angles, penetrate environments surgically, enlarge spaces and movements in close-ups and slow motion, and record numerous takes. The cinema provides new representations of reality’s unexamined depths

and previously unnoticed minutiae—the “optical unconscious” (266)—as well as unexpected montages of images. The mode of reception germinating in the age of technological reproducibility is supplied with fresh perspectives of “the necessities governing our lives” as well as of the “vast . . . field of action” that are “our bars,” “city streets,” “offices,” “furnished rooms,” “railroad stations and . . . factories” (265). Here, Benjamin suspects, emerge possibilities for a political art serving the masses striving for social transformation. Meanwhile, fascism is mobilizing technology for “aestheticizing . . . politics.” In leader cults, mass rallies, and war spectacles, the masses find means of expression and a purpose. Humans are diverted from overthrowing existing property relations and channeled “into a bed of trenches” (270). Benjamin’s enigmatic work found little recognition during his lifetime. Today, he counts as one of the most influential twentieth-century thinkers. Theodor Adorno, with whom he maintained a long correspondence (1928–1940), Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, and others consider Benjamin a decisive reference. Since Benjamin’s writings on commodities, mass culture, art, and experience sustain a tension between rigorously criticizing modernity and engaging with its political potential, they are often read as more nuanced—and indeed more current—counterparts to the Frankfurt school’s scathing condemnations of capitalism and its culture industry. Matthias Benzer See also Adorno, Theodor; Advertising; Baudrillard, Jean; Commodities; Department Stores; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Spaces of Shopping; World Exhibitions

Further Readings Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999a. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, 1927–1934. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999b. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938–1940. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Gilloch, Graeme. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Leslie, Esther. Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000.

Bicycles

BICYCLES Broadly defined, a bicycle is any two-wheeled, singletrack vehicle wholly propelled and guided by human power. Most are powered by the feet using pedals attached to rotating cranks, and they are guided by a transverse handlebar, but numerous alternatives exist and are not uncommon. The bicycle is unique in that it cannot be maintained upright or steered unless it is moving. Its physics are not well understood, and no fully successful automated bicycle has been developed. It was long thought the gyroscopic effect of the wheels was the bicycle’s secret, but this was disproved by David Jones in 1970. It is now believed that as many as six separate forces contribute to the stability and responsiveness of a bicycle. Worldwide, between three and six times more bicycles have been produced and sold than automobiles, and when comparative prices are adjusted for historical inflation and local disposable income, more money has been spent on bicycles.

History Bicycle history has often suffered from nationalism, commercial exploitation, biased scholarship, and the occasional fraud. Leonardo da Vinci’s alleged 1492 bicycle illustration was proven to be a forgery created between 1967 and 1974 by an Italian scholar seeking to displace a prior French claim of priority that was itself fictional. The first verified protobicycle was developed in Germany by Karl von Drais about 1817. His “running machine,” or draisine, had two in-line wheels and a steerable front wheel turned by a handlebar, but no transmission, as it was propelled by pushing with the feet directly against the ground. The evolution of the pedal-driven bicycle is similarly contested. It is believed the first bicycle was probably created by adding cranks to the front wheel of a draisine. Long attributed to the Parisian fatherand-son blacksmiths Pierre and Ernest Michaux in 1861, another city resident, Pierre Lallement, later claimed he was first in 1863. Lallement emigrated to the United States in 1865 and filed a U.S. patent for the “velocipede” in November 1866. He could not find a manufacturing sponsor and returned to Paris in 1868. Recent scholarship has supported Lallement’s claim, suggesting that the Michauxs learned of the velocipede only after being hired by two wealthy

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students from Lyon, the Olivier brothers, to build them. The Oliviers, in turn, picked up the idea from Lallement prior to his American departure. However, others dispute this, asserting the Oliviers learned of the velocipede from the Michauxs, and still others believe that the Michauxs and Lallement both copied a now-forgotten predecessor. All subsequent advances in bicycle design originated in Europe and were adopted in America only after achieving an initial commercial success. America’s contributions were primarily in the form of improved methods of manufacturing and marketing. The high-wheeled or “ordinary” bicycle evolved between 1869 and 1871 after Eugene Meyer of Paris developed a front wheel using thin wire spokes, a technology adapted from waterwheels. A year later, two Britons, James Starley and William Hillman, invented a new method for maintaining uniform spoke tension that made even the largest front wheel practical. Similarly, the low-wheeled safety bicycle matured over a five-year period between 1885 and 1890. A first prototype, introduced by the British firm Rover, was not much of an improvement over existing “safety ordinaries.” However, a refined second version pointed the way to the future, and the third production version of 1886 was hugely successful. In the United States, the growing availability of lowcost standardized components such as hubs, cranks, and frame lugs reduced bicycle prices throughout the 1890s. The ordinary and the early safeties had been successfully marketed as expensive, exotic, high-status luxury items. As bicycles became cheaper and more widely available, they filtered down to successively lower socioeconomic classes. Its cachet evaporated, with higher status users progressively abandoning it as their perceived social inferiors took up the sport. For example, prior to 1897, African Americans in the South, barred from bike shops, could only purchase cycles from itinerant drummers who often stole their deposits. With the wider supply of bicycles, reputable black-owned businesses such as hardware stores began carrying them. But as soon as blacks were seen awheel, many Southern whites abandoned the sport. To a less drastic extent, Francophone Canadians experienced the same thing. After 1897, low prices, surplus production, and flat demand led to a general industry collapse. By 1910, bicycle manufacturers were captive to component makers and large retail outlets. In some cases, the largest retail outlets, such as Sears Roebuck and Co. or Montgomery Ward, bought their parts

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directly from New Departure, Bendix, or Torrington, drop-shipping them straight to the bicycle maker, who was paid only for the frame and assembly.

Use Bicycles became a viable transportation tool in the United States only after losing their social status and being subsequently adopted for many mundane tasks—mail collection, message and package delivery, and street vending. However, scholars have recently uncovered evidence that some cities, especially in the Midwest, may have experienced significant bicycle use for transport purposes between 1900 and 1920. These cities, including Detroit, Toledo, and Minneapolis, also had a large number of workers who walked to work, probably for the same reasons they rode: large, centrally located factories, many blue-collar jobs, and a willingness to make deep personal sacrifices to enable the purchase of a home in the newly emerging suburbs—the same suburbs that eventually eliminated cycling as a viable transport mode by 1925. This was not the case in Europe, where mode shares of 35 to 50 percent were normal in smaller Dutch, German, and French cities through the 1980s. However, rising incomes, dispersed urbanization, and mass transit privatization led to mode splits more like those in North America and Australia. Despite reports of phenomenally high rates of cycling in China, urban bicycle use there was largely similar to that in many northern European nations. The Chinese per capita bicycle ownership rate in the late 1980s was one-third of that in the Netherlands and one-half of Japan’s. Beijing’s share of cycling trips in 1990 was about equal to that in the highest-use northern European cities, but this has fallen with improved bus service (in 1985 Beijing had fewer buses per resident than Chicago). In the United States, bicycle use has remained flat since the 1970s. Government programs have largely targeted recreational cyclists, suburban commuters, and other relatively affluent voluntary cyclists at the expense of the homeless, the poor, the chronically ill, and other captive users who rely on the bicycle to access basic life needs. Tricycle pedal rickshaws (“jinrikshaws”), becaks, and other multitrack human-powered vehicles are often included in the broad category of “bicycle” and have been important to the transport development of several non-Western societies. They spread across Asia in the 1930s as depression and then war created

fuel and material shortages that sidelined the taxis and buses that had earlier replaced hand-pulled rickshaws. Depending on the individual city, jinrickshaw use peaked between 1950 and 1970, and although they are now invariably held in disfavor, considered symbols of backwardness and poverty, they often provide a valuable source of quick, low-skill, survival income for recently displaced agricultural workers. Predominantly handmade, their manufacturing and repair has been an important low-capital start-up industry, and there is a growing international trade in them as art objects.

Mass Production In the 1960s, American bicycle makers freed themselves from dependence on domestic parts makers by turning to European, then Japanese suppliers such as Shimano, SR (Sakae Ringyo), and SunTour (Shikanosuke Maeda). These firms, in turn, gestated a pan-Asian industry that, within twenty years, supplanted their Western rivals. The mass production of bicycles ended in America in the mid-1990s. Few firms replaced their obsolete factories, and those that did found they still could not compete. In 1991, Columbia, the United States’ oldest bicycle maker, shuttered its 97-year-old Massachusetts factory and exited the business. Schwinn halted domestic production in 1992. Murray-Ohio, which did build a stateof-the art factory in Tennessee in the 1980s, closed it in 1999 and liquidated. Raleigh, Britain’s largest firm, closed its giant Nottingham factory in 2002 and, like Schwinn, turned to importing Asian bicycles under its name. In 2006, China produced 83 percent of the world’s trade, making 84.9 million units, with the 15 core European Union nations together producing 9.6 million units, and the United States only 300,000 cycles. Several nations, notably India (10.9 million units), Brazil (3.7), Vietnam (2.9), Mexico (1.9), and Poland (1.4), have maintained significant production for local or regional consumption. Bruce Epperson See also Automobiles; History; Infrastructures and Utilities; Leisure; Mass Production and Consumption; Recreation; Social Shaping of Technology

Further Readings Crown, Judith, and Glen Coleman. No Hands: The Rise and Fall of the Schwinn Bicycle Company. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Binge and Excess Epperson, Bruce. Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Herlihy, David V. Bicycle: The History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Jones, David E. H. “The Stability of the Bicycle.” Physics Today 23 (April 1970): 34–40. Lessing, Hans-Erhard. “The Evidence against Leonardo’s Bicycle.” In Cycle History 8: Proceedings of the 8th International Cycle History Conference, edited by Nicholas Oddy and Rob van der Plas, 49–56. San Francisco, CA: Van der Plas, 1998. Lloyd-Jones, Roger, and M. J. Lewis. Raleigh and the British Bicycle Industry. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000. Norcliffe, Glen. The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869–1900. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Wheeler, Tony, and Richard I’Anson. Chasing Rickshaws. Melbourne, Australia: Lonely Planet, 1998. Wilson, David Gordon. Bicycling Science. With contributions by Jim Papadopoulos. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

BINGE

AND

EXCESS

Consuming too much and consuming too quickly are generally considered disorders and may be socially, morally, or medically dangerous. Binge and excess are aspects of both the timing and the amount of consumption. To binge is to consume a great deal at once, typically after a period of abstinence or poverty. Excess, like poverty, is a relative concept, always defined in reference to some socially defined standard of consumption. The same kind of consumption defined as excessive in one setting may be considered perfectly normal in others. Both binge and excess carry strong connotations of overconsumption and are frequently the subjects of moral and legal sanctions, which link them to individual weakness in the face of temptation, greed, and antisocial or self-destructive behavior. Most major world religions treat both bingeing and excess as harmful to the individual and to society in general.

Origins of the Binge Early humans lived in a seasonal world, eating what was available and lacking the ability to store a surplus, so they would binge when they could get a large amount of food in a short time, for example when a small group killed a large mammoth, or during the

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few days when wild berries were naturally fermenting. These eating binges probably gave rise to the universal human custom of feasting, celebrations in which consuming large amounts of food and drink are accompanied by singing, dance, and other rituals. Every culture has some form of social feasting, and in some cases participants are expected to lose control, pass out, or engage in sexual behavior that would normally be considered deviant or transgressive. In later civilizations, public festivals became a common setting for bingeing, and today many countries continue carnival traditions where the normal rules against public excess are suspended for days or even weeks at a time. In many cultures, people report that a binge creates a sense of great joy and freedom, usually followed by a period of hangover, depression, and recovery. Excessive displays of extraordinary wealth were a constant feature of the early states and kingdoms of the Old and New Worlds throughout prehistory and early historical periods. These often centered on the rulers’ courts, on religious and calendrical festivals, and especially the events surrounding the burials of important people—the great pyramids of Egypt are a conspicuous monument to excess. The display and conspicuous consumption of wealth are seen by many anthropologists as forms of advertisement of the economic health of the polity, but this excessive consumption often became an end in itself, and competition would eventually undermine economic and social stability. Another form of the binge emerged historically in seventeenth-century Europe among male miners, loggers, hunters, traders, soldiers, and sailors whose work took them away from home, often exposed to great danger, for long periods of time. After working months or years in difficult conditions, they were usually paid off in a lump sum. Typically, they would binge on alcohol, prostitution, gambling, expensive food, and other forms of recreation until all their money was gone and they had to go back to work. Entire towns, and sections of large cities, were devoted entirely to serving the needs of men on their periodic binges. Today, the concept of the binge is more closely connected to the wild drinking behavior of college students and disaffected youth, and holiday or weekend sprees of gambling, drinking, drug use, and sex. The participants often see these binges as a necessary escape from the pressures of daily life, and they come

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to depend on them. Binge eating and drinking has an addictive quality to it, and both are often treated as medical, rather than social or psychological, disorders. The disorder called bulimia is defined as alternate gorging and purging, eating large amounts of food very quickly followed by vomiting or the use of laxatives. Bulimia is found mostly in rich Western countries, and it may be related to strongly contradictory social pressures to be thin but to enjoy eating, to be modest and controlled and at the same time spontaneous and outgoing. Some scholars argue that bingeing is a fundamental part of life in all modern capitalist societies, where consumption typically follows rhythms of restraint and release. After working hard, or restraining their appetites, people feel that they deserve release and self-indulgence. This can quickly build up a feedback relationship where greater efforts at self-discipline create a greater need for a larger binge. The result can be socially and individually destructive.

The History of Excessive Consumption Excess has a more complex history, because it is so hard to find the border between what is reasonable consumption and what is excessive. Excess is usually connected to social inequality and displays of social status. This in turn began about 6,000 years ago, in small towns in many parts of Eastern and Western Asia and North Africa. Some people seem to have won the right to consume more than anyone else, getting the best food, housing, furniture, and clothes, and using the labor of others to import cosmetics, fine crafts, and jewelry from far away. Within a thousand years, classes of hereditary nobility and priests emerged, people who thought they were naturally entitled to a much larger share of wealth than the rest of society. Their excess was sometimes displayed in public ceremonies and rituals, where it was presented as the symbol of the greatness of the gods and the state. The fundamental drives that lead people to seek excessive wealth and consumption are poorly understood, despite many years of research and speculation. These have been traced to such abstract forces as greed and desire, to basic human social needs such as seeking distinction and acceptance, and to biological urges founded in human genetic heritage. Organized religions have militated against excessive consumption for thousands of years, on the grounds

that it is unjust and/or because the worldly pursuit of pleasure distracts people from holiness. Some argue that the quest for excess is a positive social force that drives people to compete, invent, organize, and explore, creating wealth for all. This contradiction between restraint and excess is one of the central themes in modern capitalism and is continually reflected in mass media, which alternatively glorify and promote excessive consumption and luxury and decry the moral and political corruption they cause. The display of excessive wealth always hovers on the edge of respectability, and in its more modern forms of “bling” and celebrity home tours, it has no pretense to anything but hedonism and social competition. The newly rich classes in former socialist countries such as China and Russia are particularly famous for their ostentatious and exuberant display of excess, widely seen as compensation for the forced egalitarianism of the previous regimes. Yet there is little scientific evidence that excessive consumption of this kind makes people happier, and it may actually make them feel even more insecure. Nevertheless, it provides an example to society, and drives the process through which the forms of consumption that seem excessive at one time can become accepted as normal “needs” later, constantly ratcheting up standards of living. Unfortunately, this process also drives an endless cycle of debt and, on a larger scale, leads to the kinds of speculative bubbles that have recently destabilized the world economy. The personal pursuit of excess is often diagnosed as a personality disorder or a disease that stems from a failure of empathy or from emotional insecurity. At the same time, dreams of excess are closely linked to the ideas of endless personal opportunity and freedom, which are basic to modern market-based consumer societies. The most visible form of excess is the global epidemic of obesity, with an estimated one billion clinically overweight people on the planet, about equal to the number of those who are undernourished. Advertising and marketing are often blamed for promoting excess, and businesses obviously benefit from selling large amounts of luxury goods. We have not been able to find a full explanation for obesity and other disorders of excess, like uncontrolled gambling and drinking, probably because there are many causes, and also because these behaviors are so deeply embedded in consumer society. No single discipline has been able to explain the seemingly endless

Body, The

nature of human material desires or has been able to find practical ways to constrain excess, though this has now become an urgent issue.

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Wilk, Richard. “Consumer Culture and Extractive Industry on the Margins of the World System.” In Consumer Cultures: Global Perspectives, edited by John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, 123–144. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

Excess on a Global Scale While excess is difficult to measure on a social or personal level, the concept of sustainability gives us a better yardstick for setting a point where consumption can be considered excessive. The inequality of consumption levels on a global scale is striking, with a single person in a rich developed country consuming as much as 500 times the resources and energy as an impoverished individual in one of the poorest countries. Concepts like the “ecological footprint” show us how richer people are consuming far in excess of what the earth can sustainably produce, and this consumption continues to increase with economic expansion, the spread of Western lifestyles, and population growth. Concepts like “overconsumption” and “sustainable consumption” draw attention to the absolute limits of what humans can consume without making the planet unlivable. From this perspective, many of the things we consume in a day should be considered in excess of our needs, or alternatively, in excess of what the earth can provide without sustaining permanent damage that will impair or imperil the planet’s ability to support us. Richard Wilk See also Addiction; Anorexia; Consumer Maladies and Illnesses; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Gambling; Hedonism; History; Moralities

Further Readings Chapman, Audrey, Rodney Petersen, and Barbara SmithMoran, eds. Consumption, Population, and Sustainability: Perspectives from Science and Religion. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999. Jones, Martin. Feast: Why Humans Share Food. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Kulick, Don, and Anne Meneley. Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession. New York: Tarcher, 2005. Price, T. Douglas, and Gary M. Feinman, eds. Foundations of Social Inequality. New York: Springer, 1995. Princen, Thomas, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, eds. Confronting Consumption. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Redclift, Michael. Sustainable Development: Exploring the Contradictions. London: Routledge, 1989.

BODY, THE It has become relatively commonplace in sociological work on “the body” to think in terms of both being and having. We are our bodies, or rather we are embodied (being) but at the same time we experience “our bodies” as external appendages that we possess (having), as when we talk about “my body,” “her body,” “my nose,” and so on. Both of these aspects are important in relation to consumption. Consumption is an embodied practice. It is something that we do, a bodily activity. At the same time, however, “my body” is an object that can I elect to modify by way of consumption practices. I might buy a new nose via cosmetic surgery, for example, or hire the services of a personal trainer or image consultant. Furthermore, some modifications of my body might involve embodied activity on my part, such that the distinction between being and having is blurred as both are implicated in the same activity. Walking in high heels modifies a woman’s body, for example, changing its external appearance by making the woman appear taller and her legs slimmer, but walking in heels is also an acquired bodily skill. A woman has to learn to walk in heels and exercise the competence she has acquired when she wears them. If she can’t walk properly in heels, then the bodily transformation she wants to bring about will not succeed. In what follows, some of these aspects are teased out. This entry has three sections. In the first, consumption as an embodied practice is considered. In the second, how the body has become a focus of consumption practices in late modern societies is considered. The third section considers a trend, also related to consumption, that somewhat contradicts the message of the second: the rise in levels of obesity.

Consumption as an Embodied Practice To consume an object is to appropriate and use it. This implies physical handling, which, in turn, implies embodied competence. For example, eating

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lobster requires that the consumer knows how to use the implements provided, where to break the shell, how to break the shell, and so on. If the consumer doesn’t, the lobster will remain largely uneaten. Knowing what to do “in theory” is no good, however. The knowledge required is practical knowledge; knowledge “in the hands.” And our consumption choices are shaped by this competence (or lack of it) and the expectation of (un)successful use that it entails. This same point might apply to cars, high heels, tools, computers, and any number of other items that require embodied competence for their use. If consumed objects are to be used, and use presupposes embodied competence or knowledge that a consumer may lack, then embodied competence will shape consumption choices. There is not space here to consider how far this notion of embodied competence might stretch, but there are interesting examples that stretch beyond the obvious. Joanne Entwistle’s (2000) work points to the embodied experience and art of wearing clothes, for example, identifying far more subtle tricks of the trade than are suggested by the high heels example. Successfully pulling off the wearing of a particular type of clothing can presuppose certain sorts of bodily comportment—witness a man walking in a dress, for example—and also a certain bodily type, as we acknowledge when we concede that we “don’t have the figure” for this or that type of clothing. Beyond physical use and embodied competence, the practice of consumption is embodied by way of our tastes, appetites, and desires. We eat and drink to satisfy a hunger or thirst, for example, and our preference for certain foods hangs in many cases on the sensual (dis)pleasure, the taste, we associate with them. This association can shape cravings. I’m not just hungry. I am specifically craving a burger. The practice of eating burgers in the past left an embodied memory within me, a trace that can somehow be reactivated as an impulse to repeat the experience. Of course this applies beyond the realm of food too. Many of the items we buy provide us with sensual enjoyment, whether because they make us happy or more specifically by way of their visual, auditory, tactile, or olfactory impact. We desire things that “look good,” “smell nice,” and “sound great.” And what economists call our preference for these items is often experienced as a physical urge. The dither of shoppers as they move their hand to and from a

desired object on a shop shelf is as much a conflict of embodied desires and impulses—the desire to have the object conflicting with, for example, the fear of overspending—as it is a rational calculation of costs and benefits. Indeed, there would be no dither if consumption was a matter of rational calculation and the embodied desire for objects was reducible to measurable preferences and a neat calculus of costs and benefits. What to do would be clear, because precisely calculated, and we would do it. The shopaholic, who in some sense feels compelled to consume, is an example of this in extremis. Shopaholics’ compulsion is not an abstract preference but rather an embodied impulse that overrides their capacity to think “rationally” about what they buy. Insofar as our tastes and desires are specific, however, they are also social and reveal a social patterning of embodied conduct. The concept of the habitus, which has a long history in sociology but which has been developed in the recent of work of both Norbert Elias (1984) and Pierre Bourdieu (1984), provides a useful way of capturing this. Among other things, including the embodied competence previously referred to, the habitus is an embodiment of social structures; a translation of social codes into physical feelings and impulses. Thus, Elias reveals the long social history underlying the feelings of disgust, shame, and embarrassment that shape many of our current patterns of behavior. His analysis of what he calls The Civilising Process demonstrates that many activities that we would not contemplate today on account of one or more of the previously mentioned affective reactions were fairly common in our medieval past and would still be enjoyed by infants today if they were not steered away from them and taught otherwise. We would be disgusted at the thought of burning a sack full of live of cats over a large open fire for entertainment, for example, where our medieval ancestors considered this good fun. Likewise we might be reticent about urinating in the middle of a crowded street or stairwell, feeling too embarrassed, where medieval nobles had to be explicitly informed in etiquette books that such behavior was for “rustics and peasants only.” How we act feels natural to us but only because our bodies “naturalize” acquired and socially structured preferences, turning them into feelings. This might strike us, as consumers, when we are confronted with foodstuffs from a “foreign” culture. We can sometimes feel ill at the very thought of what others eat as a staple and appear to enjoy.

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Bourdieu extends this point into the present and more squarely into the domain of consumption, building at the same time on the theme of distinction between social groups that are found in Elias (e.g., between rustics and nobles). An actor’s cumulative economic and cultural wealth, as well as the “composition” of this wealth (i.e., whether it is weighted in the direction of cultural or economic capital), have a demonstrable effect on their “taste,” Elias shows; that is, on their revealed preferences for certain items and activities over and above what can be explained by reference to purchasing power. What appeals to a highly cultured individual, for example, seems not to have the same appeal for the less cultured, irrespective of economic wealth, and so on. This serves to differentiate groups, but Bourdieu’s claim is that it is not so much driven by a calculated plan to distinguish oneself as by deep-rooted and embodied desires and feelings that are shaped by social experience. The “highly cultured” feel a genuine repulsion in relation to “uncultured” products and activities, or what they deem “uncouth.” And the “uncultured,” though encouraged to recognize high culture as superior, are instinctively inclined to avoid it on account of feelings of incomprehension, inadequacy, resentment, hostility toward “pretension,” and so on. Differential association, as described by Bottero (2005), and differential consumption are not driven by strategy and calculation but rather by embodied inclination and feeling. Social divisions shape consumption in a way that serves to perpetuate those same divisions but they do so by way of “the body” and the body lends this social process both a natural feeling and, thereby, a legitimacy. Beyond taste, the items we consume have to be purchased or accessed. This, again, is an embodied practice. From the deeply ingrained habits that steer us to one shop rather than another, through the fancy footwork required to maintain social order in busy pedestrian walkways and the facework of shop assistants and sales personnel, to the sights, sounds, and smells designed to lure us in, shopping is an embodied activity.

Body Building On a different level, some writers, such as Mike Featherstone, have argued that the growth of consumer culture and the various (sometimes privatized) public spaces in which it typically occurs has

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encouraged a greater attention to the body as both a possession and a vehicle of self-presentation. From nightclubs, vacation resorts, and trendy restaurants to “hip” shopping streets and boutiques, consumer culture puts the body on display and, as such, encourages both body consciousness and aesthetic labor on the body, cultivating the “look” necessary to win recognition, or perhaps even just to “pass” in these contexts. Understandably, a great deal of analysis has been devoted to this work of cultivating physical appearance. Empirically, this work has focused on clothing and fashion, diet, exercise, cosmetics, and cosmetic surgery. Theoretically, it has tended to be framed by reference to theories of (a) identity, (b) power and particularly gendered power, (c) physical capital and the pursuit of “market returns” and distinction, and (d) deviance or resistance, or both. There are, of course, conflicts between these theoretical approaches, but as Nick Crossley (2006b) has argued, to some extent, these different theories apply to different domains or “zones” of practice. Some practices are normative, adhered to by the majority and more or less enforced; some attach to distinct identities and serve to distinguish their practitioners; and some are deviant (statistically and normatively) and have to be managed as such. Following Elias’s previously mentioned discussion of the civilizing process, for example, we might be inclined to argue that body odor has become unacceptable in modern societies, in a way that it was not previously, and to a point at which the smell of stale sweat and halitosis “turn our stomachs.” In this climate, some level of body hygiene becomes normative. We expect people to wash, with soap and shampoo, to clean their teeth, and to use antiperspirants and deodorants. Likewise, women may experience a degree of pressure with regard to underarm hair and the need to remove it. There is no such pressure with respect to body piercing or tattooing, however. We choose whether or not to undergo these body modifications, and our choice is likely to be driven by identity concerns if also perhaps shaped by the social positions discussed by Bourdieu. Tattooing used to be associated with working-class masculinity, for example, but in recent years it has become more “arty” and middle class, notes Margo DeMello. Of course, such distinctions can become so distinct that they are, in effect, deviant; they contravene accepted aesthetic norms. Both extensive tattooing

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and piercing and professional bodybuilding often fall into this camp. At this point, mainstream theories of identity and distinction struggle to make any sense of what is going on, and we need to turn to other theories more attuned to the dynamics of deviance. The emphasis of body modification and maintenance is not only on appearance, however. Body work and the consumption activities associated with it also focus on health, fitness, and the management of the various “risks” to health and happiness identified within mainstream culture. The consumer society is also a risk society, a society in which we are more aware of the dangers to which we are exposed and to which we expose ourselves. Body-related consumption is often a way of managing these risks. We buy vitamins and join gyms, at least to some extent, for example, to keep our bodies healthy and promote our longevity. Moreover, there are many specialized sporting niches that demand considerable body work that do not fit neatly into the general categories of appearance, health, or fitness. Exercise, particularly when it takes the form of a sport, can cease to be a means to an end and become an end in its own right. As such, it can generate its own demands for bodily related consumption or rather, when entrepreneurs latch onto such activities, they are able to construct product niches around these embodied activities. The now highly differentiated market in running shoes, which caters for every foot and surface type imaginable, is one clear example of this. Not that this market is entirely functionally focused, of course. A cursory glance at runners, cyclists, and climbers, to name only the most obvious, reveals consumption practices driven by appearance, fashion, and distinction. Athletes appear to compete for the most flamboyant look and also sometimes seek to distinguish themselves as authentic practitioners of a sport from mere pretenders—a process that often centers on consumption items that (visibly) signify authenticity to those “in the know.”

Overbuilt Bodies The interesting paradox in all of this, however, is that the most obvious bodily trend in Western societies is not toward the slimmer, healthier, more toned, and arguably therefore more beautiful bodies “sold” within consumer society, but rather, as Crossley (2004) argues, toward obesity: bodies that are fat, unfit, and unhealthy. Reading the great majority of

works on the sociology of the body, it is difficult to resist the hypothesis that our bodies must be getting slimmer, fitter, more tanned and toned, and so on. But they are not, at least not on aggregate. Unpicking this paradox is a complex matter that cannot be fully explored here. It must suffice to make two points. First, the trend toward obesity, while it runs contrary to the bodily ideals of the consumer society, can be, nevertheless, largely explained by reference to consumption and the dynamics of the consumer society. Body weight is a function of energy consumption; of the ratio of our (calorific) energy input to our (calorific) energy output. If we take more in without using more up, or use less without decreasing input, we put on weight. A cursory glance at the consumption literature suggests that we are doing both. The populations of Western societies are eating out more often and drinking more alcohol. And what we eat when we eat out is typically more calorific than home-cooked food. Alcohol, needless to add, is highly calorific. Thus, a shift in our consumption practices has increased our calorie intake. We are not using this excess up, however. On the contrary, our increased consumption (and use) of cars, home entertainment products (e.g., television), and the many labor-saving devices that have come onto the market in recent years, from washing machines to remote control televisions, have all served to reduce our energy output. So input is up, output is down, and the difference, in both cases, is converted and stored by our bodies in the form of fat. The realities of embodiment in a consumer society are thus often quite different from the ideals. In some cases, this impacts back on producers and thus the consumption process. It creates a demand for bigger sizes of clothes, for example, and perhaps even a recalibration of clothes sizes, such that a size 10 is more generous today. It also fuels a market for diet and gym products. In his study of gyms, Crossley (2006a) shows that many people join gyms and health clubs following a shock recognition that they have put on weight. A recalcitrant bikini or unflattering photograph forces bodily change into consciousness, sparking a (usually consumption-based) attempt to correct “the problem.” To date, however, this consumption-induced change in our bodily makeup does not seem to have prompted very much alteration in our bodily ideals. We still aspire to be slim, fit, toned, and healthy. As such, being and having a body in the context of a

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consumer society can be a rather contradictory and fraught experience. There is a double bind of a sort, in which we are encouraged to indulge pleasures that, in effect, will move us farther away from the ideals that we are encouraged to aspire toward. The result, as Susan Bordo suggests, is that consumer societies can seem “bulimic” in nature, characterized by a constant rocking between indulgence and self-punishment. For some—and for further reasons unrelated to consumption—this can materialize more literally as a clinical condition (bulimia nervosa) in which the consumer, like the shopaholic referred to earlier, feels compelled both to binge and then to purge. And for others, particularly younger women, and again for additional reasons related to the pressures of consumer society, it might materialize in anorexia nervosa, which involves a distorted body image and compulsive dieting and exercise. Still others fall on the other side of the line and become obese. Nick Crossley See also Beauty Myth; Consumer Maladies and Illnesses; Embodiment; Identity; Social Distinction; Taste

Further Readings Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Bottero, Wendy. Stratification. London: Routledge, 2005. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Remarques provisoires sur la perception sociale du corps” [Preliminary remarks on the social perception of the body]. Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales 14 (1977): 51–54. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Crossley, Nick. “Fat Is a Sociological Issue: Obesity in Late Modern, Body Conscious Societies.” Health and Social Theory 2, no. 3 (2004): 222–253. Crossley, Nick. “In the Gym: Motives, Meanings and Moral Careers.” Body and Society 12, no. 2 (2006a): 23–50. Crossley, Nick. Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society. Buckinghamshire, UK: Open University/ McGraw-Hill, 2006b. DeMello, Margo. Bodies of Inscription. London: Duke, 2000. Elias, Norbert. The Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Featherstone, Mike. “The Body in Consumer Culture.” Theory, Culture and Society 1, no. 2 (1982): 18–33.

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BODY SHOP, THE The Body Shop (TBS) is a values-driven, high-quality skin and body care producer and retailer launched in 1976 in Brighton, on the south coast of England. Anita Roddick, the founder of the company and a self-proclaimed feminist, initially sold twenty-four naturally based skin and hair care products with minimal packaging. Just three decades later, the company has become a globally recognized brand: it now sells over 600 products and 400 accessories, has more than 2,000 outlets in more than 50 countries, and has a multimillion dollar turnover. Despite its phenomenal growth and emergence as a new global organizational asset (following its acquisition by L’Oréal), TBS is still trading on its original association with “natural products,” with advertising mainly organized by its franchised outlets as opposed to mass-marketing campaigns. Such franchise-based outlet advertising includes storefront posters and leaflets and brochures, all containing messages that directly question some contested aspect of contemporary consumerism—from commodity fetishism to environmental damage to globalization. TBS was among the first cosmetic companies to adopt an “against animal testing” policy and a fair trade strategy for its ingredients, its outlets offer the possibility to join an environmental or human rights campaign, and it is ranked high by ethical consumption guides. The TBS company profile articulates responsibility in the direction of nature (packaging is minimal, and each product is presented as being based on one natural substance, generally plant based, such as cocoa butter), of disadvantaged communities (the reliance on a community trade program is stressed), and of employees (TBS prides itself on its ethical business complying with human rights, social welfare, and animal protection, transparency of information, and active campaigning in favor of social issues). TBS has also clearly counted on three factors dissonant with the meanings that normally characterize cosmetics ads. This includes new modes of advertising that incorporate criticism for commercial culture, and TBS’s own promotional strategy builds onto consumers’ diffidence for conventional cosmetic ads that sell “hope in a jar.” It has relied on irony (a tongue-in-cheek attitude that reframes consumers’ desires to be beautiful as unserious); on

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the moralization of consumption (via a direct attack against more traditional forms of frivolous and misleading advertising and a concern for animal rights, the environment, and its suppliers); and on defetishization (through reference to fair trade, natural ingredients, and critique of the productive process). In a well-known campaign, a voluptuous anti-Barbie doll named Ruby invites all women to consider that only a few of them might ever resemble the standard supermodel of contemporary advertising. However, each woman may allow herself the pleasure of a cream, especially if the latter is ethically sound. In insisting on a relaxed authenticity, on the ability to reason with one’s own head, on the possibility of having a more transparent and fair relationship in the productive process, TBS captured the feelings of those women who, while being socially aware, critical, and perhaps feminist, did not want to renounce taking care of themselves. Thus, it put consumers’ critical feelings and increased awareness to work to sell its products. TBS’s marketing strategy has been hailed within marketing circles as a triumph in image building: it has been able to attach a feel-good ethic and aesthetic factor to cosmetic and personal care products that traditionally have carried a strong aura of selfindulgence. While other companies have used ads to associate themselves with progressive politics (i.e., Benetton), TBS has been blunt, innovative, and effective in terms of market success and cultural influence in deploying ethical issues and political controversy as a feature of its brand image. Because of this, it is not easy to understand the TBS phenomenon solely through critical approaches to consumer culture that stress homogenization and a general cultural drain. If anything, TBS is symbolic difference and an example of a global brand that goes beyond the four pillars of McDonaldization (efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control) suggested by George Ritzer. As to its internal organization, TBS has worked to enhance local flexibility within global standards and to provide an alternative to bureaucratic impersonality among workers, encouraging expression of emotions. This alternative emotion management approach is instrumental to humanize the product when it reaches its customers and may require the promotion of self-proclaimed “corporate citizenship” among its employees, who are asked to actively demonstrate the organizational values.

At the point of purchase, TBS appears as one of those marketplaces devised to fulfill the desire for personal and intimate spaces that the very spread of global and impersonal retailing has elicited. As such, it occupies the aestheticized pole of the contemporary retail sector, embodying an emphasis on quality, authenticity, and ethics as opposed to the McDonaldized pole that relies on standardization and value for money. In TBS outlets, calculability is counterbalanced by the emphasis on quality; predictability by customization, as consumers themselves can mix different essential oils; efficiency by recycling, refilling of bottles in the shop; and generally by the invitation to spend time by reading brochures and chatting with shop assistants. All in all, the emphasis on ethics has been an important marketing tool for TBS, and at the same time has made it a favorite objective of both environmentalist associations who feel it is their right to demand evergreater levels of transparency and academics who are torn by questions such as to what extent we can expect a genuine moralization of market relations. While some take TBS as an example of the powers of capitalist markets to absorb any value and use it for profit, others prefer to make distinctions between commodities and look for criteria on the basis of which to evaluate the “greenness” of a company. Roberta Sassatelli See also Advertising; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Branding; Cosmetic Surgery; Markets and Marketing; Political and Ethical Consumption; Shopping

Further Readings Brabazon, Tara. “Buff Puffing an Empire: The Body Shop and Colonization by Other Means.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2001): 187–200. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed. Toronto, ON: Harper Perennial, 2004. Kaplan, Caren. “‘A World without Boundaries’: The Body Shop’s Trans/National Geographics.” Social Text 43 (1995): 45–66. Martin, Joanne, Kathleen Knopfoff, and Christine Beckman. “An Alternative to Bureaucratic Impersonality and Emotional Labor: Bounded Emotionality at The Body Shop.” Administrative Science Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1998): 429–469.

Bollywood Peiss, Kathy L. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993. Robbins, Peter Thayer. Greening the Corporation: Management Strategy and the Environmental Challenge. Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2001. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory, Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Todd, Anne Marie. “The Aesthetic Turn in Green Marketing: Environmental Consumer Ethics of Natural Personal Care Products.” Ethics and the Environment 9, no. 2 (2004): 86–102.

BOLLYWOOD Bollywood refers to Hindi-language cinema produced by the film industry in Mumbai, India. Although it encompasses a variety of genres, it is characterized by a distinctive narrative and visual aesthetic style influenced by traditional inputs, such as Hindu, Roman, and Greek mythology; classical Indian, folk, and nineteenth-century Parisian theater; as well as more contemporary influences, such as Hollywood and music television. In particular, a celebrated feature of the Bollywood aesthetic is the employment of music and dance as integral components of the narrative. Bollywood was formally accorded industry status by the Indian government in May 1998. Since the 1990s, Bollywood movies have exerted a direct influence on the steadily advancing upper and middle classes in India by espousing capitalism and consumerism as cinematic themes, as well as through techniques such as product placement. More significant, a lucrative consumer culture based on Bollywood movies and related paraphernalia has been developing both in India as well as globally. Rajinder Dudrah notes that while the films are produced from this geographic center, the industry actually exhibits a much broader global scope in terms of activities such as distribution, subtitling, dubbing, music, and viewership. Bollywood cinema caters to audiences not just within India, but also diasporic audiences across Southeast Asia, East and South Africa, the Caribbean, Fiji, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and North and South America. In addition, Bollywood cinema is

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popular among non-diasporic audiences in South Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Bollywood also nurtures significant auxiliary industries, which in turn determine the successful performance of a film. For instance, the central role of song and dance sequences in a Bollywood film has led to the development of the successful Indian music industry largely oriented toward the production and distribution of Bollywood music, both in India as well as abroad. It has also influenced the nature of music television in India, with Bollywood song sequences forming an integral part of programming in channels such as MTV. Other supplementaries include film magazines, as well as video and DVD rental and sale operations. Shakuntala Rao locates the historic origin of this cinematic form to colonial India, where its birth coincided with the Indian independence movement against British colonialism. Linguistic differences ensured limited foreign influence in the medium, resulting in a distinctively Indian cultural identity for Bollywood since its inception. Vijay Mishra notes that the major paradigmatic features of Bollywood cinema, such as the conflict between tradition and modernity, had been established by the 1930s and 1940s. In her analysis of thematic trends in postindependence Bollywood, R. Kaur contends that the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by nationalist, religious themes, as well as a focus on urban-rural migration, feudal oppression, and caste conflict. The 1970s witnessed a shift toward more urban themes and the depiction of class conflict, a trend that had, by the 1980s, developed into a focus on corruption and violence in society, as well as the pathos of urban life. Consequent to the economic liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, Bollywood cinema is acknowledged to have moved into another distinctive phase, both thematically in terms of the emphasis on the upper-middle class and the diaspora, motifs of global mobility and consumerism and capitalism, as well as a stylistic shift incorporating elements more favorable to the shifting audiences. The thematic emphasis on the diaspora is a recognition of its significance as an important export market. Since the 1990s, the overseas market accounts for an increasingly large proportion of profits for the industry. In fact, a film that may have been written off as a revenue generator within the domestic market in India may often generate such

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high profits in the overseas markets as to be billed an overall box office success. Particularly in the United Kingdom, Bollywood films are regularly featured in the weekly box office rankings alongside Hollywood blockbusters. Bollywood shares a contentious relationship with Hollywood. While initial criticism labeled Bollywood as an imitation of Hollywood, it is now recognized that the form of Bollywood cinema, as well as the size and scope of the industry, merits much greater and in-depth analysis. Bollywood, as a thriving business as well as a global cinematic form, offers a significant counter to the media hegemony imposed by Hollywood. This is particularly observable through Bollywood’s engagement with an alternative modernity that is not Western, a characteristic that accounts for its popularity among non-diasporic audiences outside India. However, within India, Bollywood is also understood to have established a hegemonic relationship with regard to cinema in other Indian languages. Since its inception, Bollywood has consistently offered an alternative to Western modernity; since the 1990s, it has become a vital element in mediating the audiences’ experience of globalization and consumer culture. The motifs of globalization and consumerism are seamlessly integrated within the narrative format of Bollywood films, highlighting the inherent conflicts generated by these processes. Lakshmi Srinivas argues that within India, Bollywood conveys transnationalism, both directly to the new globally mobile middle class, as well as indirectly through second-hand transnationalism to urban viewers who lack such mobility. In addition, brand placement within the film as a marketing strategy is also aggressively pursued by multinational advertisers. A significant element of the Bollywood experience has been its facilitation of the consumption of various identities. The strong nationalist theme in the cinema contributes to the construction and consumption of an idealized group identity within India, coterminous with its thematic shift toward globalization. Diaspora studies have noted a similar influence of Bollywood films among diasporic Indian settlements across various countries, with the films often serving as a tool in cultural reproduction of the diasporic Indian family. Bollywood also provides a “third space” for non-Indians to consume an identity

constructed through the interplay of tradition and an alternative non-Western modernity. Jillet Sarah Sam See also Cinema; Culture Industries; Diaspora; Glocalization; Hollywood; Production of Culture; Transnational Capitalism

Further Readings Bhattachrya, Nandini. “A ‘Basement’ Cinephilia: Indian Diaspora Women Watch Bollywood.” South Asian Popular Culture 2, no. 2 (2004): 161–183. Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge, 2004. Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar. Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies. New Delhi, India: Sage, 2006. Hirji, Faiza. “When Local Meets Lucre: Commerce, Culture and Imperialism in Bollywood Cinema.” Global Media Journal 4, no. 7 (2005): 1–18. Kaur, Ravinder. “Viewing the West through Bollywood: A Celluloid Occident in the Making.” Contemporary South Asia 11, no. 2 (2002): 199–209. Larkin, Brian. “Itineraries of Indian Cinema: African Videos, Bollywood and Global Media.” In Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, edited by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, 170–192. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Mishra, Vijay. Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. New York: Routledge, 2002. Nelson, Michelle, and Narayan Devanathan. “Brand Placements Bollywood Style.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 5 (2006): 211–221. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 25–39. Rao, Shakuntala. “The Globalization of Bollywood: An Ethnography of Non-Elite Audiences in India.” The Communication Review 10 (2007): 57–76. Srinivas, Lakshmi. “Communicating Globalization in Bombay Cinema: Everyday Life, Imagination and the Persistence of the Local.” Comparative American Studies 3, no. 3 (2005): 319–344.

BOUNDED RATIONALITY Bounded rationality is a grand theme that cuts across various areas of the social sciences, sharing a common interest in the determinants and the consequences

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of human action. At the root of this concept stands explicit recognition that when dealing with a problem of choice, humans—be they consumers, producers, or policymakers—can rely on limited capacity, at best, to process relevant information, and their decisions will be affected by cognitive or cultural biases. Applied to consumer demand, bounded rationality entails a range of situations in which individuals cannot scrutinize at once the entire spectrum of goods and services, are not always capable of matching their preferences with the appropriate purchases, or do not have continual knowledge of the variety of ways in which needs can be met. Such conditions lead to suboptimal outcomes, meaning that individuals settle, at least temporarily, for second-best solutions. The integration of these intuitive notions in the broader scheme of decision-making theory has spurred profound revisionism within the social sciences, especially concerning the way in which the formulation of decisions is understood and operationalized. The notion of bounded rationality first surfaced in a series of writings published by Herbert Simon in the 1940s and 1950s. The versatility of the concept combined with the eclecticism of Simon’s opus granted rapid diffusion in fields as diverse as political science, economics, theories of organization, cognitive psychology, and computer science. From his early writings to his later works in the 1980s, Simon’s chief preoccupation has been to understand how individuals search, collect, and use information and how they form judgment accordingly under the joint effect of personal biases and cognitive limitations. His interest in the process and not merely the outcomes of decision making places him in stark contraposition to the orthodoxy: whereas the axiom of full rationality in standard economics sees consumers and producers as having stable preferences, being fully informed of all conceivable ranges of options and thus being able to optimize under all circumstances, Simon’s procedural models portray decision making as the buildup of heuristics from experience and social interaction. Whereas fully rational agents optimize, boundedly rational agents “satisfice” in the sense that temporary setbacks are integral to longterm learning and the achievement of desired outcomes. Methodological approaches built on bounded rationality are concerned with the cognitive processes

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adopted by individuals to cope with uncertainty as well as with the characteristics of the environment in which they operate. As Simon himself put it (2000, 25) “in the real world rational behaviour is as much determined by the ‘inner environment’ of people’s minds, both their memory contents and their processes, as by the ‘outer environment’ of the world on which they act, and which acts on them.” Bounded rationality bears strong influence on modern theories of economic organization. The evolutionary economics agenda (Nelson and Winter 1982) epitomizes the integration of the concept in the study of business strategy, managerial behavior, and competitive performance (see Foss 2003 for a review). This approach departs from standard rational choice axioms of mainstream economics and emphasizes the experiential, localized, and socially held nature of knowledge. Decision making under these circumstances is embodied in the concept of routines, that is, repeated patterns of actions that are regarded as the vehicle by which firms align internal abilities and external targets over time. By limiting the sphere of decision making to a manageable spectrum of options, routines confer stability to business conduct while at the same time being a source of organizational inertia. Modified operative conditions or the appearance of inefficiencies urge firms to change their routines, but bounded rationality makes such changes neither regularly feasible nor easy to implement. In turn, differential ability in searching, creating, applying, or adapting organizational routines is viewed in evolutionary approaches as a powerful selection mechanism for firms’ survival or decline. The notion of bounded rationality has opened up new avenues also in the analysis of consumer behavior. In the microeconomics textbook version, rational consumers pick bundles of goods from a menu of options on which they possess perfect information; their choices are “optimal” in the sense of achieving maximal utility within the budget constraint. Experimental tests designed by cognitive psychologists on individuals, however, demonstrate that actual consumer behavior deviates from the regimen prescribed by the framework of optimization: Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky found that memory of past outcomes and cultural biases shape individual experience and the way in which decisions are framed. Preference formation thus

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observed is consistent with bounded rationality in the sense of being strongly dependent on the broader context in which individuals operate. Richard Nelson and Davide Consoli further articulated these threads in the context of evolutionary approaches to household consumption behavior with a view to complementing the existing body of work on business firms. In this view, boundedly rational households are seen as attending a specific set of wants through dedicated consumption routines or activities with no global utility function directing their decisions. Households pursue aspiration goals (or minimal levels of satisfaction), which, instead of being predetermined and stable, adapt to emergent needs and evolve as a result of experience. Like in orthodox theory, new personal circumstances or price variations elicit changes in consumption routines; however, adaptations are neither automatic nor instantaneous, but rather generated by means of heuristic search, that is, selective exploration of feasible alternatives. Restricting the range of acceptable outcomes to a limited spectrum makes the search process more manageable but also prone to suboptimal outcomes in the terms previously indicated. Overall, the evolutionary approach does not dispute that households may be rational in selecting desired goals but rather seeks to articulate the imperfections that are likely to emerge in adopting a particular strategy to achieve them. In so doing, this framework adds to existing theories by integrating the explicit influence that individual abilities and environmental constraints exert on consumer behavior. Davide Consoli See also Advertising; Consumer Behavior; Econometrics; Economics; Goal-Directed Consumption; Markets and Marketing; Price and Pricing Mechanisms

Further Readings Foss, Nicolai J. “Bounded Rationality in the Economics of Organization: Much Cited and Little Used.” Journal of Economic Psychology 24 (2003): 245–264. Kahneman, Daniel, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Nelson, Richard R., and Davide Consoli. “An Evolutionary Theory of Household Consumption Behaviour.” Journal of Evolutionary Economics 20, no. 5 (2010): 665–719. Nelson, Richard R., and Sidney G. Winter. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982.

Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972. Simon, Herbert A. Administrative Behavior. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Simon, Herbert A. Models of Bounded Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. Simon, Herbert A. “Bounded Rationality in Social Science: Today and Tomorrow.” Mind and Society 1 (2000): 25–39.

BOURDIEU, PIERRE (1930–2002) Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and anthropologist whose substantial and influential body of work traversed disciplines and international boundaries. Born in a remote village in southwestern France and influenced by his experiences in military service in Algeria, Bourdieu’s early anthropological works focused on the conflict between tradition and modernization. Breaking with the subjectivism of theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre but also critiquing the determinist assumptions of structuralism, these studies reveal the beginnings of an approach to social theory focused on practice and reflexivity for which he would later be known. They also demonstrate Bourdieu’s desire to investigate the sociopolitical issues of the day, a focus that continued throughout his life and made him a prolific and varied author. In addition to ethnologies of Algeria and France, Bourdieu’s work includes the sociology of education, art, photography, sports, television, academia, and language, as well as discussions of class and gender and critiques of the economy and the state. Bourdieu paid particular attention to the sociology of culture and the consumption and production of symbolic goods. Among these studies is his most famous book in the English-speaking world: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984). In this vast ethnography of French cultural consumption, Bourdieu refutes Kantian aesthetics that suggest that high cultural forms have intrinsic qualities and that the more gratifying response to them is “disinterested” contemplation. Instead, he exposes the social patterning of taste and argues that aesthetic judgments relate to upbringing and education. To do this, Bourdieu first maps the “spaces of social position.” Building on previous studies of the education system, such as The Inheritors: Students

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and Their Culture (1979), Bourdieu suggests that the exposure to and internalization of social conditions influence the way individuals act in the world (habitus). This allows them to accumulate different levels and types of cultural resources (capitals). He identifies four types of capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, which function differently according to their context, or in what Bourdieu (1984) calls “semi-autonomous social fields.” In Distinction, Bourdieu suggests that the volume and composition of economic capital (wealth) and cultural capital (knowledge and demeanor) position individuals in social space. After mapping the spaces of social positions, Bourdieu goes on to outline the space of lifestyles and, using multiple correspondence analysis, observes a correlation between class position and consumption practices. In 1960s France, Bourdieu finds that the bourgeoisie are predisposed toward goods that reflect distance from economic necessity and are more inclined toward cultural experimentation. For example, he (1984, 186) finds that those people high in cultural and economic capital are likely to eat foods that are rare or experimental. In contrast, and partly because of this difference, he suggests that the working class has a “taste for necessity” that is a consequence of economic constraint and limited knowledge of other tastes. For example, he finds that manual workers are more likely to eat strongly flavored, cheap, and filling foods, such as casseroles and bread. In between these two groups are the petite bourgeoisie, who recognize and aspire to standards of good taste but do not know how to consume cultural products in the appropriate manner. In Distinction, Bourdieu was one of the first theorists to recognize an emerging class of media professionals and those working in the service industries, which he termed the “new petite bourgeoisie.” He argued that in this group were the main initiators of a change from “the ascetic ethic of production and accumulation, based on abstinence, sobriety, saving and calculation” to “a hedonistic morality of consumption, based on credit, spending and enjoyment” (1984, 310). The “new petite bourgeois,” he argued, were denouncing the values of the old bourgeoisie as “up-tight” and preaching new values of “relaxation” and “laid-back” lifestyles in their roles as the disseminators of taste (311). This early observation has inspired many studies of “new cultural intermediaries” and the “aesthetization of everyday life.”

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By arguing that there is a “structural homology” between social position and lifestyle, Bourdieu stands apart from many postmodern consumer culture theorists. He also marks his difference from Marxist theory by suggesting that class is not only created and reproduced through production and economic relations, but also through consumption. Both these points mean that Bourdieu’s substantial empirical insights into the field of consumer culture have been much debated and, as a consequence, are enduring. In addition, his rich conceptual toolkit (including the concepts of practice, habitus, capital, and field), developed and clarified in works such as The Logic of Practice (1980) and An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (1992), means that Bourdieu’s legacy continues to be highly relevant to understanding producers, consumers, and their cultural practices. Sarah Elsie Baker See also Cultural Capital; Cultural Intermediaries; Habitus; Lifestyle; Social Class; Symbolic Capital; Symbolic Violence; Taste; Theories of Practice

Further Readings Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. The Inheritors: Students and Their Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 1992.

BRANDING Branding is the practice of adding an artificial identity to a product, company, or person. Originally, branding referred to the practice of marking slaves or cattle with signs of property. Throughout the history of commerce, artisans and artists have branded their name onto their products as a way of accumulating a reputation. As a maker’s mark, brands thus have a very long history, dating back to classical times. In the eighteenth century, a growing consumer society established a number of important brands, mostly for luxury goods. On the British market, Champagne and Bordeaux established themselves as important brand

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names for French wine (now sold by the bottle by specialized merchants), and they were collected by members by the aristocracy and the affluent bourgeoisie who were beginning to develop a culture of connoisseurship. Wedgwood and Bentley became an important brand of porcelain, building their reputation by systematically cultivating public opinion through surprisingly modern strategies of advertising and public relations. They would “place” their products in the households of the wealthy and famous, thus cultivating reputation and status on the middle-class market. However, branding only becomes an important commercial practice with the development of a mass market for consumer goods that followed on the emergence of more mature industrial economies in Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. As mass production replaces local crafts production, products lose their recognizable origins and identity. Objects of everyday use that used to be produced locally by people who had recognizable and culturally meaningful identities are now made in factories by anonymous workers. This way, production is separated (or alienated) from the lived networks of everyday life, and objects of everyday use become commodities with more or less mysterious origins. In this situation, it becomes possible and necessary to create artificial identities for products. In the modern, industrial sense, a brand thus no longer denotes a maker’s mark; its function is no longer principally that of marking the identity of its producer, but that of providing a culturally constructed, “artificial” product identity that principally works to differentiate one product from its functionally and aesthetically identical competitors. Such artificial product identities would sometimes reflect an actual producer, but often they would depict some fictional origin (like Quaker Oats in the United States) or draw on nationalist or colonial imagery (like Pears Soap in Victorian Britain). Such artificial product identities, or brands, originally served three principal functions. First, a brand could install relations of trust with consumers, enabling them to recognize the origins of a product and know who to hold responsible for possible problems. This was particularly important in an early industrial economy, where quality was uneven and the number of frauds and forgeries were high. Second, a brand renders an anonymous product recognizable, and thus makes possible the very situation of choice and competition on which mass

consumerism rests. How else would it be possible for consumers to choose between functionally and aesthetically identical products (like Lux or Persil and Coca-Cola or Pepsi)? Third, the creation of a brand allows manufacturers to create enduring relations with consumers and retailers, thus reducing the complexity of a modern market economy. This third function, the ability of the brand to create an affective bond of some sort with consumers, grew ever more important during the twentieth century. The early twentieth century saw significant developments in consumer culture and mass communications, such as the emergence of department stores, the development of design and poster art, the growth of advertising, and the new market for film and music. Brands were central to this new commercial culture. First, brands in their modern form represented an integration of the industrial production of material goods with the industrial production of immaterial images and symbols of culture. Subsequently, the need to produce brands on a mass scale gave birth to the rapid development of a new branch of “cultural industries.” Advertising agencies grew rapidly during the 1920s, and they channeled corporate investments in brand building on to other culture industries, such as film, music, and the (mostly weekly) press. This way, brands quickly became a key cultural institution, financing a new commercial cultural universe that became an important factor in the formation of identities and worldviews. Second, this new commercial culture formed a background against which individual brands could elaborate their communication strategies. It became common for brands to associate themselves with movie stars or other celebrities. (The J. Walter Thompson advertising agency ran a campaign for Lux soap throughout the 1920s, claiming the product was used by “9 out of 10 Hollywood stars.” Cigarette manufacturers built their brands largely by sponsoring movies. As a consequence, smoking became a central act in many movies, and the cigarette became a key character trait for movie stars, such as Humphrey Bogart or Marlene Dietrich.) More generally, commercial culture, and in particular women’s magazines, supplied a new worldview, where consumption naturally appeared as an important activity and brands as objects worthy of interest and scrutiny. At the same time, the consolidation of modern national (and sometimes international) distribution systems strengthened the managerial function of

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brands. Large companies (like Procter & Gamble, who would introduce the figure of the “brand manager” in the 1930s) began to view branding as a holistic assemblage of the immaterial assets related to products, including their marketing and distribution channels and market strength. This conception of the brand as a marketing asset, rather than a mere symbol, gave rise to new integrated campaigns in which advertising efforts were paired with distribution strategies. This strengthening of the managerial importance of branding increases in the 1930s, when—partly as a response to the Depression—more importance was given to design, market, and audience research in an attempt to organize a modern mass consumer society. The result was a gradual but steady transformation of managerial perspectives where brands, rather than products, become central. This logic culminated in the 1950s as companies become increasingly market driven. The point of business management becomes not so much to sell what can be produced, but to know the market and adapt production to its wants. To achieve such a turn, however, the ability to build and sustain the kinds of relations with consumers that enable a reasonably predictable demand becomes crucial. This further increases the importance of brands. In Europe and the United States, the postwar years saw three important developments in consumer culture. First, rising wealth radically increased the space of consumption. This meant that more people could satisfy their basic needs and engage in more sophisticated and personalized consumption patterns. Marketing professionals identified growing wealth as driving a development toward what psychologist Abraham Maslow had called “postmaterialist” values. At the same time, the media environment grew more complex. The introduction of television multiplied the number of advertising channels available. Television also significantly altered the experience of advertising, integrating the advertising message deeply into the viewing experience and creating more intimate and deeper affinities with brands. The combination of affluence and a new media environment lead to a growing differentiation of consumer demand. Young people, but also middle-class adults, began to experiment with alternative consumption patterns and to view consumer goods as means to individual projects of self-realization, to be chosen freely, rather than as components of the collectively imposed “standard package” of prosperity.

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Within the marketing profession, this growing complexity of consumer demand led to an emphasis on the brand, or “brand image,” as distinct from products. In an influential article, Burleigh Gardner and Sydney Levy claimed that people were now no longer naturally accepting of an older hierarchy of needs and motivations. They did not so much follow “(a) the striving to be economical or (b) the desire to emulate people of higher status” (1955, 34). What mattered now, more than before, was the symbolic dimension of the product, the brand image. The brand image, Gardner and Levy argued, represents “a public image, a character or personality that may be more important for the over-all status (and sales) of the brand than many technical facts about the product” (35). The function of brands was thus gradually reconceptualized from that of providing an attractive if artificial identity for the product to that of establishing a symbolic and effective bond with consumers that could serve to render complex patterns of consumer demand more predictable. The material product began to be conceptualized as just one dimension of this affective bond, along with advertising, public relations, and other forms of communication with what, beginning in the late 1970s, would be known as “stakeholders.” As contemporary globalization processes accelerate in the second half of the 1970s, brands become ever more separated from products. This development has three important drivers. First, the globalization of production resulting from the spread of information technology, the opening up of the Chinese economy, and resulting global assembly lines, tended to generalize the ability to engage in material production. One no longer needed special skills to make sunglasses, an outsourcing agency would find an appropriate factory in China. This led to a wave of brand extensions, where actors ranging from car makers to fashion houses began to distribute a wide range of objects, from clothes to household implements, under their brand. This development severed the strict relation between a brand and a product, making material products one medium among many for the construction and maintenance of brand identity. Second, the globalization of media culture resulting from the Reagan administration’s push to deregulate global media markets in the 1980s, together with the impact of new media technologies (such as, first, satellite and cable TV, and then later, the Internet)

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created the kind of global media culture that made coordinated, global brand-building campaigns possible. The development also led to a diversification of available media channels and an accompanying convergence of content. Branding becomes a way to market content across media channels, maintaining an identifiable consistency on a wide range of platforms. (Harry Potter is a book, a film, toys, and a cultural icon in general.) Third and finally, growing media literacy and a general value change have tended to accelerate the dynamism and creativity of consumer behavior. The result has been an acceleration in fads and fashions (often initiated and produced by consumers and consumer groups as opposed to being imposed by marketing firms) and a greater interactivity on the part of consumers (particularly when empowered with networked PCs). In response to this, branding has come to rely on a series of sophisticated techniques of market and audience research, like data mining and cool-hunting, to predict and, if possible, to anticipate such consumer innovation. This way, branding becomes a matter of giving a direction to the evolution of consumer demand, anticipating and containing its “creativity” within a proprietary framework.

Brand Management Today Today branding has developed from a matter of marking a product with the recognizable identity to a matter of deploying a wide range of strategies— advertising, product placement, public relations events, media sponsorship, and so on—to create a durable platform on which a wide range of actors, consumers, employees, subcontractors, investors, and the public at large can come together to create a valuable and consistent identity. This way, the objective of brand management is largely directed to consumers and other external stakeholders. It is largely a matter of managing external communication processes in ways that either add to or reproduce the particular qualities that the brand embodies. Brand management is about putting public communication to work under managed forms; by providing a context where it can evolve in a particular direction. From the point of view of brand management, consumers use brands as means of production. From this perspective, brand management is about proposing branded goods as tools or building blocks whereby consumers can create their own meanings.

Customers are thus expected to add more or less personal dimensions to the brand, to accommodate it in their lifeworld, to produce something—a feeling, a personal relation, an experience—with it. The simplest way to make consumers work for the brand is then to simply appropriate the surplus that they produce in their normal use of branded goods. This takes a variety of forms, from viral marketing that puts consumers’ own personal networks to work in advertising the brand via attempts to tap into and place the brand in naturally occurring consumer lifestyles or subcultures—such as extreme sports, “ghetto style,” or the electronic music scene—to various user-led innovation initiatives where consumers are encouraged to participate in developing advertising, packaging, or even products, thus tying them tighter to the brand and harvesting their creativity and ideas. Overall, contemporary brand management feeds on large amounts of consumer research. Such research mostly takes the form of surveying a rapidly changing consumer opinion. Consequently, the growing importance of brands in the contemporary economy has fed an industry of qualitative market research, data mining, and the surveillance of online consumer habits and trend scouting or cool-hunting, where highly innovative “elite” consumers are surveyed to capture emerging trends early on. Even though few people have the time and energy to be trendsetters, from the point of view of brand management, all consumers use goods to produce a significant share of the solidarities and shared meanings that anchor them in their lifeworld. Consequently, an important task for brand management is to ensure that the ongoing production of a common social world on the part of consumers proceeds in ways that reproduce a distinctive brand image and that strengthen the brand equity (the productive potential that the brand has in the minds of consumers), which is understood as the most important factor behind brand value. To ensure this, brand management uses strategies that can be described by Michel Foucault in the term government. Government does not so much entail giving orders or shaping actions according to a given norm as much as it entails working from below, by providing an ambience in which freedom is likely to evolve in particular ways. One works with and through the freedom of the subject. In brand management, this is achieved through the provision of particular ambiences that frame and partially

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anticipate the agency of consumers. As Celia Lury argues, the brand works as a kind of “platform for action” that is inserted into the social and works to “program” the freedom of consumers to evolve in particular directions. While it is not impossible for consumers to break with the expectations inscribed in these ambiences, the task of brand management is to create a number of resistances that make it difficult or unlikely for consumers to experience their freedom, or indeed their goals, in ways different from those prescribed by the particular ambience. At the most abstract level, the construction of such ambiences proceeds through the management of media culture. In a diversified media environment, a coherent and well-managed ambience fulfills two important functions. First, it provides a context for consumer action within which a particular consumer good or media product can acquire additional dimensions of use value. In modernity, such contexts were either provided “naturally” through class traditions or other forms of “rooted” communities or by means of the “ideological state apparatus” and the code of value that it helped implement (particularly through its media branch: public service television). As such forms of context wither away, the brand replaces them as a commercially managed context of action, where a certain attitude, a certain modality of consumption, is anticipated. Second, such ambiences serve to capture the attention of consumers who habitually move between media platforms. Previously, such attention could be captured by a physically situated media technology, such as, paradigmatically, the television set in the living room. But with the hypermediation of the lifeworld with the emergence of technologies such as remote controls and VCRs initially, and now the integration of television and the Internet, which allows a personalization of media consumption, consumers are less subject to the technological power of particular media platforms. The same thing goes for advertising. It is generally recognized that the new media environment, new interactive technologies, and a heightened media literacy on the part of consumers make them less likely to accept traditional, hard-sell advertising messages. The response on the part of advertising has been both a greater recourse to reflexivity and irony and, most important, a shift over from advertising to brand management. While selling messages is still prominent, a growing importance is attached to the

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ability to create the brand as a media ambience. The main strategy here is to place the product in different media (and real-life) circumstances. Hollywood blockbusters (in particular the James Bond films, in themselves a sort of consumerist manifesto) have pioneered this tendency, and television series, such as Sex and the City or the British Coronation Street, now generate significant revenues from fees paid by advertisers to make sure, for example, that the computer is a Macintosh, the car a Mercedes, and the cell phone a Motorola. Indeed, much of the logic of the media industries is oriented to the search for (or invention of) content that can easily be extended across different media platforms and used for product tie-ins and cross promotions. The purpose of such strategies is to create a network of intertextual links that suggests a coherent modality of use or enjoyment for the product. One medium that has acquired a certain popularity is physical space. Recently, as a key strategy of retailing in general, there has been a proliferation of themed commercial environments aimed to create programmed “experiences.” In these spaces, consumers are set free in a controlled environment to produce an identity or a common social world using the means of production and the hints provided by the themed environment. Within marketing, contemporary brand management has developed as a response to the growing complexity and diversity of consumer demand. Over time, it has shifted its focus from working principally on the product and its aesthetic presentation to working more on managing the social practices in which meaning and value are attached to brands. This way, brand management has become ever more a matter of managing social processes that are external to the companies, a form for social engineering, if you will. This shift of attention, from the product to the social processes in which the product is used and talked about, has become particularly articulated in the new media environment, in part because new media (or, more precisely, networked information and communication technologies) allow a greater mobility and productivity of consumer demand. Consumers can come together in new and more advanced ways to produce meaning and value around brands. At the same time, the digital new media environment renders such communications and interactions traceable in new and radically enhanced ways. This has created an enhanced scope for data mining and other forms of consumer surveillance.

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Finally, the new media environment can be artificially designed and programmed in new ways, giving rise to new kinds of “realities,” that is, artificial ambiences where brands come to assume particular kinds of meanings or be connected to particular kinds of experiences. Recently, we have seen how this logic of programming is extended into physical space as emotional and affective factors are ever more taken into account by designers and architects in constructing experiential spaces where particular affective intensities have been inscribed.

Brands and Finance The shift of attention from the material to the immaterial and from products to brands as the focus of strategic managerial intervention has coincided with a general financialization of the economy. As production processes become ever more globalized and socialized, involving extended networks of subcontractors and coproducers, values and profits depend even more on the ability to appropriate a share of the global surplus that circulates on financial markets. Within management, this development is visible in the growing orientation toward shareholder-oriented corporate governance, where the goal of management is no longer principally that of maximizing the long-term position of the company but that of maximizing the (often short-term) value of stocks. Brands play two important functions in relation to this new global financial economy. First, because production processes have been socialized and globalized, most mass-market products are now produced by similar (or even the same) subcontractors. This means that material production processes have become generic and, as a consequence, most midmarket products are practically identical in form and function. Given the virtual absence of functional and quality differences between such products, the ability to construct a brand that makes a meaningful or affective difference becomes a crucial strategic advantage. This way, brands become an ever more valuable strategic asset. Second, and perhaps more important, brands are becoming ever more important as financial assets. While some of the value of brands consists in their ability to motivate consumers to pay a premium price for goods, a more important aspect of their value consists in their ability to convince investors to pay a premium price for stock.

The reasons for this are complex but worth briefly reiterating. The globalization of production means that companies rely ever more on external resources in the production process: the capacity of cooperation within the complex networks of subcontractors on which they rely; the ability of their coworkers to innovate and be creative and flexible (qualities that can, per definition, not be commanded); or, as mentioned before, the ability to attract positive affective investments or even innovation from their consumers and the public at large. These are resources that are located outside the processes that can be controlled and measured by means of established accounting regimes (which were erected in the 1930s to address the problem of inadequate accounting of the productivity of industrial capital, which had been a major factor behind the stock market bubble of the 1920s). This means that a growing share of the productive resources on which companies rely cannot be adequately represented by their book values. Instead, they are referred to as “intangibles.” In general, intangibles are resources that one suspects are crucial to business success but that cannot be adequately measured or represented. Presently, brands are the most important and fastest growing of these intangible assets. While impossible to measure in any precise way, figures indicate that the value of brands amounted to some 20 percent of the market value of intangibles in the 1950s, and some 70 percent in the 2000s. Interbrand, a leading brand consulting firm, routinely value brands to between 30 and 60 percent of the market value of companies. This means that to the extent that financial rent becomes an ever more important component of corporate profits (and this is the case in most consumer-oriented companies), the role of brands becomes not only that of motivating consumers to pay premium prices, but also or principally that of motivating investors to pay share prices that reflect a valuation of up to 60 percent above book value. In other words, brands are becoming important as cultural conventions that determine the division and appropriation of the global surplus that circulates on financial markets. Consequently, corporate branding strategies are increasingly directed toward the construction of such cultural conventions, with a view to underpin high financial valuations and not just consumer demand. This is particularly noteworthy in the fashion and luxury sector. The value of fashion brands

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has increased massively since 2004 (when investors turned to fashion and art in the wake of the dot.com crash). Consequently, the strategic focus of global fashion brands has shifted away from that of producing innovative garments and accessories able to follow or anticipate the flow of global demand to that of investing ever more in the construction of a valuable brand image, through investment in high street presence, the creation of art museums, luxury hotels and resorts, sponsorship of the fine arts, and generally a presence in the cultural environment in which the people who trade on financial markets move. Arguably, a similar logic contributed to explain the rising popularity and importance of corporate social responsibility. To the extent that brands grow in importance as financial assets, then a good reputation among the public at large (and not just among particular consumer groups) acquires tangible economic value. This way, it becomes even more important to contain and, if possible, anticipate responses to company behavior on the part of a diverse group of stakeholders. Overall, the nexus between brands and finance exemplifies an emerging key value logic of the information economy, where the socialized immaterial production that unfolds in diffuse networks of interaction and communication is connected directly to financial markets, where, packaged in the form of brand, it serves to provide the kinds of cultural conventions that can support the distribution of value and profits.

The Expansion of Branding The structurally central role of brands within global financial capitalism is reflected in the diffusion of branding beyond strictly economic practices. This is particularly visible in two important phenomena, city branding and personal branding. City branding builds on the idea that interventions on the aesthetic level can have direct political consequences. City branding initiatives generally consist of attempts to create new urban environments where particular, desirable attachments and practices can be inscribed within the environment itself, programmed so to say. This way, for example, gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods is supposed to generate an ambience that attracts members of the “creative” middle class. In turn, these people are supposed to support certain, more desirable, consumer-oriented lifestyles that have the effect of diminishing crime and instilling a different

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atmosphere in the city. As a consequence, the climate of the city changes and it becomes more prone to immaterial and symbolic innovation, spurring economic growth. Alternatively, investments in monuments, museums, or buildings by famous architects are believed to put the city on the map and attract members of the global managerial class as tourists. This will have the combined effect of changing the self-perception of the city and, as a consequence, instill more desirable behavioral patterns among its inhabitants, making the city attractive for the global managerial class, and thus hopefully attracting corporate investments and the relocation of offices. City branding has been a popular political tactic, in particular among postindustrial cities seeking to convert themselves to new centers of the knowledge economy. Evaluating the empirical evidence, however, it seems that, with few exceptions, city branding policies have been largely ineffective in generating innovation and economic growth. On the other hand, they have been generally effective in raising real estate prices (and attracting the middle class back into city centers). This way, city branding replicates the emerging financial value logic of brands. Through city branding, a new affective ambience is created for the city or neighborhood, this ambience is subsequently transformed in new higher real estate valuations, which can create a loan-fueled consumer bubble that drives the city economy. Just like city branding is a way of valorizing a cultural identity on real estate markets, self-branding has spread among contemporary knowledge workers as a way of valorizing those assets that do not fit neatly into a job description. The argument goes a bit like this: in an earlier epoch, personal identity was largely given by factors beyond the control of the individual—class, religion, inherited profession— and did not in any way matter much for his or her personal success. Today, however, personal selfpresentation and social networks are directly productive components of one’s professional self, and they need to be rationally cultivated to maximize the individual’s chances for success. But since such social and affective qualities are beyond established forms of measurement and certification (they are independent of formal qualifications, for example), they can only be rendered tangible through the construction of a personal brand that acts as tangible proof of one’s ability to display the kinds of qualities that are desirable. And the personal

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branding literature generally stresses that the personal brand is not a matter of appearances only, but that it should penetrate one’s whole life conduct; it needs to be “authentic.” In other words, if one can show that one is able to adapt and mold one’s life conduct in accordance with the requirements of the market, then this works as a tangible proof of one’s ability to undertake the kinds of affective labor that are becoming ever more central to any kind of successful knowledge work. In essence, like city governments and large corporations, knowledge workers invest in strategies of self-fashioning and identity management to construct cultural conventions that are able to support their otherwise immeasurable market values.

The Future of Brands Contemporary trends like the mediatization and rising interactivity of consumer culture have led brand managers to open up their brands to increased levels of consumer participation. Many brands now cultivate brand communities in which consumers are encouraged to interact and form social relations around the brand; other companies invite consumers to actively contribute to product and brand development through various strategies of user-led or “open” innovation. It is likely that this increasingly productive role of consumers will increase in the future, as online connectivity expands horizontally (including more people and reducing the digital divide) as well as vertically (penetrating deeper into the lifeworld through things like ubiquitous computing and an “internet of things”). Emerging technologies like three-dimensional printing and desktop manufacturing will probably also spread the ability to engage in material production (at least of simple things like, for example, plastic toys). Combined with expanding open design and open hardware movements, this will considerably shift the balance of power in the direction of consumers, who will, in turn, tend to act even more like producers or at least coproducers. It is likely that corporations will need to give up certain amounts of control over their brands, as well as parts of the revenue that they derive from them, to consumers to compensate for their new, directly productive role. Brands are likely to evolve in the direction of becoming productive communities—something akin to contemporary open source communities—where

the distinction between consumers and producers is less clear and where consumer participation is mainly motivated by affective or “ethical” concerns, like identification with the brand and its values. This means that it will become increasingly important for managers to articulate clear and attractive values that are able to keep the community together. Combined with the greater transparency that is likely to result from the further diffusion of Internet connectivity, this means that corporations will need to put greater emphasis on actually “living their values” in an authentic way to attract consumer participation in their brand communities. Companies will be pushed to act on their values in ways that go beyond merely economic concerns. This will give a growing political role to companies, as they will have to become major sources of social activism to sustain their brand communities.

Conclusion The transformation of brands from a maker’s mark signifying the identity and provenance of a product to a general principle of economic, urban, and even personal self-governance has accompanied the rising centrality of brands as social and economic institutions. These developments have been deeply interconnected to the globalization of the economy and to the transition from an industrial capitalism centered on material production to a cognitive capitalism centered on the immaterial production of information. In particular, the transformation and growing importance of brands have been the result of three important tendencies that have been central to the development of an information society. First, processes of globalization and automation have rendered material production increasingly generic. The result has been an ever more central role of information—such as design or brand—as a directly productive element in the value chain. Indeed, the history of brand management reflects an increasing integration of informational (or cultural) production within industrial production more generally, accompanied by the rise to prominence of first the cultural industries and later the so-called creative industries. Second, the growing financialization of the economy reflects a general socialization of the production process and an increasing reliance on cooperation, common knowledge, and a host of other external resources that are not easily quantifiable within

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exiting accounting regimes. In relation to these developments, brands have become important as cultural conventions that can establish the monetary value of such otherwise immeasurable resources. This function of brands as value conventions able to measure otherwise immeasurable resources has migrated outside of the corporate field. The knowledge worker establishes a branded self that is able to support his or her market value; the successful participant in online dating sites and other forms of Internet romance creates a romantic brand that is able to establish his or her desirability among thousands of virtually identical profiles; and successful city branding contributes to determining real estate prices. Overall, the centrality of branding testifies to the ever more important role played by the reflexive construction of a cultural identity in determining the flows of economic value. Third, the rise of brands testifies to a transformation in strategies of governance. The brand has been part and parcel of the rise of governance and control vis-à-vis older forms of institutionalized discipline. Indeed, the information society is characterized by a diminishing importance of institutional boundaries and a corresponding movement toward the putting to work of life itself as a source of value. In this context, brands exemplify a general movement from a form of power mainly located within particular institutions to a form of power that operates all across the social context, controlling movements and flows and creating artificial, programmed spaces where particular kinds of actions and desires have been inscribed. In this sense, brands exemplify a new kind of power that works through rather than against the freedom of individuals, attempting to manage such individual freedoms productively or, as in the case of self-branding, to promote the responsible self-management of freedom. Indeed, the core feature of contemporary branding is the attachment of economic value to properly managed freedoms. The spread and rising importance of this technique of governance reflects a real situation in which the production of value is ever more displaced from the kinds of institutionalized practices that could be (relatively) easily controlled to the kinds of socialized diffuse practices that escape disciplinary intervention. Adam Arvidsson See also Advertising; Globalization; Governmentality; Information Society; Innovation Studies; Markets and Marketing; Network Society; Production of Culture

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Further Readings Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge, 2006. Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. London: HarperCollins, 1997. Cochoy, Franck. Une histoire du marketing [A history of marketing]. Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1999. Gardner, Burleigh, and Sydney Levy. “The Product and the Brand.” Harvard Business Review (March–April 1955): 33–39. Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Lloyd, Richard. Neobohemia: Art and Commerce in the Post-Industrial City. New York: Routledge, 2006. Lury, Celia. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge, 2004. Marazzi, Christian. Capital and Language. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008. Marchand, Roland. Advertising and the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Maslow, Abraham Harold. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995. Moor, Liz. The Rise of Brands. London: Routledge, 2007. Muniz, Albert, and Thomas O’Guinn. “Brand Community.” Journal of Consumer Research 27, no. 4 (2001): 412–432. Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory, Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Schroeder, Jonathan, and Miriam Salzer-Morling, eds. Brand Culture. London: Routledge, 2006. Zwick, Detlev, Samuel K. Bonsu, and Aron Darmody. “Putting Consumers to Work: ‘Co-Creation’ and New Marketing Govern-Mentality.” Journal of Consumer Culture 8 (July 2008): 163–196.

BRAUDEL, FERNAND (1902–1985) Fernand Braudel was a leader of the group of French historians associated with the journal Annales, who took a long view of history (longue durée) in which the emphasis was on historical structures rather than

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events. Instead of the traditional approach to history that focused on the sequence of political events surrounding rulers of nations—their wars, laws, alliances, and succession—the Annales historians tried to understand the gradual changes in the everyday lives of people throughout the world. Braudel was distinctive in charting the economic life of people rather than of nation-states; much of his writing focused on the everyday consumption of goods and on the practices of local production rather than on monetary or mercantile systems. After an early career teaching in Algeria and Brazil, Braudel returned to Paris in 1938 and began research for what was to become his magnum opus; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. He wrote much of it while a German prisoner of war, defended it as a thesis in 1947, and published it in 1949, with a second revised edition in 1966, which was translated into English in 1972 (1995). In this work, Braudel began to explore how the material conditions of existence, such as the slowness of transport and communication lines, constrained the actions of rulers and generals. The structures that affect everyday life are not exclusively political but range beyond the nation-state and even the empire to cover larger geographical areas—such as the Mediterranean Sea—and involve environmental features such as mountains, mineral deposits, and rainfall. He writes of dividing “historical time into geographical time, social time and individual time” (1995, 21) and developed an approach to history that explained events not in terms of the personal qualities of individuals but in the circumstances under which they could act. Braudel is most important to the study of consumption as a historian of the almost imperceptible pace of change in the lives of ordinary people up until the advent of modern communications in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In 1979, his account of “material civilization,” subtitled “The Structures of Everyday Life” (English trans. 1992), became the first in a three-volume work with the overall title of Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century. In it, he describes the flow of gradual changes through the preindustrial world in terms of population, food, clothes, shelter, money, and towns. Material culture is not designed or constrained by political boundaries but contributes to what Braudel calls “civilizations”—groups of people who share cultural characteristics. He

records, for example, how wheat was grown in many parts of the world, but in Europe it was a staple crop characteristic of the regional civilization. Other grains, vegetables, and pulses were grown but, because only the rich regularly ate meat, dependence on bread led to chronic scarcities when wheat crops failed. Typically, Braudel moves between these broad generalities and the specificity of archival detail, such as the lease granted to Carthusian monks in Picardy in 1325 to arbitrate in disputes over the distribution of manure for improving wheat yields (1992, vol. 1, 116). Braudel spells out the lack of light, fresh water, and sanitation, domestic amenities that we take for granted, but he does not dismiss fashion as a frippery indulged in only by the rich. He reports the contrasts among ordinary folk in seventeenth-century Flanders and Germany who sometimes wore ruffs and hats trimmed with gold and silver to express taste and distinction but at other times were characteristically dirty and lacking shoes. Braudel suggests that fashion among ordinary people began in 1350, as men’s tunics became short and tight and women began to wear close-fitting bodices cut with a large décolleté (317). As well as food, houses, and fashion, he explores technology, weaponry, energy, and mobility as the background for the discussion in later volumes of the more traditional historians’ themes of trade, industrialization, and state politics. Braudel’s work continues to serve as a reminder to all those interested in consumer culture that it is socially and historically embedded in the everyday lives and material practices of people in processes extending far beyond those of markets, exchange, advertising, selling, and buying. Tim Dant See also Civilizing Processes; Elias, Norbert; Geography; History; Material Culture

Further Readings Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Burke, Peter. “Fernand Braudel.” In The Annales School Critical Assessments. Vol. 3, Fernand Braudel, edited by Stuart Clark, 111–123. London: Routledge, 1999.

Bricolage

BRICOLAGE Bricolage is the process of taking consumer objects and symbols and putting them together in new configurations to create new meanings. Examples of bricolage in consumer culture include the use of the safety pin in punk subcultures or, in the United Kingdom, the Volkswagen car insignia in hip-hop culture as personal decorative items: a sort of homemade jewelry made from nonjewelry items. The term is usually used to describe the practices of groups or subcultures for whom the use of consumer symbols provides an identity that is resistant to the dominant culture from which the symbols were appropriated. Although primarily associated with British subcultural groups, such as punks, mods, Teds, and skinheads, the term is now used widely to describe any active “putting together” of styles, music, settings, and objects that contribute to a group identity. The term bricolage (from the French bricoler: to arrange, to “potter”) has been used in various disciplines (including visual arts, architecture, and linguistics, as well as in the social sciences) to refer to the process of “putting together” of different items. Its influence in studies of consumption originates from the seminal use of the term by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, between 1964 and 1991. This usage borrows heavily from the structuralist anthropology of Claude LéviStrauss, which describes bricolage as the improvisations of ordinary people in making order and meaning from the world around them. The Birmingham school approach also favored a broader model of hegemonic power that relied on ideas of negotiation and partial consent within hierarchies. Other important influences on the use of the term include Surrealist art, particularly the use of “ready mades,” such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” constructed from a urinal. Its use by the Birmingham school means that bricolage has a particularly British and European pedigree, yet the term has traveled well, capturing the process of using style and consumption to display active or resistant group membership across the world and in many different settings. The publication by members of the CCCS of the key texts Resistance through Rituals in 1976, and Subcultures in 1979, launched the notion of bricolage as stylistic politics, in which groups of young people

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used style and consumption as a way of marking differences from dominant and parental cultures. In this context, bricolage refers to the presentation of a collection of cultural and consumer symbols by youth groups to define specific group identities. Important, however, is that the presentation of symbols often involves the subverting of original or intended meanings, or the reuse (the term appropriation is often used in this context) of symbols alongside other contradictory or jarring symbols. Perhaps the most widely known example of this type of bricolage is from the punk subculture, originating in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, but then spreading to the United States and beyond. Punk became the archetypal do-it-yourself bricolage, in which not only did musical skill matter less than “making noise” with instruments, but key symbols of authority, such as images of the British aristocracy (the queen’s portrait, tartan), were placed playfully on clothing and record covers, alongside reappropriated tokens of throwaway consumer culture, such as the safety pin and ripped plastic bag. The Birmingham school approach to youth cultures highlighted consumption activities as central to the resolution of tensions faced by the workingclass youth of Britain in the postwar period. Facing upheaval caused by rapid social change, social and occupational mobility, increasing affluence and migration (e.g., of immigrant labor from the dwindling British Empire into the United Kingdom and of established working-class communities out of slum areas into new suburbs), teenagers in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s created a prolific range of distinctive styles. These stylistic communities, according to the Birmingham school authors (such as John Clarke, Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, and Tony Jefferson), provided a way of bridging the ambivalences young people felt. Money in their pockets, yet rejecting the dislocations felt by their uprooted parents, youth groups turned to style and cultural consumption for identity and community. Examples of these consumption communities included mods, teddy boys, skinheads, Rastas, rude boys, and hippies. Each group had a series of key consumer items, including dress, music, settings, and “accessories” that denoted membership. For example, the mod style included the use of Italianate, sharp tailoring, close-cropped hair, the scooter (such as a Vespa or Lambretta), and soul music played at “all nighters.” Teddy boys used a similar range of symbols, including

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Edwardian-style suits, often in bright colors, crepesoled shoes, bootlace ties, and longer, greased hair that was styled in deliberately elaborate ways. Such collections of consumer symbols, argued the Birmingham school, were formed as a bricolage because the stylistic whole communicated a message that was resistant to the dominant and parental cultures, yet that also appropriated parts of that culture. The particular group style was a collection of things, some remaining unmodified, some turned on their heads and used in a manner different from that intended (the Edwardian suit was originally designed on Savile Row for wealthy, upper-middle-class men; the scooter was originally designed for women shoppers wearing the full skirts of the 1950s, yet shifted in meaning to become the ultimate masculine accessory). These processes—putting together, appropriating, redefining—were the essence of bricolage. Yet they were not seen as random and meaningless; on the contrary, the outcome was a meaning that was coherent and significant in relation to the particular class and cultural position of the youth groups at the time. In the case of the mods, the strait-laced smartness of their hardworking parents was adapted and modified by using distinctly modernist European references and by the hedonistic attachment to street drugs and imported black music, the rarer the better. This combination of styles provided a meaning that challenged the respectable, white, working-class, suburban origins of young mods without completely rejecting their background. The Teds appropriated styles aimed by mainstream tailors at upper-class men, but they were worn by working-class men with very precise rules about the arrangement of clothes and hair. Any challenges to these fashion rules were met with hostility and often violence (according to Jefferson), thus undermining the relationship between smart dandyism and gentility. The Ted style was both accepting of the image of rough, violent, working-class culture that was prevalent in the media of the 1950s and 1960s, yet at the same time modifying it with a highly aesthetic rule book. Bricolage became the shorthand for collective symbolic politics in many discussions of consumer culture following the early subcultural writings. The term became synonymous with postmodern approaches to consumer culture, which favored the exploration of mixed meanings and juxtaposed symbolic messages as sources of resistance, creativity, and

opportunity for agency and identity in the face of mass consumption. The idea of (symbolic) resistance to mass consumption was an appealing alternative to the idea of consumers as “dupes.” However, the term and the broad assumptions of the Birmingham school approach have faced considerable critique. The first major objection is that in order for bricolage to have a salient political or aesthetic purpose, groups ought to know they are being resistant in their consumption choices and even have some sense of the shared meanings outlined by academics. In fact, many critics objected, youth subcultural members themselves had no idea what they were wearing and buying had such apparent significance. Second, the process of borrowing cultural symbols from the dominant culture combined with the voracious appetite of consumer capitalism for new fashions meant that bricolage inevitably became incorporated into the dominant culture. Partial consent to be part of the dominant culture meant that, in the end, bricoleurs end up colluding with the very culture that was challenged. The inevitable commercialization of punk is often cited as a prime example of this incorporation. Third, the overemphasis on spectacular forms of youth consumption and the attribution of agency to stylistic processes have arguably contributed to the idea of consumption as a distraction from the real conditions of socioeconomic disadvantage faced by young people. Although the idea of bricolage is still used, these objections have led to an empirical focus on more mundane consumption practices. There has also been extensive theoretical critique: despite becoming the keyword for postmodern cultural consumption, bricolage remains essentially a structuralist concept. Under the influence of poststructuralist ideas, however, it also fell out of fashion, perhaps superseded by the idea of assemblage, which has a similar meaning, but without active subjects remaking discourse. Rebecca Leach See also Cultural Studies; Material Culture; Post-Structuralism; Resistance; Semiotics; Subculture; Subversion; Youth Culture

Further Readings Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976.

British Empire Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979. Jenks, Chris. Culture. London: Routledge, 2005. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966. Muggleton, David. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Berg, 2000.

BRITISH EMPIRE This entry examines the contribution of the British Empire to consumer culture and looks at how the British Empire can help us understand the historical links between consumption and the development of international commerce. The British Empire—that is, the imperial holdings of the British state from the seventeenth century onward—emerges in two stages. Discussion of what has become known as the First British Empire focuses on the settlement and government of parts of the mainland of North America, as well as the Caribbean. This initial formation of empire lasted from the early seventeenth century until the late eighteenth century, at which point British holdings became severely depleted after the United States successfully prosecuted a war of independence. The stage that is known as the Second British Empire developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as British imperial ambition and appetite for the emerging practices of free trade was directed toward Asia, the Pacific, and especially the colonization of India. This latter fit of imperial adventurism was to reach its height in the mid-nineteenth century and last until World War II.

Empire, Trade, and Consumption As Niall Ferguson and others have noted, empire began as a race for natural resources between the major European states and developed into an enterprise founded on the pursuit of trade. The British Empire introduced new markets to the British commercial sector but also provided an abundant variety of exotic goods and merchandise to the British marketplace. In many respects, the Britain of the eighteenth century had a set of conditions peculiarly suited to governing such an empire. For one thing, in a process accelerated by the union between England and Scotland, Britain had its networks of government, regulation, and trade centralized in the capital

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of London, which even then stood apart as a truly “international” city. Also, the population of Britain was rapidly moving from agriculture to manufacturing, often beginning with a transitional pattern we would now recognize as seasonal working, before finally shifting into full-time factory work. All of this meant that by the first decade of the nineteenth century, Britain had a greatly expanded and more economically productive population. While the establishment of a mercantile class of professional traders was crucial for exploiting the opportunities that the imperial holdings presented, still more fundamental was the extension of a regular income across a greater spread of the population with a corresponding increase in spending power. The latter stage of the British Empire was therefore coincidental with the expansion of the consumer base in Britain, meaning that, as it developed, the British Empire became progressively tied in with the creation and satisfaction of consumer needs. The viability of the imperial project depended on extracting commodities from overseas territories and marketing these commodities to consumer bases, both in Britain and elsewhere. One of the most notable of these emergent commodities, one that straddles both periods of empire, is tea. From the seventeenth century, prohibitive taxation levied on tea from China made it a luxury item. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, the availability of mass-produced tea from imperial holdings in India, coupled with increased speed and reliability of transportation through the introduction of the high-speed clipper ships, began to make tea an accessible commodity. An organization known as the East India Company was instrumental in establishing tea as a mass crop in India and held an early stateapproved monopoly on its export. Another significant factor in establishing imperial produce within everyday habits of consumption was the British habit of taking tea with sugar; a commodity imported from other, slave-dependent British colonies in the West Indies. The exoticism of tea as a product from a faraway continent has been apparent in the way it was marketed right up until the twentieth century, with brands such as Camp Tea combining Orientalist discourses with the power-laden imagery of white colonial rule. Even now, reminders of empire can be seen in such “nostalgia” brands as Clipper Tea. Julie Fromer reflects on the irony of the drink of a leaf

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nonindigenous and impracticable to grow in Britain becoming such an integral part of the daily practice of Britishness; a “necessary luxury,” as she describes it. It is also ironic, in quite a different way, that the trade in tea helped cleave Britain from its initial imperial holdings, when objections to the levy of a British taxation on tea imported to the United States gave rise to the 1773 protest known as the Boston Tea Party.

Empire, Violence, and Addiction The British Empire’s original roots were in money making of a far less cultivated sort. In Ferguson’s history of empire, he points to its beginnings in acts of state-sponsored piracy by such figures as Henry Morgan and Sir Walter Raleigh against Spanish overseas interests in the Americas and the Caribbean. Even in legitimate settlements, peopled by impoverished emigrants and persecuted minorities, British colonies in the Americas and the sugar plantations of the West Indies were cultivated and made profitable by forced labor, with the London-based Royal African Company (1660–1752) being a major provider of enslaved Africans. Much of the affluence that allowed the extension of the consumer base in Britain came thanks to mass enslavement and deportation. The cultivation of what may be described as addictive consumption was also used as a political weapon by British imperialists. This entry has already alluded to the doomed attempts to draw taxation from the American appetite for tea, and a still more extreme example centers on the introduction of the drug opium into China in the eighteenth century. This was a strategic attempt to manipulate consumer demand to overcome importation and currency restrictions. On goods exported from China, of which tea happened to be one, the Chinese authorities would only accept silver as a means of payment, which Britain had to acquire from elsewhere at considerable cost. In response, British traders started using opium as a means of exchange in dealing with Chinese traders. From 1757, the previously mentioned East India Company became the main traffickers of opium into China, using tactical means, such as temporary credit systems, to circumvent Chinese law. This caused widespread addiction in China and occasioned such concern among the Chinese authorities that their attempts to quell the supply of opium, against the will

of the British authorities, caused the ill-fated Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860) and the decline of imperial China.

Conclusion It is useful to remember that consumer practices are elements of a competitive capitalist system, where branding strategies are geared with an “inbuilt obsolescence,” and different consumer choices compete for a portion of what the consumer spends. The influence of the British Empire should be seen in this unfolding context. Creation of the demand for opium was discreditable even at the time, attracting disdain from British political figures, such as the then-future Prime Minister William Gladstone, and it would certainly be seen as international criminality in the contemporary era. Even the British attachment to tea is weakened by a shift toward coffee and the packaged “café culture” of such brands as Starbucks and Costa Coffee. Just as the consumption of tea was at once a marker of personal sophistication and of national belonging from the eighteenth century onward, so it is that branded coffee has become a lifestyle marker of the twentyfirst century. Yet tea remains Britain’s default national “ordinary” drink and is still marketed as such. Overall, the consumer market depends on an effective and focused media strategy, as well as historical and cultural factors, and is inevitably contingent. The East India Company, described by Karl Marx as masters of bribery and corruption in their manipulation of trade and consumer demand, sounds as quaint to contemporary ears as Starbucks Coffee might be to those in the future. Even so, practices associated with the British Empire helped establish the practices of creating market demand to meet supply, and in that sense can be seen as an important staging post in the development of consumer culture and the exploitation of consumption for profit and national gain. Michael Higgins See also Caribbean and the Slave Trade; Coffee; Colonialism; Luxury and Luxuries; Opium Trade; Orientalism; Sugar; Tea

Further Readings Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Broadcast Media Fromer, Julie E. A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. Hall, Catherine, and Sonya O. Rose. At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. MacKenzie, John M. Imperialism and Popular Culture. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987. Marx, Karl, and Fredrich Engels. On Colonialism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959. Stocker, Sarah, ed. The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

BROADCAST MEDIA Broadcast media, including over-the-air radio and television, have been the primary drivers of consumer culture in the United States, and, increasingly, since the latter part of the twentieth century, across much of the world. Broadcast television in particular is the most powerful vehicle that drives consumer culture for three reasons. First, among all mass media, broadcast television reaches and is used by the greatest number of people. It can in fact be argued to be the most “massive” of all mass media. Second, one of the factors that accounts for this widespread use is ease of use. We are able to watch television (and listen to radio) on a continuum from absolute passivity to absolute engagement, but always take in some measure of information as long as our eyes are open and because our ears cannot be closed. Third, the commercial model of broadcasting took hold from early on in the United States and, despite efforts and sympathies against this and in favor of the social or public broadcasting model, is increasingly becoming the preferred standard across the globe. According to this commercial model, the attention of listeners and viewers is paramount; this is the commodity the broadcasting industry buys and sells. As a result, the nature of broadcast programming is shaped and determined, first and foremost, by decisions about what will best attract and hold audiences’ attention. Another way to frame broadcast media’s power in the creation, maintenance, and growth of consumer culture is to place it within the context that is the history of media. Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press in Mainz, Germany, in AD 1455. This invention not only brought about the first medium of mass communication, but also

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one of the original inventions of the Industrial Revolution: the printing press is a literal assembly line for text, and the assembly line is the key invention of the Industrial Revolution. The assembly line allows for the mass production of goods, which in turn means we are able to produce goods to support a growing population, and that we can do so based on economies of scale that reduce production costs and thereby make goods more affordable. However, we sometimes also produce more goods than there is demand for them. This leads to a situation in which we need to create demand for the excess goods. And this creating or ensuring of demand becomes one of the main entry points to what is called mass culture. Mass culture is the modern condition in which mass media, the mass production of goods, and the establishment of a mass public intersect. Goods themselves are mass produced with the onset of the Industrial Age—and continue to be so in our information and service-based economy. Media fare itself also becomes a mass-produced commodity at this juncture, bringing about our modern media industry and connecting people as audiences, markets, readerships, and so on. In addition, mass media become the means by which messages about goods and services are brought to such people’s attention—to assist in the selling of goods and services, to help one company win out over its competitors, and to lay the very foundation for the commercial mass media industry. The latter comes about through two important developments. The first of these developments is what has come to be known as the “penny press.” Benjamin Day is largely credited with this innovation through the publication of his newspaper, The New York Sun, in 1833. The significance of what Day conceived is that it turns the tradition of journalism, if not the entire history of our media of human communication, on its head. Prior to the penny press, a book or pamphlet (the precursor to the modern newspaper) offered content that had intrinsic value for a relatively narrow constituency, who would choose to purchase it for their use and edification. With the penny press, however, content is decided on and presented based on assumptions about what will interest a mass readership, with the objective of attracting as many readers as possible. Thus, the term penny press comes from Day’s realization that he could charge readers an affordable price—making The New York

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Sun attractive to them on the basis of both its content and its price—because the paper would not derive its revenue from their purchase. Instead, the paper would make money by offering page space to producers of goods and services who wished to bring their wares to the attention of the readership that the paper would deliver. And the value of that page space would be determined by how many readers would buy the paper and potentially see and read the commercial message. The second development is the rise of the modern advertising industry and its agencies. This industry also arises during the nineteenth century, as the “middleman” between companies that produce goods and services and a mass media industry that increasingly adopts Day’s business model and becomes the primary means for producers to market their wares to the masses. Volney Palmer, which opened for business in Boston in 1841, is generally recognized as the first advertising agency in the United States. However, Volney Palmer represented and operated in the service of newspapers rather than producers and advertisers. N. W. Ayer, established in Philadelphia in 1875, becomes the first modern agency, serving producers and advertisers rather than the media. This ancillary business is conceived just in time for the introduction of broadcast media on both the local station and national network level.

The Birth of Broadcasting Broadcast media are developed as the result of a series of discoveries and inventions that harness electromagnetic energy as a means to transmit messages through both wires and space (or what at the time was called the ether). The inventions include the telegraph, the telephone, and the “wireless,” or wireless telegraph, invented by British citizen Guglielmo Marconi during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The wireless is the immediate precursor to the invention of wireless telephony, or radio. The wireless itself is not a broadcast medium. While it is a point-to-multipoint medium, sending out its signal from a single transmitter to all receivers within range, the user/receptor of a wireless message must be trained in Morse code to “receive” the message. With the invention of radio during the first decade of the twentieth century—and credit for the actual invention remains contested to this day—we send an electrical analog of sound energy through space via a

“carrier wave,” and then convert this signal back to sound energy (pressure on the molecules of air) via a speaker or headset for reception by our ear. Thus, radio is a broadcast medium due to the fact that anyone with the receiving apparatus can receive and process the message. The development of radio as an industry was delayed by World War I, largely because the U.S.based patents for wireless and radio technology were given over to the U.S. government for military use. It is when the engineers who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps returned home and continued to pursue radio telephony as a hobby that the industry came into being. Westinghouse, an appliance manufacturer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, learns that one of its employees, an electrical engineer named Frank Conrad, is operating a hobby “station” in a space above the garage of his home, from which he is transmitting recorded music and reading the news of the day. This station, which Conrad gave the call sign 8XK, inspires Westinghouse to establish the first radio station operating as a business in the United States: KDKA—a station that is still in existence today. Also important, Westinghouse’s plan to build a business out of radio is motivated by the company’s primary business. The idea is a simple one: if Westinghouse can put a station or stations on the air that will attract listeners with music, news, and talk, they can capitalize on such a service by manufacturing and selling radio receivers. However, without planned or built-in obsolescence, this business model is a dead end: once everyone owns a receiver, no further source of revenue remains. It is on August 28, 1922, that an AT&T-owned station in New York, WEAF, borrows a page from Day’s playbook and ushers in the age of commercial broadcasting—utilizing what was at first referred to as “toll broadcasting.” (The owning company grants an outside entity the use of its airwaves and airtime, in return for which the outside entity pays a toll.) The management of WEAF sells 15 minutes of airtime for $50 to the Queensboro Corporation so the latter can make a sales pitch to listeners for their Hawthorne Court cooperative apartment complex. The idea of selling chunks of time in this way quickly gave way to the practice of program sponsorship—a practice that lasted into the age of television in the 1960s (at which time thirty- and sixty-second commercial breaks became the conventional standard). With program sponsorship, the sponsor pays

Broadcast Media

for or subsidizes the cost of production, the sponsor’s name is attached to the name of the program, and commercials for the single sponsor, with accompanying music and sound effects, are announced live-toair during the program. The final realization of the power of the commercial model in the United States came with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is during this period that radio became a respite from the tumult of the times, and, as a result, that the industry was able to weather the economic downturn better than most industries. It also became clear, however, that for all of the hope and promise that broadcasting would uplift the masses by bringing culture and educational programming into their homes, it is entertainment that people seem to be interested in more than anything else. In particular, they want storytelling into which they can escape from the burdens of daily life and relax. As a consequence, and given a business model that prioritizes and requires audiences’ attention, the imperative to “give the audience what they want” was cemented into the U.S. system at this time.

The British Social or Public Broadcasting Model as Alternative The other model for broadcast media, which developed concurrently with and as an alternative to this commercial model, was Great Britain’s social or public model for broadcast media. British public broadcasting differs greatly from public broadcasting in the United States in that public broadcasting in the United States was not formalized until passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 (an addendum to the Communications Act of 1934) and because public broadcasting in the United States has always been overwhelmed by, and underutilized because of, the commercial juggernaut that is well over 90 percent of U.S. radio and television stations and programming hours. This public sector model begins with the establishment of the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, in the same year U.S. radio discovers the concept of toll broadcasting: 1922. The philosophy undergirding the creation of the British broadcasting system and the BBC is in three parts. The first is that broadcasting will exist mainly to serve as and provide a public service. The second is that the system and its programming will be financed by a license fee imposed on peoples’ receiver or “set” ownership.

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The third is that the system will be a monopoly service; that no competition will influence its programming or basic purpose. For the greater part of the twentieth century, this model is adopted or closely adapted in most of the countries and sovereign territories of the world— becoming the rule rather than the exception. This is true of the countries that make up the rest of Western Europe. It is true of countries like the former Soviet Union, in which broadcast media are state-owned and operated but as a mouthpiece for government control and propaganda. It is true for developing countries in which media are also almost exclusively state-owned and operated in support of the country’s continued growth and existence. And it remains true for the greater part of the twentieth century—until the mid-1980s and well into the age of television.

Television The two technologies behind the invention of television—the iconoscope, or image tube, and the electrical scanning process—were developed during the 1930s. And it remains an interesting historical fact that the first laboratory image transmitted by Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of the scanning process, was that of a dollar sign. Television came into the picture and supplanted radio as the world’s primary broadcast medium after World War II and as part of the rise of the peacetime economy. The obvious reason television replaces radio as people’s preferred medium is its provision of pictures: the medium provides, in its entertainment programming, a closer analog to our experience of the real world—much like cinema, but now delivered to the comforts of one’s living room. However, the key reason for television’s ascendance is not audience interest in the added attraction of video to audio. The real impetus behind this shift has to do with the addition and power of visuals as a means to sell products and services. Sponsorship of broadcast programming ended shortly into the age of television, and the practice of interrupting programming with regularly scheduled short-form commercials began for two reasons. The first is that the cost of producing television programming dwarfs the cost of producing radio programming, rendering the process of replicating the purchase of radio airtime with television airtime hugely expensive. The second reason is that the practice of scheduling

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thirty- and sixty-second commercials during what are really a limited number of programs on a limited number of television channels means greater opportunities for more companies to advertise on television. The overarching role of television in consumer culture, however, is not to be found only in the portion of television’s offerings that is its commercials. While television is an audio-visual medium, in the practice of television production, it is the visuals that are emphasized: attention-getting visuals are what hold and are used to hold audiences’ attention. Compound this with the commercial broadcasting industry’s now-conventional practice of assuming what audiences want, and creating and providing programming based on these assumptions, and the result is entertainment programming that speaks, in its entirety, to the cultural mindset of consumption. Broadcast television programming is replete with images of affluence; of a material culture that includes beautiful homes and cars and attractive people with expensive, fashionable wardrobes. In addition, product placement within programming is a relatively recent phenomenon that has resulted from the broadcast industry’s attempt to find alternative streams of revenue in the face of dwindling viewership and ratings brought about by competition from cable and satellite television and the Internet. A significant factor in the rise of cable and satellite television is that these services do not merely compete with traditional broadcast television, they are an extension of the basic business model of broadcast media, while also making plain the fact that television programming is itself a consumer product. Cable and satellite television bring the concept of the “dual revenue stream” to electronic mass communication. Networks and cable and satellite service providers derive revenue from both the sale of commercial time and monthly fees paid by subscribers, much as newspapers and magazines have always done. As a result, consumers not only pay for television as they always have—indirectly, through the premium placed on the price of goods and services to offset the costs of advertising them—but they also pay directly through their subscription fee. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the commercial model of U.S. entertainment television programming began to catch on across the globe, beginning in Western Europe. It did so for three reasons. The first is that the history of the United States and

Hollywood exporting its entertainment fare eventually brings about acceptance of (or resignation to) the clamor for such programming, but also leads many countries and cultures to endeavor to produce their own such programming, rather than continue to import U.S. programming, which some view as a means of “colonization” by cultural products. The second reason is the push at the time toward free markets, economic growth, and the stimulation of private enterprise. The third reason is the sudden push toward globalization and the growth of multinational corporations—in particular, multinational media companies like The News Corporation and Sony, who learned well the lessons and production values of what were formerly, in many cases, U.S.-based businesses.

The Future Perhaps the only antidote to the great power and sway broadcast media hold over consumer culture is to be found in the movement known as media education or media literacy. This movement arose out of English-speaking countries, such as Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, beginning in the 1970s, at least in part as a response to U.S. commercial media and its seeming promotion of consumption rather than citizenship and materialism and acquisition over active engagement in political, civic, and social life. Among its lessons, media education can provide educators and citizens with the tools to critically assess broadcast media, to resist their seductions, and to adjust one’s use of and reliance on these media in ways that are healthy and constructive. The one threat to broadcast media’s hegemony among commercial media that remains is whether the practice of “personalized” advertising via the Internet—which uses aggregated information about an individual’s past web purchases and information about the similar purchase histories of others to suggest or predict what one might want to buy—will prove to be a more effective and efficient advertising model than broadcast media’s advertising that targets the least common denominator. Thomas Gencarelli See also Advertising; Audience Research; Broadcast Media; Gender and the Media; Hegemony; Information Society; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Print Media

Broadcast Media

Further Readings Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2001. Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. Barnouw, Erik. A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Barnouw, Erik. The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States 1933–1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Barnouw, Erik. The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States from 1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Press, 1985. Scannell, Paddy. A Social History of British Broadcasting. Vol. 1, 1922–1939 Serving the Nation. New York: John Wiley, 1991.

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Schiller, Herbert I. Mass Communications and American Empire. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. Siebert, Fred S., Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm. Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1963. Sterling, Christopher H., and John M. Kittross. Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting. 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Tunstall, Jeremy. The Media Were American: U.S. Mass Media in Decline. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wood, James. History of International Broadcasting. Vol. 1. Herts, UK: Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2008.

BUZZ MARKETING See Markets and Marketing

C that destroys the old (feudal) order of society; capitalism is a continually revolutionary force that never rests and acknowledges no limits, whether geographical or normative, to its activities—what Josef Schumpeter would much later refer to as “creative destruction” (1942); capitalism is a force for secularization and for what Max Weber called the disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world (our “sober senses”). The claim that capitalism is a revolutionary force that both removes barriers to and finds mechanisms for ever-increasing efficiency and thus wealth (whether for some or for all has been a frequent matter of contention) was made in a no less well-known passage written some seventy years earlier:

CAPITALISM Capitalism has frequently been identified as the central driving force of modernity, sometimes alone, but usually in combination with the state, religious or philosophical ideas, or a combination of them. As a starting point, capitalism can be defined as a system of production and exchange operating on a continual basis in which goods (commodities) are produced to be sold on a market with the aim of maximizing profit. Capitalism is founded on the private ownership of the “means of production,” and work is organized via the labor contract in which wages are exchanged for work. This entry examines capitalism as a system of production and exchange, its relation to market and consumer society, and raises issues of diversity and the “spirit” and ideas it embodies.

I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among themselves about twelve pounds of pins in a day. (Smith 1776, 5)

Capitalism as a System of Production and Exchange All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx and Engels 1848/1967, 83)

This is Adam Smith’s famous pin factory, in which “one man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a forth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head” (5). The passage identifies a further key component of capitalism: an advanced division of labor (specialization of tasks) within the production process that, as Émile Durkheim argued, generated and reflected a broader social division of labor. The maximization of efficiency is, in turn, driven by the need to maximize profits. Weber, for example,

This famous passage from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is packed with recurrent themes in the analysis of capitalism: capitalism is a revolutionary force against tradition 129

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draws a sharp distinction between the “old economic order” that asked “how can I give, on this piece of land, work and sustenance to the greatest possible number of men?” and the new capitalist economy, in which the question becomes “from this given piece of land how can I produce as many crops as possible for the market with as few men as possible?” (1906/1948, 367). He therefore distinguishes rent from profit. The rents drawn from the ownership of land are designed to maintain a specific lifestyle, say that of the riding and hunting country gentleman. Unlike profit, rent has no necessary drive to maximization. Under conditions of market competition, however, the maximization of profit becomes a necessity for survival detached from tradition or cultural definitions of an appropriate or adequate standard of living. It becomes an end in itself. Goods are produced for the market, for their “exchange value” rather than their “use value,” to use Marx’s terms. In other words, they are commodities produced to be sold. What distinguishes capitalism from earlier modes of production is not the simple fact of commodity production, but that monetary profit becomes the dominant rationale for production; everything that can be converted into a commodity (including human labor power) is so converted. For Marx, under capitalism, money becomes the universal measure of value, and social relations become increasingly mediated via it; via the “cash nexus.” Both Marx and Weber also distinguish modern from premodern capitalism on the basis of the latter’s continual and rational nature. For Marx, modern capitalism is a circular and continuous process in which commodities (C) are exchanged for money (M), which is then plowed back into the production of new commodities, creating a theoretically unending cycle: C-M-C. Similarly, Weber differentiates premodern adventurer and robber from modern rational capitalism. The former is periodic, opportunistic, and irrational; the latter continuous, grounded in an ethic of business, and rational.

Capitalism: One or Many? If there is general agreement that capitalism is a continually revolutionary force, there is equal disagreement about means and outcomes. With respect to means, the Marxist tradition emphasizes the role of violence in capitalism’s struggle against tradition and,

with respect to outcomes, Marx, in his economic (though not always in his historical) writings, tends to the view that the effects of capitalism are fairly uniform; that it reconstructs society and social relations in its own image. These are two of the key issues on which Marxist and Weberian analysis of capitalism diverge. The private ownership of the means of production by capitalists (by the bourgeoisie) requires the separation of the worker from the means of production; a historical process that includes both the legal and violent destruction of traditional rights (e.g., access to common land, the collection of firewood from forests) and the expropriation of the means of production (tools, land, etc.). Only in this way can the worker be converted into a wage laborer and forced into the factory. Marx refers to this process, which includes such diverse historical phenomena as the English enclosures, colonial adventure, and the Indian Wars, as “so-called primitive accumulation” (Marx 1867/1976, part eight). Once these and other “traditional” barriers to the operation of capitalist accumulation and production have been removed, the way is clear for capitalism to unroll itself, eventually across the globe, and to unfold its inner and inexorable logic to the point of its own eventual destruction. Although Weber accepts that the expropriation of the means of production is an essential feature of, and historical precondition for, capitalism (indeed, he extends this to the soldier, administrator, university assistant, etc.), he views the struggle against tradition as in part a cultural process that can take a peaceful course and one that, furthermore, has divergent and context-dependent effects and outcomes. These points can be seen with particular clarity in his contrast between the impact of agricultural capitalism in America and on continental Europe in his St. Louis lecture of 1906. In America, the abundance of “free land” (at no point does he say how that land became free), the destruction of its nescient aristocracy in the Civil War, and the absence of a two thousand–year tradition that “did not train the peasant to produce in order to gain profit” (1906/1948, 365) leaves the way clear for relatively unconstrained capitalist development. In the “settled old civilized countries” of continental Europe, in contrast, capitalism must accommodate itself to historically given conditions. These conditions are geographically diverse, not merely between countries but also within nations (e.g., the highly diverse

Capitalism

conditions in the western and the eastern parts of the German Empire gave rise to quite different forms of capitalism). Furthermore, in Europe, capitalism faces powerful enemies who continue to side with the precapitalist order: the church and the liberal professions (including the academic) everywhere, and, in Germany in particular, an administrative class whose ethic is “far removed from the interests of the money makers” (370). Rather than make everything conform uniformly to its inner logic, capitalism must take different forms, and thus has different effects, in distinct contexts. Finally, Weber hints that as free land in America runs out and as an aristocracy “not in form though in fact” (383) emerges within the capitalist class, American capitalism too will eventually confront social limits to its unconstrained workings, though in unforeseeable forms. This difference of view between those who view capitalism as a fairly uniform phenomenon that has similar effects everywhere and those who emphasize the diversity of the forms capitalism takes continues to the present day. The former view can, for example, often be found among contemporary critics (and indeed supporters) of economic globalization and neoliberalization. The latter view can be found in historical/sociological institutionalism, and specifically in the influential “varieties of capitalism” literature (the locus classicus is Hall and Soskice 2001).

Capitalism and Market Society The previous discussion presents the perspectives on capitalism in a way that is, or perhaps was, the convention within sociology: Marxist versus Weberian. What can easily be forgotten in such an approach is that despite normative, political, and analytical differences, all sociological approaches (in a broad rather than narrowly disciplinary sense) have a common underlying aim: the critique of dominant economic explanations that view the market as a “spontaneous order” that emerges out of our natural “propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another” (Smith 1776, 12). In contrast, economic sociology has generally treated capitalism as a highly unnatural arrangement that emerges with the assistance of other social institutions, notably the state (Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation is a version of this argument), in a long-term and highly contested historical process. This argument has been channeled into contemporary economic sociology via the

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economic historian Karl Polanyi, writing in the 1940s, whose work can be read as an innovative synthesis of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, and which sets out the basic outlines of a sociological approach to the market and the social effects of capitalism. Polanyi insists that when viewed from the perspective of historical anthropology, the two motivations that underlie economic activity under capitalism— fear of hunger and expectation of gain—are highly artificial constructs. These needs/desires have to be transformed into economic motivations via a process in which the economy, which in most human communities was meshed with other social institutions (with the family, religious practices, etc.) becomes “disembedded” and comes to dominate all other social relations. It is only under capitalism, in which fear of hunger is translated into the need to earn a living, that it becomes a major motivation for economic activity. A parallel argument can be made with respect to the desire for gain (Weber’s rent-profit distinction discussed earlier makes just that point). For Polanyi, the market subject is a historical and social construct; the endpoint, not the first mover of the market economy. There can be no market economy without a market society, and the latter is the result of a historical “double movement” in which “factitious commodities” (notably labor) are subject to increasing control, while traditional constraints, for example of a religious nature (sumptuary laws, etc.), on the free trade of other goods are loosened or lifted (Polanyi 1944/1957, 76). While Polanyi’s account of the emergence of market society and the market subject can appear just as negatively connoted as Marx’s, he lacks the latter’s faith in the proletariat as the agent of change and foresees no necessary end to capitalism. Normatively, his analysis is ultimately a plea for social democratic constraints on the range of market activity to protect the community from the negative effects of a fully disembedded economy. It is a call for modern regulation of the market to partially replace the restrictions imposed on it by a now-unrecoverable tradition. This is the Durkheimain element in Polanyi’s analysis.

Capitalism as Idea and Way of Life Polanyi’s analysis also raises, and seeks to answer, another set of closely connected questions: How are modern market subjects constituted? What ethic or spirit do they embody? To what ideas and beliefs do

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they adhere? What is their character? These are the central questions addressed by two further key texts in the analysis of capitalism: Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905, revised 1920) and Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (1977). Weber and Hirschman treat the emergences of capitalism as a puzzle. Weber views tradition as the more-or-less default position that can be challenged only by a revolutionary force, and even then with uneven and perhaps only temporary success. Even where the material conditions for the emergence of capitalism are favorable, the power of traditional beliefs and practices can effectively block its progress (China is Weber’s typical example). The Protestant ethic thesis, which remains highly controversial more than a century after Weber first proposed it, identifies a contingent shift in the religious beliefs and practices of a single strand of Protestantism (Calvinism) as the source of the “Protestant ethic,” with its “elective affinity” (he is careful to avoid causal language) with early capitalist virtues: thrift, calculation, self-discipline and selfmonitoring, restlessness, and so on. Capitalism here is more than a system of production and exchange. It is a meaningful orientation to the world, an ethic, a specific “conduct of life” (Lebensführung). Although Hirschman identifies seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory rather than religion as the source of the ideas that accompanied the emergence of modern capitalism, he shares Weber’s initial proposition: such were the barriers to the emergence of capitalism that it took a revolution in thought to stimulate and legitimize capitalist activity. Prior to this shift, the terms associated with business activities—avarice, lucre, usury, trade—were just as negative as those associated with other unbridled passions. Hirschman traces a slow intellectual movement in which a distinction emerges between the “hot” and dangerous passions and the “colder,” more rational, and thus more controllable interests. The latter came to be viewed as a potential balancing force: “one set of passions, hitherto known variously as greed, avarice, or love of lucre, could be usefully employed to oppose and bridle such other passions as ambition, lust for power, or sexual lust” (Hirschman 1977/1997, 41). As with Weber’s account of the shifts within Calvinism, the emergence of the passionsinterest distinction and their respective reevaluations was an entirely contingent product of European thought. In both cases, the “product” is the same:

the rational, self-regarding, calculable, responsible subject of modern capitalism; capitalism’s sovereign individual capable of what the German philosopher Alexander von Humboldt called Selbsttätigkeit, selfmotivated and self-directed activity.

Consumption and Contemporary Capitalism It should by now be clear that the classical analysis of capitalism has a productivist bias. The subject is the market-subject—whether worker (Marx), businessman (Weber), or entrepreneur (Schumpeter)—not the consumer-subject. This has created analogous problems in the Marxist and the Weberian analysis of capitalism. Consider this observation from an orthodox Marxist economist: “the entire history of trade between the sixteenth and twentieth century is the history of a progressive transformation from trade in luxury goods into trade in mass consumer goods” (Mandel 1970, 40). But if the polarization thesis is correct—that is, if capitalist competition pushes the petite bourgeoisie into the proletariat, and if the latter becomes pauperized—who is there to buy these mass goods? Similarly, if Weber’s Protestants embody an ethic of thrift and self-control, to whom are they selling (see Campbell 1987)? There is one influential exception to this productivist bias in the older literature: Georg Simmel. Simmel shares Weber’s (and indeed Marx’s) view that individualism is the core ideology of modern capitalism; more, that it is part of the character and habitus that we share. However, Simmel’s individuals assert themselves in a complex play of imitation, demarcation, sociability, and competition by exploiting the opportunities for self-expression offered by the money economy. This is an option open even to those who only have small change in their pockets. As Simmel’s famous essay on fashion makes clear, the effects of fashion, like the money economy generally, are paradoxical: they allow individuals to express their (highly contradictory) natures, but fashion is also marked by conformity and imitation, and, like money, increases the power of material culture; the power of “form” over “life.” If consumption was relatively neglected in the early analysis of capitalism, then it has been transformations in the nature of capitalism itself that have pushed it into the center of analysis. In later neoMarxist analysis, mass production (Fordism) was associated both with mass consumption and with

Car Cultures

the Keynesian policies that gave security to a sufficiently large section of the population to secure the confidence to spend and to consume. More recently, under ever more post-Fordist conditions in which production is increasingly geared toward market segments (taste cultures), state-led planning has been partially displaced by market-led design; increased, and increasingly global, competition; and by a blurring of the distinction between production and consumption. David Harvey offered an early and highly influential version of this argument by identifying a “time-space compression” in the productionconsumption cycle. It was no longer the factory, but the fast-food joint—a place of both production and consumption, and of insecure employment—that became the locus of capitalist enterprise. The regime that replaced Keynesianism from the 1970s onward—usually referred to as neoliberal— has been driven, on the one hand, by high levels of consumption (often supported by personal debt) and, on the other, by the growth of financial services (so-called financialization). This system of privatized Keynesianism, which both generated and depended on private debt, met its nemesis in the financial crisis of 2008. While some—in the spirit of Durkheim and Polanyi—hoped that this would mean a revival of state regulation, capitalism’s latest phase appears to be a mix of state intervention (to rescue the financial system), public austerity, an appeal to corporate social responsibility, particularly that of transnational corporations (see Crouch 2009), and, perhaps, a greater reliance on elite rather than mass consumption in the face of the social and economic insecurity of middle-income consumers in West. The key consumer drivers of this next phase may well be found among the growing middle and upper-middle classes within the “emerging markets” of rapidly developing economies, notably China and India. Alan Scott See also Economic Sociology; Globalization; Industrial Society; Mass Production and Consumption; Money; Political Economy; Protestant Ethic; Rationalization

Further Readings Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Crouch, Colin. “Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime.” British Journal of

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Politics and International Relations 11, no. 3 (2009): 329–399. Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labour in Society. Translated by W. D. Halls. London: Macmillan, 1982. First published 1893. Hall, Peter A., and David Soskice, eds. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. 20th anniversary ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. First published 1977. Mandel, Ernest. An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory. New York: Pathfinder Books, 1970. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Press, 1976. First published 1867. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. London: Penguin Books, 1967. First published 1848. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. First published 1944. Schumpeter, Josef A. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harpers, 1942. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” In Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine, 294–323. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971. Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991. First published 1776. Weber, Max. “Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany.” In From Max Weber, edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 363–385. London: Routledge, 1948. First published 1906. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Stephen Kalberg. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. First published 1920.

CAR CULTURES Perhaps more than any other commodity or “thing,” cars have been linked to the emergence and development of consumer societies. There are two reasons for this: first, the car or automobile appeared as a new and distinct object of individual consumption just as modern consumer culture was becoming established; and second, the car has led in the transition from being an object whose standardized

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mass production helped shape the economy of modern societies to being one whose variety and appeal to individual choice transformed it into a consumer society. David Gartman describes this history by showing how the early car culture of leisure for the very rich who could afford handbuilt machines was transformed into a protoconsumer culture by Henry Ford’s mass produced Model T. By controlling all aspects of the process of making the car, by using a moving production line, and by employing unskilled labor on relatively high wages to operate preset machine tools (e.g., drilling jigs for the engine block), Ford was able to turn out a large number of cars, each selling for a price affordable by those, such as farmers, salesmen, commercial representatives, who would use them for work as well as leisure. The Model T was cheap partly because of standardization; each one was exactly the same. But the high cost of the machine tools needed to be recouped over many years, so the Model T remained fundamentally unchanged between 1909 and 1927. Ford famously offered “any colour . . . as long as it is black” because black was the only enamel color that remained consistent after being cooked in an oven to dry it quickly (Gartman 1994, 45–46). If Ford introduced mass production and a standardized product available at an affordable price, his competitors, especially Alfred Sloan’s General Motors, began to offer variety in design with different marques and models that changed annually. New features were introduced in the top ranges and then spread to cheaper marques in following years. The setting up of a design studio under Harley Earl brought the sophisticated styling of the early French limousines to the mass-produced car; the Cadillac La Salle of 1927 demonstrated the lines of an aesthetic rather than an engineering imagination in a factoryproduced car. No longer were cars simply about what a standardized machine tool could stamp out but became objects that stimulated the imagination, with chrome features and streamlining that emulated fantastic air or space vehicles. Instead of social status accruing from simply having a car, it was now linked to which type of car and how new it was. Unlike clothes that are limited in their visibility by the size of the wearer’s body, and unlike houses that are stuck in one place, the car is a mobile symbol of prosperity and taste that is difficult for others to ignore. The car became a visible indicator of identity as size, styling, features, color, and engine tone provided a system of

signs that could be associated with class, age, gender, and even personality. The system of marques and models became readily available to the culture at large through advertisements and commentary in magazines and the press that reinforced the visible signs of function and style of the vehicles on the roads. Roland Barthes distinguished two codes for cars in the industrialized countries, the “domestic” (the standard family sedan that varied in size) and the “sporty” (the two-seater sports car that varied in performance). Each model appeals more or less to each code in a system that continues today, although both codes combine in a variety of hybrid models (the sports sedan, the coupe, etc.) reaching an extreme convergence in the ostentation value provided by the sports utility vehicle so popular in the late 1990s. The domestic/sporty code does not operate in rural economies, especially in eastern and southern areas of the world, where the predominant family vehicle is the pickup truck or even the lowpowered motorbike. And in the industrialized urban world, a new code of frugality and restraint to do with the microcar and alternative fuels threatens the domestic/sporty system of car culture. Barthes recognized that social status could be expressed through the way a car was driven as well as its material form. An embodied relationship with the car, including the way it is adapted and modified (whether with added spoilers outside or accumulated rubbish inside), asserts the identity of its owner. The style of driving— how and when power and braking are applied, how lights and indicators are used to communicate with other road users, how road space is given up and when it is grabbed—becomes an emotional expression of individuality, according to Jack Katz. The car as a “thing” may be associated with individual identity, but its consumer culture depends on an “automobile system,” as noted by John Urry, that includes the roads, availability of fuel, car sales, repair, and maintenance, insurance, and policing that is required for a car culture to exist. The road system with its signage is a costly investment undertaken at the level of the state that has entrenched the role of the car in the mobility of modern societies. Keeping car traffic flowing is a matter of economic significance, as it carries people to work, school, leisure activities, and shops. The car promotes a privatized and individualized—or at least family-centered— mode of mobility in competition with collective modes such as the bus, or train.

Carbon Trading

The system of automobility has a decivilizing effect, according to Norbert Elias, that causes violence and harm both to drivers and noncar users and requires society to accept the unintended but inevitable consequence of death and injury at a level beyond any other legitimate social practice but war. Cars using internal combustion engines produce noxious gases that pollute the environment, sometimes with direct detrimental health effects on the population. The fossil fuels that most cars use discharge carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change as well as being a rapidly diminishing finite resource. The road system, so much a part of car culture, carves up cities and rural areas, limiting the opportunities for children’s play, walking about a locality, and the ability to roam safely, free of noise and pollution. It has shaped urban and suburban development, determining the zoning and location of residential, work, and leisure facilities. The personal mobility that the car provides has fueled demand for the allocation of vast resources that could otherwise be used for different purposes. Yet it seems that the demand for even more personal mobility by car is insatiable; in rich Western societies as well as emerging new economies, each year more cars are produced and more miles are driven. The system of automobility is, as argued by Steffen Böhm and colleagues, ultimately impossible because as roads become increasingly congested, the mobility promised by the car will progressively diminish. There are political movements opposed to the building of new roads and the promotion of the car as a means of mobility in preference to other collective and less environmentally damaging modes. The threats to the mobility of society are such that the car system as we know it will have to change; car culture is retreating in the face of an anticar culture. John Urry and Kingsley Dennis argue that as oil declines and climate change demands low carbon solutions, mobility will take on new forms “after the car,” with new modes of personal mobility featuring new fuels, new models of ownership and possession, and organized by new technology systems. On the way to this postcar culture, the driverless car, controlled by onboard and in-the-road digital systems will produce a safer, more economic, and better flowing car culture. But as the driver becomes disconnected from control of the vehicle’s speed, direction, route, and maneuverability and as cultural pressure to demonstrate restraint through choice of a small, shared,

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green car increases, the opportunities for expression of personal identity through the car as a possession and as a cultural practice will become increasingly limited. Cars will once more become functional, and the flamboyant car culture of the middle of the twentieth century will become a much less remarkable feature of consumer societies. Tim Dant See also Automobiles; Barthes, Roland; Civilizing Processes; Individualization; Mass Production and Consumption; Rationalization; Semiotics; Urban Cultures

Further Readings Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. First published 1957. Böhm, Steffen, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, and Matthew Patterson. Against Automobility. London: Blackwell, 2006. Elias, Norbert. “Technization and Civilization.” Theory, Culture and Society 12 (1995): 7–42. Gartman, David. Auto-Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design. London: Routledge, 1994. Katz, Jack. “Pissed off in LA.” In How Emotions Work, 18–86. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Miller, Daniel, ed. Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Urry, John. “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” Theory, Culture and Society 21, nos. 4–5 (2004): 25–39. Urry, John, and Kingsley Dennis. After the Car. London: Polity, 2009.

CARBON TRADING Carbon trading is the exchange of property rights and financial instruments based on greenhouse gas emissions. Larry Lohmann has framed the problem of climate change as one of an overflowing pollution dump caused by economic growth and material consumption unrestrained by social norms or formal regulation. Consumer culture is, therefore, at the heart of the greenhouse gas problem because it is the process most readily associated with rising levels of consumption. Carbon trading is a response to the environmental problems generated by consumer culture. Broadly, within carbon trading institutions, economic actors exchange financial instruments related

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to greenhouse gas output or reductions in emissions from “business as usual.” As such, polluting activities are to some extent governed by price and competition rather than explicitly political processes or norms of restraint, precaution, care, or equity. While being widely promoted as an economically efficient means of governing climate change mitigation, carbon markets have received criticism for being unjust and ineffective. Carbon trading has risen to prominence in international climate policy through the negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The flexibility mechanisms in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol are intended to reduce the cost of compliance with the emissions limits for industrialized economies and foster sustainable development in developing nations. The first examples of carbon transactions were voluntary undertakings in the early 1990s, between electricity generators in the United States and the Netherlands, and forestry nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in South and Central America. Formal regional emissions trading schemes are currently in operation or under development in Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. In advance of state legislation, voluntary purchases of emissions reductions credits are increasingly popular in wealthy industrialized economies. Internet retailers now enable individuals to calculate personal emissions and consume an equivalent amount of carbon credits in compensation. This exposes new audiences to the problem of climate change, key sources of emissions, and to a carbon price of some sort, but arguably entrenches high-intensity practices of travel and consumption. Carbon neutrality has become a vogue consumer status conferred to products, businesses, and leisure activities by a variety of private companies operating to autonomous standards. Although the co-benefits of investment to poor communities are often promoted, ultimately carbon offsetting is market exchange, not unbridled philanthropy. Welfare and environmental economics theorize climate change as a market failure involving a public good; economic activities can emit greenhouse gases freely without facing the costs of climate change impacts that are felt elsewhere. It is an externality caused and experienced globally. As such, there is a case for regulation to correct this distortion by assigning liability to polluters and imposing taxes or restraints to realize a socially optimal level of pollution. This approach assumes that the central regulator

knows in advance what the most productive use of a resource is, in this case the access to the pollution dump, or what the marginal damage cost is. Emissions trading removes this requirement and recognizes that there are reciprocal costs not only borne by the entity suffering harm but also by the polluters who must invest in new infrastructure or curtail their activities. In theory, unrestricted, private bargaining in well-defined property rights will lead to the most economically efficient net outcome, regardless of the initial distribution of those rights and with no central intervention except for enforcement. However, Ronald Coase argued forcefully that this outcome depends on the scale of transaction costs in asserting rights and negotiating settlements. Carbon trading draws on these insights to create institutions that enable flexibility in timing and location of emission abatement and reduce transaction costs between parties. There are two basic types of emissions trading: (1) cap and trade and (2) baseline and credit. In cap-and-trade systems, a total permitted quantity of pollution is decided, along with the entities to be regulated, penalties for contravention, and the time period for the cap to be held. Permits, also called allowances, are distributed among the regulated entities that must then monitor their emissions and submit an equal quantity of allowances at the close of the compliance period. The initial distribution may be on the basis of historical emissions, so-called grandfathering, via an auction, or against an industry benchmark. After allocation, entities have the choice of mitigating their own emissions or purchasing permits from others who have a surplus. Those with the lowest marginal abatement costs, or conversely those who are the least economically productive sources of pollution, will reduce their emissions first. As a quantity rather than price instrument, the environmental stringency of the system is determined by the volume of the cap rather than the response of the actors. Baseline-and-credit systems award property rights, credits, to entities that reduce emissions from an anticipated level, the baseline. The activities and calculation methods that are eligible are defined by the awarding body, but participation in the scheme is voluntary. The credits may then be used by an entity “short” on allowances in a capped system to meet its deficit. For example, an iron works operating outside of any emissions restrictions installs a new, efficient smelter that burns less fuel than the existing technology. Credits are awarded for the difference between a counterfactual case, business as usual (BAU), that

Carbon Trading

is, the pollution from the old smelter, and the monitored emissions from the new equipment. These credits may then be purchased by a power station elsewhere whose emissions exceed its allocation of permits. The efficacy of this arrangement is dependent on the award of the credits; if the new smelter were to be fitted regardless of the carbon trade, then the emissions reduction would not be additional to BAU, and the trade would result in a net increase. In both cases, the allowances and credits exchanged are components of social institutions, rather than discrete physical entities, although they are frequently denominated in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). Carbon trading institutions may exist at a variety of scales and regulate diverse entities, from nationstates, corporations, power stations, industrial plants, and hospitals down to individual consumers. Personal carbon trading schemes are usually based on an equal per capita allocation and require surrender permits for every purchase of fossil fuels. Internationally, the Kyoto Protocol includes both permit and credit trading in its flexibility mechanisms. The Annex I nations that are bound by quantified emissions limits, predominantly rich, northern, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies, are able to trade their emissions allowances (assigned amount units, or AAUs) among themselves. The clean development mechanism (CDM), originally proposed as a means of allocating funding from penalties should the Annex I countries breach their agreed limits, has been substantially developed to provide a source of extra allowances for compliance with emissions limits. As of 2009, there were over 4,000 projects in the CDM pipeline, and it is anticipated they will generate 1.3 billion credits by 2012. The world’s largest carbon market by volume is the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), which regulates heavy industry and electricity generators and transacted 3.1 billion tCO2e in 2008, worth US$91.9 billion (Capoor and Ambrosi 2009). Proponents of carbon trading argue that the longlived and well-mixed greenhouse gases are ideally suited to an emissions trading approach. The local impacts are much less than their aggregate global impacts, so “hotspots” are not significant. It is impossible to know in advance the marginal abatement costs for such a diversity of emissions sources, so inefficiencies in “command and control” regulation are likely. As such, substantial reductions in emissions

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are required to avoid dangerous climate change, and economic efficiency in achieving them is of the utmost importance. Furthermore, the investment directed to developing economies through credit mechanisms may have other co-benefits, such as improved local air quality and wider access to reliable electricity. For a variety of reasons, critics of the whole approach contend that it is not the absence or failure of markets that causes environmental problems but rather the inappropriate extension of market norms. Price mechanisms may be unjust and regressive, limiting access to goods or influence for poorer members of society in what ought to be political matters. Pricing may remove the proper moral stigma attached to negative acts, and individuated, economic transactions lack a sense of collective endeavor or sacrifice necessary for social transformation, as Michael Sandel famously noted after the conclusion of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations. The environmental integrity of credits produced in both voluntary and regulated markets is also open to question. Predicting the future state of complex systems in the natural and social world is highly problematic, yet the calculation of emissions reductions assumes knowledge of the full consequences of specific transactions. While verifiers and accountants may observe flows of investment and emissions, it is never possible to capture all consequences of an intervention or conclusively prove the additionality of a given project and hence that reductions are real. Further, the sociotechnical systems that determine greenhouse gas emissions are typically associated with long-lived infrastructures and entrenched habits. For instance, commuting in fossil-fueled private vehicles is a problem of land-use planning, work habits, vehicle technologies, and preferences for suburban housing. The marginal logic of carbon trading does not incentivize innovation, long-term planning, or radical change, and indeed it may enable further lock-in to highly polluting infrastructure. Carbon trading institutions intersect with consumption practices in a variety of ways. Compliance markets seek to optimize industrial activity and interact with consumers solely via the pricing of goods and services. Carbon neutral products and brands engage with consumers with a similar remote logic but depict benign production systems that culturally legitimize continued consumption. Direct retailing of carbon commodities for personal consumption generates new modes of green governmentality, causing ethical consideration of driving or heating one’s home while

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providing the opportunity for further consumption of an antidote commodity. Ultimately, carbon trading is a response to the ecological problems of consumer culture that justifies existing economic structures and creates new avenues of consumption. John Broderick See also Eco-Labeling; Economic Sociology; Energy Consumption; Environmental Footprinting; Externalities; Global Institutions; Price and Price Mechanisms; Public Goods

Further Readings Capoor, Karan, and Philippe Ambrosi. State and Trends of the Carbon Market. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009. Coase, Ronald. “The Problem of Social Cost.” Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1960): 1–44. Lohmann, Larry. “Marketing and Making Carbon Dumps: Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation.” Science as Culture 14, no. 3 (2005): 203–235. Lovell, Heather, Harriet Bulkeley, and Diana Liverman. “Carbon Offsetting: Sustaining Consumption?” Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 2357–2379. O’Neill, John. Markets, Deliberation and Environment. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007. Sandel, Michael. “It’s Immoral to Buy the Right to Pollute.” The New York Times, December 5, 1997, editorial desk; section A, 23. Stern, Nicholas. Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Unruh, Gregory. “Understanding Carbon Lock-In.” Energy Policy 28 (2000): 817–830.

CAR-BOOT SALES FLEA MARKETS

AND

Car-boot sales and flea markets can be defined as transient, informal forms of exchange. They have affinities with the street markets that characterize developing countries and are of interest since they are types of exchange that Max Weber argued would disappear in rational modernity. Car-boot sales are primarily a U.K. phenomenon. They emerged around the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although there are no accurate data as to numbers or frequency, qualitative research suggests that these events peaked in the mid-1990s. Although they

continue to occur, they have been affected by the subsequent emergence of virtual secondhand exchange, notably eBay. Car-boot sales require vendors to have access to a car, which works both as the means to transport goods to the site of sale and as the fixture for displaying goods for sale. Thus, once at a carboot sale, the car-boot (trunk), bonnet (hood), doors, and seats all become props for draping, hanging, and laying out goods for sale. In that these sales are car dependent, they generally occur on large, open sites. Farmers’ fields and racecourses are typical locations, as are parking lots. In the United Kingdom, planning regulations limit the number of car-boot sales occurring on one site in any one year, thereby contributing to the transient character of these events. Car-boot sales have affinities with a range of other exchange activities, including garage sales, flea markets, and rummage sales, as well as nearly new sales and table-top sales. Key points of commonality are that the sales are primarily of used goods and that consumers act as vendors and not just buyers; but, there are important differences between these sales. One is in the quality of goods for sale: in the British case, the distinction between a nearly new and a rummage sale is considerable, reflecting both value decisions (relative, not absolute) and the degree of consumption visible in goods (how used they look). A second distinction is in the site of sale and its geographical location. The garage sale is a U.S. and suburban Australian phenomenon, conducted at the home of the vendor. This home-based, face-toface form of selling has never taken off in Europe. In part, this is explicable in terms of differences in housing stock (older fabric, lack of garages, a high proportion of apartment dwelling). It is possible, however, that the mix of secondhand exchange in particular countries is indicative of different social and cultural norms and practices. For example, the absence of the garage sale in the United Kingdom, and the prevalence of sales in nondomestic spaces may say more about attitudes toward privacy and the boundaries drawn around domestic life. In this way, the range and character of secondhand sites and spaces of exchange in particular countries and regions of the world show how consumer cultures are more broadly embedded within, and shaped by, culture and cultural practice. The theoretical importance of car-boot sales, flea markets, and their close relatives lies in their

Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets

contribution to debates about exchange, value, the social life of things, and consumer competence. These sites and spaces show that acts of consumption—even when narrowly defined as shopping—are not confined to urban malls, high (main) streets, department stores, and supermarkets. Rather, acquisition and exchange can occur anywhere, even temporarily in farmers’ fields. What is important is that these sales highlight the extended social life of things. It is not inevitable that goods are discarded when they reach the end of their socially useful lives in one household. Car-boot sales and their ilk show that things are not just thrown away, and that people do invest time (and money) in endeavoring to connect their surplus goods with others. The complex flows and trades in these goods, locally, nationally, and internationally, testify to this and provide a powerful antidote to overly simplistic accounts that characterize consumption through the label of the “throwaway society.” Without the parameters of exchange in formal retail sites (fixed prices, a clearly specified legal framework of consumer rights, retailer buyer-supply chains), exchange activities become less predictable. To participate in these events successfully, both buyers and sellers need to understand complex geographies of value and relative value; they also need to understand bargaining and the bargain. For vendors, particularly if money-making is a goal, it is imperative to understand relative local geographies (i.e., what to sell where and when). The various markets in used goods, then, place a premium on consumers’ skills and competences, as consumers. For many participants, therefore, these events become sites to practice and display their skills. Getting “the bargain” and spotting (and getting) “a find” are key motivating influences; so too is the potential of “lost treasure,” but as important is the enactment of the practice, of looking, spotting, and bargaining. For other consumers, the skill lies more in using these sites to live on a tight budget. Certain car-boot sales, as well as nearly new sales and rummage sales, provide a ready source of cheap household goods, children’s clothes, and children’s toys. Using them well is a means to buying more for less. Consequently, car-boot sales and their like point to the continued importance of thrift within contemporary consumer cultures. The policy debate about car-boot sales is closely bound up with their representation in popular culture. In the United Kingdom in the 1990s, at

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the height of their popularity, car-boot sales were portrayed in the popular media as populated by a cast of British TV characters, all of whom earned a living from “shady” forms of trading (Del Boy Trotter and Arthur Daley were often-cited figures). This representation was critical to the argument that car-boot sales needed tighter regulation, for the protection of consumers as well as more established local authority markets, for which they were seen to provide “unfair competition.” While there is a degree of resonance in these comparisons, the research conducted suggests that this is to overly simplify the phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is instructive to note the appearance of the same discourses around virtual secondhand economies. Of greater importance is the undeniable value in secondhand items. When, at the end of the 1990s, ordinary high/main street retailers in the United Kingdom began to dedicate parts of their floor space to secondhand goods, it was a sure sign that secondhand goods sell. What is less clear is the difference that location makes to their sale, or—in other words—just what the difference is for the consumer between a pair of secondhand jeans bought at Top Shop or at a car-boot sale. Researching car-boot sales and other variants of secondhand exchange poses a number of questions of method. The absence of clear numerical data makes it difficult either to quantify these events (beyond the most established of flea markets) or to map them. Equally, to research them to any great depth requires ethnographic work, both to establish the locations of exchange and to research sales in action. Clipboards, survey instruments, and certain forms of photography are all regarded with a degree of suspicion, since they are readily identified with the research instruments of regulators. Indeed, a characteristic of the best work in the field is that it has all involved long periods of depth ethnography. As such, the work is demanding of researchers’ time and can frequently involve “anti-social” working hours, including weekends and very early morning starts. While the primary forms of face-to-face exchange have all been researched in this way, it remains to be established how these connect with, and have been affected by, the rise of virtual secondhand exchange. Nicky Gregson See also Car Cultures; Collecting and Collectibles; E-Commerce; Informal Economy; Reuse/Recycling; Spaces of Shopping; Typologies of Shoppers

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Further Readings Belk, Russell, John F. Sherry Jr., and Melanie Wallendorf. “A Naturalistic Enquiry into Buyer and Seller Behavior at a Swap Meet.” Journal of Consumer Research 14 (1988): 449–470. Clarke, Alison. “‘Mother Swapping’: The Trafficking of Nearly New Children’s Wear.” In Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces, edited by Peter Jackson, Daniel Miller, Frank Mort, and Michelle Lowe, 85–100. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crewe. “The Bargain, the Knowledge and the Spectacle: Making Sense of Consumption in the Space of the Car-Boot Sale.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (1997): 87–112. Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crewe. Second-Hand Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Gregson, Nicky, Louise Crewe, and Beth Longstaff. “Excluded Spaces of Regulation: Car-Boot Sales as an Enterprise Culture out of Control?” Environment and Planning A 29 (1997): 1717–1737. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodification as a Process.” In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Reardon, L. “The Legal Aspects of Car Boot Sales and Markets.” Journal of Planning and Environmental Law 94 (1994): 13–19. Sherry, John F., Jr. “A Sociocultural Analysis of a Midwestern American Flea Market.” Advances in Consumer Research 17 (1990): 13–30. Soiffer, Stephen, and Gretchen Herrmann. “Visions of Power: Ideology and Practice in the American Garage Sale.” Sociological Review 35 (1987): 48–83. Tranberg, Hanson K. Salaula: The World of Second-Hand Clothing and Zambia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

CARIBBEAN

AND THE

SLAVE TRADE

This entry examines the origins of modern Western consumer culture in the consumption of Caribbean plantation commodities within a slavery-based transatlantic economy. It encompasses the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, but places the main emphasis on British consumer culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It seeks to redress the absence of the Caribbean in histories of European consumer culture, including aspects of the slave trade and the

antislavery movement, and to show its relevance for contemporary debates around fair trade and ethical consumption.

Historiographical and Theoretical Context Given that the early modern consumer cultures were all thoroughly grounded in the wealth produced by the African slave trade and Caribbean slave plantations, initial studies of early modern consumer culture are reticent in addressing slavery and the slave trade. The landmark collection edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (1994), for example, was one of the first to backdate the birth of European consumer culture to the early modern period, yet from fifteenth-century Italy to sixteenthcentury Holland to eighteenth-century England, their work largely ignores the slave trade. Though there was slightly more attention on empire in the subsequent volume edited by Ann Bermingham and Brewer (1995), the slavery-based transatlantic economy that drove the growth in consumption remained peripheral to the study of European consumer cultures. At the same time, the literature on the “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas 1989) also has generally ignored the colonial connections of the new political public sphere of the eighteenth century. Although many critics of Jurgen Habermas’s public sphere model focus on his lack of attention to “subaltern counterpublics” and the constitutive exclusion of women from the masculine public sphere, few noted how his understanding of publicity precluded any discussion of the colonial world in relation to an emerging modernity. Consuming publics arguably played a crucial part in the emergence of a political public sphere in the era of slavery and created a consumer culture premised on slave-based economies in the Caribbean. Public spaces of consumption, such as London’s coffeehouses, were “the site for the public life of the eighteenth century middle class, a place where the bourgeoisie developed new forms of commerce and culture” (Schivelbusch 1992, 59). They were dedicated both to the consumption of colonial goods and to the discussion and transaction of colonial trade, including the slave trade and the sale of enslaved African children to work as domestic servants in British households. As a political public formed here, that public was also forming relations of consumption premised on distant imperial trade and the ingestion of colonial commodities and labor.

Caribbean and the Slave Trade

Consuming publics, defined as elements of the public oriented toward a world economy from which a new cornucopia of consumer goods flowed, were crucial to the emergence of London as the center of networks of material and cultural exchange that spanned the world. Through the work of Chandra Mukerji, Simon Schama, Colin Campbell, and others, the modern capitalist consumer emerges as a complex bundle of impulses toward spending and saving, acquisitiveness and asceticism, gratification and deferment. Puritanism and hedonism occur as a central contradiction within capitalist consumer culture, closely related to concerns over the domestic and moral impact of empire, associated both with its exotic luxuries and with the system of slavery itself. Through various phases of the formation of Atlantic markets and cultures of consumption, this initial set of dilemmas concerning bodily indulgence and moral corruption, consumer luxury and producer exploitation, natural acquisitiveness and moral restraint, have repeatedly resurfaced right up to the ethical consumer movements of today.

Tasting the Tropics Some of the earliest flows of botanical substances from tropical islands back into European markets were the highly valuable plant products known as spices, many of which were used as medicine. The category of spice included East Indian items, such as pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon, as well as West Indian products, such as allspice, cocoa, and sugar. Timothy Morton has examined the discursive field of “the poetics of spice,” in which the flow of luxury trade goods across global markets incited both acquisitive commercial capitalism and moral critiques of its luxury, excess, and overconsumption. Wolfgang Schivelbusch also examines the history of a whole range of substances, which in German are called Genussmittel, a category denoting “articles of pleasure” that are eaten, drunk, or inhaled, including spices and condiments as well as stimulants, intoxicants, and narcotics, such as tobacco, coffee, tea, alcohol, and opium. The emergence of European capitalism via the Eastern spice trade and then its replacement by the Atlantic sugar trade revolved around the ingestion of these articles of pleasure, linked to global markets and to debates over their moral effects. The Dutch dominated the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury slave trade and pioneered the creation of a

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global trade empire stitched together by the flow of commodities and wealth from colonial peripheries back to the metropolitan core. Taking over from the fifteenth-century Florentines, the Dutch merchants became world leaders in navigation, trade, and commerce. They carried the bounty of empire back to Antwerp in a burst of cultural acquisitiveness, according to Schama, and the profusion of objects of empire and their visual representation came to reflect the central moral contradictions of an emerging capitalist modernity with a nascent consumer culture. In the great national museums of Europe and North America, we can see the remnants of this consumer culture in its exquisitely gleaming still life paintings. Here, perishable exotic fruits from the Americas and Africa are broken open next to delicate shells and corals from the Indies, luxuriant Turkish and Persian textiles, fine Chinese and Japanese ceramics, unfinished meat, and goblets spilling wine. Schama focuses our attention on a dilemma in the interpretation of these depictions of the things caught up in the net of Dutch navigation. Roland Barthes’ 1953 essay “Le monde-objet” (“The empire of things”) strongly influenced interpretations of these paintings as showing a moral vacancy based on the entrepreneurial marriage of the domestic empire of things and the global empire of commerce. For Barthes, paintings of “the edible made visible” and other valued luxuries were a straightforward “celebration of private property.” However, Schama argues that this reading reduces the deliberately unstable relation that he sees in these paintings between the naturalistic and the symbolic. The paintings play on antiphonal themes of luxury and decadence, the worldly and the eternal, materiality and spirituality, concreteness and insubstantiality. Rather than reveling in empty materialism, “this particular commercial culture seems almost excessively anxious about both the propriety and durability of wealth. . . . Death is present at the feast” (Schama 1987, 482). Consumer culture thus opens up a field of ambivalence, in which the perishability of the material world undermines the pleasures of consumption, establishing the significance of the “perennial combat between acquisitiveness and asceticism” in driving capitalism (Schama 1987, 338). Yet Schama’s focus on the spiritual dilemmas of the consuming body still stays within the realm of metropolitan culture, ignoring its connections to the colonial world. It is about the morality of consumption, rather than the ethics of consumer culture’s

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relation with distant others. As long as the historiography of the Caribbean and of the slave trade remain separate subfields from the study of consumer societies, it leaves the non-Western world coded as nonmodern and noncapitalist. In point of fact, the moral dilemmas of consumption do not exist in a metropolitan vacuum, but open out into ethical dilemmas concerning Europe’s relation to the world and to the people whose labor was producing the empire of things. The lust for acquisition of new tastes, new islands, and new riches was tempered by an ethics of restraint and abstention played out on consuming bodies and in imperial politics. If consumers recognize that demand drives the empire of things, a glimmer of moral accountability and social responsibility enters into their relation to those things. Food consumption became a particularly powerful point of ethical critique both because it so intimately entered the body of the consumer and because it so violently impinged on the bodies of the plantation laborers enslaved to feed the consumer markets. Insofar as people’s bodies were implicated in consumption, antislavery could be framed in a way that made consumers more aware of and sensitive to their mediated yet direct relation to the enslaved bodies of suffering others. This became especially apparent due to the massive impact of tropical commodities on European diet, especially in Britain, which took over from the Netherlands as the major maritime power of the Atlantic world in the seventeenth century. Here we can begin to see how the tasting of exotic foods was not simply a concern of a wealthy capitalist elite but pervaded every aspect of the movement of people and things around the Atlantic world.

Europe’s Sweet Tooth Sidney Mintz, in Sweetness and Power (1985) and subsequent work, has explored in depth the changing consumption of West Indian sugar and sweetened imported beverages, such as tea and coffee, in Europe. He argues that the transformation of sugar from a luxury for the elite to an item of mass consumption for the working classes had a profound impact on the structure of production, processing, shipping, marketing, and consumption. Mass consumption of these Caribbean and Asian commodities fed into—and literally fed—a new capitalist world that tied together far-flung markets and created a new international division of labor, affecting the meaning

of work, the definition of self, and the very nature of material things. In consuming the Caribbean, Europe was itself transformed, as were its North American colonies. As Europeans became more and more attached to colonial goods, they were sucked into the vortex of slavery and its transatlantic humanconsuming economy. As T. H. Breen has shown, “the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world was bound together . . . not simply by ties of language or administration, but also by a shared material culture which was constantly nourished by flows of commodities” (Styles 1994, 527). The flow of commodities from the West Indies to Europe and North America indicates that imperialism was not only “an extension of empire outward,” but also “a kind of swallowing up” (Mintz 1985, 39). By the eighteenth century, the white settlers of the Caribbean, known as Creoles, had gained a reputation for excessive indulgence in eating and drinking a hybrid cuisine that was suggestive of the planter’s own creolization. It was a diet invented by African cooks that drew on the produce of the Americas, Europe, and Africa, later to be joined by Asia as well. Gluttony symbolized the planter’s moral corruption by slavery, and the way in which it got inside him and contributed literally to degeneracy, illness, indigestion, fevers, poisoning, and what were understood to be diseases of consumption. Back in Europe, sugar consumption became a national habit, argues Mintz; and sugar, along with tea, came to define English character. It is difficult to imagine English cuisine without sugar, a crucial ingredient in jams and preserves, chutneys and cakes, chocolate and biscuits, not to mention its role in both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Sugar brought together the domestic realm and the world market, with women playing an especially important role in domesticating this once-exotic luxury good. In making preserves, conserves, marzipans, and other sugary confections, elite “seventeenth-century women participated in a growing movement from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic economy, and made the English home an important part of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the modern world system” (Hall 1996, 169). Initially, sugar was used mainly for medicinal purposes, being a key ingredient for making bitter medicines palatable. It was used in marmalades carried on ships to treat scurvy, as a medicine, a spice or condiment, a decorative material, a sweetener, and a preservative. Molasses, a by-product of sugar production,

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was also the key ingredient for the production of rum, with a daily rum ration standard throughout the British Navy. By the turn of the eighteenth century, sugar had made the transition to a common household item of consumption. Kenneth Morgan argues that “there is no doubt that cane sugar from the Caribbean was the most valuable British import in the century and a half down to 1820. English sugar imports increased sevenfold from 430,000 cwt. in 1700 to over 3,000,000 cwt. in 1800.” Per capita sugar consumption in England “rose from 1 lb. to 25 lbs. between 1670 and 1770,” and by “1787–96, English labouring families spent around 10 per cent of their annual food expenditure on treacle, sugar and tea” (Morgan 1993, 184–185), indicating a “national addiction” (Lawson 1997, 16). Others argue that the momentous shift from an anticonsumerist mercantilist political economy to an unfettered free market world of consumption and consumers began with sugar. Ralph Austen and Woodruff Smith argue that sugar (taken with tea or coffee) became central to new rituals of respectability that stimulated and ultimately reshaped the entire pattern of Western consumer demand. Rather than sugar consumption simply being a by-product of the demands and needs of an industrializing economy, they argue that sugar stimulated industrialization insofar as it played a crucial part in the active construction of a broader European market for overseas goods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contributing “to the conditions that made industrialisation historically possible” (1992, 189, 195). Philip Lawson further argues that tea consumption transformed the forms of hospitality and civility, manners and habits, the uses and architecture of personal and public spaces, and women’s lives in particular. In both aristocratic and later in middle-class culture, drinking these beverages became occasions for self-display. In seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury court society, such display involved the use of enslaved African children to serve the beverage in domestic settings presided over by wealthy cultured women. The drinking of coffee, tea, and cocoa were thus all closely related to new forms of embodied ritual and consumer practice. If new public modes of consumption produced a new bourgeois habitus, they also produced a new domestic habitat. From the late-seventeenth century on, the “middling” farmers, tradesman, and artisans of Britain began to consume “what were often entirely

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new household goods, consisting most obviously of clocks, prints, earthenware, cutlery, equipment for drinking tea and coffee, and window curtains” (Styles 1994, 537). A new sense of middle-class comfort and material opulence of domestic settings was further developed by the West Indian planters and flaunted on their return to Britain, often accompanied by their enslaved servants. To feed this consumer culture from 1700 to 1773, imports from its North American and Caribbean colonies rose from 19 to 38 percent of all British imports, while exports from Britain to its colonies rose from 10 to 38 percent of total British exports. The West Indies surpassed North America and Asia in importance to the British economy in this period. Between 1701 and 1780, up to one million slaves were landed in the British Caribbean colonies, with the largest portion destined for the sugar and coffee plantations of Jamaica.

Antislavery Ethical Consumer Movements The flow of people and material goods between Europe and the Caribbean thus fed a new middleclass consumer culture in multiple ways, via the boom in consumption of sugar and coffee, the new material culture, and the refined display of cosmopolitan taste. Yet British consumers also began to frame a moral discourse in which consuming publics could take responsibility for driving markets through their day-to-day decisions about what to buy and what to eat, or not eat. Consuming publics not only emerged out of the masculine realm of the London coffeehouses, but also in the feminine domestic realm where everyday consumption decisions were made. In both cases, there was a crucial relation between metropolitan consumption and colonial plantation slavery, between home economies and colonial political economies. The antislavery movement latched onto this explosion in consumption of colonial plantation commodities as a way to personalize responsibility for the enslavement of other human beings. It used sugar, in particular, as an inroad into people’s hearts and into the privacy of their homes, where much consumption took place. Moral blame for slavery could be pinned on anyone and everyone who consumed its products. Quaker antislavery activists especially targeted women, who bought the products of slavery, which were depicted as soaked in African blood. Boycotts of slave-grown sugar began in the

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1790s, were rekindled in the 1820s, and taken to new lengths with the free produce movement of the 1850s. The conjoining of the embodied experiences of female consumers and Caribbean slaves through the mobility of the sweet commodity of sugar “brought home” the contradictions of empire. This early example of an ethical trade movement among consumers has close parallels with contemporary fair trade and social justice movements. Modern ethical consumer movements such as fair trade in many ways originate in the antislavery movement’s intervention in the provisioning networks of sugar, cotton, and coffee. They both deploy moral economies of the body in which the ethical consumer is produced via a direct identification with the suffering body of the producer, whose blood, sweat, and tears are imagined as literally infusing the commodity. Ethical consumer movements have attempted to bring these two bodies into closer proximity, even solidarity, by reflecting on how they directly touch each other through the commodity. One of the most compelling symbolic weapons of the first major abolitionist campaign of the 1790s was the imagery of sugar soaked in blood. William Fox’s famous 1791 Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum, for example, referred to sugarcane “steeped in the blood of our fellow-creatures” (Fox 1791, 2). Indeed, “so necessarily connected are our consumption of the commodity, and the misery resulting from it,” argued Fox, “that in every pound of sugar used . . . we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.” Timothy Morton refers to this as the “blood sugar topos,” by which the “sweetened drinks of tea, coffee, and chocolate are rendered suddenly nauseating by the notion that they are full of the blood of slaves” (2000, 173). He links this blood–sugar discourse to wider developments in Romantic aesthetics and ethics, including the movements of vegetarianism and concern for animals. Thus, the sugar boycotts were part of a wider culture of radical food, which has close connections to the contemporary resurgence of ethical consumer movements promoting vegetarianism, animal rights, and fair trade. A new culture of ethical consumption was spearheaded in England especially by Quaker women’s antislavery organizations. Female consumers questioned the sugar on their tables and became concerned with the ways in which slavery poisoned

their own bodies and homes. Abolitionist Thomas Clarkson computed that there were approximately 300,000 people abstaining from West India Sugar during the 1790s campaign. China makers introduced sugar bowls labeled in gold letters: “East India Sugar not made by Slaves,” thus entering the private realm of tea service, by which women could politicize the domestic economy through the choice of material objects that constituted this everyday ritual. Following the disruptions of the Napoleonic Wars, the sugar boycotts resumed in the 1820s, when prominent antislavery activists, including James Brougham, Thomas Fowell Buxton, Stephen Lushington, and Joseph Sturge, formed a Free Labour Company to trade with India. Middle-class women were perceived as moral arbiters and guardians of their families, and their consumption habits became linked to broader temperance movements, which urged restraint. As Paul Glennie argues, “Consumption was made morally legitimate through notions of responsible consumption, which defined socially appropriate styles, timings and settings for consumption, and were inflected particularly through moralising about women’s roles” (1995, 181). It was women who presided over the taking of tea and who purchased the sugar that would sweeten it and the china in which it would be served. As Anne McClintock has argued for a slightly later period, “the mass-marketing of empire as a global system was intimately wedded to the Western reinvention of domesticity, so that imperialism cannot be understood without a theory of domestic space and its relation to the market” (1995, 17). It was the women’s antislavery movement that first used these connections to mobilize women’s activism. Following British slave emancipation in 1834, ethical consumer movements continued to boycott sugar grown in the booming slave plantations of Brazil and Cuba and promoted free produce cotton (in place of that from the American South, where slavery continued until the end of the Civil War in 1865). They believed that demand creates supply, and that each consumer had a personal responsibility for the continuation of slavery. By 1851, there were twenty-six free-produce societies in Britain, and stores were set up in cities such as London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Thus, the guilt for slavery and the means of overturning it were placed explicitly in women’s hands, in the day-to-day decisions they made in the consumption practices of their households. This was

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a powerful ethical discourse of abstention and transformative action, linking women to the world market and having a significant critical impact on consumer culture that is seldom acknowledged, yet has implications for the contemporary world.

Conclusion Today ethical choices about eating once again challenge the interests of huge agro-industrial corporations. Although consumers are culturally and economically distanced from the social and cultural space of production in which their food originates, today “the links between First World ‘taste’ and Third World suffering are understood by the producing nations and it has become evident that increasingly their destiny has become, in effect, a secondary effect of shifts in First World consumption patterns” (Miller 1995, 3). Social movements have again called attention to the ways in which consumption patterns cause distant suffering. As Daniel Miller argues, “What is required is a ‘middle-range’ morality, which reinscribes on to the surface of commodities their consequences for producers, often from the developing world” (48). Ethical issues have become increasingly central to modes of consumption throughout Europe and North America. In Britain, from the 1960s onward, Oxfam, later joined by Twin Trading, Traidcraft, and Equal Exchange Trading Limited, promoted alternative agro-food networks. The Fairtrade Foundation formed in the early 1990s, and the British Association for Fair Trade Shops in the late 1990s. Fair trade claims to give producers fair prices for their produce, better terms of trade, access to markets and credit; it encourages organic production and offers support and emergency assistance for growers. If antislavery consumers first made evident the connections between the barbarities of enslavement in the colonies and the supposed refinements of bourgeois civility, embodied relations of mobile consumption remain central to the contradictory impulses of capitalist modernity grounded in the material connections between consumer pleasure and producer pain. In Britain, for example, something of an ethical stance emerged in relation to the EU-U.S. “Banana wars” of the late 1990s, with the growing, distribution, labeling, and marketing of “ethical bananas” gaining ground around the turn of the millennium, amid efforts to boycott so-called dollar bananas

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produced by the three big U.S.-based transnational corporations: Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte. Following the formation of the Single European Market in 1992, the European Union became the world’s largest market for bananas (35–40 percent). In 1996, the United States and several Latin American countries filed an ultimately successful complaint with the World Trade Organization against the European Union’s tariff protections for small Caribbean growers, especially in the British Commonwealth Windward Islands. The 1998–1999 banana wars between the United States and the European Union (in which the United States placed punitive 100 percent import duties on a range of sensitive EU exports, including cashmere sweaters, batteries, plastics, biscuits, and cheese) placed the trade dispute on the front page of many newspapers. The entire incident reflects the complex flows of trade, diplomacy, governance, and historical relationships of production and consumption across the Atlantic world. It connects the macrolevel that we call “the global” (with its debates over world trade regimes) and the microlevel of a corporeal ethics (central to many contemporary social movements around “slow” food and local agriculture). The contemporary neoliberal discourse of free trade must be examined in light of not only the fair trade discourse, but also the history of the Caribbean’s relation to European and American consumers. The trade wars may be tied up with a type of colonial guilt and postcolonial racial politics of responsibility for slavery, oppression, and reparations; and a contemporary politics of ethical consumption will likely pivot on how those historical legacies are addressed. Mimi Sheller See also Colonialism; Commodities; Geography; History of Food; Moralities; Political and Ethical Consumption; Political Economy; Sugar This entry is adapted from chapter 3 of Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Further Readings Austen, Ralph, and Woodruff Smith. “Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization.” In The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, edited by Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, 183–204. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992.

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Bermingham, Ann, and John Brewer, eds. The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text. London: Routledge, 1995. Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge, 1994. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Fox, William. An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum. 10th ed. Birmingham, UK: Swinney and Walker, 1791. Glennie, Paul. “Consumption within Historical Studies.” In Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, edited by Daniel Miller, 164–203. London: Routledge, 1995. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hall, Kim. “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century.” In Feminist Readings of Modern Culture, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 168–190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lawson, Philip. A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1660–1800. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1997. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995. Miller, Daniel. “Consumption as the Vanguard of History: A Polemic by Way of Introduction.” In Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, edited by Daniel Miller, 1–57. London: Routledge, 1995. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985. Morgan, Kenneth. Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Morton, Timothy. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches. London: Fontana, 1987. Schama, Simon. “Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still-Life Paintings and the ‘Empire of Things.’” In Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 478–488. London: Routledge, 1994. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants. Translated by David Jacobson. New York: Pantheon, 1992. First published 1980. Styles, John. “Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England.” In Consumption and the

World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 527–554. London: Routledge, 1994. Sussman, Charlotte. Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713–1833. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

CARNIVALS Evidence of the existence of carnivals or carnivalesque events dates back nearly to the inception of written history (see, for example, Herodotus). The term’s origins are in the Latin carnelevamen, which became the Italian carnevale: caro-, meaning “flesh” and levare, meaning “to put away.” Many Latin countries celebrate Carnevale, a feast and celebration (often attributed to Christian appropriation of pagan rituals) preceding forty days of fasting during the austere Roman Catholic season of Lent. The tension between these two periods was famously captured in the 1559 painting, The Battle between Carnival and Lent, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the 1504 painting, The Garden of Earthly Delight, by Hieronymus Bosch.

Function The field of study pertaining to carnivals is characterized by Chris Humphrey as exhibiting a binary division across the dual frameworks of social protest theory and safety-valve theory. Broadly speaking, social protest theory views the carnival as a temporary space where participants can escape the prevailing social order and freely experiment with alternative ways of being, elements of which may be realized more permanently within the social order. Such arguments tend to focus on the homogenizing and democratizing aspects of carnivals: for example, the frequent use of masks to render participants anonymous. In other cases, such as the Carnival traditions of Trinidad and Tobago as studied by Max Harris, post–slave era blacks challenged the dominant social order by dressing as whites and representing them as violent and hypersexual. This is an example of “inversion,” or the exchange of social roles within the festival. Transvestitism is, perhaps, the most frequently cited example of inversion, but there are many others, including the medieval practice of selecting a bishop boy or electing a temporary king or queen “for laughter’s sake” (Bakhtin 1965/1984, 5). Harris found that free blacks in

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Trinidad and Tobago also dressed as and imitated devils to embody the legacy of the past evils of slavery. The various acts use anonymity of the carnival as protection while making public “social transcripts” (i.e., culturally embedded ways of thinking and acting) that usually remain hidden because they challenge the assumptions of those in power (Scott 1992, 175). In some cases (e.g., the 1976 Nottingham Hill Carnival), carnivals have turned into riots, which have had more direct political consequences. Safety-valve interpretations, on the other hand, tend to focus on the way in which carnivalesque transgression is appropriated by and integrated into the broader social order, relieving pent-up frustration and acting as an incentive for continued subordination. Humphrey (2001, ix) defines a safety valve as a “licensed and ultimately contained explosion of popular energies.” While the term and concept of the safety valve is frequently used in sociological literature pertaining to carnivals and other festive events, it did not originate as an analytic tool for scholars to describe these phenomena. There are many known references to this concept in the political discourses surrounding the Homestead Act of 1862, which sought to remedy industrial discontent by offering cheap frontier land to settlers: Frederick Jackson Turner found evidence of such political debates as early as 1634. The binary between social protest and safety-valve theories, however, is largely artificial and, perhaps, exaggerated in some scholarship. The prominent theorists of the carnival each offer a complex set of analytic tools, which do not fit exclusively into either category and express aspects of each while transcending both.

Theorists In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin explores Rabelais’ incorporation of folk carnival humor into his work, which distinguishes Rabelais from the rest of the Western canon and makes his work more subversive. By turning the stage over to more democratic and popular sources (i.e., the expressions, idioms, and humor that characterize folk culture), Rabelais’ images (like Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival itself) have a subversive nature. Bakhtin explains, “no dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images” (1965/1984, 3).

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Bakhtin argues that, in premodern cultures, a “double aspect of the world and human life existed,” whereby the comic and the somber, the heroic and parodic were equally official (6). But, as class and state structures were consolidated under feudalism (and, ultimately, capitalism), all aspects of culture had to be consolidated under one authoritative narrative. Within that hegemonic framework, high culture and folk culture were distinguished. The former came to be salient in the history of “serious” art, literature, and philosophy, whereas the latter became the substance of popular humor and carnival festivities. Bakhtin describes the carnival as completely distinct from the Church, religiosity, or magic. It exists in its own sphere between the borders of life and art, the real and the ideal, and relates to them both through its characteristic element of play. Unlike the spectacle, the carnival does not distinguish between actors and spectators and, in that sense, is more democratic (1965/1984). When and where it exists, participation is compulsory. It suspends all laws and universally subjects participants to its rules and logics. Carnivals are not merely manifestations of the practical needs to eat, rest, or commune, but they also always have meaningful content, whereby they parody and challenge the norms of the real to open space for the possibilities represented in the ideal. Bakhtin contrasted the revolutionary potential of carnivals to official festivities that “looked back at the past and used the past to consecrate the present” (9). Finally, parody and comic degradation became for Renaissance society a mode of communication symbolic of the carnival in daily life. However, such language is only carnivalesque insofar as it is universally critical (i.e., it does not negate one form to assert the dominance of another) and insofar as it is fecund, inviting new possibilities. Bakhtin has been criticized as being too idealistic for assuming that power relations can ever be suspended—that we can, in a sense, step outside of society. Detractors argue that all speech is social, thus always a product of power. Moreover, in modern times, carnivals, such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans, are frequently appropriated by capitalist institutions by distinguishing local participant and touristic spectator and by leveraging the event for the real and immediate goal of accruing profit (as opposed to the ideal aim of stepping outside of the system). We must, however, distinguish the medieval carnival from the modern spectacle, which Guy Debord

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has described as a series of images through which the social relations of nonparticipant spectators are mediated. Even the official feast, which Bakhtin criticized and contrasted to the carnival, required active participation in reaffirming the social order through pageantry, manners, proper attire, and ritual. On the other hand, the spectacle is characterized by “passive acceptance,” which Debord explains “is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply” (Debord 2004, 10). Julia Kristeva, who played a significant role in raising attention to Bakhtin’s work outside of Russia, clarified and expanded on his notion of carnival and carnivalesque language. She emphasizes the definitive tension within the carnival between “prohibitions” (established by the prevailing forms of law and representation) and “transgression” (accomplished through a dialogical engagement that both recognizes traditional modes of organizations and, simultaneously, posits alternatives). Carnivalesque structure . . . is essentially dialogical. It is a spectacle without a stage; a game. . . . A carnival participant is both actor and spectator; he loses his sense of individuality, passes through the zero point of carnivalesque activity and splits into a subject of the spectacle and an object of the game. Within the carnival, the subject is reduced to nothingness, while the structure of the author emerges as anonymity that creates and sees itself created as self and other, as man and mask. (1977/1980, 78, emphasis in original)

Thus, for Kristeva, carnivalesque activity is always a double-movement; one that is characterized by neither the singularity of affirmation or of negation, but the “ambivalence” of dialogue, which neither fully affirms nor negates the objects of its expression. According to Kristeva, the novel, as the quintessential modern literary form, externalizes the tension between two semiotic formations: the monologic of the “‘realist’ narrative” and the poetic double-logic epitomized in the carnival. The structure of the novel, however, does not simply embody the carnivalesque in opposition to the monological authorial narrative; instead, it subsumes the two and simultaneously plays one off of the other. She explains, for example, “The writer can use another’s word, giving it a new meaning, while retaining the meaning it

already had” (73). Following Bakhtin, she describes such a synchronic semiotic system as “ambivalent.” Kristeva makes clear that the logic of the carnival and ambivalence applies not only to literature and art but also to law, history, religion, philosophy, and science: “Carnivalesque discourse breaks through the laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics and, at the same time, is a social and political protest. There is no equivalence, but rather, identity between challenging official linguistic codes and challenging official law” (65). Ambivalent ethics, then, simultaneously posit and negate a reality, leaving open the possibility of other ways of being. Every author finds himself or herself as the inheritor of the medium of language on which he or she operates, thus each author is locked in an unavoidable dialogue with all expressions previously formulated with his or her words just as every social actor finds himself or herself working within a social milieu that is a product of all the former layers of history. Neither author nor social actor creates ex nihilo; rather, a history of other realized possibilities is always implied within their works. While Victor Turner’s work focuses on rituals such as initiation rites, a similar logic can be applied to carnivals. Such events, which he describes as “liminal,” exist between a social logic that once prevailed (for an individual or for the group writ large) and one that is soon to come, acting as “a moment in and out of time” (1995, 96). According to Turner, the carnival as a liminal entity is not a temporary suspension of the social order, but a bridge between two orders and the point of possibility for social change. Liminal events function by stripping away extant roles, producing what Turner describes as a state of “communitas,” where social differences related to status are undermined and participants experience feelings of belonging, equality, and comradeship. Liminal events can be antistructural insofar as the desire for the further realization of communitas undermines extant inequalities. Turner classifies the carnival as one of several performative genres (including ritual, carnival, theater, spectacle, film) that imitate, reflect, and assign meaning to the social drama. Like Kristeva, Turner’s notion of the carnival is distinguished by a double-movement, but his theory relates it to a more basic unit, the social drama, in which history, especially in time of crisis, forces a choice between two social trajectories: precedent and the unprecedented.

Celebrity

Consumption Perhaps the most obvious relation between the carnival and consumption is that the carnival is characterized by excess. Excess itself implies a form of transgression from the norms of moderation so that consumption itself often becomes integral to a carnival’s subversive activity. Moreover, theorists tend to highlight the significance of the carnival participant’s engagement in simultaneously producing and consuming the event. Given its ubiquity in the history of human culture, the carnival may be the paradigmatic example of what has recently been termed “prosumption” (a portmanteau of production and consumption). Insofar as the argument can be made that we are (or always have been) moving toward a society where activities of production and consumption are collapsing into one another, as suggested by George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, the carnival becomes an increasingly important metaphor and the carnivalesque an increasingly important object of study. PJ Rey See also Liminality; Prosumption; Resistance; Rituals; Semiotics; Social Movements; Spectacles; Tourist Gaze

Further Readings Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. First published 1965. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press, 2004. First published 1967. Harris, Max. “The Impotence of Dragons: Playing Devil in the Trinidad Carnival.” The Drama Review 42, no. 3 (1998): 108–123. Herodotus. The Histories. Book 2. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. London: Penguin Classics, 1954. Humphrey, Chris. The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001. Ivanov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich. “The Semiotic Theory of Carnival as the Inversion of Bipolar Opposites.” In Carnival! Vol. 64, edited by Umberto Eco, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, Monica Rector, and Thomas A. Sebeok, 11–36. Approaches to Semiotics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1984. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. First published 1977. Ritzer, George, and Nathan Jurgenson. “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism

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in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer.’” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 1 (2010): 13–36. Scott, James. C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1921. Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.

CELEBRITY Celebrity is the status of being well-known, praised, exalted, or attributed with importance, and it is also used to describe people or things endowed with such status. So someone can have celebrity and also be a celebrity. The provenance of the word is revealing: from the French célébrité, which derives from the Latin celebritas, meaning honored or renowned, the term has strayed into English language dissociated from references to accomplishments or great deeds. Celebrities do not typically ply their labor so much as their presence, usually in the form of a moving visual image that appears on television or computer screens or a stationary representation on a print advertisement. Either way, the effect is to implicate those looking at or reading about the celebrity in an act of consumption. As Egon Franck and Stephan Nüesch have pointed out, “the well-knowness [sic] of celebrities has become a viable commodity all by itself” (2007, 225). It has become tradable “independent of accomplishment, heroics, or talent.” Celebrities are, by definition, renowned, though not necessarily for anything they have done or said.

History The condition of being well-known is immemorial: dramatists and philosophers earned reputations for their wisdom, and political and military leaders for notable achievements since the growth of Aegean city-states from 900 BCE. Homer, Pythagoras, and Plato remain canonical figures. Alexander the Great commemorated victories over the Persian Empire by naming cities in his honor: the Egyptian port Alexandria was founded in 332 BCE. Alexander has been identified by Leo Braudy, in his The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (1986) as the first figure to foment his own fame.

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Certainly, famous people appear throughout history; indeed, the way we study history is principally through the decisions and deeds of the famous. But celebrities index a particular type of historical context, one in which fame and accomplishments are decoupled. Some scholars argue that this is not unique to the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. “In the first half of the eighteenth century a process occurred by which a nascent culture of celebrity began to form side by side with an existing culture of fame,” recorded Stella Tillyard in her work “Celebrity in 18th-Century London” (2005, 22). She identifies three specific sets of circumstances: a weak English monarchy with limited moral authority, the lapsing of legislation controlling the numbers of printing presses, and, to some extent, printing itself, “and a public interested in new ways of thinking about other people and themselves” (22). Combined with limited prohibition on libel and the proliferation of places of entertainment, these led to a culture in which the casual and unconstrained conversation we now know as gossip about others’ lives, public and private, became a kind of right of citizenship. There is a resemblance to the social conditions that underlay the growth of celebrity in the 1990s: (1) a loss of confidence in traditional leadership, (2) a multiplication of global media channels, and (3) an uncommon interest in the personal and hitherto confidential affairs of other people.

Voyeurism/Performance As the authority and indeed credibility of established leaders receded, consumers searched for newer sources of inspiration. They found them amid the burgeoning media channels filled with inexpensive content culled from music videos, talk shows, and what was once called light entertainment. In another era, prying into those aspects of another’s life considered private might be unwholesomely voyeuristic, even prurient. Yet, in this field of inquiry, the media found a new resource; and, during the 1990s, more invasive forms of journalism gave rise to a new type of figure for which impertinent inquiries became a necessary condition. To be a celebrity, one required others to take an interest in one’s personal affairs. Those others were the consumers known as fans. In his Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America, Joshua Gamson argued that fans became simultaneous voyeurs of and performers in

commercial culture” (1994, 137). Gamson’s research into the fans’ experiences indicates that, while they were popularly regarded as manipulable consumers of the popular media in which celebrities regularly appeared, fans were in fact aware of their own roles in creating, shaping, and perhaps destroying celebrities. Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the simultaneity of voyeurism/performance came in 1993 with the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, who was the ne plus ultra of celebrities, though without explicit commercial interests. “Since her death, a new (and improved) generation of commodities circulate with her image on them—commemorative stamps, plates, and dolls,” observed Diana Taylor. “The music and books she’s inspired have reached the top of the charts and grossed millions of dollars.” Taylor described the consumption of Diana as an “orgy of promiscuous identification. . . . ‘The people’ are not only the consumers, but also the constructed of this death” (2002, 75–76).

Commodities A culture in which worshipful devotion to celebrities was a prominent feature took shape incrementally through the 1990s, though the celebration of Diana was a reminder of how it was possible to personalize a relationship with someone known only through images, whether on screen or in print. This collective sensation of intimacy was crucial to celebrities’ value: the illusion of having a human relationship with celebrity figures effectively offered a nexus of consumption, linking consumers to products that bore the endorsement or imprimatur of someone they experienced as familiar. When Marina Sejung Choi and Nora J. Rifon wrote, “consumers are constantly transporting symbolic properties out of products into their lives to construct their self,” they suggest a mechanism through which celebrities transmute into commodities: “Celebrity emulation may take the form of purchasing and using the product endorsed by the celebrity, thereby obtaining the celebrity-conveyed meanings and constructing a satisfying self-concept” (2007, 309). Buying cologne, jewelry, cars, or any other piece of merchandise associated with a celebrity, by this account, links consumers not just to celebrities but to the values, sentiments, and imagery they seem to personify in the eyes of the consumer. This was especially pertinent in a global market that, in the 1990s,

Celebrity

segmented demographically; human figures in whom a variety of consumer groups invested relevance were transcendent—they cut across markets. Lee Barron invoked Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus citizenship to understand how consumers were invited to engage and share with fashionable celebrities endorsing products, in particular clothes, cosmetics, and personal products: “To purchase such items may, symbolically at least, enable the consumer to share in the glamour of such celebrities” (2007, 457). In this sense, celebrities not only advertise commodities, but the culture in which those commodities acquire value. Celebrities promote what Christopher Lasch, in his The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), called “consumption as a way of life”: their sheer presence persuades consumers to buy goods for which there is no obvious need. To extend Barron’s point, the “need” is developed in the habitus, the way in which experience is constituted. Celebrities are both fabricators of and ambulant advertisements for consumer culture.

Authenticity “Celebrities are rapidly filling the roles that priests, politicians, and wealthy philanthropists once served,” wrote Daniel Harris in 2008. “We are transferring moral authority to the only public servants that remain: pop singers, Hollywood stars, and the casts of our favorite sitcoms” (138). We should also add evacuees from reality TV shows to this group. As traditional leaders once guided opinion on how to prosecute the good life, celebrities later instructed by example, consuming conspicuously and inexhaustibly. By the early 2000s, “the attention economy,” as Charles Fairchild calls it, needed careful management: as advertisers vied for consumer’s interests, new forms of entertainment appeared, most noticeably reality TV, featuring unexceptional people conscripted into what might forty years earlier be mistaken for a Philip Zimbardo experiment (in which participants were secreted in a simulated prison and observed). As preposterous as the concept might have seemed, reality television, with its fly-on-the-wall documentary format, proved an improbable success, and its dramatis personae were unlikely celebrities. In his study of “idols,” which, as contestants in shows such as American Idol and Britain’s The X Factor, were

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close relatives of the reality TV characters, Fairchild stipulated: “Their celebrity is dependent for its public validation on the ways in which each emerges from anonymity” (2007, 357). Authenticity was key: the shows pioneered a type of consumer identification by establishing what Fairchild recognized as “trust,” not just in the contestants but in the integrity of the whole enterprise. Viewers voted for who they wanted to remain in the show and who they wanted ejected, providing for a kind of interactive democracy. It engendered, as Fairchild detects, an ingenious form of branding that was “primarily about creating sustainable relationships with consumers by constructing and mobilizing their loyalty and trust” (2007, 358). The ordinariness of the characters reinforced the vital authenticity: unlike the remote, inaccessible, and untouchable Hollywood stars of the 1940s and 1950s, the new celebrities were recognizably common. Their celebrity might be fleeting and, of course, subject to the caprice of consumers, but, during their short reigns, they typically endorsed products, authored prescriptive DVDS, wrote magazine columns, appeared on talk shows, opened nightclubs, and engaged in all manner of activity that entailed selling products and, in some way, kept fans involved in a culture of perpetual consumption. The upsurge of interest in celebrities has been explained as an ersatz religiosity in a secular culture, a media-borne enterprise produced and sustained by global corporations, and, more conspiratorially, a political distraction that diverts attention from pragmatic affairs that affect material lives. Ellis Cashmore See also Authenticity; Citizenship; Commercialization; Commodities; Fans; Promotional Culture; Reality TV; Self-Presentation

Further Readings Barron, Lee. “The Habitus of Elizabeth Hurley: Celebrity, Fashion, and Identity Branding.” Fashion Theory 11, no. 4 (2007): 443–462. Choi, Sejung Marina, and Nora J. Rifon. “Who Is the Celebrity in Advertising? Understanding Dimensions of Celebrity Images.” The Journal of Popular Culture 40, no. 2 (2007): 304–324. Fairchild, Charles. “Building the Authentic Celebrity: The ‘Idol’ Phenomenon in the Attention Economy.” Popular Music and Society 30, no. 3 (2007): 355–375.

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Franck, Egon, and Stephan Nüesch. “Avoiding ‘Star Wars’—Celebrity Creation as Media Strategy.” Kyklos 60, no. 2 (2007): 211–230. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Harris, Daniel. “Celebrity Bodies.” Southwest Review 93, no. 1 (2008): 135–145. Taylor, Diana. “Dancing with Diana.” The Drama Review 46, no. 1 (2002): 149–169. Tillyard, Stella. “Celebrity in 18th-Century London.” History Today 55, no. 6 (2005): 20–27.

CHANNELS

OF

DESIRE

The concept of channels of desire basically refers to ways in which various social agents mediate communication about what is desirable and what is not. As such, it incorporates all social autocommunication about the goals and purposes of life and the practices and aspirations that constitute it, from schooling and other socialization systems to mass mediatized imagery. Desire is a triadic relation between a desiring subject, a desired object, and another, possibly collective, desiring subject. Desire is mimetic. Hence, in its broadest sense, society at large and its institutional orchestrations of, as well as individual member’s communications concerning, what is of value and what is not represent the overarching channel of desire. For analytical purposes, it is necessary to break down the general concept of channels of desire into some of its more significant constitutive and institutionalized parts. Georg Simmel was one of the pioneers who analyzed the functioning of fashion and proposed a trickle-down theory, according to which desire is channeled from the higher social classes to the lower classes through processes of emulation, and conversely, the higher social classes are obliged to engage in stylistic renovation to maintain class distinctions of taste. The predominant source for channeling this process has historically been the advertising industry. Consequently, advertising and its role in the historical development of contemporary forms of social communication are leading aspects of channels of desire. The manipulative ways in which advertising is seen as shaping social and personal worldviews have generated a plethora of critical analyses. The notion

of channels of desire in a consumer culture context is therefore often associated with the work of a certain branch of critical sociology that is concerned about the spread of consumerism and materialism, in particular through the manipulative power of contemporary mass media. From this perspective, the rise of consumer culture, with its processes of industrialization, commodification, and mass-mediated commercial communication is the background on which one must understand the workings of channels of desire. The eponymous work of Stuart and Elisabeth Ewen stands as prototypical of this school of thought, with its critical analysis of the social history of the proliferation of “a wide, repeatable vernacular of commercial images and ideas” (Ewen and Ewen 1982, 9). Primary sources of these commercial images and ideas are the industries of advertising, movies, and fashion. To some extent, behind this critique there is a tacit moralism, an understanding that desire is somehow dubious and less acceptable as a social principle of organization compared to the more acceptable fulfillment of personal and social needs. But as has been argued elsewhere, desire represents a way of understanding human social motivation that fundamentally challenges the idea that it is possible and useful for social scientists to isolate more basic, presocial sets of utilities and privilege them with the denomination “need.” As a consequence, desire, here, is understood not so much as addressing the cornucopia of things, services, and experiences that contemporary consumers can long for beyond the satisfaction of their basic needs, but more generally as the way in which the social environment influences our aspirations in life. This is why the question of channels of desire opens up and becomes much more inclusive of various social forms of communication. From the basic socialization patterns to the plethora of social contacts and massmediated imagery that constitute modern lives, all of these teach us something about what is desirable in life, not just in positive but also in negative terms— channels of desire teach us goals and aspirations in life, but likewise we are taught what not to desire, depending on various social taste patterns. This implies that the classical channels of desire, as evoked in the legacy of Ewen and Ewen, remain important, although they possibly work in more complex ways than we are usually inclined to think. In her discussion of the historical emergence and the

Channels of Desire

institutional anchoring of consumer culture, Roberta Sassatelli suggests that the two major institutionalized systems for channeling desire are advertising and fashion. Both operate as the dominant cultural intermediaries between the production and the consumption of goods and services. Advertising is traditionally the channel of desire par excellence, but increasing marketing literacy as well as an increasing skepticism regarding the effect of advertising leads advertisers and advertising critics to a revised shared view—that advertising is a powerful tool for inducing desires for specific products and brands. Consequently, new types of nondetectable advertising have emerged, for example, through viral marketing, product placement, and so on. To announce the end of the advertising era would, however, probably be premature. Instead, as we are reminded by Michael Schudson, advertising works more on the level of influencing market agents more generally and by promoting not so much specific products as consumer culture’s central dogma, that consumption is the predominant realm through which one can realize one’s desires. Fashion, as the other classical channel of desire, has been less contested in its efficacy in producing images of desirability. Fashion is one big communicative system about the desirability of styles, looks, and products, notes Malcolm Barnard. But fashion as a social institution has undergone a rather fundamental fragmentation. All channels of desire operate in a double social process of inclusion and distinction, both on the social and the personal level. The fragmentation process is linked to an increase in desire for individual distinction, which nevertheless continues to function in a social universe of recognizable and inclusive styles. The proliferation of fashions also undermines certain criticisms against fashion as a hegemonic system. Fashion provides a system for individual expressivity and identity formation. Hence, the fashion systems (in plural) generate a multitude of platforms for individual expressivity and creativity through ephemeral desires in daily life settings. The recent proliferation of styles is both nurtured by and nurturing a process of increased intertwining of popular cultural forms of expression and the commercial processes of product development and strategic communication. Thomas Frank analyzes the history of this intertwinement, especially from the 1960s onward. Instead of a channel of desire trickling down from the upper social strata to the

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lower strata, there is an increased tendency that inspirational new desires emerge from street styles and subcultural groups, sometimes referred to as trickleup or trickle-across processes. Through processes of co-optation, commercial agents search the market for emerging trends and styles, a process often referred to as cool-hunting, as an inspiration for new product development and strategic market positioning and communication. Likewise, consumer-based innovations and service-dominant logics cater to contemporary prosumers. Processes of cultural production and consumption are thus increasingly intertwined. In this respect, it may be useful to think of contemporary flows of meanings and objects in terms of what Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2007) have analyzed as a two-way process between object and mediation, which they term the thingification of media and the mediation of things. Contemporary production of cultural goods represents a shift away from a situation where a sharp distinction between the object and representations of the object is meaningful. As noted by Jean Baudrillard, we live in the age of the object-sign. A brand can be understood as a strategically produced and disseminated sign (or a set of signs) that refers to the value universe of a commodity. The brand, Martin Kornberger argues, has become the new axis around which the management of production as well as consumption is organized. Consequently, and with the arguments concerning the consumer activities in a convergent media universe as well as the confluence of objectification and mediation in mind, it may be useful to consider the brand as a channel of desire in its own right, beyond the influence of institutionalized advertising and fashion systems. The convergence of media is also relevant in another setting, which seriously undermines or at least attributes new agentic power into the power relationship between fashion and advertising on the one side and the consumer on the other. In consumer research, the notion of opinion leader is often assigned to people who—because of their institutional positions (being journalists or critics) or due to their personal charisma and social network—exercise a particularly big influence on how desire is channeled and how tastes are formed. With the coming of the digital age and the democratization of media access and production of mass-mediated messages, the role of the individual consumer, especially if he or

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she has charisma and communicative skills, becomes even more important as a channel of desire. Finally, it may be worth noting that the channeling of desire simultaneously produces conservatory and (r)evolutionary forces. Desire is operant in a state of reaffirmation of social categories (desiring standard expression of “the good life”) and challenging or transgressing these categories through the introduction of new distinctive ways of life, new constellations of meanings, and new objects that challenge existing principles of categorization. Søren Askegaard See also Advertising; Communication Studies; Consumer Socialization; Desire; Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Fashion; Needs and Wants; Simmel, Georg

Further Readings Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. London: Routledge, 2002. Baudrillard, Jean. Consumer Society. London: Sage, 1998. First published 1970. Belk, Russell W., Güliz Ger, and Søren Askegaard. “The Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry into Consumer Passion.” Journal of Consumer Research 30 (December 2003): 326–351. Ewen, Stuart, and Elisabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kornberger, Martin. Brand Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Lash, Scott, and Celia Lury. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. First published in French in 1987. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007. Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

CHARITY SHOPS See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Reuse/ Recycling; Voluntary Associations

CHILDHOOD The standard definition of childhood denotes the earliest stages of the life course in which the human being has yet to achieve full physical and mental development. Most of the secondary definitions connote notions such as immaturity, irresponsibility, and dependency. However, the meaning of childhood has varied throughout history and across different cultures, and there are corresponding variations in the way societies understand and organize children’s lives. In academic study, the naturalistic child development view clashes with the social constructionist view, but the former tends to be dominant in popular culture. The hybrid view accepts the notion of natural developmental stages while also accepting that there are sociocultural variations in our understanding of when and how these stages occur. Now that identity is increasingly forged in relation to the consumption of symbolic objects and the very young child is a primary target of the marketing industry, the debate on childhood is crucial to the study of consumer culture. Historical and literary records suggest a widespread tendency to view both childhood and parenthood as difficult experiences. In ancient Hellenic culture, parents were responsible for instilling virtue in children, and since then Western cultures have tended to portray children in three basic ways: naturally innocent and in need of protection from corruption, naturally wicked and in need of discipline, or tabula rasa, a blank slate on which culture writes its scripts. The argument has not been settled, and childhood remains a contested category. The relationship between young people and consumer culture is also contested. Is consumer culture a corrupting influence that captures gullible children to construct tomorrow’s consumers or a site of creative identity construction in which young people can find themselves as they play with its symbols? Despite these wide conceptual variations, most cultures have rites of passage as means of integrating children into society. At their most basic, these rites are simply attempts to make potentially problematic transitional stages as smooth as possible, but at their most complex, they are means of integrating children into the social world and forming individual characters. The integrationist ethos assumes that the adult world is a complete, rational, and desirable condition to which the child should

Childhood

aspire. This ignores the possibility that adulthood itself might be socially constructed as a vehicle for reflecting and reproducing the social elite’s values, norms, and institutions. The standard socialization discourse assumes that the child’s assiduously arranged bonding with the prevailing social order is good and natural. Does this bonding crush dissent, difference, and individuality? Conservative thinkers tend to agree that to some extent it does, but it is more important to socialize individuals and cultivate “good characters.” Conversely, liberal and radical thinkers tend to argue that this is an oppressive arrangement that incorporates the child at an early age into the sociocultural system and its prevailing hegemonic ideology. The child development paradigm, based on the principle that incremental cognitive competence is the result of a natural, biological process, has also been highly influential in Western thought. The growing child passes from the early sensory-motor stage through preconceptual, intuitive, and concrete and formal stages, each one increasing the child’s ability to understand the world. In Jean Piaget’s schema, each child moves from the affective, subjective, and value-laden world to the rational, objective, and fact-defined world. Often criticized as ethnocentric in that it privileges scientific rationality, this schema is also defended as a flexible process that can be adapted to any set of values that require advanced cognitive ability. Just as the developmental process can lead the child to Western scientific rationality, it can lead it to something else. The radical liberal critique of the developmental paradigm suggests that children develop cognitive and emotionally resilient capabilities long before Piaget claimed. However, this has recently been criticized; by claiming that resilience and rationality exist at an early stage in the child’s life, the radical liberal position might have played into the hands of the consumer marketing industry by helping to dismantle traditional modes of parental protection, posits Sharon Beder. If the first stages of the child’s development as a rational, reflective being able to resist manipulative forms of influence and choose wisely need a protected environment, radical liberalism could be accused of colluding in the destruction of that which incubates the very individual freedom and citizenship that it values. The alternative to the developmental paradigm is to see the child as entirely socially constructed, the product of authoritative discourses that structure the

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social world. These discourses can reconfigure themselves in different historical periods, sometimes quite radically in what the constructionist Michel Foucault named “epistemic breaks.” Harry Hendrick notes that for Foucault, history is characterized by different political contexts in which specific discourses are dominant and others are subordinate. Thus, Sigmund Freud, Piaget, and others constructed normalizing discourses that, as they were acted out by individuals in everyday life, produced forms rather than reflecting reality. Thus, it is these dominant discourses of childhood, not natural processes or rational choice, that actually constitute childhood, and this focus on dominant symbolism places the enquiry firmly in the area of social power, according to Christopher Jenks. However, this theory marginalizes biology and the universal process in which the individual’s capabilities develop, and it is perhaps more likely that socially constructed identities and natural processes of development grind over each other with considerable friction, notes Steve Hall and colleagues. Dominant discourses might attempt to constitute the child as an incomplete adult, but perhaps before a certain age, the child is a naturally incomplete being no matter which discourse is dominant; which, if true, would suggest that developmental theory should not be abandoned but integrated with social constructionist perspectives. Early critical theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse and Louis Althusser, saw the child as a product of repression, ideology, and the internalization of the cultural means of social reproduction. Alternatively, radical liberal theorists, such as Alison James and Alan Prout, saw children as potential agents of social change, active in the construction of their own social worlds and thus in need of empowerment. Children’s cultural worlds are separate from those of adults, but this difference can constantly challenge the dominance of the adult world. However, Paul Willis’s more sobering 1977 study indicated a tendency for children to “rebel into conformity” as they grow older, rather than promote social change. Perhaps the most celebrated social constructionist commentator on childhood, Phillipe Ariès, argued that there was no distinct conception of childhood in Europe during the Middle Ages. The childhood that was commonly accepted in Classical Greece and Rome seemed to have been forgotten. Awareness returned throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where, according to Lloyd

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DeMause, childhood began its move from a hellish state to the one of love and care we see today; here the natural, evolutionary development of history is thought to mirror the development of the child. As this change gathered pace, two contrasting discourses of childhood emerged: the child was either wicked and in need of harsh discipline or beautiful and innocent and thus deserving of worship and special treatment. Those who subscribe to Foucault’s conception of historical change argue that the early discursive dichotomy of barbarism and worship has been replaced largely by child care practices of surveillance and control. Those who see this “disciplinary society” as insidious and oppressive argue that a better way to care for and educate children is for the adult to simply pass on problems for the child to solve; thus learning can take place through selfdiscovery and the celebration of difference and choice.

Childhood, Late Modernity, and Consumer Culture Some contemporary thinkers view the current postmodern or late-modern era as the end of nature and the tradition. Formerly, stable cultures and societies have fragmented into a profusion of contrived lifestyles. Arguments rage as to whether these lifestyles are autonomous and creative or cultivated as conformist modes by prevailing ideology, marketing, and mass media. Those who argue that the current profusion of lifestyles offers opportunities for transgression and rebellion at the point of consumption are constantly challenged by others who argue that the authority of the corporations and the mass media has replaced nature and tradition and compromised the creative agency of the individual. The extreme intergenerational separation of children and adults is seen by some as evidence for the latter view, and critics argue that a shortened and culturally impoverished childhood is now colonized by consumer culture. Yet, simultaneously, the same marketing industry presents it nostalgically as a lost realm of love, dependability, permanence, security, and stability, the re-enchantment of a nihilistic world. Although today children are protected and indulged to an unprecedented degree, they are also easy targets for consumer culture and its images. Taking this critique further, Neil Postman argued that the child is not an agent of progressive change but a casualty of the mass media’s destruction of traditional

cultures. The modernist distinction between childhood and adulthood grew alongside the growth of the print medium and its power to classify and construct the sociocultural world. As the print medium is replaced by contemporary mass media, such modernist classifications as “child” and “adult” begin to disintegrate. TV, film, computer games, and the Internet are now the media that communicate hegemonic images of childhood and all other categories of human existence. Constant invitations to violence, sexuality, exploitation, and dark nihilism are all portrayed as images of “cool” individualism to consume as the bases of identity construction. Thus, childhood begins to disappear, which for Postman signifies a regressive return to the Middle Ages. Adulthood also begins to disappear, replaced by what Benjamin Barber calls “adultescence.” When children are empowered and enfranchised in this way, they are susceptible to all the problems and risks faced by adults who are mature enough to deal with them. As children lose innocence and become embroiled in crime and violence, the idea that they are inherently evil returns, which fuels regressive social attitudes, such as the British tabloid press’s demonization of “hoodies” and “feral youth.” However, some continental philosophers have argued that the passage into adulthood is far more complex: The aforementioned theories of social construction, discursive constitution, and natural processes need to be combined with theories of desire and social power. Discourses are not entirely free and malleable but effectively limited by concentrated structural power, dominant ideology, and the human material they have to work with, so we must not overestimate their constitutive power. For instance, Slavoj Žižek, following Jacques Lacan, suggests that by respectively overestimating and underestimating the child’s capabilities, liberals and conservatives alike hand over the child and its developing desires to the prevailing form of social power. To become an adult and resist dominant ideology and culture by rational reflection, the child must first pass through the Oedipal phase, enter the symbolic order of prohibitions, and abandon its narcissistic identity. This flight from narcissism allows the child to develop reflective and empathetic capabilities. By interfering in this development, consumer culture can destroy the stable sociocultural systems valued by conservatives and the desire for structural change valued by liberals, replacing both with a childish and constantly

Childhood

unsettled identity driven by a nagging desire for lifestyle symbols. Adopting a more left-libertarian stance, Jenks argues that restrictions should be lifted on children’s sexual activity, schooling, political involvement, and so on to free them from the conventional ideological discourses that define childhood on behalf of the established order. Critics, such as Barber, argue that this grants individual rights and autonomy too early, ignoring the need for protection and the progressive development of morality and cognitive ability. Too much too early is culturally dangerous, playing into the hands of the marketing industry as it attempts to exploit the vulnerability and gullibility of the unworldly child. On the other hand, a protected childhood might delay the onset of the rationality and autonomy that is necessary to resist established ideology and the corporate manipulation of desires. While the philosophical and theoretical arguments continue to rage, the social sciences have produced copious empirical evidence that children are primary targets of consumer marketing. In the 1970s and 1980s, consumer culture was often celebrated as a site for freedom, fun, autonomy, creative identity construction, and resistance to the norm at the point of consumption. However, current empirical research raises crucial questions: If children are rational, autonomous, resilient, and creative, why is the marketing industry seemingly able to manipulate and exploit them with such consummate ease, and why are so many aspects of childhood deteriorating? In 2006, a group of British academics expressed concern about the current well-being of Western children, too many of whom were suffering from depression, substance abuse, violence, and self-harm. In 2007, a UNICEF report condemned the current state of children’s well-being in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, the three most consumerorientated nations in the industrialized West, where rates of unwanted pregnancies, binge-drinking, obesity, suicide, criminality, and imprisonment among young people were also on the rise (see Beder, 2007). Today there are more critiques of corporate interference in childhood via the marketing industry, the mass media, and an increasingly formalized and corporatized education system. When Jenks’s suggestion of asking children how they feel has been carried out by researchers, many children complained of a lack of kindness, friendliness, and helpfulness among their peers. There is little doubt that corporations

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are targeting children with a barrage of advertising. Simon Winlow and Steve Hall have argued that consumer culture has displaced traditional sources of identity, such as class, culture, ethnicity, occupation, locale, and so on. This change could be fostering permanent discontent and anxiety among vulnerable children, allowing relatively less vulnerable children, encouraged by the marketing industry, to use interactive communications technology to dominate their peers as the “cool” leaders of fashion. If this is true, then children themselves are being used as frontline troops in the marketing industry’s campaign to establish consumer culture as the principal site for identity construction, according to Thomas Frank. This invasive strategy targets children at the earliest possible age, transforming play from a site of creative exploration to an opportunity for corporations to build in rapid obsolescence to toys, fostering discontent and the need for a more rapid turnover. According to Beder, some of the more ruthless Western businesses have lobbied for cuts in education funding to move in and reorganize the education system. These businesses prefer instrumental education that is functional to business rather than education as an end in itself. This represents a fundamental shift from quality to efficiency, with standardized testing based on narrow educational values. In the process, schools and colleges are being turned into yet more sites for the creation of brand loyalty and the promulgation of the ideology of corporate beneficence. The cultural effects are the production of submissive children as future workers and consumers, the retardation of critical thinking, and the promulgation of views of history and society that are friendly to big business and consumer culture but hostile to alternative ways of life. Families, communities, schools, and colleges have been “opened up,” no longer havens for the protection of children from the harshness of outside life or the intrusive strategies of the marketing industry. According to Sue Palmer, marketing strategies for the inculcation of promotional messages into the psychic and cultural lives of children have become increasingly ingenious. By age ten, 78 percent of British children list shopping as one of their favorite activities and show extreme familiarity with three to four hundred brand names. Seventy percent of British three-year-olds recognize the McDonald’s symbol before they recognize their own surname. The average British or American child views between thirty and forty thousand advertisements per year,

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and many of these are produced to cultivate “pesterpower” in children so that parents can be nagged into buying more goods. In Britain the children’s consumer market is worth over 30 billion pounds per year, and executives see children not as precious and potentially autonomous future citizens but as “evolving consumers” to be primed for a lifetime of maximized consumption. New “neuromarketing” techniques are being developed to stimulate parts of the brain that deal with humiliation and envy. The primary message is that without a certain product, the child will feel like a “loser” compared to the “cool” children who emulate celebrities, pop stars, and sports stars by displaying the brands these stars have been paid to promote. Self/ brand identification signifies both individual identity and group membership, and young children are systematically encouraged to feel anxious about their identities, fuelling the desire to buy consumer items that carry the required symbols. Some, such as Frank, argue that even the symbols and desire for rebellion and authenticity can be prefabricated in preferred forms by the marketing industry. Beneath this onslaught, the possibility for meaningful childhood with space for organic growth and development is diminishing and runs the risk of disappearing altogether, taking meaningful adulthood with it, asserts Barber. These are the two poles in this complex, ongoing debate. A large body of research suggests that corporate marketing strategies are profoundly changing the experience of childhood and creating manifold problems among children to increase profits and mold younger generations as enthusiastic consumers. Others argue that most young people are autonomous and rational and thus able to engage with the malleable symbols supplied by consumer marketing in a creative, ironic, and ultimately resistant way. Can children protect themselves from this marketing onslaught, or do responsible adults need to intervene through culture, politics, and law? Steve Hall See also Age and Aging; Branding; Bricolage; Consumer Anxiety; Discourse; False Consciousness/False Needs; Identity; Narcissism; Neuromarketing

Further Readings Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books, 1971. Ariès, Phillipe. Centuries of Childhood. London: Cape, 1962.

Barber, Benjamin. Consumed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Beder, Sharon. This Little Kiddie Went to Market. London: Pluto, 2007. DeMause, Lloyd, ed. The History of Childhood. London: Souvenir, 1976. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 1971. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. London: Allen Lane, 1977. Hall, Steve, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum. Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. Cullompton, UK: Willan, 2008. Hendrick, Harry. “Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood.” In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout, 33–60. Basingstoke, UK: Falmer, 1990. James, Alison, and Alan Prout, eds. Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. Basingstoke, UK: Falmer, 1990. Jenks, Christopher. Childhood. London: Routledge, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London: Abacus, 1972. Palmer, Sue. Toxic Childhood. London: Orion, 2006. Piaget, Jean. Language and the Thought of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage, 1994. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labour. Farnsborough, UK: Saxon House, 1977. Winlow, Simon, and Steve Hall. Violent Night. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 2000.

CHRISTIANITY Christian attitudes toward consumption are formed in the tension between celebrating and sharing the goodness of creation and an awareness of the sinfulness of greed and the unjust distribution of goods.

Biblical Teachings Christianity inherited from Judaism an understanding of the right use of goods as founded on the Exodus: God’s liberation of the Israelites from Egypt; leading them to the Promised Land “flowing

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with milk and honey” (Ex 3:8). This experience of liberation and gift grounded a positive evaluation of all creation. The land’s bounty was celebrated in a rich cycle of agricultural feasts and temple sacrifice. The quotidian details of production and consumption were sacralized in a temporality of labor and Sabbath, in restrictions on harvest and ownership (gleaning, Jubilee), and in a detailed system of slaughter and dietary regulations. The challenge of the prophets rests on this foundation of goodness and gift. Wealth can be idolatrous, tempting humans to trust in their own power rather than God. Riches become sinful when they are not shared in the community, especially with the poor. Jesus preached during the first-century Roman occupation of Judea. His central theme: the Kingdom of God—a nonviolent order of love and generosity— was an inversion of the imperial order. The poor and hungry are blessed, while woe is pronounced on the rich and well fed (Lk 6:20–24). Riches were equated with the unjust economic order of the time. In one parable, a servant about to be fired colludes with his master’s debtors to discount their debts. Jesus praises him for using unrighteous mammon to build relationships. No concern is shown for the master defrauded of his unrighteous gains (Lk 16:1–9). True wealth is not found in riches. Sharing with the needy is “treasure in heaven” (Mt 6:19–21). Jesus counsels a rich young man to sell all that he has and give to the poor. When the man departs in sorrow, Jesus observes it is easier for the rich to pass “through the eye of a needle” than to enter the Kingdom of God. God makes possible this seemingly impossible call to discipleship (Mk 10:23). Consumption also figures positively in the Gospels. Jesus was accused of being a drunkard and eating with sinners. A lavish banquet is one of his most repeated images of God’s kingdom. The Christian ritual of the Eucharist reenacts Jesus’ final meal: his offering of bread and wine to his disciples as his own body and blood. This positions bodily consumption at the heart of divine and human communion. Members of the community in Jerusalem sold their possessions, sharing the proceeds with all according to need (Acts 2:44). The apostle Paul criticized the distortion of the Eucharistic meals by class differences. Some went hungry while others got drunk (1 Cor 11:22). The Letter to Timothy condemns

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those who use religious authority for material gain. “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tm 6:10).

Early Church Early Christian preaching wrestled with these demanding teachings. In the second century, Clement of Alexandria softened Jesus’s exhortation to the rich young man: The commandment “sell what you have and give to the poor” is not to be taken literally, but as a call for spiritual detachment from wealth and for its proper use to supply the needs of the poor. John Chrysostom, writing in the fourth century, was more rigorous: God distributed resources equally in creation. Thus, private property is either theft or it is inheritance. To withhold aid from the needy is further robbery. Greed is idolatry that fractures relationships. Almsgiving is not merely the restoration of justice but also of community. Constantine’s Edict of Toleration in AD 313 ended the persecution of Christianity. Monastic groups fled the empire’s welcoming embrace to pray in the wilderness. Their renunciation of private property became fundamental to vowed religious life. Augustine of Hippo summarized many elements of biblical teaching in his influential distinction between things to be “used” and things to be “enjoyed.” God alone should be enjoyed. No other person or thing can fulfill human longing. These are to be loved perhaps, but in use—oriented to the enjoyment of God. This distinction forms the basis for much subsequent teaching on material goods and spiritual “detachment.”

Medieval Period Christian views on consumption and poverty were transformed by the social upheavals of the twelfth century. Defeudalization and the rise of the towns increased the vulnerability of the poor. Increased commerce brought both prosperity and greed. “Apostolic life” movements emerged, seeking to replicate the preaching and poverty of the early Christians. In the process, poverty was transformed from a monastic spiritual discipline or an opportunity for alms into an ideal of the church of the poor. Many of these movements were politically revolutionary and openly criticized ecclesial wealth, and as result, many were severely persecuted. Francis of Assisi channeled this movement into a Catholic religious order that required poverty of its members individually and

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collectively. Francis synthesized several views of poverty: the renunciation of wealth, a romanticization of poverty (he spoke of service to “Lady Poverty”), and solidarity with the poor. This balance proves perennially difficult to sustain. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas addressed acceptable levels of consumption in the context of almsgiving. Consumption should be indexed to state in life. Higher social stations require greater resources. All should, nevertheless, give out of their need. The Protestant Reformers rejected the Catholic distinction between religious elites and the laity. They sought to apply Jesus’ counsels to the entire church. The result was a moderating position that challenged the greed and luxury fed by growing commerce, yet defended private property and demanded sharing with the needy. Max Weber famously traced the roots of capitalism to the Protestant ethic inspired by John Calvin. This is found not in his attitude toward wealth and consumption but in his doctrine of predestination and the belief that a disciplined life of work confirmed membership in the elect. Wealth was valued as a sign of virtuous industry but was not to be enjoyed in itself. This transformation in religious sensibility undermined both almsgiving and festivity. Poverty was reconceived in terms of individual and social reform. Wealth became an abstract sign rather than an occasion for shared celebration of the goodness of creation.

economies are called to contribute from their wealth to the development of all. The development of the relationship between consumption, poverty, and solidarity continued in the twentieth century. Liberation theology and allied global movements empowered impoverished peoples to recognize that God intends them to share in the goods of the earth. It also inspired many wealthy Christians to evaluate their affluence from the perspective of the need to be in solidarity with the poor. A more diffuse, but significant global movement is the so-called prosperity theology or the prosperity gospel, popularized by radio- and televangelists, which views material wealth as a direct blessing from God to be sought and enjoyed in itself. Justiceminded churches have employed consumption in a very different manner by playing a founding role in the establishment of fair trade networks. Christianity has a long and well-developed tradition of material culture. Embrace of the forms of consumer culture is particularly evident in contemporary evangelical Christianity, according to Colleen McDannell. Contemporary theologians have engaged consumerism from a variety of perspectives: as a manifestation of the deficient modern anthropology (Long), as a set of destructive ideologies conveyed in advertising (Kavanaugh), as the result of the disciplining of the imagination by commodity consumption (Miller), and in relationship to environmental destruction (Gottlieb). Vincent Miller

Modern Period Pope Leo XIII responded to the economic upheavals of the nineteenth century. He called for a living wage that could support the needs of a family on one income. In contrast to socialism, he insisted on the right to private property, a position the Catholic Church continued to emphasize through the cold war. This right, according to tradition, is not absolute. In Pope John Paul II’s words, private property is subject to a “social mortgage” for use for the common good. John Paul II spoke explicitly about excessive consumption: the global economy leaves the majority of humanity struggling with underdevelopment, while a minority is captivated by a “superdevelopment” that makes them “slaves of possession and immediate gratification.” The World Council of Churches describes “limitless possession” as an idol “connected with Satan.” Members of highly developed

See also Fair Trade; Hinduism; History; Islam; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Money; Poverty; Protestant Ethic; Sacred and Profane

Further Readings Gottlieb, Roger. A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. John Paul II. On Social Concern. Vatican City: Pauline Books, 1987. Kavanaugh, John. Following Christ in a Consumer Society: The Spirituality of Cultural Resistance. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006. Little, Lester. Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Long, D. Stephen. Divine Economy: Theology and the Market. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Christmas McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Miller, Vincent. Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. New York: Continuum, 2004. Phan, Peter. Social Thought, Message of the Fathers of the Church. Vol. 20. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1984. Schweiker, William, and Charles Mathewes. Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004. World Council of Churches. Gathered for Life: Official Report of the VI Assembly of the World Council of Churches. Geneva: Author, 1990.

CHRISTMAS From the point of view of consumer culture, Christmas has become the key ritual celebrating consumption. This ritual takes place not only within the Christian world, but is increasingly enacted in Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures as well. This seemingly improbable embrace of a Christian holy day by non-Christians seems due to the festivity and modernity associated with contemporary public Christmas celebration as well as the holiday’s traditional seasonal role in helping to brighten the darkest time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Celebrating Christmas lends a sense of participating in global consumer culture. For some Jewish immigrants to the United States, adopting aspects of Christmas celebrations was also seen as a way of fitting into the culture. The same is true of other non-Christian immigrant groups. But besides this pull from consumers helping to spread Christmas geographically, there has been a big push from merchants, who see the opportunity to profit by increasing mall traffic, store sales, and Internet buying through providing a festive atmosphere that encourages buying extravagantly for family, friends, and loved ones. Providing hope for religious salvation is now overshadowed by providing hope for the economic salvation of merchants as the general public anxiously watches to see how retail sales in December compare to the previous year. The fact that Christmas is now being celebrated in non-Christian locations, such as Japan, China, Turkey, Thailand, India, and Egypt, does not mean that it is celebrated in the same way in each locale.

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For example, in Japan and China, rather than the family coming home for the holiday, couples go out to restaurants, bars, and hotels to celebrate. Even within the largely Christian countries of North and South America, Europe, and the Pacific, Christmas traditions differ, although they each invoke the same iconography of Santa Claus, reindeer, Christmas trees, holly wreaths, snowmen, Christmas carols, and Christmas cards. Besides the shared Christmas iconography, the key shared element of the ritual enactment of Christmas is extravagant spending. This spending includes special Christmas meals, drinks, entertainment, home decorations, and gifts. These expenditures differ culturally as well, but in some cases include not only gifts to others, but “selfgifts” as well. Besides demonstrating the personal sense of materialism as the belief that consumer goods are the chief source of happiness in life, such expenditures also provide a public affirmation of materialism in what has been called the “giant potlatch” of “wasteful” Christmas spending and giving. A disproportionate amount of the feast preparation and gift buying at Christmas is produced by women, reinforcing the stereotype of women as consumers. Although it is easy to imagine that the materialism we now associate with Christmas as a recent development that has resulted from the secular celebration taking over much of the religious celebration, this is not entirely the case. Drawing on Clement Miles who was quoting the Roman Libanius, Daniel Miller shows that there was strong criticism of the lavish feasting, gift giving, decorations, spending, and gambling associated with the predecessor Roman festivals of calends and Saturnalia that were also held in the latter half of December. The invention of Christmas at this time of year by the Christian church was no coincidence. It was intended to co-opt both the Roman Saturnalia and the celebration of the Persian sun god, Mithras, which was also popular at this time of year during the second and third centuries AD. So before the commercial co-optation of our winter celebrations, there was the Christian cooptation of predecessor holidays. This does not justify either appropriation of the seasonal enthusiasm, but it may temper criticisms that commercialism and popular culture have taken Christ out of Christmas. A chief protagonist in the advance of the commercial Christmas is Santa Claus. Although there is some scholarly debate on the roots of this mythic gift bringer, there is general agreement on his

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contemporary trajectory. An amalgam of various European predecessor figures, the largely American Santa figure has been reexported to the rest of the world. There are certain parallels between Santa Claus and Christ, including omniscience, miracles, and granting wishes/prayers. But if Santa is a deity, he is the god of materialism as he sits on his shopping mall throne and encourages children to tell him their fondest fledgling consumer wishes before his assistants sell their parents the obligatory photo of the event. Because of the ongoing competition between Santa Claus and the earlier Dutch figure of Sinter Klaus, the Netherlands has barred advertising with Santa until after Sinter Klaus Eve (December 5). It is clear that the ongoing evolution of Christmas is being directed more by media and marketing than by earlier folklore. Although it has been argued that this commercial impetus is redeemed by the family values associated with the holiday, as the examples of Japan and China illustrate, this is a Western view that may not travel well in Asia. The New Year’s celebrations of these cultures instead have more of the family focus found in the Western Christmas. And for all the yearly criticism of Christmas as an orgy of material greed, there are a large number of people who manage to find joy during the holiday. Russell W. Belk See also Christianity; Commercialization; Commodification; Food Consumption; Gender; Gifts and Reciprocity; Hedonism; Materialism and Postmaterialism

Further Readings Barnett, James H. The American Christmas. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Count, Earl W., and Alice Lawson Count. 4000 Years of Christmas: A Gift from the Ages. Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 1997. Gillis, John R. A World of Their Own making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Golby, John M., and A. W. Purdue. The Making of the Modern Christmas. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Marling, Karal Ann. Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Miles, Clement A. Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan. Toronto, ON: Bell and Cockburn, 1912.

Miller, Daniel. “A Theory of Christmas.” In Unwrapping Christmas, edited by Daniel Miller, 3–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas. New York: Knopf, 1996. Restad, Penne L. Christmas in America: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Waits, William B. The Modern Christmas in America. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

CINEMA Cinema as the mass culture art form that we know today began with technological advances in French photography by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1827 and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1837. By 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière screened their first moving pictures. These silent moving pictures were usually accompanied by a live musical performance and quickly became popular but nonetheless minor attractions that were added to vaudeville shows; vaudeville being, at the time, the dominant theatrical medium. With the onset of World War I, many Europeans fled the fighting in Europe to make a new life in the United States. These European immigrants brought cinema with them, and soon penny theater venues known as nickelodeons appeared throughout America. Unlike vaudeville shows, which treated cinema as a passing novelty or fashion, nickelodeons were a concerted effort that gave cinema the main stage for public consumption. According to Patrick Mullins, nickelodeons attracted regular crowds, were cheap to attend, and formed an important aspect of the social lives of the people displaced by World War I. However, nickelodeons were also known to be fire hazards due to the extremely flammable film stock used in the projectors. This, coupled with the basic seating and crowded atmosphere, soon made nickelodeons as famous for their regular emergencies as for their popularization of cinema. Some nickelodeons sought to exude a grandiose aura with their interiors, but all faced the dangers of the highly flammable film stock. Prior to nickelodeons, films were usually short clips of single scenes of either fiction or nonfiction, which suited the format of the traveling vaudeville shows. With the permanent premises and regular audiences

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established by nickelodeons, films began to become lengthier. The Pathé Frères Company was the first to experiment with longer narratives. Following this French lead, the Edison Manufacturing Company, an American company, started to manufacture longer films also. Longer films favored the producers of the films, as they could charge higher prices for exhibition. By 1910, almost a quarter of New York City was attending cinema screenings in nickelodeons on a weekly basis. Numbering between 1.2 and 1.6 million people, this regular and sizable audience provided the basic economic conditions for cinema to become a mass-culture phenomenon; to cater to this large demand, the studio system was invented. Although sound was included in films in the early 1920s, it was not until Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures released the first “talkies” in 1929 that consumption of major feature films became de rigueur. Western Electric (later AT&T), after buying Lee de Forest’s Phonofilm invention, improved on sound technology. Subsequent developments by the Vitaphone Corporation, which acquired the AT&T Phonofilm technology, made sound a viable aspect of cinema. Vitaphone approached Warner Brothers with its improved technology, and in 1927, Warner Brothers produced one of the first films with synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer. Several other films from other studios offered synchronized soundtracks in this period as well, including Columbia’s My Wife’s Gone Away in 1928. Sound provided an impetus for cinema as a phenomenon of mass culture and mass consumption. Alongside the technological advances of sound and production innovations, such as multiple shoots, Hollywood studios developed what came to be known as the star system. The star system secured an actress’s or actor’s public image for the studio and created a culture of celebrity that was avidly consumed by cinema-going populations. Through the construction of stars, film studios were able to construct a world of social capital outside of the theaters and studios for the public to consume. The avid reception of this celebritization of actresses and actors still continues in present-day cinema, with events such as the Academy Awards (the Oscars) being a testimony to the enduring power of cinema and its cultural reification. While the construction and reification of cinema stars may have given the film industry a welcome boost in social acceptance and popularity, it also became a method that was adopted by other media,

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such as television. The growing popularity of television in private homes throughout the 1940s and 1950s was viewed by the cinema industry as competition for audience share, according to Robert Sklar. An audience consuming moving-images at home seemed, to industry speculation, less likely to venture out to the cinema. Indeed, it took a long time for film studios to warm to the idea of licensing their back catalogs to television networks and broadcasters. In an attempt to challenge television’s early popularity during the 1930s, film studios took notice of Richard Hollingshead’s independent innovation: the drive-in theater. The production of drive-in theaters boomed by the end of the 1940s, precisely when television began its unusually strong ascent as a medium in its own right. The social and political history of cinema is also an important factor in assessing its status as a premiere medium of consumer culture. Two things stand out in the political history of cinema that highlight its social embedding and political economy: (1) the Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays Code), spanning from 1930 to 1968, that forced studios to censor their films while simultaneously developing a clandestine onscreen language to explain what they could not show directly, and (2) the antitrust case in the United States that came to be known as the Paramount Decree of 1948, which radically altered the state of the cinema industry by forcing studios to divest themselves of their cinema theater chains. The consumption of cinema was the target of the Motion Picture Production Code, which promulgated a socially conservative approach to narratives and film content. One especially poignant effect of the code was the censoring of the visage of Christ in Ben-Hur (1959). Such an effect signals that the code did not only censor the release and distribution of films but also their production, the very basis that allows cinema to be created and constructed as a consumable object. Similarly, the Paramount Decree of 1948 targeted the production and distribution of cinema. The decree effectively divested the big five studios—Fox Film Corporation, Loews Incorporated, Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures, and Warner Brothers—of their theater chains and led to the establishment of a more market-driven structure of film releases from multiple studios. This enabled cinema venues to become more varied in their distribution of films and therein in the types of audiences they could gather to consume these films.

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In the years since the decree, cinema has remained strong with the loosening of censorship in the shift to the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system (e.g., G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) and the creation of blockbusters. Jaws inaugurated the cinema blockbuster trend with its much publicized release in 1975. While global audiences have been divided into distribution “blocks” or “regions,” reflected in DVD region codes today, Jaws proved so popular that it kept playing in multiple regions simultaneously; hence the name blockbuster. Jaws was also unusual because it was a high-concept film that stylized everyday life and rendered it fantastical, which made it a film text that audiences could escape into through the suspension of disbelief. With the inauguration of the high-concept blockbuster trend by Jaws, many other films followed in its wake, including some of the most recognizable cultural tropes of Western film culture, such as Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, ET: The Extraterrestrial, Jurassic Park, Se7en, and Avatar. Today it is not unusual for film audiences to number in the tens of millions, and these numbers are grounded in the marketing and publicity of high-concept films: they are vessels of the popular imagination that transport audiences. Although high-concept cinema has become the fodder of mainstream popular cinema, there have been some recent independent endeavors that provide interesting diversity to the landscape of cinema consumption. The Blair Witch Project, for example, long held the title as the most profitable film ever made, amassing 20,591.67 percent of the value of its production budget; a staggering figure more recently trumped by Paranormal Activity, which drew in an excess of 655,505.52 percent after October 2009 (Nash Information Services). While high-concept blockbusters require huge budgets, the consumption of these films tends to not produce a particularly good return for the production companies that have steadily come to rely on merchandise sales. ET cost US$10.5 million, whereas Paranormal Activity cost a mere US$15,000 (Nash Information Services). Cinema, which is created to be consumed, provides consumer culture with an unparalleled means of spectatorship and popular imagination. There is no other art form that consistently attracts such sizable audiences to such a spectacle. Daniel Hourigan

See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Audience Research; Bollywood; Celebrity; Culture Industries; Hollywood; Leisure; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)

Further Readings Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. McDonald, Paul. The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. London: Wallflower, 2008. Mullins, Patrick. “Ethnic Cinema in the Nickelodeon Era in New York City: Commerce, Assimilation and Cultural Identity.” Film History 12, no. 1 (2000): 115–124. Nash Information Services. “Movie Budget Records.” http:// www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/budgets.php. Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Social History of the American Movies. New York: Random House, 1975.

CIRCUITS OF CULTURE/ CONSUMPTION The term circuits of culture refers to the argument that cultural meaning is produced through the articulation of a series of processes, stages, or moments in the biography of a given cultural artifact, which could be an object, commodity, or text. The specific processes discussed have varied since cultural theorists, notably Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson, first outlined circuit type models, but they have centered on the links between processes of production and consumption. In this, they reference the skeleton of commodity production outlined in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse as well as in Capital. In Grundrisse Marx wrote, Production is . . . at the same time consumption, and consumption is as the same time production. Each is directly its own counterpart. But at the same time an intermediary movement goes on between the two. Production furthers consumption by creating material for the latter which would otherwise lack its object. But consumption in its turn furthers production, by providing for the products the individual for whom they are products. The product receives its last finishing touches in consumption. (1857–1858/1980, 24)

It is this stress on the articulation of production and consumption as linked but distinctive moments that Hall drew on to develop his encoding/decoding model of communication in the 1970s. The encoding/

Circuits of Culture/Consumption

decoding model was designed to challenge the linearity of traditional sender-message-receiver communications process models. The communications process, Hall suggested, could instead be thought of as a structure sustained through the articulation of distinct stages, which he defined initially as comprising production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction. Each of these moments is understood to be necessary to the circuit as a whole but no one moment can fully guarantee the next. Moments have their own specific forms and conditions of existence, and each has the capacity to break into, or interrupt, the circuit. Despite this recognition of the functional, formal distinction and relative autonomy of the stages, production in the encoding/decoding model retains from its Marxist heritage a privileged position. Consumption here is a “moment” of the predominant production process, and while the consumption of, in this instance, television messages, is not identical to their production, they are closely related. Johnson’s circuits of culture model retains many of the characteristics of Hall’s earlier model, but here the emphasis shifts away from communication toward everyday social, cultural life. Reinforcing a growing commitment that cultural studies needed to concern itself not solely with the media and popular culture, Johnson remarked the need for all social practices, whatever their setting, to be understood as cultural. This call for an enlargement of the scope of cultural studies analyses, echoed by authors like Meaghan Morris, was grounded in the theoretical view that culture was best defined neither aesthetically nor anthropologically but symbolically. Thus, culture concerns those objects, texts, and practices that carry and construct meaning. Production, whether the setting is the economy, workplaces, commercial organizations, or markets, in this sense should be understood as cultural in the same way as consumption. Culture, and cultural meaning, is thus the outcome of processes whose various stages might be described diagrammatically, as a circuit comprising production, circulation, and consumption. Each box is a stage or moment in the circuit, each box is interdependent on the others, and they are all indispensable to the whole. Although these moments depend on each other, the relation between moments is not deterministic. The conditions of production, of course, imprint certain meanings onto a cultural product, but production processes do not ordain the manner of consumption.

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It is this relative autonomy of consumption that has frustrated the producers of elite products that found themselves unable to dissuade “off-target” groups of consumers from adopting, and potentially devaluing, key designer brands. In the early 2000s, the designer fashion brand Burberry became closely associated with “chavs.” The derogatory term chav is widely used to refer to young, unrefined, and badly—but expensively—dressed working-class people. Contests of this type over the symbolic meanings associated with some cultural goods between producers and designated groups of consumer signal the significance of other moments in the circuit beyond Johnson’s production-circulation-consumption model. Johnson’s model of the circuit was not intended as a final theory but as a guide to the direction future research efforts might take. The best known further elaboration of the circuit of culture model came from a team of researchers led by Paul du Gay and Stuart Hall in 1997. Through a cultural analysis of the Sony Walkman, they developed a five-stage model of the circuit of culture comprising representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. As with Johnson’s model, the emphasis is on the necessity and interdependence of the moments. Cultural analysis should pass, in no particular order, through each stage if it is to adequately study any cultural text or artifact. In keeping with Marx’s account, particular importance is attached to the articulation of the five distinct stages, as their interaction would lead to varied, contingent outcomes. This step in du Gay and colleagues’ argument was important to mark a further shift away from the sovereign role accorded to production. Articulation refers to the generative significance of linkages between stages that are not necessary, determined, or essential for all time but have to be located in the contingencies of circumstance. These articulations offer the beginnings of an explanation of how artifacts and such come to possess meaning. With the introduction of the stages of representation, identities, and regulation, emphasis was placed on the role of processes outside, but still hugely significant to, production and consumption. The introduction of representation marked the importance of efforts (whether through advertising or branding), publicity, or other discourses to “fix” the meaning of artifacts; identities drew attention to the processes by which particular types and groups of individuals and particular corporate identities also shape these

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meanings. Finally, regulation concerned how cultural meaning is shaped by the rules, standards, norms, and practices mediated by both state and market institutions. In this expanded circuit, the influences on consumption of factors other than production are granted greater prominence. This marked a decisive move away from the “production of consumption” perspective associated with the Frankfurt school. Theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Hebert Marcuse, writing in the aftermath of World War II, argued that leisure and consumption goods and activities proliferated through the twentiethcentury expansion of commodity production. The increased availability of consumer goods and activities was understood to have simultaneously increased the scope for ideological control and manipulation. The arts, culture, and leisure are thus theorized as the debased products of the “culture industry” consumed by citizens transformed into passive dupes. The production of consumption perspective has been profoundly influential, but its somewhat elitist opposition of true, authentic culture to superficial mass culture and its characterization of consumers as compliant victims of a supremely powerful deterministic culture industry has generated considerable critique. Meaning, in the Frankfurt tradition, is a stable, essential characteristic of culture, whether in its “true” or its mass form. As mass cultural artifacts carry only those meanings determined by their commodity form, consumption is necessarily passive. There is little scope for an account of how consumers might appropriate goods in ways other than those inscribed in the production or manufacturing process. In marking the significance of representation, identities, and regulation, cultural circuit analyses involved a shift toward a more creative, active account of consumption. Consumption, as theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Pierre Bourdieu noted, may not only be active and pleasurable, but it also acted as a social marker inscribing identity and difference. Thus, social groups, whether designated by class, subculture, or fashion tribe, might be marked by their appropriation of cultural artifacts. Such creative and pleasurable dimensions of consumption, as anthropologists such as Daniel Miller remarked, have to be balanced with an understanding of the labor and politics involved in routine consumption. While consumption of fashion or electronic goods might be pleasurable, shopping for food can be an anxiety-provoking

labor, where behind the drive for domestic thrift lies a complex international political economy. This increased emphasis on the sociopolitics of consumption over the last decade can be witnessed in debates over consumers/citizens, fair trade, organic foods, and sustainability. More recently, cultural circuit analyses have been challenged for overemphasizing the symbolic over the material and technical dimensions of consumption. Work in the actor-network tradition led by Michel Callon has increasingly sought to demonstrate the importance of material and technical devices in equipping consumers and “formatting” consumption. Future directions for research might involve an attempt to more successfully combine the symbolic and the material in cultural and sociological accounts of consumption. Liz McFall See also Commodities; Communications Studies; Cultural Studies; Culture Industries; Cycles of Production and Consumption; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Production of Culture; Symbolic Value

Further Readings Callon, Michel, Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa, eds. Market Devices. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Vol. 1, Culture, Media, and Identities. London: Sage, 1997. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 123–138. London: Hutchinson, 1980. Johnson, Richard. “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text 16 (Winter 1987): 38–80. Marx, Karl. Marx’s Grundrisse. Edited by David McLellan. London: Paladin, 1980. First published 1857–1858. Miller, Daniel, ed. Acknowledging Consumption. London: Routledge, 1995. Morris, Meaghan. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” Block 14 (1988): 15–26.

CITIZENSHIP Citizenship is the specifically modern form of political association. It is a juridically codified reality whose exercise reconstitutes individuals into citizens. It typically involves a connection between individuals and

Citizenship

the nation-state in purely secular terms. Citizens are social selves whose conduct is motivated by norms and interests. They are the bearers of rights whose origins, scope, and consequences are the object of political contestation. Depending on concrete historical and geographical conditions, individuals qua citizens have specific sets of rights and duties. This involves a process of self-rule in which, as Quentin Skinner observes, “the sole power of making laws remains with the people or their accredited representatives, and in which all individual members of the body politic—rulers and citizens alike—remain equally subject to whatever laws they choose to impose on themselves” (1998, 74). Besides this juridical-political dimension, citizenship involves a sense of belonging to a political community: political identities are formed as citizens, through diverse forms of political socialization, come to see themselves as members of a common political body, with a shared past and future, according to Amy Gutmann. These individual senses of belonging coalesce into collective understandings of what citizenship ideally entails, which Russell J. Dalton designates as “norms of citizenship.” There are several such norms of citizenship, the origins of which can be partially traced to the founding, constituent moments of each polity. At least two normative axes can be distinguished. The first has a socioeconomic basis: consider the rise of postmaterialist values, with a strong individualist emphasis, during the ascent of the neoliberal model of state. The other normative axis refers to the distinction between ethnic-based (“thick”) versus bureaucratic-legal (“thin”) norms of citizenship. There are also several different models of citizenship as norms and interests that are historically articulated in different ways in distinct contexts. These aspects of modern citizenship shape current debates over citizenship. Citizenship, however, has been a topic of concern for social scientists ever since the inception of professional social sciences.

Citizenship and Classical Sociology Classical sociological theory treated citizenship as part and parcel of the societal process of political modernization. In The City (1921/1958), Max Weber famously traced the origins of modern citizenship to the late medieval cities of Northern and Central Europe: subjects were replaced by citizens as modernity unfolded, bringing about a secular urban culture along with Christian notions of political

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obligation (which replaced local or tribal membership ties). Another German classical sociologist, Georg Simmel, did not ignore the close relation between cities and citizenship: in his seminal 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel began a line of critical reexamination of the relation between urban lifestyles and the exercise of citizenship rights that proved immensely influential over the years. For Émile Durkheim, the religious underpinnings of collective ties in traditional societies were to be replaced by the secular solidarity associated with citizenship. George Herbert Mead, in turn, offered a conception of citizenship as the universalistic, impartial, and egalitarian viewpoint associated with modern science and selfhood. A generation later, Talcott Parsons drew on Weber, Durkheim, and Ferdinand Töennies to develop a sociological account for the emergence of the modern system of societies. In Parsons’s account, citizenship is the epitome of political modernization: as societies differentiate into autonomous sectors and values become more universalistic and based on achievement criteria, a societal transition from “status” to “contract” occurs. In the political domain, this transition concerns the replacement of traditional particularistic forms of social membership for the universalistic set of practices, values, and institutions associated with citizenship. Parsons’s account, however, remained too vague and abstract to provide a satisfactory analytical framework for those interested in studying citizenship. An alternative is found in the work of British sociologist T. H. Marshall, whose 1949 Alfred Marshall Lecture at the University of Cambridge, published in the following year as Citizenship and Social Class, soon become the standard sociological approach to this topic. Marshall’s analysis reveals the three components or elements of modern citizenship: civil, political, and social. Each of these components is analytically and historically different from the other, corresponding to different sets of rights and institutions that can be found in the course of development of British society in the last three centuries. Civil rights, such as the freedom of speech, thought, and faith, the right to own property, and the right to justice, are the rights necessary to ensure individual freedom. They were developed in the seventeenth century as a response to absolutism and were institutionalized through courts of justice. In the eighteenth century, a new set of rights emerged, this time associated with the political element of modern citizenship. The right to participate in the

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exercise of political power, both as an elector of the organs of government (parliament, councils of local government) and as a member of such organs, is a crucial extension of the earlier civil liberties and was the focus of intense political strife throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is only in the course of the twentieth century that the third element of citizenship comes about: social rights, which refer to social entitlements in the realms of health care, social security, and education, are introduced to guarantee a modicum of economic welfare. Social citizenship, at least as developed in postwar welfare parliamentary democracies, is aimed at counteracting the inequalities produced by the capitalist economic system. Central to the conception of social citizenship that marks the social welfare model of state are socioeconomic rights. If civil and political rights were important elements of the modern political problematic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, socioeconomic rights were presented in the second half of the twentieth century as the epitome of the latest, more-advanced stage in democratic life. All three generations of rights, however, were conceived in strictly secularist terms. Each national subculture, including religious ones, was supposed to free its individual members from its embrace so that they could be reconstituted as citizens. The modern syndrome of state, social knowledge, and social policy provided the material basis for this secularist project. Marshall’s analysis of citizenship has been the object of intense debate and criticism over the last few decades (see e.g., Turner 1993, 7–12). First, there is the evolutionary character of Marshall’s account. The Marshallian gradual transition from civil to political to social rights is historically misleading (for instance, fascist and communist regimes were generous in providing social rights but granted no significant political or even civil rights), and analytically poor because no causal mechanism for the development of human rights is put forth. Second, according to Sylvia Walby, Marshall’s historical description shows insufficient sensitivity to gender inequalities: despite the formal promises of universal inclusion, women were systematically denied civil and political rights until very recently. Third, the relation between the principle of citizenship and political institutions and behavior suggested by Marshall is oversimplified. Political organs and actors may act under the

influence of that principle, but they are influenced by a host of other, competing ideas and may have different understandings of what that principle means. Fourth, Marshall seemed to take for granted the secularist nature of modern citizenship. In the last few decades, however, the Western European secularist model of social citizenship became the target of fierce political contestation. The first attack came from the neoliberal model of state. The socalled crisis of the welfare state, the attempts at its reform or dismantlement, can all be traced back to this alternative model of relations between the state and the economy. The latest challenge to the secular model of welfare state has been posed by postsecular politics. The secularist belief in the inevitable and foreseeable disappearance of religion as modernity progressed has been replaced by the consciousness that religion is here to stay. As a consequence, what was once considered the model of social progress is increasingly seen as an anomaly, an episode in the societal development of one of the “multiple modernities,” which has yet to come to terms with its postsecular condition. Marshall’s theory of citizenship gradually lost its appeal as the world it took for granted faded away. The prevalent norm of citizenship in mid-twentiethcentury Western societies was duty-based: citizens’ duties included electoral participation, payment of taxes, and availability to serve in the military. In turn, citizens expected to have their civil, political, and certain economic and social rights protected. Gabriel A. Almond and Sydney Verba’s 1963 classic, The Civic Culture, is perhaps the best description of the political culture in which this conception of citizenship originated and developed. They suggest a “threefold classification of participant, subject, and parochial” political cultures, where the highest degree possible of civicness corresponds to someone who devotedly performs his or her citizenship duties. The authors note that such a classification is itself exemplary of the mode of thinking associated with this duty-based idea of citizenship. The inculcation of citizenship duties functional to the political system was an elemental aspect of the political socialization experience in this period. In addition, the style of politics in mid-twentieth-century Europe and North America still had strong elements of class politics and clientelism: left and right were clearly opposed to one another as hierarchical relations between the citizenry and their representatives predominated.

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All this began to change in the 1960s, with the public questioning of racism, sexism, and homophobia, as well as the assertion of individual rights of selfexpression. As industrial societies gave way to postindustrial societies, the traditional postwar party system was transformed with the decline of unions and leftwing parties seeking new social bases. The model of the welfare state, as well as the relationship between citizenship and capitalism it presupposes, came under increasing criticism in the 1970s, and new collective understandings of citizenship began to emerge.

The Rise of the Consumer Citizen The most important new norm of citizenship is the new political culture, or postmaterialism. This original blend of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism was first identified in the 1970s urban United States. Terry Nichols Clark and Ronald Inglehart suggest seven general elements that help understand the emergence of this new civic norm: (1) the classic left-right dimension has been transformed; immigration, women, and many new issues no longer map onto one single dimension; (2) social and fiscal/ economic issues are explicitly distinguished, work no longer drives all; (3) social and cultural issues, such as identity, gender, morality, and lifestyle, have risen in salience relative to fiscal/economic issues; (4) market individualism and social individualism grow: people seek to mark themselves as distinct from their surroundings; (5) the postwar national welfare state loses ground to federalist and regionalist solutions; parties, unions, and established churches are often replaced by new, smaller organizations that may join into social movements; (6) instead of rich versus poor, or capitalisms versus socialism, there is a rise of issue politics—of the arts, the environment, or gender equality—which may spark active citizen participation on one such issue, but each issue may be unrelated to the others; (7) these postmaterialist views are more pervasive among younger, more educated and affluent individuals and societies. This new political culture has been rising in most developed societies, bringing about significant changes to the way citizenship is conceived. The shift in citizenship norms from a class politics paradigm to the new political culture is revealed as soon as one considers that the older debates about capitalism versus socialism, and left versus right, have gradually been complemented, if not replaced

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entirely, by new, issue-specific concerns, such as feminism and environmental protection, among others. In contrast to the hierarchy and tradition of the past, individualism and egalitarianism exist more pervasively today. A new focus on the citizen, on neighborhoods, on individual participation and self-generated bottomup rather than top-down politics has also become apparent. French politics provide a good illustration of this shift. If General Charles de Gaulle was illustrative of the older class-politics style, Nicolas Sarkozy and his celebrity wife Carla Bruni are the consummate personification of new political culture values. The shift from class politics and clientelism to the new political culture is also illustrated by individualizing lifestyles, exemplified in dress, entertainment, spontaneity, and volatility of choice. This same individualism—which can be expressed politically—is also expressed daily in people’s lives, in how they choose clothes or where to spend their free time. This tendency extends individualism to many new domains. In contrast to tourists traveling in a large group to a classic, fixed destination or traveling to the same vacation home with one’s family, instead young people increasingly find, or search for, more personalized lifestyles. Underlying this normative shift is the assumption that there are multiple components to citizenship. Traditional components include norms of lawabidingness, solidarity, criticism, and deliberation. The new political culture citizenship norm adds others that are more self-expressive and individualistic: political consumerism is one good illustration of this. If class politics was associated with a dutybased norm of citizenship, the new political culture comes associated with a more egalitarian, individualistic, and expressive conception of what it means to be a citizen. The rise of cultural issues is a critical, specific aspect of the new political culture. As this new norm of citizenship develops, classic concerns of work and job decline, ceding their importance to a new creativity, a playfulness, an entrepreneurship that has come to define the ideal workplace. “Ideal” organizations, such as Microsoft or Google, are detailed as having “campus-like creative settings.” They are the new models in business magazines such as Fortune and Business Week. Work and leisure are no longer so isolated; leisure concerns penetrate the workplace. This recent yet widespread tendency of dedifferentiation

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directly questions the classic modernization theory’s thesis that functional differentiation is the dominant principle of societal organization. Driven by more income, education, and the new political culture, culture and tourism are key parts of this transformation. Art is on the walls of many banks; major corporations sponsor theater, music, and public art. Political leaders sense the importance of rising arts and culture concerns among citizens and look for ways to capture these concerns: via public art, music festivals, historic preservation of neighborhoods, museums, and more. Charisma and individualistic self-expression are alternative mechanisms that may successfully engage citizens with their political systems—in addition to voting and civic participation. The individual fruition of amenities or megacultural events is a powerful and significant civic engagement, as an alternative to participation in the local neighborhood association. Along with postsecular politics, this is perhaps the single most important social change currently taking place—the shift from a class-based style of politics to an issue-based, individualistic, and consumptionoriented mode of citizenship. Approximately at the same time as the postindustrial transformation in the West, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent wave of democratization in Eastern Europe made the study of citizenship emphatically postdisciplinary and more global in scope, according to Patrick Baert and Filipe Carreira da Silva. These recent developments have set the tone of today’s debates over citizenship. The territorial nation-state is no longer considered the “natural” home of citizenship: with the economic globalization of the 1990s, subnational units (such as cities and regions), and supranational entities (consider the European Union) are gradually becoming alternative arenas for citizenship acts—global demonstrations, such as against the invasion of Iraq in February 2003, are taking place in cities around the world, making use of electronic media, and bringing together millions of citizens of dozens of different countries. New models of citizenship (e.g., cosmopolitan citizenship, transnational citizenship) thus seem to be emerging and are the focus of heated debates. Participants in these debates now include sociologists, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, feminists, and jurists, which constitutes a radical departure from academic debates in the 1950s and 1960s on citizenship. Likewise, the journals in which these discussions are taking place, such as Citizenship

Studies, are largely interdisciplinary. As a result, a wide set of discourses enters the contemporary debates over citizenship: from Marxist approaches emphasizing democratic participation to liberal models that focus on the relation between citizenship and political modernization and individualism, and to feminist perspectives that question the gender-blind character of conventional accounts of citizenship to postcolonial viewpoints that explore the hybrid nature of such accounts, there is a plethora of intellectual resources one can draw from studying citizenship today. Filipe Carreira da Silva See also Civil Society; Collective Identity; Life(style) Politics; Materialism and Postmaterialism; National Cultures; Postindustrial Society; Social Movements; Urban Cultures

Further Readings Almond, Gabriel A., and Sydney Verba. The Civic Culture. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. First published 1963. Baert, Patrick, and Filipe Carreira da Silva. Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Clark, Terry N., and Ronald Inglehart. “The New Political Culture: Changing Dynamics of Support for the Welfare State and Other Policies in Postindustrial Societies.” In The New Political Culture, edited by Terry N. Clark and Vincent Hoffman-Martinot, 9–72. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Dalton, Russell J. The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation Is Reshaping American Politics. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2008. Gutmann, Amy. Identity in Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Kivisto, Peter, and Thomas Faist. Citizenship: Discourse, Theory, and Transnational Projects. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Magnette, Paul. Citizenship: The History of an Idea. Essex, UK: ECPR Press, 2005. Marshall, T. H., and Tom Bottomore. Citizenship and Social Class. London: Pluto Press, 1992. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by Kurt Wolff, 409–424. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950. First published in German in 1903. Skinner, Quentin. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Turner, Bryan S., ed. Citizenship and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1993.

Civil Society Walby, Sylvia. “Is Citizenship Gendered?” Sociology 28 (1994): 379–395. Weber, Max. The City. Edited and translated by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958. First published in German in 1921. Zukin, Cliff. A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

CIVIL SOCIETY Civil society refers to social space, the plural entirety of public associations, consolidations, and gatherings based on the voluntary collaboration of citizens. Historically, the development of the concept of a civil society was linked to the development of the bourgeoisie and their connection to commonwealth and state. Whereas the meaning of the term civil society has changed in the modern era since the seventeenth century, there is still an ongoing discussion about the significance of economic action (production and consumption) within civil society.

Historical Development Considerations about civil society can be found in political and societal theories since Aristotle. He stated that a citizen is a social being and citizens should organize and be in charge of themselves. The politiké koinonia (civil society) is a community of citizens who are united for the purpose of a virtuous and good life. The contract theories of the seventeenth century resumed the conception of civil society. The political theory of Thomas Hobbes mainly regards the citizen as the subject of an absolute sovereign. The state and the absolute sovereign ensure safety and order; the citizens are obedient in return. This conveys an apolitical concept of citizenship. The dispositions and interests of the citizens are seen as their private concerns. John Locke delivered a crucial improvement toward a modern concept of citizenship and civil society as well. The obedience of the citizens to the ruler implicates the duty to secure their fundamental rights (protection of life, freedom, and property) for the state. In doing so, Locke laid the foundation for a liberal argumentation—putting the focus on the significance of private property and the protection of

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the individual from the state. He regarded the sphere of civil society as one of private, especially economic, interests that should be free of influences of the state. This way, Locke distinctly indicated the limits of legitimate governmental activities. In the eighteenth century, the dimension of the market entered the discussion about civil society. At first, Adam Smith pointed out that the economic citizen is the bearer of the project of a civil society. He saw civil society as a sphere of autonomous economic activities set free from governmental regulations based on the mutual dependencies organized via the market. The coordination of these (economic) activities of the citizens was thought to lead to the common wealth. Because of the invisible coordination of the market, there are no tensions between common wealth and private interests of the individual citizens. Despite all the differences between Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, they have in common a so-called liberal point of view. The special characteristic of this position is the conviction that there is a sphere of private and commercial interests that is and should be outside the influence of the state. Montesquieu is considered to be the founding father of an emancipatory—as opposed to the liberal— perception of civil society. He saw the scope of civil society as a third part between citizens and state. In “The Spirit of the Laws,” he refers to the meaning of associations as a place for the citizens’ balance of interest. This perspective was resumed and further developed by Adam Ferguson. He saw the consequences of capitalism and its rampant accumulation of capital and goods as a problem that could be solved by a basic “friendly predisposition” of the citizens, which leads them to engage themselves politically and thereby pursue their noneconomic ethical goals. The first fundamental work about civil society in the United States is the 1835 book Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Within this book, the link between democracy and civil society is especially stressed. For Tocqueville, the equality of all citizens is the foundation of democratic order and individualism, so civil society is constituted by the sphere of voluntary associations, free individuals acting together in a democratic manner, apart from state and market. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations” (Tocqueville 1835/2000, 489). Civic activities and the balancing of interests among the engaged citizens both take place in these associations. They are schools

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for democratic behavior, which can be practiced and habitualized through everyday action. “Thus the most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have . . . carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes” (490). Especially from an emancipatory point of view, civil society has developed simultaneously with and as a corollary of capitalism. The citizens having private property are the central actors in civil associations. Civil society associations therefore are seen as a mechanism to secure and promote democracy besides and in addition to institutions of the state and the economy.

Current Debates and Political Relevance Since the 1980s, theoretical developments and political discourses are strongly connected: the importance of civil society for the breakdown of communism, a cultural theory of civil society, and democratization of third-world countries by building up civil society institutions and structures. Breakdown of Communism There have been few developments all over the world that led to a growing interest in the possibilities to (re)build democracy on the basis of civil society. All of them are based on an emancipatory concept of civil society. Civil society was seen as a central motor for the breakdown of communism. There have been significant social movements in the late 1970s, especially in Hungary and Poland, that aimed at establishing a third force, a special societal sphere apart from the state. First was Solidarnosc in Poland, an organization aimed at a systemic change of the state and the political system of communism from the inside. “Because the lack of civil society was part of the very essence of the all pervasive communist state, creating such a society and supporting organizations independent of the state have been seen by donors as the connective tissue of democratic political culture” (Hann and Dunn 1996, 1). The area of civil society is seen as fundamental for the consolidation and renewal of social democratization in critical theory. This indicates a strong link between political society and civil society. The question of the citizens’ participation in political decision making is the main focus. At the same time, however, a strict separation between political society and

commercial society is made, and the economic area and that of consumption are systematically excluded from the development of a civil society. Cultural Theory In the 1990s, a culturally oriented perspective on civil societies developed in the United States, mainly coined by Jeffery Alexander. Taking up positions of Talcott Parsons, he saw civil societies as a “societal community”—in the sense of a differentiated sphere of action and institutions of modern societies—on the one hand. On the other hand, the term is part of the symbolic self-description of these societies: some institutions and actions are declared normatively desirable (civil), which depreciates others at the same time. “Civil”—seen from this perspective—has a normative meaning. This meaning also nourishes a sphere of solidarity. A civil society is, in that sense “a ‘realm of solidarity,’ a ‘we-ness,’ that simultaneously affirms the sanctity of the individual and these individuals’ obligations to the collectivity” (Alexander 1997, 115). Civil Society Institutions and Structures In the last decade of the twentieth century, there was a remarkable rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in capitalist and especially in thirdworld countries. As the core of global civil society, these organizations were increasingly seen as a tool for establishing democratic developments in all parts of the world, especially in developing countries. Eventually, the building of civil organizations in developing countries came to be seen as a method of specifically establishing democratizational processes in states with authoritarian and/or corrupt regimes. Civil society, thus, is a means to reduce poverty and a developmental aid for the democratization of thirdworld countries. Following the classic and modern conceptions of civil society, doubts about the success of this strategy are legitimate. The idea of a free citizen, as well as the idea of civil collaborations, has to exist before civil society associations in the sense of a school of democracy can develop. Whether this premise is given in developing countries, or not, has not yet been researched sufficiently. Petra Deger See also Citizenship; Civilizing Processes; Enlightenment; History; Markets and Marketing; National Cultures; Political and Ethical Consumption; Voluntary Associations

Civilizing Processes

Further Readings Alexander, Jeffrey C. “The Paradoxes of Civil Society.” International Sociology 12, no. 2 (1997): 115–133. Alexander, Jeffrey C. The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cohen, Jean, and Andrew Arato. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hann, Christopher M., and Elisabeth Dunn. Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge, 1996. Keane, John. Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Tester, Keith. Civil Society. London: Routledge, 1992. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Harvey C. Mansfield, and Delba Winthrop. Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. First published 1835.

CIVILIZING PROCESSES The theory of civilizing processes was developed by Norbert Elias in the 1930s to describe and explain the generation of higher standards of various forms of conduct in the context of unplanned but structured changes in state formation and lengthening chains of social interdependencies. The idea of civilized conduct may seem a strange companion to popular understandings of consumer culture, when the latter phrase is often associated with hedonism, individualism, and excess. But consumer cultures do refer to the meanings, values, emotions, and practices surrounding the use of goods and services, including how people use their bodies through acts of consumption. Elias’s book The Civilizing Process, originally published in 1939, examines changing expectations regarding eating, especially, but also other bodily practices, such as deportment and dressing. Through broader social processes, such as urbanization, industrialization, and commercialization, within the context of the state increasingly pacifying people within the territory (i.e., state agencies such as the police force become solely responsible for keeping the peace), each person comes to depend on more and more interlinked people for the fulfillment of needs and wants on a more consistent basis. For example, in very agrarian societies, people tend to rely on themselves or small local groups for the provision of food, but within industrial societies, the various processes involved in the production,

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distribution, and consumption of food can involve many individuals connected through specializing in the various parts of these processes (the division of labor). This is an example of lengthening chains of social interdependencies, and as this occurs, cultures of consumption also change. Through these changing norms and ideals of social conduct, including consumption practices, within broader and tighter networks of people (figurations), each person increasingly feels the need to exert greater self-control over behavior and emotions. Thus, civilizing processes also refer to the changing balance of restraints exercised on and through the individual, from social constraints toward more selfrestraint and self-steered conduct. Part of this process involves the elevation of ideals of individualism and, as a variant of this, the notion that “the customer is king.” In other words, in principle, the consumer has come to be imagined as a sovereign, self-contained individual who knows his or her desires and is capable of fulfilling them in the market.

Consumption Skills and Displays While Elias was not primarily concerned with consumer culture per se, he saw civilizing processes partly through developing norms, ideals, and practices pertaining to table manners and clothing styles. He noted how successive editions of leading etiquette texts over several centuries demonstrated higher and more precise standards for consuming food. Also, some rules or advice disappeared from later texts. For Elias, this meant they no longer needed to be explicitly stated to adults, as it was taken for granted that people do not breach such standards. Early etiquette manuals of the Middle Ages (written for the courtly circles of feudal lords) directed readers against sharing eating utensils with others, returning partly eaten food back to the common dish, or spitting at the dinner table. These are precepts that today we take for granted; as adults, there is no need for them to be written in manuals (though parents still have to tell young children not to engage in such behavior at the table). Some behavior at the table, and other forms and styles of consumption, became so shameful that they could hardly be alluded to in writing for an adult audience. Most adults had internalized these standards so that following them did not feel like compliance but rather fulfilling one’s tastes and desires. Over the course of the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries in France, former provincial nobles with

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their own courtly circles and centers of power gradually became defunctionalized as the central monarchy gained in relative power. Their political and military functions declined as the state became more centralized. As they depended on the king for the maintenance of social status and the distribution of favors, pacified courtiers centered their social competition on public displays of opulent and stylized consumption. Through consumption, courtiers tried to maintain or enhance their position in the status hierarchy. With the subsequent decline of both the monarchy and nobility and the related rise of the bourgeoisie, food consumption became more of a privatized practice within smaller family households. Refined consumption skills and displays are less crucial to social success in the occupational sphere in the twentieth century compared to court aristocracies. However, Elias did see the court society as a model-setting class for broader strata in French society, so that the legacy of civilized consumption continues (though informalization processes throughout the twentieth century extend and add complexity to this process). As well as codes and practices changing, new consumption technologies emerged as part of civilizing processes. For example, Elias highlights the invention and physical development of the fork as a materialization of specific social relations demanding greater sensitivity and decorum. The fork was not simply an instrument to facilitate eating, but the objectification of the shifting emotional standards surrounding embarrassment caused by potential breaches of eating etiquette. The use of cutlery allowed for consumption without touching certain types of food. These developments were partly driven by “pressure from below,” the rise of the middle classes that sought to emulate the nobility, who in turn were driven to further attempts at social distinction. But with the growing interdependence between classes and the corresponding partial decline in inequality, the widespread adoption of prescriptive table manners gradually lessened their ability to serve as means of distinction.

Individuality As society becomes more equal, the previously understood instances of shame or embarrassment, which had referred only to relations with individuals of higher or equal rank, become generalized. The social reference or compass for emotional experience

recedes from consciousness. As there is no longer a direct relationship between power relations and emotions, these feeling states, which increasingly have to be hidden from public view, seem to emerge from the inner self. The intertwined processes of functional specialization (primarily through the division of labor) and the propensity for people to imagine their emotional experiences as emanating from within advance feelings of individuality. The increasing complexity and interdependency of relations between people mean each individual must observe himself or herself and others to succeed (though to varying degrees due to uneven social pressures across the overall figuration). As previously expressed, impulses are placed under greater control by the self, each person imagines a greater division between himself or herself and others, further supporting the development of a norm of individuality. Thus, Elias charts the social and historical trajectory of subjectivity or habitus. New self-formations are not the intention of previous social groups, but are the unplanned outcome of many social interactions and interdependencies over generations. With the heightening thresholds of shame and embarrassment, the creation of the inner private self, and the growing centrality of state authority, pleasure becomes a more regulated domain. Society increasingly becomes a spectating society. The eye becomes “a mediator of pleasure” (Elias 1939/2000, 171). This is related to the increasing constraints on impulsively touching objects or people. Though consumption practices are still embodied (or experienced emotionally through the body), the greater socially expected self-control of emotional display (controls that each person expects of himself or herself too, once these social controls have been learned) means people tend more often to seek and experience pleasure at a greater distance or remove. Consumption experiences have become more spectacular for more people over time. Novels, theater, cinema, sports, and television are clear examples of experiencing emotional excitement at a distance. Selfhood within civilizing processes must be understood as a process within broader processes of denser social interdependencies. The self is not in opposition to social relations, but is only possible through them. The greater functional differentiation within society, the greater interdependence between people, the greater felt separateness of the person

Civilizing Processes

within these webs of interdependence, and the growing self-direction of the person, all interrelated, culminate in new forms of anxiety. The growing differentiation and individualization in society also produce a growing ideal of individuality and difference as a cultural value (Elias 1991). The imperative to “take care” of oneself is less an appeal to monitor the physical threat posed by others, as in less-pacified times, and more of a reminder to fulfill one’s own needs and oneself for fear of neglecting the “inner” person. Many contemporary consumption practices and advertising appeals revolve around these therapeutic discourses of self-care and expression, particularly in the area of clothing, cosmetics, health, wellness, and beauty. Elias connects subjectivity not just with intersubjective or interdiscursive relations but also with the very development of social relations (for example, between classes, genders, generations, and nations), incorporating the formation of the nation-state itself. The greater pacification of society and the related development of more structurally complex social differentiation produce a growing rationalization and “routinization” of life. In such societies where “the propensities for the serious and threatening type of excitement have diminished, the compensatory function of play-excitement has increased” (Elias and Dunning 2008, 53). However, this is a “controlled decontrol of emotions” as self-restraints are still required for the enjoyment of consumption and leisure pursuits common in industrialized societies. These leisure satisfactions are, for example, sought in sports spectating and participation, where the play activities mimic more violent forms of social conflict. They are safer institutions for the generation of tension and excitement as the propensity of direct physical violence has reduced for most people (but as this is a nonlinear social process, societies can become more violent, thereby changing the mimetic functions of sport). Similarly, romantic (and erotic) novels and films represent the excitement of intimate relations that arouse emotions for some consumers (53–54).

Elias’s Methodology In terms of methodology, Elias (1939/2000) uses various texts in his analysis of changes in morals and manners, but these serve explicitly as symptoms (evidence) of social changes. They are not assumed to have any productive capacities, though this remains a

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possibility. Rather, the emphasis is on what no longer needs to be said—advice that has become redundant due to its inculcation within the self (the conversion of social constraints into self-restraints). A central part of civilizing processes is the explanatory framework provided by figurational shifts. Elias used the concept of figuration to refer to the dynamic social network comprising mutually dependent people. As the number of people and types of interdependencies expand, the direction of the overall figuration is less subject to the control of any one person or group comprising the network. The conflict and power relations between people provide the dynamic of change, but this trajectory, while not unilinear and (being based on intergenerational social learning) subject to reverses, does have a structured order. Existing social formations allow for many possible future formations, but retrospectively, the order or structure of change can be traced. For example, Elias shows how central monarchies sought to pacify their territories to maintain their rule. This led to court societies where former warrior nobles had to conform to the new position of courtier and sought favors from the king through distinguishing themselves from their peers. New forms of distinction centered on consumption displays, etiquette, and refinement as physical force became prohibited. The central kings of France did not seek this consumption society in their midst, but it was nevertheless an outcome of pacifying and controlling potential threats.

Subsequent Research Since the 1970s, Cas Wouters has sought to extend civilizing processes to take account of the apparently less formal social relations between people of different class, gender, and age groups. While this has been considered as evidence of a permissive society, and even reason to refute Elias’s theories (see Mennell 1998, 241–246, for a discussion), Wouters contends that this represents an advance in social expectations of more subtle and differentiated self-control—an informalization process within the broad development of civilizing process, as more informal social relations also presuppose and demand greater ease of control of the self. Processes of individualization are likely to massively expand the scope and extent of needs and wants (Dolan 2009). Social needs are supplemented by unplanned, sociohistorically induced individual

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desires. As individualization processes increase choice, and the need to choose, there is a growing awareness of the future, in terms of possible paths to be taken and one’s life to be molded. The future becomes a potential site for personal colonization and transformation. The market offers opportunities for experimenting with possible future selves by bringing them into the present in material form. The market of course is a highly differentiated social figuration enabling and enabled by commodity exchange, and needs have to be understood in that context. According to Elias (1950, 291–292), “Human needs become differentiated and specific only in conjunction with specialized human techniques; these on their part emerge and crystallize into occupations only in view of potential or actual human needs.” Functional specialization and growing social interdependencies therefore produce both an increased sense of individuality and expanding needs. This social and cultural development supports the symbolic transformation of “the consumer” from the relatively restrained consuming public to the potentially “never-satisfied” sovereign of choice. Furthermore, practices and ideals of consumption are not mere effects of social processes of differentiation and functional specialization; they provide a further spur for these social processes as diversifying needs and desires crystallize into new occupations. Somewhat contrary to Elias’s theories, Tim Dant posits the potentially decivilizing effects of material consumer culture. He argues that the development of more complex and autonomous material objects may actually lessen direct interdependence between people, thus constituting a decivilizing effect. However, such apparent lessening of direct dependence on other people may reflect the contradiction of a growing reticence by people to express emotional connectivity with others in general, together with a desire for physical closeness with particular individuals, an outcome that Elias (see especially 1991) clearly detected. The increasing technical complexity of material objects also of course entails a high degree of social interdependence in their production and distribution, if not necessarily in their use. Consumers are also producers and distributors through work, and so any decivilizing effect of material consumption would have to be seen in the context of other civilizing processes. Sam Binkley also argues that new material environments may affect civilizing processes. The development of more media outlets means

consumers are more likely to experience shame and embarrassment in individualized contexts of media and branded consumption compared to the face-toface contexts of the past. In this respect, Binkley suggests that civilizing and commodifying processes are integrated. Elias did discuss many of the processes that pertain to commodification, including the commercialization of social relations, the monetization of the economy, and the reflexivity involved in consumption practices. For Elias, however, the social constraint toward selfrestraint in the context of increasing social interdependencies is the central aspect of civilizing processes, and the more recent processes of commodification associated with consumer culture seem to exemplify rather than supplement these civilizing processes.

Future Research Opportunities The general implication of Elias’s theories for the study of consumer culture is that the values, symbols, and even material objects of consumption are largely unintended aspects of long-term social processes. Because of this, it makes little sense to assert that producers or advertisers create consumer culture or that they possess the power to instill and manipulate consumer desires. There are multiple dependencies, interactions, and other relations between producers, advertisers, distributors, retailers, regulators, and consumers. Even for each of these categories, a figurational approach demands that we see people in the plural, so that “the consumer” is actually a person in many social relationships and consumer decisions are never individual as such. The single consumer does not rationally decide on a course of action, based on his or her interests or desires, only to be influenced by other people later; interests and desires are also formed in social contexts and people learn from infancy what and how to consume. This leads us to another implication; consumers and consumption practices are neither rational nor irrational. Consumption involves emotional processes that form and change as part of social relations, competition, cooperation, and conflict. Jealously, guilt, shame, pride, joy, and other emotions take shape as people meet, exceed, and transgress social standards that only make sense through the relations between people. As working life has become more routinized and predictable, consumer culture has become a more important site for the generation and enjoyment of

Clothing Consumption

emotional experiences. Academic research needs to take greater account of this emotional dimension. There are innumerable research opportunities to examine and extend Elias’s theories in different geographical and historical contexts. Such research should not be expected to mirror Elias’s findings exactly, as all societies undergo distinct processes of social development (see Elias 1996, 1939/2000, for comparisons between France and Germany). For future research on this topic, a retreat into the present (Elias 2009) would limit our explanatory horizons. Paddy Dolan See also Civil Society; Elias, Norbert; Food Consumption; History; Individualization; Informalization; Rationalization; Tamed Hedonism

Further Readings Binkley, Sam. “The Civilizing Brand: Shifting Shame Thresholds and the Dissemination of Consumer Lifestyles.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2009): 21–39. Dant, Tim. “Material Civilization: Things and Society.” British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 2 (2006): 289–308. Dolan, Paddy. “Developing Consumer Subjectivity in Ireland: 1900–80.” Journal of Consumer Culture 9, no. 1 (2009): 117–141. Elias, Norbert. “Studies in the Genesis of the Naval Profession.” British Journal of Sociology 1, no. 4 (1950): 291–309. Elias, Norbert. The Society of Individuals. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Elias, Norbert. The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Polity, 1996. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Rev. ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. First published 1939. Elias, Norbert. “The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present.” In Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities, edited by Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell, 107–126. Dublin, Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 2009. Elias, Norbert, and Eric Dunning. Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process. Dublin, Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 2008. Mennell, Stephen. Norbert Elias: An Introduction. Dublin, Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 1998. Wouters, Cas. Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890. London: Sage, 2007.

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CLOTHING CONSUMPTION Along with the consumption of food and shelter, consumption of clothing fulfills the fundamental physical needs of humans. Without thick layers of bodily hair, a human body requires clothing to protect itself from the elements, distinguishing it from that of other animals. Clothing is also used as a symbol to distinguish a person from other people or to assimilate with others, in which case, clothing consumption transpires beyond that of basic needs. Although clothing appeared by the Neolithic period and since then has been a feature of human societies, consumption of clothing itself, separate from consumption of textiles, appeared in more recent societies with the emergence of the ready-made clothing industry. The origins of ready-made clothing are found in the early uniforms of armies and navies and in the secondhand clothing markets in seventeenth-century Europe. Other early examples are work clothes for sailors on long-haul voyages and those for children in orphanages. In eighteenth-century England, nonnoble consumers were fashionably clothed, often in printed calico costumes, purchased secondhand, with a muslin handkerchief around their neck. It is said that the craze over the printed calico made available to the British consumers, thanks to the expansion of commercial voyages, motivated the inventors of the cotton spinning and weaving machineries during the Industrial Revolution. Although the textile industry was the first to be mechanized during the industrialization in the late-eighteenth century, the mechanization and the mass production of ready-made clothes for non-noble citizens increased with the diffusion of the sewing machine. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the sewing machine expanded the output of clothing factories in the United States, well ahead of the development in Europe. In the United Sates, Diana Crane argues, standardized and mass-produced denim overalls, for example, became widely available from mail-order catalogs by the end of the nineteenth century and were worn by farmers on the Western frontiers as well as factory workers in the North. Cheap, readymade seersucker jackets were also widely available by then in the warmer South. The transition from handmade to machine-made clothing occurred earlier in the United States than in Europe, not only due to the availability of the sewing machine, but also due

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to the diffusion of clothing patterns and the development of a standardized system of body measurements, as well as the lack of mature local markets for secondhand clothing outside of the cities. In Europe, working-class families relied on the fast turnaround of used clothes and, by the end of the nineteenth century, on inexpensive ready-made clothes. The contexts in which clothes are worn and the sociocultural meanings of clothing have changed over time. Fashion and social norms have governed the way people dressed themselves for centuries, but had become pronounced by the eighteenth century with the influx of less expensive textiles, as seen by the contemporary social critiques and satirical cartoonists who recognized the effect of fashion and social emulation in the English towns and countryside. Although clothing that had traditionally been worn by the working class, such as smocks and wooden clogs, did not disappear until the twentieth century, workers started to possess stylish garments and suits for Sunday use. Social emulation was most apparent in one’s best clothes, commonly called Sunday best because they were reserved for going to church. By the end of the nineteenth century, male workers would often dress themselves in three-piece suits, with a black or dark blue jacket, trousers, and a waistcoat, adorned with accessories such as a chained watch and a hat, resembling the style of the middle class. By the early twentieth century, the desire to dress well was more widespread among the working class in the United States than in France or England, possibly due to their higher aspiration in the less-hierarchical society and because immigrant newcomers often discarded traditional clothing and customs on arrival. The custom of wearing one’s Sunday best as a means of conspicuous consumption receded slowly during the twentieth century. Mass production and mass consumption of quality, stylish garments became common in the interwar years both in the United States and in Europe due to the development of synthetic fibers and the rapid expansion of retail outlets for factory-made clothing. The use of sportswear as an inspiration for youthful urban lifestyle by fashion designers, such as Chanel, contributed to the increased availability of stylish ready-made clothing through retailers, including department stores, variety stores, and mailorder catalogs. The simple and reproducible designs, as seen for example in the “little black dress,” also found outlets in clothing patterns and catalogs, and

encouraged home sewing, while at the same time, the female workforce in factories was increasing. Despite the popularity of such modern styles, the consumer market for ready-made clothing was easily saturated, and the industry was burdened by overproduction. Large manufacturers strove to cultivate consumer demands for quick replenishment of wardrobe, and such commercial needs were met by the biannual holdings of couture fashion shows, and textile, yarn, and ready-to-wear exhibitions. With this background of commercial development, the clothing norm changed in the 1960s, when the so-called Youthquake destructed the established sociocultural meaning of respectable appearance. Fashion became increasingly casual and more open to experimentation. The young became important consumers of clothing and major trend-setters. This era is marked by what has been termed the “democratization of fashion”—the process whereby mass production of stylish clothes made fashion a means of self-enhancement and self-expression for the majority. Miniskirts for women and denim jeans for both sexes, which at first symbolized association with the counterculture, became socially acceptable with the aging of the Youthquake generation. Fashion became more fragmented, not only with white youth being trendsetters but also with ethnic minorities and members of subcultures performing crucial roles in generating new styles. Displays of sartorial taste, which were once considered a function of wealth, became an important outlay of self-expression and free speech, especially for the marginalized. T-shirts, in particular, have been used as a platform for free speech. However, in the more commercialized culture of fashion, the words and the graphics on T-shirts are often used to fuel consumer appetites and to generate corporate profit. The issue of clothing consumption is relevant to the contemporary debate about the spread of “Fast Fashion” (a term used to capture the increasing speed with which clothing items move from fashion shows to retail stores and the rapid pace of changing styles and designs) and globalized production (especially from developing countries) of ready-made clothes. With the rapid innovation of information technology and logistics since the late 1990s, low wages, long hours, and poor working conditions have increased significantly in clothing production by multinational companies that subcontract out to developing countries. Subcontracted manufacturers

Clubbing

kept stock turnovers high to supply increasingly fashion-orientated and inexpensive throwaway clothes to consumers in developed countries. Super stores emerged as rivals to the traditional Main Street, and they were able to use their buying power to stock large volumes of cheap, fashionable clothes. According to consumer expenditure data, clothes shifted from being durables (expensive items required by everyone and bought infrequently) to consumables (cheap items bought frequently as part of active engagement with consumption). This is indicated by the decline of percentage share of total household expenditure spent on clothing and by the rise of absolute amount of clothes purchased. The real cost of clothes in the United Kingdom, for example, declined from 1961 to 2001 by 70 percent, which compares with a 20 percent decline in the real cost of food, according to the retail price indices. In this period, for example, a coat moved from being a major-expenditure item that was expected to last several years to a fashionable, single-season item that was widely available in super stores and other low-cost retailers. This massive expansion of productive capacity required new markets. As the youth market became saturated, retailers increasingly sought to extend the scope of fashionability to new social groups, such as children and older people, both of whom are in the twentyfirst century increasingly being included within the orbit of “Fast Fashion.” Shinobu Majima See also Consumer Expenditure Surveys; Fashion; Fashion Industry; Jeans; Licensing of Clothing Brands; Mass Production and Consumption; Textiles; T-Shirts

Further Readings Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. New York: Picador, 2000. Lemire, Beverly. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Majima, Shinobu. “Fashion and Frequency of Purchase: Womenswear Consumption in Britain, 1961–2001.” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 12, no. 4 (2008): 502–517. Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

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Twigg, Julia. “Clothing, Identity and the Embodiment of Age.” In Aging and Identity: A Postmodern Dialogue, edited by Jason L. Powell and Tony Gilbert, 93–104. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2009. Wills, Gordon, and David Midgley. Fashion Marketing. London: Allen & Unwin, 1973. Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: Virago, 1985.

CLUBBING Over the past two decades, clubbing has become a nearly global signifier of going out dancing in the context of youth nightlife culture. Since the 1990s, clubbing scenes have emerged especially, but not only, in major cities in Europe (foremost in the United Kingdom, but also in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, Belgrade, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, among many others), North America (e.g., Vancouver, Montréal, San Francisco, New York), Australia (Sidney), Asia (e.g., Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Bombay), Latin America (e.g., Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Sao Paolo), and the Middle East (e.g., in Lebanon or Israel). Nightclubbing culture is a global phenomenon (even though significant parts of the world are still untouched by it), but its semantics are geographically diverse. Due to its transgressive and playful elements as well as its endorsement of hedonism and sensual immersion, clubbing can be seen as a feature of postmodern consumer culture. Broadly speaking, clubbing denotes a cultural and social practice that combines (mainly) electronic, beat-centered music of various genres (and their subgenres), such as techno, house, garage, drum and bass, R&B, electro, dubstep, grime, global beats, different styles of dance, fashion, drugs, and often a sexualized atmosphere in varied temporal and spatial contexts of copresence. Despite these common elements, the particular practices, social actors, spatial settings, and modes of sociality that clubbing refers to in different national contexts vary enormously. This presents ample opportunity for comparative research into the local cultures of clubbing and their particular societal significance and pathways of development in certain political, economic, and social structures. While clubbing in the United Kingdom is a common leisure activity of young people from all social groups (though middle-income groups are

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predominant), clubbing in Istanbul, for example, is associated with nighttime entertainment of wealthy middle- and upper-class youth. Clubbing may refer to dance and music events in venues of variable sizes and capacities (from super clubs with a capacity of several thousand to smaller, more alternative venues or hybrid bar-clubs that integrate eating, drinking, socializing, and dancing in one place). Clubbing is mostly associated with events in licensed venues in urban, especially metropolitan contexts, but mobile sound system technologies make it possible to transform the countryside, beaches, mountains, boats, parking lots, train and underground stations, and even aircrafts into clubbing sceneries. Clubbing has also become an important aspect of the holiday business in seaside resorts (Ibiza, Gran Canaria, Faliraki, Malia, Mykonos, Aya Napa, in Croatia, at the Black Sea Coast, the Baltic Coast, Crimea, and Goa, among many others). Clubbing culture stands in the legacy of earlier youth dance and music cultures. This includes the British Northern Soul amphetamine-based weekenders and all-nighters of the late 1960s, 1970s disco, the Detroit techno and the gay Chicago house music scenes of the 1980s, and the Ibiza-influenced, ecstasybased British acid-house and rave culture movement that became popular in Britain in 1988 to 1989. In the mid-1990s, after the clampdown on the British rave scene that had staged unlicensed parties in disused warehouses and open-air sites, music and dance culture was forced to revert to licensed venues. In the late 1990s, Britain saw an unprecedented rise of club and dance culture and the emergence of high-capacity, well-equipped super clubs. Compared to overall consumer spending on leisure and recreation in Britain, clubbing is a fairly marginal leisure activity. However, for young people, it has become a major leisure or holiday activity; expenditure on nightclub admission in the United Kingdom has almost reached the same level as cinema consumption.

Clubbing and Consumer Culture Clubbing raises a number of issues relevant for the study of consumption and consumer culture. First, it can be understood as a form of experiential consumption, which has gained significance since postindustrial urban centers are increasingly furnished with culture, service, and leisure functions (see, e.g., Hannigan 1998). Experience and leisure economies such as clubbing often thrive on the promise of liminality—a

threshold phase of ordered disorder, in which social structure and identities are challenged and temporarily displaced—as well as transgression, experimentation, inner-worldly transcendence, and release from daily routines and obligations. Aestheticization is an important vehicle for constructing such transcendence in clubbing spaces, for example, through role-playing, playful interaction, and self-stylization by means of fashion, costume, and dance. Yet, such environments also rely on certain forms of ordering and on the “routinization of liminal practices” (Hobbs et al. 2000, 711). In this respect, clubbing can be compared to postmodern simulated environments and leisure spaces (e.g., theme parks, shopping malls, and urban spectacles, such as sporting events and music festivals) that promote the quest for hedonism and excitement through absorbing sensual stimulation. Further, clubbing gives room for playful simulation, eclectic use of styles, irony, and deliberate inauthenticity. As has been argued, however, postmodern leisure spheres generate programmed, simulated, and surrogate experiences (e.g., Hannigan 1998). To some extent, clubbing also is based on the standardization and routinization of experiential scripts. The amplification of sensual effects through alcohol, drugs, and other means may create a sense of the constructedness and artificiality of the experience. Nevertheless, in its demand for serious involvement and affection, clubbing also evokes an ethic of authenticity. Therefore, it seems more apt to say that interactional settings in clubbing culture sway between an authenticity norm and a flexibility norm; a deep expressivism on the one hand and a depthless virtualism on the other hand (Rief 2009, 191). The former adheres to, and reactivates, the reference to a discourse of authenticity; the latter erodes authenticity. For example, drugs in clubbing culture serve as means of deepening the authentic emotional involvement. At the same time, techniques such as alcohol or drug consumption may serve to support playful and deliberate inauthenticity. In retrospect, the authenticity of the emotions and the affectual bonds created during drug-induced states at nightclubs is often questioned. Other tensions pervade the consumption of clubbing and drugs. In Britain, for example, clubbing has spurred the normalization of illicit consumption practices. Legal norms clash with sociocultural values in clubbing contexts, in many of which drug consumption is widely accepted or even expected and can hardly be prevented or curbed by the authorities.

Coca-Cola

Despite their widespread use, drugs have not fully become normalized, even in dance culture. Rather, the consumption of clubbing and drugs (which need not necessarily go together) is often inserted in a justificatory structure of tamed hedonism, whereby hedonistic pleasures are rendered legitimate when held in check by self-control, when confined to certain spaces and times, or when aligned with narratives of mastery and self-realization (Sassatelli 2001, 98). The role of nightlife entertainment in urban centers and the regulation and governance of nightlife have become key issues of academic research in recent years. How to govern zones of legal liminality and how to strike a balance between consumers’ demand for liminal space and the demand for order and security imposed by legal and licensing regulations are contentious issues. Nightlife governance is caught up in a trade-off between the economic and social benefits and the social costs of the nighttime economy. In addition to issues of governance, more comparative research and more detailed analysis of the clubbing phenomenon as a cultural economy would be crucial to this field of study. Of particular interest, apart from corporate structures and the internationalization of nightlife entertainment markets, is the crossover to advertising, promotion, and social or business networking. Clubbing is not always marketed as an end in itself, but is also used for promotional activities relating to consumer products and retail outlets, fashion, design, music, art events, social movement initiatives, and even campaigns of political parties, with the formats sometimes blurring and the ends blending into each other. Retail companies and advertisers have discovered club audiences as a crucial gateway to the youth market and have begun to use clubbing and party layouts for advertising campaigns and the composition of target groups. In view of this, club music and dance culture signify more than a special nighttime entertainment activity of young adolescents. It has become a general ingredient of popular and consumer culture. Silvia Rief See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Hedonism; Liminality; Postmodernism; Spaces and Places; Subculture; Tamed Hedonism; Youth Culture

Further Readings Chatterton, Paul, and Robert Hollands. Urban Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces and Corporate Power. London: Routledge, 2003.

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Hannigan, John. Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. London: Routledge, 1998. Hobbs, Dick, Stuart Lister, Philip Hadfield, Simon Winlow, and Steve Hall. “Receiving Shadows: Governance and Liminality in the Night-Time Economy.” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 701–717. Malbon, Ben. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge, 1999. Rief, Silvia. Club Cultures: Boundaries, Identities, and Otherness. New York: Routledge, 2009. Sassatelli, Roberta. “Tamed Hedonism: Choice, Desires and Deviant Pleasures.” In Ordinary Consumption, edited by Jukka Gronow and Alan Warde, 93–106. London: Routledge, 2001. Talbot, Deborah. Regulating the Night: Race, Culture and Exclusion in the Making of the Night-Time Economy. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity, 1995.

COCA-COLA Coca-Cola is a beverage with enormous global cultural resonance. It was invented by an Atlanta pharmacist, John S. Pemberton, in 1888, and first bottled in 1894. Originally, Coke was sold as a patent medicine. It has changed from being sold as a medicine to its current status as the world’s most popular nonalcoholic beverage, available in more than two hundred countries. The Coca-Cola Corporation was formed in 1902. In 1915, the company adopted the iconic Coke contour bottle. Coca-Cola can be described as a diluted narcotic (the Coca suggesting its relationship to cocaine) and an inexpensive way that people can reward themselves with a well-known drink, associated in the popular mind with pleasure and modernity. In a book on pop icons, material culture scholar, Craig Gilborn, wrote an essay, “Pop Iconology: Looking at the Coke Bottle,” pointing out that Coca-Cola is “the most widely recognized commercial product in the world” (in Marshall Fishwick and Ray B. Browne, 1970, 24). A survey in 1949 revealed that only one person out of four hundred could not identify what product was in a Coke bottle. Coca-Cola is now number one on a list of globally available products and has been for many years.

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Perspectives on Coca-Cola Raphael Patai, a folklorist, deals with the role of advertising and the pleasure provided by CocaCola in his book Myth and Modern Man. He writes (1972, 238–239): It has been observed by critics of the American mass media that the method used in television commercials is never [to] present an ordered, sequential, rational argument but simply [to] present the product associated with desirable things, or attitudes. Thus Coca-Cola is shown held by a beautiful blonde, who sits in a Cadillac, surrounded by bronze, muscular admirers, with the sun shining overhead. By repetition, these elements become associated in our minds, into a pattern of sufficient cohesion, so that one element can magically evoke the others. If we think of ads as designed solely to sell the products, we miss their main effect: to increase the pleasure in the consumption of the product. Coca-Cola is far more than a cooling drink; the consumer participates, vicariously, in a much larger experience. In Africa, in Melanesia, to drink a Coke is to participate in the American way of life.

Patai suggests that Coca-Cola may be linked in people’s imagination to mythological stories about heroes who perform Herculean labors. So when we drink a Coke, we are unconsciously associating ourselves with the “Coke-drinking, laughing divinities” and sports heroes found in many Coca-Cola advertisements and commercials. A French Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, has suggested that advertising plays a major role in consumer cultures, providing valuation to the products that people purchase. From a Marxist perspective, Coca-Cola and all soft drinks are good examples of the way capitalist societies create false needs in people, so they can then be exploited. For Marxists, Coca-Cola becomes a signifier of alienation and self-estrangement. It may provide momentary gratification and pleasure, but it also distracts us from recognizing the degree to which we are exploited by the ruling classes. In his book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Marshall McLuhan deconstructed the significance of Coca-Cola in American culture. Coca-Cola is connected, McLuhan explains, to notions Americans had about the wholesomeness of American life. He writes (1951/1967, 118, 120):

In God Is My Copilot, the G.I.’s agreed that what they were fighting for was, after all, the American girl. To us, they said, she meant cokes, hamburgers, and clean places to sleep. Now, the American girl as portrayed by the coke ads has always been an archetype. No matter how much thigh she may be demurely sporting, she is sweet, nonsexual, and immaturely innocent.

For psychologist and anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille, Coca-Cola is a reflection of America as an adolescent culture. He explains, in The Culture Code (2006, 31): Our cultural adolescence informs our behavior in a wide variety of ways. . . . Looking at our culture through this set of glasses explains why we are so successful around the world selling the trappings of adolescence: Coca-Cola, Nike shoes, fast food, blue jeans, and loud, violent movies.

Coca-Cola is, for Rapaille, a signifier of the United States as an essentially adolescent culture and can be seen, then, as a means for individuals, who may no longer be young, of identifying with youthfulness, wholesomeness, and vitality. The popularity of Coca-Cola and its rival Pepsi has diminished in recent years, as many consumers have switched to bottled water and other more natural beverages. Coca-Cola is, after all, if you reduce it to its basic contents, carbonated water with sugar (or a sugar substitute in Diet Coke) and “secret” flavors. When one drinks Coca-Cola, what he or she gets is the “aura” of the drink generated by the enormous amount of advertising for Coca-Cola by advertising agencies in many countries. Culture critic Walter Benjamin’s theory about auras being attached to original works of art may explain the significance of one of Coke’s most celebrated campaigns that suggested Coke is “the real thing.” Some blind taste tests indicate that most people cannot tell the difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. In a number of blind tests, people choose Pepsi as tasting better than Coke, except when they find out that one glass has Pepsi and another has Coke. This preference for Coke may be due to the ubiquitous nature and the cleverness of its advertising. The cola wars continue to be fought globally, and now China, with more than a billion people, is the site of an epic battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

Coffee

Some of the more noteworthy studies of CocaCola’s cultural significance have been done by Daniel Miller, Reinhold Wagnleitner, and Robert J. Foster. Miller has an important chapter, “Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad,” that appears in his book Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. Wagnleitner’s book, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, deals with the product’s “cultural mission” after World War II. Robert J. Foster’s book, CocaGlobalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea, also deals with Coca-Cola’s role in what might be called gastronomic imperialism. Arthur Asa Berger See also Advertising; Americanization; Branding; False Consciousness/False Needs; Food Consumption; Globalization; McDonaldization

Further Readings Berger, Arthur Asa. Reading Matter: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Material Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992. Fishwick, Marshall, and Ray B. Browne, eds. Icons of Popular Culture. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970. Foster, Robert J. Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. First published 1951. Miller, Daniel. “Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad.” In Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, edited by Daniel Miller, 169–188. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Patai, Raphael. Myth and Modern Man. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1972. Rapaille, Clotaire. The Culture Code. New York: Broadway Books, 2006. Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

COFFEE Few other commodities are so deeply entrenched with the history of consumer culture as coffee. In different societies and cultures, men and women have consistently constructed their class, gender, and ethnic identity around the ritual consumption of coffee.

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The intrinsic qualities of the product—the green bean from a plant of the Rubiaceae family, which is typically roasted, ground, and brewed into a dark drink— may well have something to do with it. The taste for coffee is ostensibly culturally acquired. Children dislike it, lab rats hate it, but millions of drinkers who have grown to love it cannot live without it. Coffee contains an active ingredient, caffeine, whose principal effect on the human body is to induce stimulation, alertness, and drive. Along with other colonial commodities, such as tea, sugar, cocoa, and tobacco, which similarly produce inebriation and energy through ingredients such as glucose and nicotine, coffee enormously contributed to the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century that preceded the Industrial Revolution. The quality of its powerful stimulant also partly explains why—in different places and times—the social consumption of coffee has been associated with the formation of spaces of energetic public debate, sometimes conducive to political unrest and revolutions. Finally, coffee consumption has historically been loaded with political meanings because it has consistently been one of the most internationally traded agricultural crops, characteristically linking producers in poorer parts of the world to consumers in some of the richest. Coffee has continued to appeal to consumers and to be a key international trade good over the last four centuries, mostly because of its plastic adaptability to significant changes in the societies of the dominant buying countries. Originating in the highlands of what was then called Abyssinia, in the fifteenth century coffee spread to Egypt, Yemen, and Arabia, where beans were first roasted and brewed, similar to the modern preparation. The word coffee derives, in fact, from the Arabic word kahwah, or wine. This indicates how the original use and understanding of coffee was that of a nonintoxicating, and indeed sobering, substitute for an alcoholic beverage, which Muslim religious law forbids. The distinct social nature of coffee consumption also developed in the Arab world, where most coffee drinking was and is confined to coffeehouses. The first coffeehouse opened in 1555 in Constantinople, and hundreds more followed suit. Intense patronizing of coffeehouses soon transformed coffee drinking into a daily ritual of Muslim male socialization and conversation. Coffee first arrived in Europe in the sixteenth century as an oddity reserved to the aristocratic elite, its status

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deriving from being a scarce, expensive, and exotic product. As soon as the end of the following century, though, European colonialism and its global plantation system made coffee available and affordable to a much wider consumer base. The Dutch were successful in planting coffee in their colony of Java in the 1690s, thus replacing the early, less effective, import route from Mocha in Yemen. The French were responsible for the development of coffee plantations in the Western Hemisphere as they first brought plants in Martinique and Saint-Domingue (today Haiti). Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, as production spread from Dutch Indonesia and the French Antilles to Brazil and Spanish America, and later (in the twentieth century) back to Africa and Southeast Asia, coffee stimulated capitalist investments and the exploitation of slave, indentured, and migrant labor. In the metropolitan areas of consumption, such as Britain and the Netherlands, coffee was among the goods that most intensely defined the new culture of acquisition and distinction of the emerging middle classes. By the end of the seventeenth century, the latter had adopted it as “The Great Soberer,” a drink whose pharmacological qualities made it perfectly coherent to the social values of temperance, rationality, efficiency, and work ethic that permeated and defined the bourgeois mind. Scientists of the time also promoted it as having many medicinal benefits, including reducing excessive sexual desire. Elaborate rites, equipments, and places for coffee consumption emerged, paralleling and spurring the expansion of colonial trade and profit. A growing interest in fancy serving sets created a market in porcelain imported from China (later to be called china after the place of origin), soon trickling down from the aristocracy to the middle classes, who were equally eager to consume the expensive paraphernalia that went with the domestic preparation of coffee. In eighteenth-century London, Paris, and Vienna, the coffeehouse, or café, was the quintessential place where cultured and enlightened bourgeoisie men congregated to read newspapers and discuss literature and politics, articulating the critical debate beyond the regulations of state necessary for the formation of a public opinion. Philosopher Jurgen Habermas has called such noninstitutional political space the “public sphere.” At the same time, coffee (along with tobacco) underwent a gendering process that construed it as a “rational” stimulant associated with

public drinking places and male sociability, whereas the consumption of chocolate remained domestic and largely feminine, conveying the aristocratic qualities of idleness and sensuality. Mass consumption of coffee developed after the Napoleonic Wars, as a result of growing global output (Brazilian production, which took off after 1820, accounted for over half the world’s production by 1850) and industrialization of processing. The ensuing fall in prices allowed urban workers in Western Europe and the United States to adopt coffee consumption as a ubiquitous part of their everyday diet and style of sociability, making caffeine the drug of choice of fast-paced industrialized societies. The United States, in particular, became the most important coffee market in the nineteenth century. By 1899, Americans were consuming thirteen pounds per capita and importing over 40 percent of the world’s coffee. Many innovations having an impact on the ways coffee is consumed today also developed in the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1860s, San Francisco’s Folgers began to market ready-to-grind roasted beans. In 1901, the Maxwell House Company first sold instant coffee. Decaffeinated coffee was a Swiss contribution (1903), while in 1908, the German Melitta Bentz company developed paper filters for percolators (invented in 1819). The Pavoni Company of Milan patented the first espresso machine in 1905. The United States led the way in market concentration, as large industrial roasting firms integrated vertically and, by using advances in technology, transport, and marketing, flooded American consumers with mass-produced coffee. After World War II, Europe followed the same pattern, making coffee companies increasingly compete on price rather than the quality of their blend. The International Coffee Organization was created in 1963 under the auspices of the United Nations to regulate the trade, but by the 1970s, the international coffee market, which had grown to be dominated by a few multinational food conglomerates, faced saturation, down-spiraling prices, and consumer declining interest, especially among the young and socially mobile. Since the 1980s, though, in a shift paradigmatic of the transition from a mass to a postindustrial consumer-oriented economy, the market has been renewed and revitalized by a number of countertrends. The interest in specialty coffees marketed in

Coffee Shops

small batches by local coffee shops, first developed in countercultural circles on the West Coast of the United States, expanded to the new middle classes of young professionals. The emergence of a market for quality coffees and the consequent rebounding of coffee consumption since the 1980s are the result of both the determination of coffee producers to restructure and diversify, and the surfacing of lifestyle-oriented groups of coffee drinkers, whose identity is less and less defined by social class in its modern, Marxian meaning, and more and more by the symbolic value of the goods and services they consume. Coffee has responded to the needs and desires of such a segmented, mobile, and ephemeral market in different ways. Similarly to wine, knowledge about different blends from different parts of the world bestows important cultural capital on the coffee connoisseur. Furthermore, the distinct global politics of coffee allows concerned consumers to actively support the sustainability and fairness of the food system. Coffee is the core commodity in fair trade networks, the movement that seeks to establish more egalitarian patterns of commerce by linking marginalized producers in the world’s South with consumers in the affluent North. By accepting to pay a higher price for their coffee, consumers challenge the value-for-money logic, bring in the equation the public good, and express firsthand a moral and political evaluation of the exchange. They effectively “defetishize” the commodity by trying to reestablish a direct relationship with the good exchanged. In 2008, worldwide sales of fair trade coffee amounted to more than four billion dollars, with more than 100 percent growth in the United States and Canada between 2004 and 2007. An important retailer of fair trade coffee is Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee shop chain that in 2010 boasts over 15,000 stores in 50 countries and has capitalized on the interest in specialty coffees to define a new consuming urban lifestyle at the turn of the twenty-first century. Starbucks sells a variety of coffees with multiple options in size, preparation (iced, espresso, macchiato, decaf, etc.), and accompaniment of pastries and sandwiches, at a good price/value. The lounge setting, sometimes featuring couches and sofas, designs Starbucks coffee shops into mass-produced replicas of the eighteenthcentury European coffeehouses and their comfortable atmosphere for conversation and reading.

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At the same time, the importation of Italian coffee culture, the freedom for customers to hang out in the premises for as long as they want, and even the very ubiquity of Starbucks makes it a close response to the idealized notion of an Italian bar, the community pub that local people visit informally to reinforce existing relationships and create new ones. In fact, it has been theorized that the popularity of Starbucks has resulted from its ability to supply, along with coffee, a “third space” between the isolation of the suburban home and a workplace that no longer provides the security and predictable socialization of the past. This third space, made safe by the brand-name assurance mainstream America seeks for and projected into the global network by the free Wi-Fi Internet connection that allows customers to continue to work and shop, incorporates the coffeehouse cultures pre-Starbucks and effectively readapts them to the present social environment. Simone Cinotto See also Coffee Shops; Colonialism; Fair Trade; Globalization; Lifestyle; Social and Economic Development; Sugar; Tea

Further Readings Clarence-Smith, William, and Steven Topik, eds. The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Raynolds, Laura T. “Consumer/Producer Links in Fair Trade Coffee Networks.” Sociologia Ruralis 42, no. 4 (October 2002): 404–424. Roseberry, William. “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States.” American Anthropologist. New Series 98, no. 4 (December 1996): 762–775. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Smith, Michael D. “The Empire Filters Back: Consumption, Production, and the Politics of Starbucks Coffee.” Urban Geography 17, no. 6 (1996): 502–525.

COFFEE SHOPS The coffee shop is the latest format to have evolved for the service of coffee beverages outside the home, following innovations such as the Turkish coffeehouse

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and Mediterranean coffee bar. Each format developed to respond to specific customer demands at a particular time and setting, which reflect the nature of consumer society. All combine the sale of two basic commodities consumed in very different ways: coffee and the surroundings in which it is served. Coffee is native to the Ethiopian highlands, where its preparation formed the center of a complex social ritual involving the roasting, preparation, and serving of the beverage. From the fourteenth century, coffee was imported into Arabia, gaining a following among Sufis as an aid to staying awake during their lengthy devotions. During the 1500s, coffeehouses became established across much of the Ottoman Empire and began appearing in Europe from the mid-1600s. In the twentieth century, the coffee bar became popular among Mediterranean societies, reflecting the spread of urbanization and mass consumption; while Anglo-American youth cultures adopted coffee bars as generational meeting places during the 1950s. The contemporary coffee shop formula, initially developed in North America during the 1980s, has been successfully exported to large swaths of the developed and developing world; most notably by the Starbucks coffee chain, which by July 2008 was operating around 4,500 outlets in 45 countries, in addition to over 11,000 locations within the United States. Coffee’s success as a publicly consumed social beverage must be considered in relation to its rival beverages. For the Ottomans, coffee was the “wine of Islam”—endorsed by the religion, unlike alcohol. Elsewhere, the success of the coffeehouse has been linked to its popularity among those who were excluded, or chose to exclude themselves, from drinking establishments. Nineteenth-century temperance movements promoted coffeehouses as an alternative to pubs, while 1950s coffee bars welcomed teenagers who were below legal drinking age in the United Kingdom and the United States. The popularity of the contemporary coffee shop owes much to the patronage of women who often report finding the atmosphere less intimidating than that of drinking establishments. The current success of coffee must also be explained by other factors in relation to its nonalcoholic competitors. Here the emphasis on espressobased beverages has been crucial: these are difficult to prepare, requiring expensive equipment and trained operators, whereas tea is largely brewed in the

same way in and out of the home, leading to customer reluctance to pay the kind of mark-up readily accepted on coffee. By presenting cappuccinos and lattes as premium, hand-crafted products, individually prepared according to the customer’s instruction (tall, half-fat, double-shot, with caramel, etc.), coffee shops succeeded in establishing espresso-based beverages as aspirational lifestyle products that are relatively price insensitive. Howard Schultz, the longtime Starbucks CEO, argues coffee shops offer a luxury good at an easily accessible price. This notion of the coffeehouse as a democratically inclusive establishment is nothing new. Turkish coffee shops were notable for seating guests in the order that they arrived, rather than by rank, while the European cafés of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often served as centers for political discussion and organization, captured in Jurgen Habermas’s designation of the coffeehouse as a key arena for the formation of public opinion. Yet these were almost exclusively bourgeois and male in character, with seated patrons being served by waiters. It was only with the emergence of the American style bar in which drinks were passed over the counter by the server (barista) to the standing customers that a more classless coffee bar developed in the Mediterranean. However the Anglo-American coffee shop continues to attract a disproportionately white, middle-class clientele, attracted as much to the ambience as the coffee itself. The creation of this atmosphere is therefore a crucial part of the work carried out within the coffee shop. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg argued that a characteristic of so-called third places—spaces for socializing separate from both work and home—was that this work was performed by the customers themselves, through their willingness to engage in conversation on an egalitarian basis. The language of the “third place” has been eagerly seized on by Starbucks’ Schultz, yet the branded chains in many ways seek to perform this work for the customers by providing a ready-made, familiar environment in which some of the tasks traditionally undertaken at work or home may be performed. One can avoid the need to clean or bake at home by entertaining friends at the coffee shop, relax by reading the newspaper or listening to music, or simply use the facilities—notably the rest rooms—for a “comfort” break during a shopping expedition. Conversely the development of the personal computer, the laptop, and the wireless Internet,

Cognitive Structures

as well as the growing preference for out-of-office meetings, have all helped establish the coffee shop as an alternative workspace where the charge is paid in cappuccinos. George Ritzer, the social theorist, has railed against the McDonaldization of the coffee shop, yet for companies such as Starbucks, this forms a key to their success. Significant differences in consumer behavior within coffee shops can be observed, however. In the United States, over 50 percent of the business is estimated to be “to go,” in part explaining the preference for super-sized beverages, whereas that figure drops to 10 percent in the United Kingdom, where customers are keen to “consume” the store and its potential for sociability. Typically, British coffee shop patrons will linger over their long-lasting lattes seated on the sofas, leading operators to describe their trade as a “20 minute business,” whereas the majority of Italians quickly down their small espressos standing at the bar—using the walk to and from the office for their social exchanges. Even in new markets there are striking differences—in Eastern Europe, sipping espresso is presented as a sophisticated shortcut to integration into the heart of Europe, whereas in Southeast Asia, middle-class youths down iced coffee concoctions in imitation of their peers in the United States. Meanwhile, the most striking cleavage of all within the coffee world is beginning to close as consumers in producer countries are finally acquiring a taste for the end product, after centuries of simply shipping beans to the metropole. Jonathan Morris See also Branding; Civil Society; Coffee; Food Consumption; Franchising; McDonaldization; Metropole; Sociability

Further Readings Ellis, Markman. The Coffee-House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place : Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2008. Schultz, Howard, and Dori Jones Yang. Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time. New York: Hyperion, 1997.

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COGNITIVE STRUCTURES Cognitive structures refers to distinct subprocesses or mechanisms identifiable in mental information processing that mediate consumers’ reactions to external stimuli. Cognitive structures is the generic term for a huge variety of different aspects related to the way humans process, store, retrieve, and use information for decision making. Cognitive mechanisms often lead to characteristic biases or simplification in information processing. An analysis of these basic processes in human information processing is essential for understanding consumer behavior: What information people attend to, which aspects of a product description they remember, which characteristics of a product they use in decision making, and how they alter given information during storage in or retrieval from memory are all influenced by these mechanisms. Information people perceive, process, store, recall, and use for decisions about their behavior is never objective but constantly altered and fitted to the cognitive structures a person already holds. In psychology, the analysis of cognitive structures responsible for people’s behavior is one of the most important research fields and is called cognitive psychology. The overarching analogy of cognitive psychology is that the human mind processes information like a digital computer. It assumes that most cognitions consist of a limited number of distinct processing stages, which usually follow each other in a linear fashion. The diversity of cognitive psychology is high and includes research topics such as attention, perception, language comprehension, learning, memory, emotions, concept formation, thinking, and reasoning (see Eysenck and Keane 2005). Within each of those topics countless cognitive mechanisms have been identified in the last decades. Only some of them can be presented in this entry.

Historical Background of Cognitive Psychology Cognitive psychology developed in the United States in the late 1950s and was stimulated by technological developments in the area of digital computers and artificial intelligence. Noam Chomsky’s classical book Syntactic Structures was one of the initiating elements in the soon-to-come cognitive revolution in psychology. The upcoming cognitive psychology

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was a direct criticism of behaviorism, which was mainstream in psychology in the Western countries over the decades before. Behaviorists treated the human brain as a black box that does not reveal the processes within to the researcher. Therefore, they focused their research on the analysis of situational characteristics—so-called stimuli—that determine how people react. In contrast to that, cognitive psychologists were explicitly interested in the psychological processes within the brain that mediate between external stimuli and behavior. Cognitive psychologists assume that behavior is no direct consequence of a set of external stimuli but an interaction between external stimuli and the individual interpretation of them. A behaviorist would, for example, assume that if you present a certain product in the store, a person would automatically react to that product—for example, by putting it into the shopping basket—based on the personal learning history of associating the stimulus (the product’s package) with positive or negative outcomes. A cognitive psychologist would be more interested to analyze how the status a person is in at that very moment and the other thoughts the person has (is he or she hungry, under time pressure, keen to try out new things, etc.) determine or alter how the stimulus is perceived and how this information is understood, stored, and eventually used for a decision or ignored. Cognitive psychology usually describes information processing at the level of hypothetical models, which means that the assumed cognitive structures do not necessarily have a direct physiological or neurological correlate. If, for example, a cognitive psychologist assumes that the selection of information people extract in a given situation is determined by an entity called “attention,” it is not important that neurologists can identify structures in the brain that might represent this cognitive mechanism. However, with recent developments in neuroscience, the search for neurological correlates to cognitive mechanisms intensified. Usually, research in cognitive psychology is laboratory research, which sometimes makes the generalizability to everyday situations questionable. Although cognitive psychology was first established in the United States, it had an enormous impact on psychology worldwide. The existence of cognitive structures involved in perception, attention, memory, or decision making is now widely accepted. They are assumed to be universal both over time and

geographically. The behavioral effects of some of the mechanisms might be specific to certain cultures because they are filled with culture-specific contents, but the mechanisms themselves are assumed to be independent of culture.

Cognitive Structures in Perception Relevant to Consumer Behavior Perception describes the process of external information entering the human information processing system. It is the first step of the information processing cascade and already the first level of altering the available information. Humans have a specific set of sensitive organs picking up information from the surrounding world, which determines what type of information we can detect and what type of information is not detectable (e.g., light within a certain bandwidth of frequencies, sound waves within another bandwidth). More interesting than those basic considerations is that many cognitive psychologists consider perception to be an active, hence constructive, process. What we already know and what we expect to see or to hear interferes even with the very basic process of perceiving. This perspective, often referred to as the constructivist approach of perception, can be traced back to Hermann von Helmholtz. He proposed that perception is the end product of the interaction of external stimuli with internal knowledge, hypotheses, expectations, motivation, and emotion. Other authors, such as James J. Gibson, strongly opposed the constructivist approach and proposed that meaning is picked up directly and remains unaltered during the perceptive process. More recent findings seem to indicate that the degree of cognitive interference on perception depends on the purpose of the perceptive process: if we need information that secures our survival (e.g., that protects us from falling off a cliff), the interference of cognitions in the background is very low and the necessary information is perceived directly. If we, on the other hand, have to recognize for example product packages, the interference of cognitive processes can be very strong. This has important implications for understanding consumer behavior. Hendrik N. J. Schifferstein shows, for example, that expectations about food (e.g., knowledge about the brand) influence perceived taste in a blind test. Two effects were revealed: assimilation and contrast. Tasting a product that deviates

Cognitive Structures

from the expected taste could either result in reducing the difference by adjusting the taste experience in the direction of the expected taste or by exaggerating the taste difference to create a clearer contrast between the expected taste and the sensation. The first effect would result in recognizing the product as identical to that expected; the second would result in recognizing the product as different, which is important if a manufacturer decides to alter the recipe of a well-established product.

Cognitive Structures in Attention Relevant to Consumer Behavior Attention refers to the selectivity of information processing. Whereas perception produces a relatively rich—although not at all complete or objective— representation of information inherent in the surrounding environment, attention processes focus the next levels of processing to a restricted selection of this information. This reduction of processed information is necessary because human capacity for higher-order processing is very limited. Donald E. Broadbent’s filter theory assumed an inflexible filter system very early in the process that blocks all but the attended information. More recent theories consider the process to be more flexible. Research results show that at least parts of the unattended information remains potentially accessible in short-term memory and that the restrictiveness of the filter process depends on the cognitive load the person has. Attention is focused on information that people want or need to process deliberately. Decisional involvement, for example, leads to attention focused on aspects relevant for the particular decision at hand. However, unattended information on a more automatic level is still processed. Thus, dual process theories distinguish between two modes of information processing: one is deliberate, needs attention, and is cognitively demanding; the other is automatic, needs no direct attention, and demands much less cognitive resources. This automatic mode of information processing often occurs without conscious awareness. We can, for example, focus on what a person says and actively process the information given but at the same time process nonverbal information about the person that might lead us to other conclusions. The latter processes are often responsible for an emotional evaluation of a person.

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The importance of attention for consumer behavior is evident. Customers in a supermarket, for example, process only parts of the available product information deliberately. If a customer wants to buy a can of soup, attention is focused on soups in cans and toothpaste is ignored. However, dual process theories predict that some information about toothpaste might still be processed on a subconscious level and influence behavior less directly. Ap Dijksterhuis, Maarten Bos, Loran Nordgren, and Rick van Baaren demonstrated in a study the surprising effects decisions based on unattended information can have: if a decision about a product is complex, people are more satisfied with a gut decision than with a decision they focused a lot of attention on. If the decision is simple the effect is the opposite. This seems to indicate that the automatic mode of information processing is closer to people’s preferences and deliberate decision making about complex problems may lead to decisions that people later regret. This astonishing finding might be a result of our preferences being more often based on automatic rather than deliberate processes.

Cognitive Structures in Memory Relevant to Consumer Behavior Human memory is usually understood as consisting of three main subsystems: a sensory store, a shortterm store, and a long-term store. William James distinguished between primary memory, which corresponds to the short-term store, and secondary memory, which corresponds to the long-term store. The sensory store contains—for a very short time period—all information that is provided by the sense organs. Attention decides what part of this enormous pool of information is forwarded into the short-term store. Information contained in the short-term store is conscious. The short-term store has a very limited capacity of usually five to nine elements, which could be words, numbers, but also integrated chunks of information, such as “BMW.” It is highly vulnerable to distractions. A process of rehearsal transfers information from the short-term store into the longterm store, which is virtually unlimited in capacity. Information that is stored in the long-term store has to be retrieved into the short-term store to be conscious again. Whereas forgetting in the sensory store occurs within milliseconds as the information in the sensory

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store is overwritten by new information, forgetting in the short-term store occurs within ten to twenty seconds, if no rehearsal procedure refreshes the stored information. The elements in the short-term store have different likelihoods of being forgotten. Usually people remember the first learned and the last elements better than elements in the middle of the row. For example, if a researcher presents people with ten different products and asks them to recall afterward, there is a much higher probability that they recall products presented first or last, which is, for example, of importance for the placement of a spot in a commercial break on TV, according to Terry Scott. Alan Baddeley suggested differentiating the shortterm store into three subsystems: a phonological loop that stores speech-based information, a visual-spatial scratch pad that is specialized in spatial and visual information, and a central executive that resembles attention. The distinction between speech-based and visual-spatial information is helpful because it explains that those types of information can be processed simultaneously and relatively independent of each other. This means that adding visual to speechbased information or vice versa, for example in commercials, extends the amount of information that can be processed by the recipients. Furthermore, even different messages can be communicated at the same time with pictures and words, a fact that is often used in commercials. Forgetting in the long-term store occurs slowly. Different theories exist as to how and why humans forget what they stored in long-term memory. Some assume that the memory trace slowly fades, and it becomes more and more difficult to read it. Other theories claim that some memories, especially memories connected to traumas, may be repressed in memory. Interference theory assumes that learning of new information interferes with already-stored information, especially if there is considerable overlap between the two. Both directions of interference are possible: proactive interference means that alreadylearned information blocks the learning of new information; retroactive interference means that new information overwrites the old information in memory. Research in marketing shows that those effects occur in real life: Raymond Burke and Thomas Srull found that previous exposure to advertisement for similar products by the same or other brands blocks product recollection.

Endel Tulving proposed the influential theory of cue-dependent forgetting in 1974. It proposes that the information is not completely lost from long-term memory when we forget something, but that we lose access to it, because relevant cues are not available any longer. Situational cues that were present during the learning session, for example, enhance the likelihood of recollecting a learned item when they are presented in the recollection session. A song presented in a TV commercial, for example, might trigger recollection of a product when it is heard again. Recollection and recognition are two different processes that retrieve information from long-term memory. Recognition, which means identifying an object as familiar, is usually much easier than recollection. Recall occurs either directly when the cue is directly accessing the information in long-term memory or indirectly via accessing information that is connected to the information that is searched for. That implies that elements in long-term memory are not stored as unconnected units but in a network of associations. Activating other parts of a knowledge network enhances the likelihood that the information searched for also pops into mind. Cognitive structures that have been discussed to store such complex pieces of information are schemata and behavioral scripts. The term schema was introduced by Sir Frederick Bartlett in 1932. He suggested that people form expectations about how things belong together and what kind of actions are appropriate. These expectations are schematic, which means generalized and simplified. They heavily influence how people give meaning to their perceptions and decide which parts of information are attended to, which are ignored, how the perceived is adjusted to fit existing memory structures, and even how informational gaps are filled and information is constructed. Scripts, which are types of schemata that store information about sequential events, guide how we perceive and recollect events in an observed situation. Often the recollected version of an event is much more related to this blueprint script that a person carries than to reality. Scripts and schemata are extremely helpful in everyday life, as they enable us to interact with other people and make decisions without having to process an overwhelming amount of information. Usually, decisions based on scripts or schemata are well adapted to situations because they are based on previous learning experiences. The downside of

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schemata and scripts is that they are, to a certain degree, imperceptive of situational changes. Consider a situation where a change in behavior would be appropriate, but a person carries scripts that are so strong that he or she does not even recognize the change in situation. This effect is especially relevant with respect to sustainable consumption, as scripts and schemata have the power to override intentions to change behavior.

Cognitive Structures in Decision Making Relevant to Consumer Behavior A lot of economic theories about human behavior assume that people’s choices are rational, which means people maximize the utility they get out of a given situation. This assumption seems simplified for several reasons. First, rationality has to be defined within the reference frame of the deciding person. The set of information a person bases his or her decision on cannot be inferred from the outside. The already-described mechanisms of information processing have the potential to heavily alter the available information on the way to decision making. Second, people’s ability to make rational decisions is limited, which means that as the number of decisional criteria increases, the ability to deal with all of them decreases. There is a maximum of complexity people can deal with, which usually means that people stop rationalizing when they feel to have reached a “good enough” decision. This process was called bounded rationality by Herbert A. Simon and is, in most situations, a good compromise between long elaboration and the necessity to make sound decisions. Third, decisional processes are often simplified by using decision rules that allow adequate decisions without considering too many criteria. Those socalled heuristics can be understood as rules-of-thumb for decision making. The idea of heuristics was introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in numerous papers. A good example of a heuristic is the “availability heuristic.” People tend to assess the likelihood of an event as higher if it is easier to recall it compared to other events. If people can, for example, vividly recall or imagine the negative side effects of a food additive, they tend to overestimate the likelihood of the side effect being observed. Mass media often play a crucial role in producing vivid images and therefore biasing the perceived probabilities of negative events.

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Conclusion This very brief introduction of the role of cognitive structures shows how important they can be for understanding consumer behavior. As many of these processes work in the direction of simplifying decision making by reducing the necessary amount of information processing at the cost of probably missing important aspects, they become most problematic when behavior has to be changed. A transfer to sustainable consumption, for example, requires that people for at least some time are receptive to new information and need to use mental resources to restructure their consumer behavior. Knowing about possible cognitive barriers is essential in this process. Christian A. Klöckner See also Advertising; Consumer Behavior; Economic Psychology; Neuromarketing; Novelty; Preference Formation; Psychology; Theory of Planned Behavior

Further Readings Baddeley, Alan. Working Memory. Science 255, no. 5044 (1974): 556–559. Bartlett, Frederick C. Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. Broadbent, Donald E. Perception and Communication. Oxford: Pergamon, 1958. Burke, Raymond R., and Thomas K. Srull. “Competitive Interference and Consumer Memory for Advertising.” Journal of Consumer Research 15, no. 1 (1988): 55–68. Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton, 1957. Dijksterhuis, Ap, Maarten W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren, and Rick B. van Baaren. “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-without-Attention Effect.” Science 311, no. 5763 (2006): 1005–1007. Eysenck, Michael W., and Mark T. Keane. Cognitive Psychology. 5th ed. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2005. Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Helmholtz, Hermann von. Treatise on Physiological Optics. Vol. 3. New York: Dover, 1866. English translation published 1962. James, William. Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt, 1890. Schifferstein, Hendrik N. J. “Effects of Product Beliefs on Product Perception and Liking.” In Food, People, and Society: A European Perspective on Consumer’s Food Choice, edited by Lynn J. Frewer, Einar Risvik, and

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Hendrik N. J. Schifferstein, 73–96. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2001. Scott, Terry W. “Serial Position Effects in Recall of Television Commercials.” The Journal of General Psychology 132, no. 2 (2005): 151–164. Simon, Herbert A. Models of Bounded Rationality. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. Tulving, Endel. “Cue-Dependent Forgetting.” American Scientist 61, no.1 (1974): 74–82. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science 185, no. 4157 (1974): 1124–1131.

COLD WAR Cold war is a term that refers to the period of deep mutual hostility between the Soviet and Western blocs that possessed many of the earmarks of actual war except for combat. The commonly accepted time frame views the cold war as beginning in the immediate post–World War II years and ending in 1989 with the breeching of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent disbanding of the Soviet Union. The primary arena of the conflict was the competition for superior military power measured in terms of men under arms and the development of advanced technology related to the number and lethality of atomic bombs and ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) to deliver them to their targets. But except for the marginal military conflicts in Korea (1951–1953) and Cuba (1961), when the two major belligerents narrowly escaped direct military confrontation, the cold war became a propaganda war between the proponents of the market economy (in which the demands of the citizen consumer determined the profile of production and expenditure of investment capital) and the socialist command economy (where decisions about what should be produced were made through centralized planning). At the grassroots level on both sides it was the standards of Western consumer culture that became the measure to judge the relative merits of the competing systems. It included everything from private ownership of cars and homes to the right to travel abroad. In an arena framed by the relative merits of social versus private goods, the playing field on which the Soviet system was compelled to demonstrate its mettle was not an even one. The Soviet Union entered the cold war arena having suffered 27,000,000

casualties and a devastated industrial plant, whereas during World War II, the American industrial plant had achieved such high levels of productivity that it was able to supply Allied military needs, including those of the Soviet Union, while at the same time raising its domestic standard of living. The postwar decade in the United States witnessed an enormous leap in prosperity based on pent-up demand accumulated during the war years. The resultant prosperity reinforced the conviction of the superiority of the market economy, which was confidently touted by Western leaders as a force to liberate humankind. While the Soviet leadership tried to rebuild their industrial base with the help of factories dismantled in East Germany as part of the reparations agreement signed at Yalta, a relatively unscathed United States offered to supply credit and risk capital to rebuild Europe’s damaged economies. The strategy of the four-year plan proposed by Secretary of State George Marshall on June 5, 1947, and implemented a year later, was aimed at rolling back the dislocation and poverty left in the wake of the war that were viewed as the seedbeds for the spread of communism. The antidote was to rebuild the stricken European economies along free market lines. The investment of $13 billion succeeded beyond the imagination of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, the newly created agency responsible for the plan’s implementation. The Soviet Union was invited to join, but after some months of hesitation, Poland and Czechoslovakia were cautioned not to accept the offer. Instead, a campaign of threats and anticapitalist invective emanated from the Kremlin, which feared the rebuilding of German industrial power and the provisions of the program, which required dismantling of repressive state security apparatus and a full disclosure of economic status and activity. The wide gap in living standards that developed between East and West cannot be attributed solely to the rejection of American largess. It was compounded by the Kremlin’s decision to burden its fragile economy with production of both guns and butter. The gaps were particularly evident in housing and the scarcity and poor design of consumer goods. As the advances in the West became apparent, the formerly complacent Soviet consumer raised questions. Surely, the nation that led the world in mastering space with Sputnik (the first satellite to be launched into Earth’s orbit) and demonstrated high-level engineering skill

Cold War

in building the Aswan Dam in Egypt could produce cars and proper housing if it set its mind to it. Knowledge of the growing gap in living standards between East and West became popular currency in the propaganda war. The strategy of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe was not to subvert the political system directly but to project the image of an enviable standard of living of a free and secure citizenry in the West. That strategy was especially effective in the central European states like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the German Democratic Republic, whose citizens often continued to view themselves as part of the Western cultural orbit. Soviet cold war strategists did fathom that the contest for the minds of men was not only waged in the quality of military hardware but in the ability to meet the needs of the consumer. After the death of Joseph Stalin and the ascendancy of Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, the Soviet leadership embarked on a policy of raising the living standard, especially in housing. Cities in the Soviet bloc became the scene of vast housing projects, which were criticized in the West for their poor design and for a penchant for constructing mass housing that looked old before it was completed. The Soviet standard of living, measured by such things as living space per person, rose in the 1960s. The high point of the battle in the arena of consumer culture occurred at the Moscow opening of the American National Exhibition in July 1959, when U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon became embroiled in an informal debate with Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet state, over the relative merits of the competing systems. Dubbed the “Kitchen Debate” because it took place in a model American kitchen featuring a full complement of American labor-saving products, the debate received worldwide publicity. Nixon used it to smooth his path for gaining the Republican presidential nomination in the election of 1960. Khrushchev, perhaps aware that Sputnik would be launched within a few months, promised again that the Soviet economy would overtake the American economy. In 1966, finally compelled to acknowledge that the privately owned automobile was at the center of the popular imagination of the good life, Soviet planners turned to FIAT, the Italian automobile manufacturer, to fill the vacuum. By the 1970s, the failings of the Soviet economy (particularly in agriculture) forced Soviet authorities

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to turn to Western markets to purchase wheat, a product that Russia had once produced in surplus. The failure of the economies of the Eastern bloc to keep up with the standard set in the West even found a place in the world of advertising. The popular “swimwear” ad sponsored by Blimpies, a New York fast-food chain, poked fun at Soviet styling, to the chagrin of protesting Soviet authorities. The awareness that the Soviet system was falling far behind became fully apparent during the Reagan administration (1980–1988), when the Soviet economy experienced a breakdown in its distribution system. The rise in the American defense budget in 1981 raised the tension within the Soviet command economy to the breaking point. In the German Democratic Republic, the hemorrhaging of human capital to the West continued, as did social unrest in the satellites. Interesting from the perspective of consumer culture was Hungary’s policy of “Goulash communism” initiated by Party Secretary Janos Kadar in the mid-1960s, which sought to restore Poland’s former role as one of Europe’s best-fed countries. Groups of dissident Jews, Volga Germans, and Pentecostals openly raised the question of “freedom of movement” as promised in the Helsinki Accords signed by Moscow in 1974. Fittingly, it was the right to travel, a favorite pastime associated with the culture of consumption, that contributed to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. That occurred when thousands of citizens of the German Democratic Republic voted with their feet to resettle in the West via Hungary and Austria. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the end of Soviet hegemony. Yet more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the ability of the Western market economies to sustain themselves no longer seems clear. The contraction of the world economy in 2009 triggered by massive consumer indebtedness and home mortgage foreclosures followed by the disintegration of a crucial multiplier—the American automobile industry, considered an anchor of the culture of consumption—coupled with a seemingly permanent negative trade balance served as indications that an economy formerly based on the production as well as the consumption of goods had been reduced to only their consumption. Under such circumstances, few contemporary analysts were still willing to tout the continued success of what has been called the “empire of consumption.” The West’s superior performance rooted in free access to mass markets

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also faces serious problems. In an emerging global economy based on “green” conservation principles, the idealization of mass consumption at the heart of a privatized consumer culture may become difficult to maintain. Henry L. Feingold See also Affluent Society; Consumer Culture in the USSR; Consumer Society; Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe; Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War; Measuring Standards of Living; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings Gaddis, John Lewis. Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Maier, Charles, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Miller, Daniel. Acknowledging Consumption. London: Routledge. 1995. Slater, Dan. Consumer Culture and Modernity. London: Sage, 1997. Smith, Hendrick. The Russians. New York: Quadrangle, 1976.

COLLECTING

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COLLECTIBLES

Collecting and collectibles comprise a relatively new and distinct form of consumption. Those who identify contemporary forms of collecting in modernity as some form of continuity with our primordial past as hunters and gatherers forget that most hunters and gatherers are nomadic and tend to have very small and portable material cultures. Critically, collecting in the modern period dates from the time when Europe began to expand beyond its own longstanding boundaries to explore a hitherto unseen world, its cultures, species, and objects. Europeans were astonished by the seemingly endless range of plants, artifacts, material cultures, and animals that a variety of wealthy individuals (and then institutions) began to collect and display—as a source of wonderment. Such collections were not unrelated to the scientific quests that were also stimulated at the same

time. This is why collecting has both educational and spectacular qualities that come together most in museums, although both were exploited as a form of marketing by commercial companies wishing to sell items in series (boosting consumption) or encourage consumer loyalty through collectible giveaways, such as cigarette and tea cards. In the later twentieth century, collecting also related to the nature of modernity to constantly improve and replace, thus threatening to make obscure and extinct a wide range of objects that comprise most people’s everyday worlds and cultures. Collecting and restoring, displaying and rendering into heritage is a new form of culture that relates to what Walter Benjamin described as a form of memory and, in recent years, this has driven an expansion in the number of collectors, collectibles, and collector markets. Collecting is a way of preserving former ways of life as experienced through their material cultures and might include fashion, technologies, packaging, decorative arts, and industrial objects such as tools and machinery. Studies of collecting have shown that around one-third of all Americans or 63 percent of American households collect something, with an average of 2.6 collections per household (Pearce 1995). What began as the treasure-trove hobby of princes and kings in early modern Europe (whose collections became the foundations for the modern museum) was emulated by middle-class amateurs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then “recommended” to working-class cultures as an improving leisure (particularly by church and chapel organizations). According to Russell Belk and colleagues, collecting accelerated in the remaining part of the twentieth century.

Research Collecting became a recognized and respected procedure of scientific enquiry, it acquired the seal of approval as an “improving leisure” and as a style of pedagogy, and it became a commercially successful marketing strategy. By the mid-twentieth century, therefore, collections and collecting were entrenched elements of modern cultures, and children in particular were exposed to it in a number of ways. First, schools were the principal demographic of museums everywhere, and without them many would fail. Through museum collections, children were exposed to what was considered valuable and important.

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Museums taught the elementary notion of objects belonging in classes; that objects belong to evolutionary pathways; that human-made objects demonstrate both characteristics that are universal to all cultures and those that are culturally specific. Second, children were the main target of merchandise collectibles, such as cigarette and tea cards, cereal toys, and Smurfs (given away with gasoline purchases). The idea here was to build brand loyalty as well as use children as leverage on parents’ purchasing. Third, children were encouraged to begin their own collections through schools and youth organizations, such as Cubs and Scouts. The latter have their own Collecting Belt Loop and Academic Pin awards for collecting. According to Belk and colleagues, most studies found that children had more collections than adults. Among adults, collecting was broadly distributed across age, class, gender, and socioeconomic category, and “in its heightened acquisitiveness and possessive orientation, [it] epitomizes modern consumer culture” (1991, 194). For collecting to become the mass leisure it did required not only the proliferation of things to collect (which modern manufacturing made possible), but also for those things to acquire meaning and desirability after their first purchase. A large proportion of collected things are secondhand objects, and studies of collecting behavior demonstrate how collecting these items also relates to specific qualities of latemodern society.

Motivations Earlier collecting genres focused on highly collective objects (e.g., stamps, coins, bird’s eggs, fossils, and minerals) of national or regional significance. By comparison, collecting in the later twentieth century became more individualized, and the collection often related to the biography of the individual or totemic of their fluid and unfolding character, a point made by Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe (2003) in relation to their observation that collectors made frequent and quite drastic changes to what they collect. The significance of older objects in these strategies illustrates a key connection between contemporary collecting and secondhand objects. Several analysts have noticed that objects chosen for collections frequently have a connection with the collector’s childhood. Such objects may invoke fond memories, nostalgia

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for better times, or, very commonly, collecting them may satisfy previously unfulfilled desires to have them as children or younger adults. So, for example, young teenagers in the 1970s might only expect to buy or receive a handful of vinyl records per year, perhaps predominantly at Christmas and birthdays. In their thirties and forties, with more disposable income, however, they have the opportunity to buy hundreds if not thousands of the records they craved as secondhand objects, and their aura, this time as collectibles, is augmented by their rarity, value, and condition. Dale Dannefer shows how this works the same way with secondhand cars. These become “vintage” and desirable when the high school kids, who craved them when they were new, reach their forties. While unfulfilled childhood desires, nostalgia for golden pasts, and rising values are all motivations for collecting, there is an important overarching motivation that was first described by sociologist Walter Benjamin. Benjamin argued that the significance of collecting to modern cultures is that it prevents the fragmenting and discarding tendencies of the rapid social changes that characterized the modernization process from inflicting permanent damage and loss. According to Benjamin, collecting is a form of memory that holds constant the look, the feel, the technology, the actual materiality and culture of times past through its objects. A return to loved childhood objects might never occur to anyone whose life and world had not changed in any meaningful way. Imagine if the same records were still being sold and freely available, if the technology to play them remained unchanged, and if the songs on them were still sung, were never superseded by new styles? There would be no sense of loss, no possible reason to collate and conserve; no way that such objects could register the passage of time or restore a golden era. This may also explain why there is such a strong moral and conservational dimension to the collecting impulse—and more than just a whiff of the sacred. As a moral quest, collected objects ought not to be forgotten, for this is to forget people and cultures. Collecting can be viewed as a technology for organizing and protecting memories from disappearing, and since our very identities are wrapped up and materialized around memories of our past, collecting is a way of protecting not so much the objects as the people who do the collecting and the audiences who visit and admire them.

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There is an even more direct connection between the identity-constructing, memory-preserving nature of secondhand objects and the contemporary efflorescence of collecting that relates to economic change, specifically the shift from manufacturing to service/ information economies that has characterized most Western economies. Objects with compelling histories of design and manufacture compare favorably to those currently on sale new. The vast majority of things around us are produced overseas by people we do not know, in towns and regions we have never heard of, and under conditions that we might well disapprove of. The marks, back stamps, and labels that once described the geography and society of our own modern world have been replaced by the anonymous ciphers of global producers, saying as little as possible so as to avoid whatever discrimination exists in faraway markets. Equally, such is the complexity of many objects and the myriad origins of their various parts that it becomes impossible to talk about them as produced “anywhere” or by “anyone.” By comparison, collecting restores to the collectors and their audiences a more coherent and relevant material culture that speaks directly to them, the details of its provenance (backstamps, signatures, model numbers, etc.) being as important as its form or function. For Zygmunt Bauman, consumer connoisseurship is a defining quality of individual competence in contemporary societies, but this means that taste is the arbiter of consumption practices rather than newness or merely the ability to buy new. Increasingly, consumer taste has also come to require a heightened awareness of aesthetic quality rather than new fashion alone, and this is no longer confined to social elites but widely generalized. Wolfgang Welsch, for example, has identified what he calls an “aestheticisation process” as a key characteristic of late modernity. This involves the mantling of aesthetic content onto more and more surfaces of modern life, from taps to door handles, and the aestheticization of everyday life relates in important ways to the democratization of art and design. Design and design schools have had a profound influence on consumption by trying to improve and extend the place of art and design in all levels of society. Designers do not work independently from either producers or consumers, but their origins in the high cultural world of art as opposed to crafts can be traced through a process of democratization that began, in Britain as elsewhere, with the

internationally orientated arts and crafts movement at the end of the nineteenth century and the industrial design movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. While early work concentrated on making better design and aesthetic content available to more people in the routines of production and consumption process, from the 1970s onward it became increasingly common for both the designer and the style of design to feature in the description of any good. This, in turn was highlighted by the consumer choice movement, and particularly through Which? magazine (and its variants), since one of their stock comparators was “design quality.” Once a discourse on design and aesthetics entered the process of consumer choice, it became apparent that contemporary design had historic influences both in terms of style, designer, and manufacturer, opening up the market to reissues of “classic” designs and of course the desirability of “originals.” From the 1980s onward, style guides began to appear, as this now-desirable knowledge on design, designers, periods, and manufacturers was researched and published for the first time. Once design connoisseurship arrived alongside a proliferation of styles and style fusions, there was no longer a singular fashionable look but a multiplicity of styles, and as knowledge of these deepened, consumers became more willing to buy “period,” “retro,” “vintage,” and more generally “twentieth-century modern.” So, if “good taste” came to require a working knowledge of, or expertise in, historic goods, designs, art, as well as their purchase and display in living spaces, then the consumer was liberated from Main Street and set loose in the auctions houses, markets, charity shops, and car-boot sales. Here, then, is yet another quite distinct foundation for the growth of collecting. As Gregson and Crewe (2003, 11) argue, “For many then, consumption through the secondhand arena is ‘clever’ consumption, a set of practices which reveal and display heightened consumption knowledge/s and skills, and which encode the extent of investment in consumption.”

Origins and Development Although timeless, the origin of the contemporary secondhand collector markets and retro taste dates back to the immediate postwar period when Oxfam opened its first shop in Oxford in 1947. Charity shops have since become an established and even

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fashionable feature of the urban landscape. And it was largely out of that wartime voluntary spirit of helping disadvantaged and needy people that the idea and enthusiasm for them grew. Oxfam was originally a wartime organization (the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief) to help famine-affected people in Nazi-occupied Greece. After the war, it continued to help Middle East refugees, and as part of that campaign, decided to take over a disused shop, fill it with donated clothes and objects, and sell them for bargain prices. On its opening day, it was inundated by a crowd of bargain hunters and sold out. The enthusiasm surprised many. Although it was considered a very quirky idea at the time, it has since gone on to add another 750 shops, powered by an army of 20,000 volunteers. Charities carefully targeted their openings in those areas with the right demographic. Conservative taste eschewed the secondhand and used markets, particularly for clothes and consumer durables, and this included large sections of the respectable and affluent working class. Charity shops soon learned that their best opportunities were to sell to the younger, educated, and less-conforming demographic who were filling university towns in large numbers and then moving into the inner city, often to former rundown areas of poor rented housing and industry. The geography of charity shops, at least during the 1960s to 1980s, was largely synonymous with the inner city, the countercultures, and, subsequently, key areas of gentrification.

Current Status Globally, secondhand consumption has grown considerably in the past forty years. While it has always been significant in some markets, such as motor vehicles ($100 billion in the United States alone), its importance in sectors such as clothing, household goods, books, and furniture is now well established. So, for example, in the United States, the size of the secondhand merchandise store market was $US4.1 billion in 2003, with secondhand clothes $1 billion, garages sales $1 billion, secondhand books $0.2 billion. The reuse of corporate assets and plant equipment adds a further $2 billion to this tally (Thomas 2003, 68). These data do not include the dramatic fillip to secondhand markets that occurred after the arrival of Internet auction sites, beginning with eBay in 1995. By 2003, eBay alone was

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responsible for the auctioning of 16 million items per week and providing an income to 68,000 new traders around the world. Although we can trace the newfound enthusiasm for secondhand markets to important developments in Western cultures, the growth of these markets has been even more profound in many third-world countries. So, for example, most Ghanaians wear secondhand clothing, much of it sourced from Europe, a market that now supplies much of Ghana’s clothing needs and employs over 150,000 people. It has become so important that many African countries have tried to protect domestic industries by banning European and American imports. Although significant and still growing, the secondhand markets of Western industrial countries began to grow strongly in the late 1960s and especially after the 1970s. Until then, there were junk shops, which often sold what we would consider antiques and collectibles as well as reusable household goods, and thrift shops that specialized in secondhand clothes. Buying from either, but particularly the latter, carried a considerable stigma that limited them to small, often discrete backstreet operations. Often they catered not only to the poor but to the genteel middle classes “embarrassed by circumstances” (Franklin 2008). In the postwar economic boom of the 1950s, styles and technologies changed rapidly in consumer markets, and buying new became normative. Prices were falling in real terms, but, crucially, consumer aspirations were heavily weighted toward new, future-oriented, and innovative products. In the late 1960s, partly as a new countercultural turn began, objects with histories, pasts, and previous use no longer seemed quite so uninteresting, passé, or socially staining. A fascination with the past, past styles (e.g., art deco experienced a second life), and cultural eclecticism began to spread. The speed with which older and used objects were now enthusiastically embraced surprised many of the early pioneers. The first charity shops shifted the motive for buying secondhand from “desperate need” to “charitable generosity,” and in this they followed in the footsteps of the popular rummage sales that had always raised money from among a local community to fund church-based activities and other worthy causes. Since the 1970s, this has been accompanied by the growth of house, garage, and car-boot sales in the United States, Australia, and Britain; indeed by the 1990s, car-boot sales had become the most popular weekend leisure activity in Britain

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(Gregson and Crewe 1997). From the 1990s onward, Internet auction sites have spread rapidly to become a global element in the expansion of secondhand goods. In 1999, there were 2.5 million listings at any time, and this grew to 4 million by 2000. By February 2005, there were almost 20 million listed in one day; and by 2007, eBay reported total sales of nearly $US60 billion. Critically, Internet secondhand markets removed the buyer and seller, finally, from public exposure and censure, removing many misgivings about using secondhand goods. It is likely that the overall impact of the Internet has been to increase collecting still further because it became a far more reliable means of locating the less predictable supplies of used goods. Some 71.8 million active users bought and sold merchandise on eBay in 2005, and around 50 percent of all Internet users browse eBay at least once a month (Franklin 2008, 10). Judging by the popularity of television programs such as American Pickers (U.S.), Antiques Roadshow (U.K. and U.S.), Bargain Hunt (U.K.), Collectors (Australia), and Cash in the Attic (U.K.), collecting is set to remain an important feature of consumer cultures. Adrian Franklin See also Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; E-Commerce; Leisure; Material Culture; Modernization Theory; Nostalgia; Object Biographies; Reuse/Recycling

Further Readings Belk, Russell W., Melanie Wallendorf, John F. Sherry, and Morris B. Holbrook. “Collecting in a Consumer Culture.” In Highways and Buyways: Naturalistic Research from the Consumer Behavior Odyssey, edited by Russell Belk, Melanie Wallendorf, John Sherry, and Morris Holbrook, 178–215. Provo, UT: Association of Consumer Research, 1991. Dannefer, Dale. “Rationality and Passion in Private Experience: Modern Consciousness and the Social World of Old-Car Collectors.” Social Problems 27 (April 1980): 392–412. Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Franklin, Adrian S. A Collector’s Year. Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Press, 2008. Franklin, Adrian S. Collecting the Twentieth Century. Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Press, 2010. Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crewe. “Excluded Spaces of Regulation: Car-Boot Sales as an Enterprise Culture out

of Control?” Environment and Planning A 29 (1997): 1717–1737. Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crew. Second-Hand Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Pearce, Sue. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge, 1995. Thomas, Valerie. “Demand and Dematerialization Impacts of Second-Hand Markets.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 7, no. 2 (2003): 65–78. Welsch, Wolfgang. Undoing Aesthetics. London: Sage, 1997.

COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION Collective consumption draws a distinction between those goods and services provisioned and consumed primarily by individuals and those that require mass provision, most usually through the state, such as public transport and mass education services. The term was developed by Manuel Castells in his 1977 book, The Urban Question, as a critical concept for explaining urban change in the postwar era. Being an essential concept in Marxist urban sociology, the social organization and process of collective consumption is important for understanding urban politics in advanced capitalist societies, contributing to accounts of consumer culture through its recognition that much consumption is collectively provisioned: consumer culture from this perspective is not only a matter of individuals and households purchasing goods and services from markets (e.g., through retail provision). For Castells, to reproduce a labor force adequate for capitalist productive activity, it became necessary to provide collective means of consumption, what he terms the collective means for reproducing labor power. Castells distinguished conditions for simple and extended reproduction of labor power. The former refers to housing and minimal material amenities, such as lighting, sewers, and roads. The later relates to three systems: (1) the economic system (biological reproduction), such as green space; (2) the institutional system (development of the capacities for socialization), such as school amenities; and (3) the ideological system, such as cultural amenities. The public facilities and service in education, health care, transport, cultural amenities (e.g., art galleries, museums, libraries), and so on, are therefore necessary to ensure healthy, skilled, and socialized workers and the long-term interest of the capitalist economy as a whole.

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In the postwar period, and accompanied by the development of monopoly capitalism, the state played a vital role in the provision of collective consumption. This took two forms: direct aid (often through subsidy or tax incentives) to capitalist monopolies, and the taking over of sectors crucial for the reproduction of labor power, such as health, education, collective amenities, and housing. As it massively and systematically intervened in the socialization of consumption, the state, according to Castells, became the veritable arranger of the processes of consumption for a whole range of goods and services. However, the contradictory nature between collective consumption and state provision became the root of urban struggles in which the dominated classes came to expect and demand increasingly more public services. As noted by J. David Greenstone and Paul E. Peterson, this was exemplified by the urban crisis of the 1970s, when the deterioration of public services ultimately resulted in conflicts and urban social movements. Indeed, Castells’s examination of the “urban question” was largely focused on the political significance of collective consumption in relation to the social relations between different groups. It was in this sense that individual consumption became less important than collective consumption. He suggested, “as the degree of objective socialization of the process is advanced, as the concentration of the means of consumption and their interdependence is greater, as the administrative unity of the process is more developed” (Castells 1977, 445), collective consumption will come to dominate and structure individual consumption. In other words, urban conflicts and relations between social groups have become increasingly related to the provision of collective consumption. On one hand, there are struggles of the dominated class who are concerned with organization and distribution of collective consumption; on the other, the state intervention makes the units of consumption the real source of order in everyday life and comes to form the political apparatus of the dominant classes. The concept of collective consumption is important because it identifies a process through which the consumption of goods and services comes to permeate all levels of society, becoming a source of contestation, an indicator of welfare, and through which the state plays a significant role in the organization of daily lives. It is a concept that has been employed to study the geography of state welfare, and housing

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and urban tenants’ movement. There are, however, many criticisms of Castells’s emphasis on collective consumption. For example, Jean Lojkine notes that Castells’s analysis tends to overlook the significance of production processes (the conventional foci of Marxist theories) in the organization of urban space and structuring of social relations. Furthermore, Ray E. Pahl argues that Castells’s account fails to adequately explain why consumption as a collective process became socialized in the first instance. The explanation provided by Castells rested on the logic of capital accumulation. For Pahl, collective provision cannot be simply reduced to the needs of the capitalist mode of production, because many collectively provisioned services are not always necessary for this purpose, and the extent of collective consumption varies significantly by regions (compare northern Europe with the United States as an example) without obvious impacts on the extent of capitalist accumulation. As consumer culture matured in the 1980s and privatized consumption became an objective of much consumption (as demonstrated by the privatization of many state services, particularly in Europe), the concept of collective consumption has received less attention. Indeed, the boundaries between what can be understood as individual or collective has become increasingly unclear. It is debatable as to whether a collectively provisioned service, such as education, can be understood as being consumed collectively from the point of view of the consumer. Developing this critique, Peter Saunders approached urban consumption from the position of the individual consumer. He suggested the main division that emerged in the process of consumption in capitalist societies was between those who satisfied their requirements through “personal ownership” (private consumption) and those who relied on state welfare (collective consumption). This distinction, or “consumption cleavage,” has, according to Saunders, become the principal division in contemporary consumer societies, a division echoed in Zygmunt Bauman’s account of the “seduced” (by private consumption) and the “repressed” (excluded from private consumption). Perhaps, suggest Mike Savage and Alan Warde, the main weakness of Castells’s account is the assumption that people are in constant struggle for more state services, which obscures the focus of analytical attention on the other meanings and significance of

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consumption in people’s daily lives. Despite this, it could be argued that the rush to focus on individual, private consumption has had the effect of diverting attention away from an important observation: that consumer cultures, and much of the consumption that occurs within them, are as much related to state provision of services and collectively shared forms of consumption as to the private purchase of goods and services within markets. Chao Zhang See also Capitalism; Keynesian Demand Management; Marxist Theories; Political Economy; Seduced and Repressed; Social Movements; State Provisioning; Systems of Provision; Urban Cultures

Further Readings Castells, Manuel. The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Dickens, Peter, Simon S. Duncan, Mark Goodwin, and Fred Gray. Housing, States and Localities. London: Methuen, 1985. Greenstone, J. David, and Paul E. Peterson. Race and Authority in Urban Politics. New York: Russell Sage, 1973. Lojkine, Jean. “Contribution to a Marxist Theory of Urbanisation.” In Urban Sociology: Critical Essays, edited by Chris G. Pickvance, 119–146. London: Tavistock, 1946. Lowe, Stuart. Urban Social Movement: The City after Castells. London: Macmillan, 1980. Pinch, Steven. Cities and Services: The Geography of Collective Consumption. London: Routledge, 1985. Pahl, Ray E. “Castells and Collective Consumption.” Sociology 12, no. 2 (1978): 309–315. Saunders, Peter. Social Theory and the Urban Question. 2nd ed. London: Hutchinson, 1986. Savage, Mike, and Alan Warde. Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity. London: Macmillan, 1993.

COLLECTIVE IDENTITY If individual identity can be seen as addressing the question “who am I?” then collective identity might be seen as engaging with the issue of “who are we?” The concept of collective identity is powerfully linked to an understanding of a social collectivity and identification with the group, although identity always carries elements of both individual

inner worlds and the social worlds that each person necessarily inhabits. These worlds are brought closely together in the field of consumption, which demonstrates the tensions between the constraints of the social world and the aspirations and desires of the inner world that combine to create collective identities. The moment of deciding what to wear at the start of the day, as being not just a matter of what to wear but a matter of identity, illustrates well the interconnections between who I am and who we are; how do I want to be seen and who do I want to be seen with? The relationship between individual and collective identities presents one of the areas of debate that is most relevant to theories of consumption and role of identity in consumer culture. This relationship raises the issue of agency, which is central to a discussion of collective identities. How far do consumers make choices about how they re-create themselves, which collective identities they might buy into, and how far are they limited or directed in their projects by the social world that reproduces what is possible? To what extent are desires shaped by the representations that dominate the social world of consumption?

Framing of Collective Identity The concept of collective identity has been associated with political action, for example, through social class, locality, place and nation, and ethnicity and religion. Traditional political understanding of collective identity was framed by class politics and strongly linked to large-scale groupings often determined by economic structures, so that typically it was political contexts that mobilized social categories into a group, as exemplified in the Marxist distinction between a class in itself and a class for itself. A class for itself has the conscious collective identity to be motivated to act politically. The crucial distinction here is between a group that is classified as such by others as a category and a collectivity that defines itself as a distinct self-conscious group. Marxist theory influenced the Frankfurt school interpretation of power in shaping collective identities through somewhat one-way, deterministic mechanisms, which has been challenged by more recent developments that demonstrate, first, the diversity of sites at which identities are collectively constituted and the expansion of consumer knowledge that creates diversity and, second, the importance

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of inner worlds and the psychic investment made by individuals in specific circumstances. In daily life, people are exposed to myriad ways of making sense of themselves and presenting themselves to others, through the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, their taste in music, their knowledge of sports and different popular cultural forms, as well as through more organized forms of attachment, to a set of religious beliefs, a political party, or an activist group, as well as the diverse identities that are created through employment and the corporate world. The consumer is invited to become an expert in the field through an understanding of the languages of consumption, which range from technical details about the calorific content of ingredients of foodstuffs displayed on packaging to the laundry symbols on items of clothing, the memories that mark out the true sports fan, and the complexities of banking and Internet systems that are constantly changing to deter fraud and stolen identities. There is heavy emphasis on the knowledge and cultural capital of the consumer who may be seen to be playing an active part in this complex process of identification, which requires some activity on the part of the person who adopts the identity position. Identification is the dynamic process that links people to identities. These processes of identification may also bring into play unconscious forces. Also, however strong the forces, for example of the advertising of commercial enterprises, they may not work. Identification may fail, however predictable the socioeconomic circumstances, as Louis Althusser pointed out in the case of the failure of a socialist revolution in France and other parts of Europe where there was social unrest in the late 1960s. Collective identity has, at times, been differentiated from individual identity in ways that largely reflect the disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary approaches to the concept. Psychology retains the strongest interest in the inner worlds of individuals, whereas cultural studies, literary criticism, and branches of sociology, political science, and economics focus more on collective identities. Psychologists have tended to stress the separation of the individual in interrogating the processes through which attachments are made to collective identities by focusing on the inner world of individuals and their biographies. In the case of psychoanalytic theories, it is the operation of the unconscious

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that provides an understanding of this interior realm in which identities are constituted. However, developments in psychology and in psychoanalytic theories have contributed enormously to the understanding of collective identities, for example, in work drawing on Melanie Klein’s object relations psychoanalytic theory, such as Wilfred Bion’s work on the experience of groups. Psychoanalytic thinking based on the work of Jacques Lacan has been influential in stressing the role of images and representations that are so much part of cultural life and that speak to the individual at the level of the unconscious; we are not always conscious of why something feels right and we think “yes, that’s me.” Words, symbols, and images can bring together the individual unconscious and the external culture that shapes identities in consumer society. What this does is demonstrate the limitations to a separation of individual and collective identities as a necessary distinction, because both involve psychic or individual investment in an identity whether or not collectively in a social world in which such investments are made. In the example of consumption, identities are constituted and re-created through the consumption of goods and services that involve a product, image, or aspiration that is socially produced and thereby has a collective dimension. For example, as the sociologist Erving Goffman argued, although the process is described as one that focuses on individuals and their interaction with the wider society, it is still one that involves the making of a shared identity, such as is presented in everyday interactions with others. It is the impression management that dramatizes the interface between self-image and public image, often provided by advertising, which is what happens in the process of consumption. Developments of the idea of collective identity have brought together seemingly disparate social and economic fields, notably through the links between collective identities and the social movements that were generated by a disenchantment with class-based politics and metatheoretical approaches that characterized postmodernism and what has loosely been called identity politics. Collective identity became an important dimension of the circuit through which the processes of production and consumption operate based on the idea that it is through the consumption of goods and services that identities are forged and that the formation of collective identities is an interactive and

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dynamic process and not simply a one-sided effect of production and a particular economic system. Consumer agency includes the extent to which actors might have scope to maneuver and shape their own identities. Thus, the concept of identity can also be applied to the complex relationships between culture and other social and economic fields. Developments following the cultural turn can be seen as part of a postmodernist, post-structuralist reaction to both the oversimplification of binary logic and dualistic thinking and the overgeneralization of metatheories that offered overarching theories of all social relationships and phenomena. In critiquing the role of collective identities, arguments have more recently pointed to the limitations of the fixity of the very concept of collective identity and a preference for the more dynamic concept of identification. It is, however, worth noting that the cultural turn in the field of consumption foregrounded the centrality of the interactive processes taking place in the formation of identity, between inner and social worlds, which were, nonetheless, frequently destined to fail. Challenges to the perceived overdeterminism of Marxism and structuralism have been particularly productive in understanding collective identities within consumer societies. Such critiques are aimed to overcome the monolithic view of power and to see consumption as a creative process through which collective and individual identities are forged rather than determined, whether by economic forces or the power of representation. First, approaches to identification that have stressed the power of symbolic systems of representation, such as in the work of Althusser, drew on Lacan’s ideas to suggest that collective (and individual) identities are constituted unconsciously through the process of interpellation, or hailing, whereby individuals are drawn into recognizing (or more correctly misrecognizing) themselves as “named” by a particular identity through unconscious processes, which has been very useful in analyzing the production of identities through consumption. Consumers may buy a product because they buy into the identities associated with it; even housing is marketed for particular collective identities, such as “young professionals.” Socioeconomic class remains an important element in the making of collective identities through consumption, and this has been addressed in a variety of ways that draw on the inextricable links between culture and economy. The work of Pierre Bourdieu

has been particularly important methodologically and intellectually in the field of consumption, especially in its exploration of how economic factors and culture interrelate to re-create distinctions of taste and class. In Bourdieu’s account, the embodied dispositions and characteristics of individuals are defined by different forms of capital—economic, social, and cultural—that influence individual and collective identities. Bourdieu’s work shows how tastes are standardized according to social situation and provide a mechanism through which identities are stabilized and social differences are reinstated in the making of collective identities. His work has been criticized, however, for failing to take on board the specificities of place, by concentrating on France, at the expense of explaining the diversity of national traditions. For example, there are significant differences between the United States and France in the aesthetics of taste in consumption that shape the collective identities so produced. The challenge to the apparent homogeneity of collective identities suggested some of the grand theories of modernity have also been influenced by anthropological approaches to the diversity of cultures drawing on the work of Mary Douglas and the specificities of place, even within similar economic systems. For example, empirical work has demonstrated the diversity of collective identities re-formed through consumption, with North Americans being more instrumental and egalitarian in their antiaristocratic patterns of consumption, while Western Europeans stress an aestheticism, and Turks and Romanians use a compensation narrative to excuse what they might perceive as materialism and excessive consumption. These different identities have been framed by cultural associations with the U.S. dominance of mass consumption that has most famously been characterized by George Ritzer as “McDonaldization” (Ritzer 1993). Although consumers distinguish between goods to distinguish themselves, Bourdieu’s account has also been criticized for its emphasis on class in the shaping of identities at the expense of other social divisions, for example, of gender, ethnicity, generation, or sexual preference. While different elements in the formation of identities articulate in diverse ways, there are points when it is necessary to highlight the particularities of these different, albeit related dimensions; for example, accounts such as Susan Bordo’s of the impact of the contradictory demands and desires of consumer culture on women’s embodied identities.

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Embodiment provides both limits and opportunities in the project of consuming identities.

Consumers as Agents: Making Their Own Collective Identities? As Roberta Sassatelli argues, the “consumer” carries hegemonic assumptions of autonomy in Western cultures. The free agent or autonomous actor, especially as embodied in the consumer who makes free choices in the marketplace, is a figure generated by capitalist economies, suggest Richard Sennett and Charles Taylor. This can be situated in the context of a commonsense resistance to the idea that the collective identities of consumers are shaped by the power of producers and the force of the advertising industry or to the desire to combat commoditization and to assert the separation of human beings from commodities and “objects.” Products and thus identities are promoted through advertising and through the global brands that are so much more than the name of a product; brands signify identities and create identifications. Resistance requires a deconstruction of the economic and cultural processes whereby desires and patterns of consumption are created and reinstated, but is possible, as Naomi Klein argues in her popular polemical account, No Logo. Alternative collective identities are made possible through the challenge to branding and the power of the advertising industry; anticonsumerism also represents a collective identity within the field of consumption. The forging of collective identities through consumption (and anticonsumption) highlights the relationship between people and things. As Georg Simmel pointed out at the start of the twentieth century, the value of things depends on the value they are given by subjects. The status of the objects of consumption has figured large in the development of theories of material culture. For example, Daniel Miller argues that material culture is a process through which people assimilate their own culture and use it to re-create collective identities. Thus, the reproduction of collective identities through consumption is an active process that is not only meaningful, but requires agency on behalf of consumers. Consumption is thus construed as an active and creative practice, rather than one that involves alienation and disengagement; identities are actively and productively constituted through the vast expansion of consumption. This argument challenges the

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determinism of the Frankfurt school’s emphasis on the detrimental effects of consumption in capitalist economies and introduces both the complexities and ambivalences of the formation of collective identities in the field of consumption. The more extensive the reach of global capital in the promotion of products, the more consumption becomes the target of resistance. Global sporting mega events, such as the Olympic Games and the men’s Football [Soccer] World Cup, have also become sites for protest.

Conclusion The concept of collective identity has been developed within theories of consumption to accommodate agency and the ways in which collective identities are formed and re-formed through acts of consuming goods and services and through the interrelationship between people and artifacts. The shift in emphasis from production to consumption, both in economic processes and, concomitantly, in the literature of analysis, has led to an intensified focus on the formation of collective identities through consumption. The explosion of consumer knowledge is also part of the asymmetry between consumption and production. Identities are framed by a language of individualism and choice, which highlights the interrelationship between the social and the inner worlds and between collective and individual identities. The notion that selves can be reconstructed through consumption also provides another arena for political action, notably in resistance to the excesses of consumption and to environmental degradation, damage, and global inequalities that ensue from such excess. Collective identities can be forged through resistance and through subversion, as in the symbolic creativity of counterculture, ranging, for example, from street fashion and youth subcultures to feminist and environmentalist challenges to orthodoxy. Collective identities highlight the tension between different views. On the one hand, such identities are claimed to be determined by processes of production and the consumption patterns of global capital and as normative social identities. This determinism is countered by a view that suggests that collective identities manifest the collective agency of consumers. The concept of collective identities necessarily involves interconnections between creativity and constraint, structure and agency, and can be ambivalent and contradictory more often than a simple one-way process of making selves.

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The concept of collective identity demonstrates most effectively the relationships between agency and constraint, between humans and artifacts, and between inner worlds and individual investments and social worlds. This is a realm that is also characterized by the dialogue between alienation and political action and subversion; on the one hand, collective identities are reproduced through the power of advertising and the forces that direct consumption and, on the other, consumption offers a medium through which collective action is possible in the subversion and rearticulation of identities. Collective identity constitutes one aspect of identity that focuses on group identifications but nonetheless retains the dynamic relationship between the individual and the social in the processes through which collective identities are formed, none more so than in the field of consumption. Kath Woodward See also Belonging; Branding; Cultural Studies; Embodiment; Habitus; Identity; Interpellation; Lifestyle; Political and Ethical Consumption; Social Class; Taste

Further Readings Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books, 1971. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Brewer, Marilynn, and Wendi Gardner. “Who Is This We? Levels of Collective Identity and Self Presentation.” In Organizational Identity. A Reader, edited by Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz, 66–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Gilroy, Paul. Post Colonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. London: Flamingo, 2000. Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture. London: Sage, 2007. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Taylor, Charles. The Source of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Williamson, Judith. Consuming Passions. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. Woodward, Kath. “Concepts of Identity and Difference.” In Identity and Difference, edited by Kath Woodward, 7–62. London: Sage, 1997.

Woodward, Kath. Questioning Identity. London: Routledge, 2004.

COLONIALISM Colonialism is a system that concerns the settlement of one group or nationality in a new geographical location. Often frequently confused with imperialism, colonialism is in fact a separate practice that results from the ideology of imperialism. The latter can involve political control of lands and peoples; however, it does not require settlement for its successful operation. Colonialism was undeniably linked to profit, economics, and material gain. Therefore Elleke Boehmer maintains that colonialism is “the settlement of territory, the exploitation or development of resources, and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitants of occupied lands” (1995, 2). Frequently based in aggressive methods of mercantilism and the economic exploitation of colonized nations for cheap labor and raw materials (e.g., sugar, cotton, gold, diamonds, tea, coffee, cocoa, rubber), colonialism employed trade and capitalist exchange so that the metropolitan center could increase profit margins as well as the diversification of consumer goods. Indeed, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in Hyde Park, London, in 1851, was a major example of consumerist colonial display, with many themed exhibits reflecting the British mobilization of colonial resources. The practice of colonialism, while pursued throughout the ages and in varying countries (the colonization of Ireland in the twelfth century by the Anglo-Normans, the Spanish and the Portuguese in their exploration of the Americas in the fifteenth century), actually reached a high point in the nineteenth century with the Scramble for Africa: a dispute centering on which European countries had most claim on African territory. The Berlin Conference (1884– 1885), organized by Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, effectively sought to avoid further antagonisms between European nations over such land, by inviting cross-country representation from Austria–Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden–Norway, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States (the latter did not join the proceedings). The conference basically partitioned African land as a European possession, and by 1902,

Colonialism

90 percent of African land was coerced into European colonial rule.

Henry Morton Stanley and King Leopold II of Belgium Two of the key players in colonial regime in Africa were the Belgian King Leopold II and Henry Morton Stanley. In 1873, the explorer David Livingstone died in the heart of Africa. His missionary career had maintained that commerce, Christianity, and civilization would conquer the slave trade. Stanley went to search for Livingstone in Africa, and was later to take over his exploratory missions as well as some of his ethos. However, a blistering newspaper scandal (in 1876) erupted when Stanley’s conduct was revealed, during his exploration of Bambireh Island, Lake Victoria, in 1875. He had been refused food by the inhabitants, as well as being threatened by them with spears and arrows. The inhabitants of the island had also stolen the oars from his boat, the Lady Alice, named after his fiancée, Alice Pike. However, Stanley returned with over two hundred men and, having enticed the inhabitants onto the shore, proceeded to fire several rounds of bullets into them. The problem was not just with the force he used, but his apparent enjoyment of the event. Further controversy emerged in 1878, when Stanley expounded his idea of colonialism: a method of opening up the African continent by use of warfare, arguing that the Africans respected only military force. In 1877, King Leopold II of Belgium organized the Conférence Géographique Africaine (which was his own mission with the company of various explorers, separate from the country of Belgium), and he soon realized that enforced labor was a cheaper option than paid labor. He also asserted that colonialism existed to exploit underdeveloped nations to “produce wealth from the natural resources of their own country” (Ascherson 1963, 47). In 1878, Leopold invited the explorer, Stanley, to Belgium, and subsequently arranged with him that a series of colonial “stations” would be built through the Congo. Despite his Belgian involvement, Stanley also pursued colonial interests for the British in East Africa and Sudan, and the Americans in Zanzibar.

Colonial Expansion in Africa, India, and Egypt Evidently, Europe’s investment in Africa was a commercial one, and this had a dual focus. First, colonized

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nations represented the possibilities of new channels for European manufactured goods, and, second, they opened up new commodities that could be obtained extremely cheaply through enforced labor: various oils from Africa, for instance, were vital to British commercial concerns, as they were essential ingredients in soap and candle making. Britain’s influence in the area was secured by the establishment of the United Africa Company in 1879, where all important British commerce in the region was consolidated under one mercantile interest. As a similar enterprise in India, the East India Company traded in cottons, silks, and tea (often with government-sanctioned monopolies), and administrated India through military control, until the Government of India Act in 1858, which instituted the British Raj (1858–1947). Similarly, during the construction of the Suez Canal in the late nineteenth century, Isma’il Pasha, Egypt’s ruler, was forced to sell the country’s shares in the canal for 4 million pounds to England due to his rising foreign debt, although the French still held the majority share. However, in 1879, the Pasha challenged his country’s debt to European nations, and England, alongside France, undertook administration of the country, compelling the Pasha from his throne. Subsequent to a rebellion against colonial government in 1898, and eventual defeat by Lord Kitchener, Britain then claimed control of the Suez waterway as a transportation link for trade between Europe and Asia (which it retained until 1956). Resistance to colonial control was a long process. In India, the struggle for independence from Britain was led by Mohandas Gandhi, and in 1947, India became a republic, while at the same time, the predominantly Muslim areas were annexed to become Pakistan, which itself claimed dominion status until it became a republic in 1956. In terms of the African continent, many regions and nations campaigned for independence from colonial rulers after World War II. Libya gained independence from Italy in 1951, while Tunisia and Morocco gained governance of their own states in 1956, having been liberated from French colonial rule. Despite this, the colonial project has brutally scarred much of the continent, with South Africa and white settler rule through apartheid only being challenged and defeated in 1994. Closer to the European metropolis, Ireland had effectively achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1921, although the partition of the country under the terms of the treaty between Britain and the Republic of Ireland

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became the source of much ethnic, political, and civil unrest, as Northern Ireland had remained under British rule. The Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement in 1998 devolved legislative powers to the Northern Irish Assembly. Similarly, a Scottish Parliament was assembled in 1999, and in Wales a National Assembly was established in 1997.

Cultural Representations of Colonialism Colonial conquest and its alliance with both geographical exploration and economic materialism is the central focus of a number of literary works from the late nineteenth century. In the 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard, the narrative describes the exploration of African territory by a group of adventurers. Haggard followed this with She (1887), in which a professor from Cambridge travels to Africa to find a white pseudo-deity worshipped as “she who must be obeyed.” However, most prominent among the literary representations of African exploration was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), first serialized in three parts by Blackwood’s Magazine, and published as one volume in 1902. The novel explicitly dramatizes the link between colonialism and commercial gain, and indeed, the central narrator, Charles Marlow, offers an insight into the ideology of colonialism. He contrasts the behavior of modern colonialists with that of the ancient Romans and claims that what saves the nineteenth-century enterprise is its motive in that there is an ideal behind it. This is a common colonial pattern: generally, the colonizers, on the surface at least, believed they were bringing education, religion, and order to far-off lands, which were not otherwise acquainted with such “civilized” values. In part, this is how colonialism sought to suppress native religions, languages, and cultures, and in their stead, convert the native peoples to Christianity and Western sensibilities. Marlow implies colonialism is justified because it brings a greater efficiency to those lands that fall under its control. However, in the novel, the ultimate motive of entering Africa is a simple economic greed for ivory. For the most part, colonialism sustained its ideology through the notion of the inferiority of colonized peoples. Part of this was developed through the identification of the colonized as “Other”: cruel, sensual, immoral, animalistic, decadent, lazy, as well as exotic, mystical, and seductive. Such peoples were

perceived to be immensely naive and childlike, and therefore supposedly needed colonial intervention to improve their economies and societies. These stereotypes were, in turn, reinforced by anthropological studies of African facial characteristics. The Victorian’s faith in physiognomy suggested the nose, lips, forehead, and bone structure were all a key to the character of an individual and by extension, a race. Pieter Camper’s theory, influential as part of the science of craniometry, proposed a scheme of facial types called prognathism (a form of pseudoscience that became popular in the nineteenth century), signifying a projecting mouth and jaw. This idea was easily extended to suggest that the facial characteristics of the individual determined and revealed the moral nature of the subject, a point further developed in the degenerative theories of Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau. It was particularly noted that short noses, large mouths, and small foreheads were marks of an inferior character, found in criminals and in African peoples. Both the cultural designation of Other and the pseudoscientific notion of prognathism aided the colonial project by suggesting the inherent and unassailable inferiority of black and Asian peoples based purely on their racial features.

Colonialism and Advertising Commodities These two aspects of colonial ideology easily found their way into nineteenth-century marketing and advertising. Notably, the rise of advertising’s status in the period coincided with the colonial invasion of foreign territories such as Africa. One of the extended debates surrounding such imagery is found in the figure of the golliwog. Originally invented as a character in a children’s picture book by Florence K. Upton, as “the blackest gnome,” with red bow tie and trousers, blue tail coat, and white shirt, he was essentially dressed in the same manner as a white minstrel in blackface. Like the colonial stereotype of an African, he possessed black skin, thick lips, was childlike, had exaggerated white eyes and wiry black hair. In his early career, he was also barefooted and had paws rather than feet (a patent symptom of his animalistic status). The golliwog became synonymous with advertising for a number of companies and was, in fact, the only consistently used representational image of a black person with which the British public would have been familiar. In 1925, the golliwog was used by

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the Andrews Liver Salts Company to associate black coloring with negativity and whiteness with positive attributes. The golliwog also was featured on advertisements for soap, toothpaste, cream, and polish. Most important, however, was the golliwog’s commercial involvement with the jam producers, James Robertson and Son, where it was a trademark and mascot for the company from 1910. In common with all golliwog images in circulation at the time, the mascot was fundamentally childlike and was commonly represented as being available for possession by the white consumer. Essentially, his image shows how ideologies of colonialism and racism were domesticated in the United Kingdom during the high point of overseas aggression. The problem was that the term golliwog and its associative wog were terms of racial abuse and arguably contributed to a destructive perception of other races. Due to extended controversy, the golliwog was finally withdrawn from Robertson’s jam and marmalade jars in 2001. Another example of how colonial ideology filtered through into the commercial mainstream was the advertising campaign for the drink Banania. It was made from banana flour, ground cereal, sugar, and cacao, and it began production in 1914 in Paris. The advertising copy for the product neatly combined French militarism and racial ideology. In 1917, advertisements for Banania pictured a grinning Senegalese tirauleur from the French colonial army, consuming the drink, while the product’s slogan sought to emulate the soldier’s pidgin French: “Y’a bon” (Sho’ good eatin’). In this instance, the soldier is seen as an infantilized creature, with “imperfect” and hybridized speech. He is also marshaled in support of the French colonial regime, as a soldier, and is a subtle testimony to colonial exploitation. In terms of location, the advertisement also combines the supposed exoticism of Nicaragua (Banania) with the commercial product, as the landscape in which the soldier features is also emphatically Other (the drink was “discovered” by a journalist, Pierre Lardet, in 1912, during a visit to that country). As the marketing of the product progressed, the figure became more depersonalized, and by 1980, he was a caricature composed of merely a black face with no body. The image is inherited from commercial images in the nineteenth century, where the black community was often represented as servants or workers on the land and, as such, evoked reminiscences of plantation and slavery.

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One of the most infamous sources of colonially influenced advertising was that of soap. A number of illustrations from the late nineteenth century imply how racially inflected consumerism actually was at this time. The soap industry in the United Kingdom was often clearly associated with the mercantile exploitation of overseas colonial dominions. This may be one of the reasons why the image of the colonized African featured so heavily in soap advertising during this period. The trade in vegetable soaps (as opposed to tallow) was rising, and the African continent provided a major source for ingredients in such products: palm oil and palm kernel oil were two examples. In such a way, many advertisements seemed to suggest that economic trade with colonized countries was in fact a merciful, civilizing mission. A Pears soap advertisement from 1887 reveals the caption “Pears Soap Is Best,” emblazoned on a rock in the Sudan, with the native community gesturing toward the sign and bowing down before it. The advertisement, headed “The Formula of British Conquest,” also claims, “‘Even if our invasion of the Soudan has done nothing else it has at any rate left the Arab something to puzzle his fuzzy head over, for the legend Pears’ Soap Is Best inscribed in huge white characters on the rock which marks the farthest point of our advance towards Berber, will tax the wits of the Dervishes of the Desert to translate’—Phil Robinson, War Correspondent (in the Soudan) of the Daily Telegraph, London, 1884.” At once the advertisement presents the “barbarous” native peoples (they have not the civilizing gift of European language and therefore cannot unravel the meaning of the sign), the superiority of Western culture (Pears soap is best), and the overt ascription of whiteness/cleanliness and blackness/dirt, which prevails in much colonial advertising. The message of Pears as a civilizing and purifying commodity was fully established by 1889 in much of the South Asian subcontinent, as well as in West Africa, China, and British Guinea, through its use by missionaries. This notion of purification as correlated with race was particularly overt in an example of advertising from the soap company Vinola in 1893. In the backdrop is a view of a seashore, while in the foreground, a primly attired and highly cultivated young girl bends condescendingly to a black, curly haired male child, and offers him a bar of soap. The caption reads “You Dirty Boy! Why don’t you wash yourself

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with Vinola Soap?” As well as emulating the first moment of colonial contact between white man and “savage,” the image undoubtedly situates blackness alongside the unclean and therefore justifies the mission of colonial intervention by suggesting that the childlike native community is underdeveloped and incapable of looking after itself.

Postcolonialism Contemporary readings of colonial history, cultural data, and literary projections of native peoples have been heavily influenced by the emergence of postcolonial theory. This is a critical practice that emerged in the 1990s (although intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon were challenging notions of colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, as was Edward Said in the 1970s), aiming to provide a method of cultural resistance to negative images of specific racial communities. While colonialism will have devalued and obscured the colonized nation’s past, the postcolonialist will seek to recover indigenous cultural artifacts. Similarly, postcolonialism seeks to deconstruct those binary oppositions at the basis of colonialism that align black with negative and white with positive. However, there is much debate as to the exact definition of postcolonialism. It is also about privileging a cross-cultural critique that destabilizes a Eurocentric and metropolitan perspective, so that Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin maintain that it is not just about a study of cultures after the departure of the colonial power, but rather a study of the historical process from the moment of external intervention to the present day. Claire Nally See also Advertising; British Empire; Caribbean and the Slave Trade; Commodities; Ethnicity/Race; Metropole; Orientalism; Postcolonial Theory

Further Readings Ascherson, Neal. The King Incorporated: Leopold II in the Ages of Trusts. London: Allen & Unwin, 1963. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto, 1986. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2001. Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In The Modernist Papers, 152–169. London: Verso, 2007. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Meredith, David. “Imperial Images: The Empire Marketing Board 1926–1932.” History Today 37 (1987): 30–36. Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford Literary Review 9, nos. 1–2 (1987): 27–58. Ramamurthy, Anandi. Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1995. Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1994. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

COMICS Comics are representative of consumer culture both as forms of entertainment (consumption) and as reflections of popular culture and subcultural groups. Themes central to critiques of consumer culture, including the sexualization of women, fantasy, hedonism, escapism, violence, erotica, and visions of utopia, are represented, captured, and mimicked in comics. The term comics, generally speaking, is used to deal with both newspaper comics, comic books (which are magazines), and all other kinds of narrative texts or art forms that have the following characteristics: they are told in drawings; the drawings usually are in frames; there are recurring characters; the dialogue is in balloons; other information is found in panels, often at the bottom of frames. All of these conventions are sometimes violated but

Comics

generally speaking, comic strips and comic books follow them. In his book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which is itself a comic book, Scott McCloud suggests the best way to characterize comics is to start with the way the comics artist Will Eisner does, as “sequential art.” Comics differ from cartoons in that cartoons generally are found in a single frame, don’t have recurrent characters or a narrative line, and generally do not have dialogue in balloons. Cartoons generally have text in captions underneath the frame of the cartoon. Not all cartoons are humorous, either. There are funny cartoons but there are also political cartoons that comment on events of importance. In analyzing comics, there are three components of comics to consider: the art style, the narrative line, and the dialogue. While this discussion focuses on comics in the United States, it must be understood that comics are a global art form, and there are important and interesting comics in most countries. The art style of comic strip artists varies from realistic portrayals, such as Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Harold R. Foster’s Prince Valiant, to highly stylized ones, such as Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Gould’s use of grotesques such as “The Mole” and “Flattop” and strong blacks and whites made his strip a powerful one. It was one of the first, if not the first, to show murders and graphic violence. Comics artists also use bold face lettering to emphasize certain words and make use of certain graphic conventions, such as having thoughts appear in little clouds. In addition to the art style found in a comic, the narrative line must also be considered. Humorous comics generally have a narrative that ends with some kind of resolution each day, whereas serious or dramatic comic strips have episodes that continue for weeks or months. The final consideration is the way language is used in comics, which often embraces regional dialects and mimicry by way of offering a commentary on popular culture. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat illustrates the subtleties of comics language. The plot of this strip was always the same: Ignatz Mouse, a malevolent mouse, spends all his time and energy figuring out how to “Krease that Kat’s bean with a brick.” Defending Krazy is Offisa B. Pupp, who loves Krazy and struggles valiantly and usually unsuccessfully to prevent Ignatz from hitting Krazy. In the first

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frame of one episode, Pupp sees Ignatz hitting Krazy with a brick. He says “Transgression.” In the next frame, he grabs Ignatz and says “Apprehension.” In the third frame, he takes Ignatz under his arm and heads toward jail. He says “Retribution.” In the final frame, the jail hasn’t been drawn, so Pupp says “WA-A-L . . . Finish it!!! Y’got Kartoonist’s Kramp?” and Krazy says “Ah. Sweet Procrastination.” The art style, the narrative line, and the use of language by the creators of comics can, in combination, lead to texts of considerable artistic and literary quality. All of these factors are of sociological and cultural interest, as well, for the comic strip and the comic book, as so-called naive art forms, may reveal attitudes and beliefs that are not found in more elite art forms. Scholars in the social sciences and humanities study comics because they are, in addition to being entertainment, a form of evidence about cultures and societies that cover many years and are easily accessible. One of the more important topics that can be investigated in the comics involves attitudes toward violence. An early and influential analysis of violence and other forms of antisocial behavior in the comics by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954, suggested that juvenile delinquency was fostered by reading the comics. This claim was highly exaggerated and is not accepted as credible by most comics scholars. But the matter of violence in the comics, in both humorous and nonhumorous forms, is a subject of considerable debate by contemporary social scientists. There is an enormous amount of comic violence in animated television shows for children, and most child development scholars believe it is harmful. And now, with the development of video games, violence continues to be a problem. Another topic of interest for scholars involves the portrayal of women in comics. It is possible to study the way women are drawn, to examine what they say, and to count the number of images of women in frames in contrast to those of men in selected comics to see how women are represented, or underrepresented, in various comics. For example, in Japan, where comics, known as manga, are very popular, there has been an interesting development in the way women are portrayed. In the 1960s, there was a phenomenon known as kawaii or cuteness. Women were shown with large, round,

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non-Asian eyes and with hardly any breast development. In recent years, since the 1990s, women have kept their round eyes but now they are shown in manga with highly developed bodies and are often in violent and sexually explicit scenarios involving such things as bondage and rape. These comics are read in great numbers by middle-class workers, and it has been suggested that these comics help Japanese middle-aged males deal with various kinds of repression in Japanese culture. There is little violence in Japanese culture, so it seems that a connection between violence in comics and in everyday life cannot be drawn, but that may be because of the nature of Japanese culture. There were a number of what might be described as “erotic” comics that were popular in the United States and elsewhere, such as Barbarella in France and Jodelle in Italy. This is to be expected, for the comic strip lends itself to fantasy, and comics artists have used the comic strip to portray women in various states of dress and undress. There was also a movement in the United States called “underground” comics that were satirical and sexually explicit. Some of these comics had titles such as Subvert Comics, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Mr. Natural, Feel Good Funnies, and Young Lust. One can also look at the kinds of topics that are dealt with in comics, such as matters involving bringing up children, romantic love, sexual relationships, and social phenomena such as fads and fashions. The comics are a popular art form, and like all popular art forms, they are designed to appeal to large numbers of people, which means they must find ways of reflecting the interests and values of their audiences. Their particular value is that they are inexpensive and easily accessible, and thus a valuable tool for cultural critics in all disciplines. Arthur Asa Berger See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Broadcast Media; Electronic Video Gaming; Gender; Japan as a Consumer Culture; Print Media

Further Readings Couperie, Pierre, and Maurice C. Horn. A History of the Comic Strip. New York: Crown, 1968. Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, 1994. Reitberger, Reinhold, and Wolfgang Fuchs. Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1993.

COMMERCIALIZATION In the global consumer societies of our times, very few discussions of commercialization are able to be conducted without invoking a moral response. Indeed, it is rare that mention of the single word commercialization is not followed by the immediate arousal of human emotions that can be charted somewhere along on a broad spectrum of feelings, from a sense of quiet unease all the way through to that of outright hostility and moral condemnation, such are the powerful political and ethical anxieties that the term is capable of invoking. It is possible to argue that these reactions are provoked by an increasing awareness of the uncomfortable fact that one of the most distinctive characteristics by which to define global consumer societies is the dominance that has been assumed by the various processes associated with commercialization. Specifically, how the ostensibly neutral economic logic of commercialization—the bringing of a product to market—has come to have a direct and identifiable impact on all aspects of our shared social, cultural, and political life. For those involved in the industries behind the processes of commercialization, these developments remain a primarily neutral feature of the professions of advertising and marketing. For many others, commercialization is a far more significant and moral issue, and it is for this reason that the term is more popularly communicated with a distinctly pejorative tone. For those of the professional advertising and marketing industries, of course, commercialization refers to a single stage in the development cycle of a new consumer product or service, typically arriving relatively late in the overall process. To simplify, the activities associated with this stage in the cycle tend to be concerned with the manufacture, distribution, and promotion of an identified new product or service (or at least a newly identified way of reinterpreting an existing product or service). Commercialization,

Commercialization

understood in this singularly professional sense, is then essentially a technical process that involves a new product or service and the related market research, advertising, and promotional strategy that is undertaken to bring it to market—to have done all of the research and development possible to place before the freely choosing consumer a particular item that they both wish to, and are subsequently convinced need to, purchase (often regardless of whether there was anything resembling a mass clamor for such an item beforehand). From the point of view of the professionals, therefore, commercialization necessarily entails a number of key assessments to realize the act of converting a potential consumer into an actual consumer, extracting monies from the wallets of as many freely choosing individuals as is possible, and that can involve the following areas of professional concern: legal (e.g., patenting, copyright); market (e.g., competition, potential share, possibilities for growth); technological (e.g., research and development strategies, computing and information technology support); financial (e.g., appropriate selling price, costs to bring product/service to market, cost to sustain development, potential for returns on investment); and associated risk (perception of threats to the success of the overall venture). As such, in this sense, commercialization can be deemed to be a largely neutral process that is carried out by professional advertisers and marketers, and one that is driven by the fundamentally quantitative aim of maximizing sales and capital profit through appropriate marketing and advertising strategies. As mentioned, however, the term commercialization is perhaps more popularly understood and widely employed so as to express a more pejorative meaning. It is thus more typical to hear the term commercialization laced with a certain sense of contempt and employed by all those who wish to provide us with a more critical interpretation of the consumer societies that exist around the world today. This is particularly the case among those sociologists, social and cultural theorists, and political commentators who share concerns about the impact that those professional practices identified earlier may have, or are having, as they come to dominate the very fabric of human shared social life. These critical interpretations of commercialization typically focus on those moral anxieties that are seen to arise as ever more aspects of our daily lives are drawn into, and

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become an integral part of, a wider network of market relations and financial exchanges, resulting for some in a blurring of the line between our roles as public, neighborly citizens and as privatized, competitive consumers. The relationship between consumerism and citizenship has become a rather vibrant area of debate. Concerns center on increasingly unresolved questions about what aspects of the social and natural world ought and ought not to be identified as appropriate for sale in the marketplace. In this sense, then, commercialization basically means the increasing exploitation of all aspects of human culture and the natural environment for the maximization of sales and profit, usually at the expense of both the creativity and quality of the human imagination and the viable sustainability of our shared lives together in the longer term. From this point of view, every aspect of human social life across the life course has been, in some way and to differing extents, commercialized— including, but by no means limited to, music, sports, childhood, education, marriage, health, party politics, public space, personal identity, food, the human body, and even death. Each of these aspects of human life has been reimagined in the consumer societies of today in the light of the logic of commercialization, reconsidered for its capacity to be brought to market; which is to say, its capacity for generating profit. Contemporary advocates of this interpretation of commercialization are the latest in a long and very rich tradition of kulturkritik (criticism of civilization) to have developed, in relation to commercialization specifically, out of the analysis of capitalist exploitation expressed in the various works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as in the subsequent blend of Weberian, Freudian, and Marxian analyses offered by the various proponents of Frankfurt school critical theory, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s essay on the “culture industry” and Herbert Marcuse’s momentous work, One Dimensional Man. Perhaps the most pertinent contribution of Marx is his analysis of the commodity in capitalism, specifically his well-known distinction between the “use-value” and “exchange-value” of an object at the start of Das Kapital. The importance of Marx’s argument for us here is his suggestion that objects are no longer produced with their use value in mind (i.e., to meet a certain, identifiable need) but rather they are deliberately produced for their exchange value

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(i.e., ultimately, they are produced to make a profit). For Marx, use value does not disappear, but rather it is subordinated to exchange value, to the need to shift goods on the market to drive profit. One can see the significance of this for understanding the critical response to processes of commercialization by considering the often-heard remark that aspects of culture are now becoming ever more commercialized. To take one practical example, consider the case of rock music (Plasketes 1992). The meaning implied in comments about the “commercialization of rock music” is far less a reflection on those technical and professional processes that opened this discussion— those that are inevitably involved in bringing the product of rock music to the market—and far more a normative assessment of the impact and consequences that such processes have had on the nature and quality of rock music, as well as on wider social, cultural, and political life. That is to say, remarks of this kind are often intended as a lament over how a once countercultural art form such as rock music is seen to have essentially succumbed to the dominant logic of professional advertisers and marketers and is thus today produced solely for the quantitative maximization of sales and capital profit within the marketplace, rather than for the more qualitative aesthetic or artistic purposes that it is seen, in some way, to have now lost. Comments of this kind, and many more like them, are seen as being supported by the way in which music of all genres is now brought to the marketplace, with the actual musical recording itself being a single— and some would argue, wholly less important— component in a wider series of products that constitute the entire merchandise associated with a music band as “brand.” In Marx’s terminology, the processes of commercialization and the professionals involved therein are the result of the dominance of exchange value over use value in the global consumer (capitalist) societies of our times. Mark Davis See also Advertising; Alternative Consumption; Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism; Cultural Intermediaries; Markets and Marketing; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Materialism and Postmaterialism; Moralities

Further Readings Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In

Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 120–167. London: Verso Classics, 1997. First published 1944. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. London: Routledge Classics, 2002. First published 1964. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1976. First published 1867. Plasketes, George M. “Taking Care of Business: The Commercialization of Rock Music.” In America’s Musical Pulse: Popular Music in Twentieth-Century Society, edited by Kenneth J. Bindas, 149–161. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992. Soper, Kate. “Re-thinking the ‘Good Life’: The Citizenship Dimension of Consumer Disaffection with Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7 (July 2007): 205–229. Trentmann, Frank. Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Commerce, and Civil Society in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Trentmann, Frank, and Kate Soper, eds. Citizenship and Consumption. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

COMMODIFICATION Commodification is an instructive concept for the study of consumer culture insofar as it allows for consideration of the social relations that lie behind— and are made possible by—acts of consumption. To understand commodification, it is important to first define what commodities are, and basic definitions suggest that they are objects with an exchange value as well as a use value. Commodification refers to the economic and cultural processes through which objects become commodities, and it is commonly held that these involve both the material production of the thing and the semiotic marking of it as a particular kind of thing. Moralistic commentators use the term as shorthand for a generalized critique in which they suggest that consumer cultures are characterized by the “commodification” of things (typically religion, intimacy, education, or the environment) that have no business being commoditized and sold for profit. It is important to recognize that critiques such as these are premised on a degree of historical blindness, as well as fundamental misunderstandings of what commodities are. Indeed, while commodities are typically understood as mass-produced manufactured goods that are particular to the capitalist mode of production, it is worth noting that commodity exchange—in

Commodification

the form of gifts and barter—has been documented in pre- and nonmarket societies. Similarly, while commodities can be distinguished from other types of objects, it would be disingenuous to suggest that particular objects are fundamentally commodities while others are not. It is more fruitful to think in terms of objects having “biographies” and that at particular point(s) in their lives, they enter a state in which they can be exchanged. In this view, commodities are objects in a particular situation, and commodification (or “commoditization”—for the purposes of this entry, the terms are used interchangeably) refers to the processes through which they come to enter this state. This entry is focused on contemporary consumer cultures, and so to begin, it is worth considering some of the more robust critiques that have been made through reference to the themes of commodities and commodification. By and large, the things that we consume reach us in a form that conceals the conditions under which they were produced. Think about it: the coffee that you drank on the bus to class, the cell phone that you used to make a call between classes, the sandwich that you ate for lunch, and the new jeans that you spilled mayonnaise on while doing so. For most of these things, we have very little idea about where they came from, who produced them, and how they reached us. For example, that cup of coffee was most likely made from beans that were farmed in the developing world— quite possibly under exploitative conditions—before being processed, distributed, packaged, and sold somewhere in the developed world. And yet for the most part, all we see is the cup of coffee and perhaps the vendor who sold it to us. In the Marxist formulation of commodities, commodification refers to the processes through which things come to be hidden behind a veil that masks the social and economic relations of their production. In this view, consumers are alienated from producers, and this distance is ultimately responsible for the reproduction of global inequalities. Moreover, commodification is thought to be responsible for the alienation of consumers from the objects that they consume insofar as they do not contribute their own labor to the production of these things. It follows that commodities are external to people, and it is this perspective that gives rise to the idea that commodities are alien objects that exist in commercial space—cold and sterile things that are either purchased functionally to satisfy a human need or otherwise manipulated (by branding, advertising,

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and marketing) to “dupe” consumers into wanting things that they do not really need. In contrast to these broadly Marxist perspectives, there are approaches that focus more specifically on the social potential of the commodity. In this view, the commodity situation is a particular point in an object’s cultural biography and a moment in which its exchangeability for something else (not necessarily money) is its defining feature. This definition of the commodity can be broken down into three parts. First, the commodity phase, which refers to the idea that throughout its life, an object can move in and out of the commodity situation. Second, the commodity candidacy, which refers to the properties and standards that constitute an object as exchangeable in a particular social and historical context. For example, attempting to sell a used textbook that has pages missing and notes in the margin is likely to prove difficult, as it does not meet the necessary standards of exchangeability. Finally, the commodity context refers to the sites and spaces through which things that meet the required standards can legitimately be exchanged and so move into the commodity phase. This definition illustrates how the process of commodification lies at the intersection of economic, historical, social, and cultural factors and that crucially, virtually any object—and not just manufactured goods circulating in capitalist economies—has the potential to become a commodity. Of course, certain types of objects are liable to frequently find themselves in the commodity situation (cell phones, for example), and it is for these reasons that they are frequently positioned as archetypal commodities. Similarly, societies in which many things will enter the commodity phase at some point in their career—such as contemporary consumer cultures—can be reasonably understood as being characterized by a high degree of commodification. The important thing to take from this is the idea that even in societies that experience a high degree of commodification, it does not automatically follow that claims about the alienating and manipulative effects of the commodity ring true. It is well established that once purchased, commodities can be recontextualized (or decommodified) to the extent that they become singularized or personalized and no longer recognizable as the homogenous and alien objects that were acquired through commercial exchange. For example, consider a T-shirt for sale in a shopping mall: in most cases, it will be one of

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many identical garments in terms of brand, style, color, and size. However, once purchased, it may well become somebody’s “favorite T” because it happens to fit particularly well, flattering the one body part the person is happy with. Or perhaps it might start to assume sentimental value, having been worn on a first date with a new love. The T-shirt is said to have been appropriated by the owner, and it would be very hard to view it as a commodity—not least because it is unlikely to be for sale. However, in time, the owner may well put on weight such that it no longer fits quite as well as it did, or perhaps it might become a bitter reminder of a relationship gone sour. At this point—assuming of course that it is suitably stylish and in good enough condition to meet the requirements of commodity candidacy—it has the potential to reenter the commodity phase. The point is this: quite apart from being external to the person, our relationships with material things—even those acquired in the commodity form—play a crucial role in constituting who we are and by creating a meaningful social world. Furthermore, Daniel Miller has demonstrated that commodities can be used as a means of expressing relations of love and devotion toward significant others. Most notably, he gives the example of a mother buying clothing: she rejects any number of functionally suitable garments until she finds the one that is just right for her child. Taken together, it can be noted that the process of commodification is a lot more complex and contradictory than facile critiques of contemporary consumer cultures suggest. There is certainly no easy way to reconcile the cultural potential of commodities with the inequalities manifest in their political economies of production. Nevertheless, a focus on commodification remains important because it provides a way of locating consumption within broader social and economic relations. David Evans See also Circuits of Culture/Consumption; Commodities; Fair Trade; Gifts and Reciprocity; Material Culture; Political Economy; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Carrier, James. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700. London: Routledge, 1994. Goodman, Mike. “Reading Fair Trade: Political Ecological Imaginary and the Moral Economy of Fair Trade Foods.” Political Geography 23 (2004): 891–915. Humphrey, Caroline, and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds. Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Marx, Karl. Capital. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970. First Published 1867. Miller, Daniel. “The Poverty of Morality.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1, no. 2 (2001): 225–423.

COMMODITIES A commodity is an object with both use and value that is typically bought, sold, or exchanged. Commodities are ubiquitous in everyday life. At the same time, and perhaps because of their ubiquity, the commodity is one of the more widely debated, widely contested, and widely studied concepts within the social sciences and humanities. This has led to a robust and sustained effort among researchers to continually (re)define, examine, interrogate, and otherwise explore commodities and their associated practices and processes. Defining commodity has long been the project of researchers, and one of the difficulties in its definition is that the term and the concept it encompasses have different meanings and, importantly, different connotations, depending on discipline.

Marxist Notions Within various branches of social sciences, commodities and commodity processes are the object of inquiry. For instance, commodities appear in economics, geography, cultural studies, as well as multidisciplinary studies, such as political ecology. Because of this wide theoretical focus, the definition of commodity is subject to interdisciplinary debates, as well as those that manifest intradisciplinarily. As result, operational definitions of commodity largely depend on various epistemologies within social sciences. Not surprising, this leads to contention and debate as commodity connotes and denotes different things depending on its context. Regardless of its divergences, however, Karl Marx’s and Marxist notions of the commodity and of commodity processes are

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largely present in its configuration. These notions, in turn, impact on the trajectories that commodities and related studies have taken. For Marx, commodities are objects that satisfy human needs. Without engaging with the particulars of these needs, Marx argues that the utility of objects, that is their use, is at the core of a commodity’s value and therefore comprises what he refers to as their “use value.” Furthermore, he argues that use values can only be realized by using and consuming the commodity. Crucially, in this framework the use value of a commodity is divorced from the labor that goes into producing it. A key component to commodities configured within Marxist political economy is that the use value of commodities comprises the wealth of a society. In contemporary Western society, these use values become the materials of exchange value, leading to an economy predicated on the exchange of commodities. Use and exchange values, labor, and materiality lie at the heart of commodity processes, and emerging from this, a commodity is an object with a use, but also an exchange value. Much of the theorization of commodities that has informed and otherwise inspired research in social sciences, in particular cultural studies and various branches of both geography and anthropology are encompassed by the concept of the fetish of the commodity articulated, again, by Marx. For Marx, the fetish of the commodity is the process through which labor relations between the people who make objects and the objects themselves are replaced by material relations between objects; the fetish of the commodity occurs when the object no longer represents the people who made it but rather when it takes on meanings and value in its own right. Underlying the fetish of the commodity are the processes of use and exchange value, whereby labor is divorced from the usefulness of an object and displaced from commodity relations. The commodity emerges, appearing as itself, a desirable and valuable object, to consumers without reference to the labor that produced it. The fetish of the commodity has clear geographical implications. The relationship between labor and the commodity is tied to processes of material production, while the relations embodied by the fetish of the commodity are tied to processes of consumption. A commodity’s value in this context is negotiated through value of the fetish in places where the commodity is consumed. Geographically, places of production are linked to places of consumption through the

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commodity and the practices that make up the commodity. In this sense, commodities are intrinsically social, cultural, and geographical, and as a result, they have become the project of some researchers to demonstrate these connections and linkages.

Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives Within the social sciences, the study of commodities can loosely be categorized into two different perspectives, each with its own theoretical perspectives and methodological concerns. On one side is an economics-based social science informed by contained systems approaches. On the other side is a socialcultural approach to economic activity, focusing on the dynamics of social and cultural reproduction as mediated through commodities and within the context of a commodity’s social and cultural negotiation of value. On both sides of this somewhat unnecessary and largely arbitrary divide are similar theoretical concerns that revolve around the processes of commodities—namely, commoditization, value, and the fetish of the commodity. For the social sciences, these concepts relate to mutually constructive social, cultural, and economic processes. Contained systems approaches work along the Marxist premise of unveiling the fetish of the commodity by identifying sites of activity, material connectivity, and political-economic circumstances of particular commodities. One of these approaches, global commodity chain (GCC) analysis, emerged as an analytical tool for world-systems theory (WST), a framework developed alongside a wider body of development studies that focused on relationships and interdependency between developing and developed states. WST can be viewed as an intellectual divergence from neoliberal economic perspectives. Specifically, WST considers the direction and flow of power, manifested as political-economic influence between global “cores” and “peripheries,” that is to say, between primary producers in the Global South and consumers in the North (Wallerstein 1974). Immanuel Wallerstein’s version of WST has direct intellectual as well as theoretical and methodological links to the work of Andre Gunder Frank, whose interest lay in the relations of power, development, and underdevelopment in the Western hemisphere. Frank’s early work that inspired WST focused specifically on third-world modes of commodity production, centering on agricultural development.

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He argued that third-world, primary commodity production (agricultural commodities and other raw materials) was utilized and exploited by first-world political economies—specifically those of the Global North. These commodity relations led to uneven development across the South and exploitative social-political relations at all scales, ranging from the global to the local. This perspective has injected a sense of moral and ethical urgency into the uncovering of commodities and their systems. Though WST has fallen out of favor within some branches of research, GCC with its post-Marxist, historical materialist perspective remains popular, as does its theoretical aim of articulating the linkages between producers and consumers. GCC emerged from Wallerstein’s initial research and emphasizes the way social and political relations shape commodity production and, in turn, defines emergent political economic systems. GCC was deployed to understand the material linkages between finished industrial commodities and their raw materials. In the process, the analysis can be employed to articulate the power relations that mediate the production and assembly of commodities. This materialist perspective begins by focusing on “finished” commodities and works backward to uncover the Marxist commodity fetish. At the center of GCC’s analysis and central to its argument is that commodity production is segmented into four “dimensions”: inputs and outputs, nodes of interaction, political governance, and institutional frameworks. A side effect of GCC is that by focusing on the social and political (and power) relations that are enacted to produce commodities, robust understandings and accountings for economic externalities can be deduced. Developed from the evolution of GCC is global value chain (GVC) analysis. With GVC, the focus is on valuation and the creation of value within commodity systems. GVC is derived from the realization that analyzing a service-based economy can no longer rely on historical materialism, but that commodity processes of use and exchange value could be extended to nonmaterial entities, such as those that produce the so-called knowledge economy. GVC is an analytical tool, similar to GCC, where the production of value is traced through different social and material linkages to understand where economic value is produced and can be added to a process. Developed as an instrument for visualizing business strategy, GVC works to envisage the different

agents deployed to vertically integrate an organization before optimizing specific structural practice within that organization. For geography, GVC analyzes as well as spatializes the value-added processes by identifying the sites and contexts of interaction whereby firms become more or less vertically integrated along their supply chains. GVC specifically organizes value chains into five different conceptual models based on the degrees of control that production firms maintain over suppliers. In contrast to business studies (or GVC implementation in business), GVC analysis in the social sciences focuses its perspective on the outward social/political-economic and ecological effects of value-added processes as part of the extractive processes of industry while also providing a lens for critical commentary on the power relations of production. Its utility is demonstrated as it considers the interior industrial and organizational practices that lead to commodity production. Recent GVC analysis has focused on the centralization of power and the decentralization of practice within different stages along the value chain. With its attention to procedural categorization and isolation of events and practice into specific arenas of interaction, along with similar political, theoretical, and methodological considerations, as well as being undertaken by many of the same teams of researchers with the same intellectual questions, much of GVC has been critiqued along the same lines as GCC. Both attempt to internalize economic “externalities,” such as social and environmental degradation, by incorporating them into econocentric understandings of value and value added. With these approaches, value remains a financial instrument, to be added to or subtracted from commodities as they move from production. This conceptualization of value ignores its social and cultural construction a subject that has informed other disciplines within social science. The second broad configuration for the study of commodities focuses on the social and cultural negotiations of commodity value; typically, value as configured by consumers. Borrowing from anthropology, in particular the material culture studies of Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff (see Appadurai 1986), this strand of research has focused on the contexts of consumption and negotiations that lead to use and exchange value and ultimately to the commodity itself. This shift from econo-centric

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understandings of commodities to understandings of their related social and cultural practices has been signaled as part of the wider “cultural turn.” For inquires into commodities, the cultural turn represented a shift from research-dominated Marxist ideologies to research that closely interrogates the cultural spaces of consumption and integrates them into the spaces of commodity production. These “circuits of culture,” where commodities are comprised of various social, material, and discursive “flows,” have come to signal the production, performance, and practice of commodities within what was formerly referred to as a commodity chain. The cultural turn has come to symbolize a period of inquiry into commodities where accounts of production and accounts of consumption were separated theoretically, methodologically, and epistemologically into divergent, occluded spaces. This division of commodity spaces represented both a growing unease at productionist accounts of commodities focused or derived from (post-)Marxist perspectives on economies and development on one side and a reluctance to include cultures of consumption on the other. Needless to say, the cultural turn has not gone unnoticed, and following it is a flurry of debates surrounding its purpose, veracity, and relevance, especially in light of the many (post-)Marxist concerns about the reproduction of capital that are, for many, still valid. Responding to David Harvey, questions appeared about the need to continually lift the veil of commodity fetishism (to illustrate the inequity that “hides” behind production), or whether it made more sense to “get with it” (Cook, Crang, and Thorpe 2004). The social sciences have taken a broad look at the sites and roles of commodity consumption as performances of cultural reproduction. Commodity cultures, consumption, and the consumption of culture through commodities, in turn have enjoyed a rich and diverse set of discussions and debates. For instance, Peter Jackson has worked broadly across topics of culture, identity, and appropriation within a wide range of topics loosely surrounding materiality and material culture. Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, similarly, have published rich accounts of consumption cultures, focusing on consumers and social practice surrounding the production of commodities through the consumption of secondhand goods as well as through objects/commodities that

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fall outside the typical pathways of production to consumption to include a second, or even tertiary “life” to objects. These accounts in particular have further called into question the “life” of commodities by arguing through material culture and materiality that commodities have many different trajectories beyond the Marxist version of production and consumption. Within this context, however, commodities research has (re)turned to the political salience of commodity fetish as a mechanism for hiding social relations and simultaneously to materiality as a means to connect disparate places and practices. This concept of the fetish, in one way or another, has informed most of the work in cultural studies (and aligned disciplines) surrounding commodities, even though researchers often prefer other metaphors in the pursuit of commodity analysis (Castree 2001). Paralleling GCC and GVC, but in cultural contexts, the methodologies and core theoretical perspective of working with the fetish is to lift its veil or to uncover the social and ecological consequences behind production, within its political, economic, and cultural frameworks. Harvey (1990, 423), in his heavily cited essay, “Between Space and Time,” advocates deploying the fetish with its “full force” by following (capitalist) materiality “backward” to uncover the “fingerprints of exploitation” (or at least their social histories) implicit in commodity production. And to do this, it is necessary, according to Noel Castree, to consider where (both literally as well as intellectually) the fetish comes from and what happens when a commodity is defetishized. Ian Cook and Phil Crang note the phenomenon of defetishization but place it within the context of the double commodity fetish produced by various knowledges about commodities. These knowledges are produced through consumer engagement with the commodity, places of retail, and advertisements, as well as its wider cultural spaces, and they become the rationale for commodity consumption in the first place. This leads to questions concerning what, exactly, is consumed when a product is embedded with meaning, context, and (geographical) knowledges. This leads to questions regarding the identity of commodities, their agents, and ultimately their geographies. This argument has been extended into all aspects of “modern life,” as commodities, however

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defined, are necessarily always consumed alongside their images and imaginations, and likewise images and imaginations alongside their commodities. The different workings of the commodity fetish, as visible in brands, images, meanings, and so on, as well as the disassociative processes that the fetish seems to produce, have led to researchers uncovering, unveiling, getting behind, or otherwise having to somehow deal with it. Thus, working with commodities in some way entails unraveling the fetish by, in part, interrogating the knowledges that are implicated in its formation. This is not to imply that commodity processes or those of the fetish are relevant only to contemporary Western consumer culture. Thomas Richards, for instance, interrogates Victorian-era commodity fetishes, signaling an earlier, though recognizable, consumer culture; whereas Nicholas Thomas examines commodities (and their exchange) in non-Western contexts.

Recent Approaches and Trends Recent approaches to commodities have been to articulate the distance between consumers and producers in an ethical turn to reconnect them, and from a postcolonial perspective to examine the mediating roles of commodities and commodity cultures in constituting colonial and postcolonial power relations. Researchers have sought to articulate notions of distance and distanciation when discussing commodity fetishes and their unveiling. However, uncovering fetishes and revealing the distances that they imply produces a new set of representations and imaginaries that replace one set of power relations with another. More recently, as epistemological divisions in the social sciences have broken down, sites of commodity production and commodity consumption have been called into question. Recent trends incorporate understandings of the commodity fetish as its own social-cultural production, with the materiality of commodities themselves to argue that commodities are produced alongside the materiality of the object. The material of an object may be produced in one place while the commodity is produced someplace else entirely. This leads to a notion of commodities where they are identified and produced by consumers who ascribe them with value. Benjamin Coles

See also Branding; Circuits of Culture/Consumption; Commodification; Spices; Sugar; Tea; Value: Exchange and Use Value; World-Systems Theory

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Castree, Noel. “Commentary: Commodity Fetishism, Geographical Imaginations and Imaginative Geographies.” Environment and Planning A 33 (2001): 7. Cook, Ian. “Follow the Thing: Papaya.” Antipode 36, no. 4 (2004): 642–664. Cook, Ian, Phil Crang, and Mark Thorpe. “Tropics of Consumption: ‘Getting with the Fetish’ of ‘Exotic’ Fruit?” In Geographies of Commodity Chains, edited by Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer, 173–192. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004. Fine, Ben, and E. Leopold. The World of Consumption. London: Routledge, 1993. Frank, Andre Gunder. Mexican Agriculture, 1521–1630: Transformation of the Mode of Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Gereffi, Gary, John Humphrey, and Timothy Sturgeon. “The Governance of Global Value Chains.” Review of International Political Economy 12, no. 1 (2005): 78–104. Gereffi, Gary, and Miguel Korzeniewicz. “Introduction: Global Commodity Chains.” In Commmodity Chains and Global Capitalism, edited by Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, 1–14. West Point, VA: Greenwood Press, 1994. Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crewe. Second-Hand Cultures. London: Berg, 2003. Harvey, David. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 4 (1990): 418–434. Jackson, Peter. “Commodity Culture: The Traffic in Things.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geography 24, no. 1 (1999): 95–108. Raikes, P., M. F. Jensen, and Stefano Ponte. “Global Commodity Chain Analysis and the French Filiere Approach: Comparison and Critique.” Economy and Society 29 (2000): 390–417. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. London: Verso, 1991. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Organization of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Communication Studies

COMMODITY FETISHISM See Body Shop, The; Commodification; Commodities; Marxist Theories; Obsession; Philosophy; Reification; Simulacrum

COMMUNICATION STUDIES Communication studies is a multifaceted academic field that deals with the production, transmission, and consumption of symbols and messages through different media and in different contexts. Because communication is a primary activity in the social life of humans, communication processes encompass a wide range of activities, including speech and face-to-face conversation, journalism and news making, uses in mass media and consumption, interaction using new media, and professional and political communication. Although the way people communicate with one another has been the subject of reflection since ancient times, organic studies of communication mainly developed in the twentieth century and only took on the form of a discipline after World War II. Today, communication studies is an interdisciplinary field that embraces several theories and methodologies in both the social sciences and the humanities, including sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, economics, semiotics, literary studies, linguistics, and rhetoric. Differences of context and the variety of disciplines involved are the reasons for both the fragmentation of the field and for the interest shown in it by various different academics, from many traditions and subfields. Consequently, it suffers from a lack of scientific consensus regarding common paradigms and a shared historical narrative. In the initial period of the development of communication studies, theoretical approaches, content analysis, and historical works were prevalent, and the increasing maturity of the discipline has brought a further expansion of its methods and perspectives over the past thirty years, especially in the fields of ethnography and qualitative research. Moreover, a more complex relationship between production and consumption has been developed, specifically regarding the role of the audience and the situated media consumption processes. For this reason, the subfields of media applications and audience research are also relevant to consumer culture

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in today’s world, in that they consider the material and cultural processes involved in the consumption of communication and the role of communication in shaping the same consumer practices.

The Historical and Theoretical Origins of the Field The crucial role of communication and the heterogeneity of the elements and contexts that characterize communication processes in human life are reflected in the fact that the study of communication can be traced back to the ancient roots of human knowledge. The central role of communication in human relationships first emerged as a coherent concept among Greek thinkers, notably in the work of Corax and Tisias, the founders of the Greek school of rhetoric, and of rhetoric as a discipline, in Syracuse in the fifth century BC. This seminal notion of communication was closely connected to its relevance as a tool of persuasion in courtroom and political debates. The same perspective flourished in Greek philosophy, and Aristotle was the first to further developed the analysis of communication in his notable work Rhetoric, in which he reaffirmed the concept of communication as a skill devoted to persuasion. In so doing, he addressed the role of the orator and the centrality of strategy in communication and the delivery of the intended message. Aristotle’s legacy was later inherited by Latin writers such as Cicero and Quintilian and later by Saint Augustine of Hippo, who further developed Aristotle’s approach to communication, including his interpretation of the Bible and holy writings. This strongly contributed to establishing rhetoric as a crucial discipline in the Christian cultural system during the Middle Ages. In the modern age, several Western philosophers have been involved in the debate surrounding languages and communication (i.e., Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and Søren Kierkegaard), but only in the second half of the nineteen century did the study of communication become central in disciplines such as philosophy and, later, linguistics, sociology, and psychology. A major reference point in the analysis of communication and language lies in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, who settled the philosophical basis for the development of semiotics, one of the main disciplines that contributed to the analysis of communicative paradigms and codes. Together, with Peirce’s work, a crucial contribution to

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structuring the study of communication came from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who established more coherently, and with more structure, the basis of linguistics and semiotics, which strongly influenced the work of other scholars, such as Roland Barthes and the whole tradition of cultural studies. In sociology, the first attempt to find a relevant place for communication in social interaction came with the work of Charles Cooley. In his 1909 book Social Organization, Cooley defines communication as one of the bases of the social relations between humans and gives it a wide ranging definition, including “the expression of the face, attitude and gesture, the tones of the voice, words, writing, printing, railways, telegraphs, telephones, and whatever else may be the latest achievement in the conquest of space and time” (Cooley 1909, 61). The work of Cooley, together with that of George Herbert Mead, first illustrated the importance of the centrality of communication in social processes and was at the basis of the development, in the 1960s, of the sociological perspective of symbolic interactionism, which gave communication a constitutive place in the study of social relations. The meaning of the word communication strongly changed at the beginning of the twentieth century. While in the nineteenth century communication was initially used on a regular basis to refer to physical means of communication, such as railways and roads, later, with the development of infrastructures such as telegraphy in the second half of the nineteenth century, communication came to be used also to identify the transmission of information and meanings, permitting “for the first time the separation of communication and transportation” (Carey 1989, 203). It was from this separation that a modern interpretation emerged of what communication is, based on the notion of the exchange of messages with the use of communication technologies, broadcasting media, and the circulation of mass culture, which were to become dominant in the twentieth century.

The Coming of Mass Communication and the Multiplication of Theories and Models The Second Industrial Revolution and the emergence of new innovations and new communication technologies, such as the telegraph, were the bases of a change in human communication, as well as of the development of the study of communication. In the twentieth century, many new communications

technologies, such as photography, sound recording, telegraphy and the telephone, and finally wireless communication, were widely applied in society. These new technologies emerged together with the parallel development of popular masses, political rights, and the commercialization of information. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the affirmation of newspapers in the United States and consequently the birth of journalism as a professional activity as well as a field of teaching and a subject of reflection. Thus, it is not surprising that the most influential work on communication in the twentieth century was the seminal study of public opinion and the role of newspapers in shaping social knowledge by Walter Lippmann in 1922. Lippmann’s work analyzes the role of communication in the context of the rise of new mass communication technologies and, although not a general theory of communication, it addresses the problems that arose in the new American society with the development of both commercial journalism and press and media conglomerates. A more functionalist tradition in communication studies emerged in the United States during World War II and contributed to establishing the study of communication as a discipline, often closely connected to corporate and governmental institutions. The institutionalization of communication studies in U.S. higher education and research is usually traced to Columbia University and the University of Chicago. At Columbia University, it was Paul Lazarsfeld who established the Bureau of Applied Social Research in 1944, as a prolongation of the Radio Project that he had coordinated from 1937. Lazarsfeld’s and Elihu Katz’s research work, Personal Influence (1955), is still a classic work in communication studies, developing the classic concept in the “media effects” tradition of “two step flow communication,” in which the influence of the media was seen as crucially mediated by “opinion leaders.” After World War II, different ways of dealing with communication emerged in the social sciences and humanities, as well as in other fields, such as mathematics. It was from this field that the most influential theoretical model of communication was developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949). The Shannon-Weaver model is a mathematical theory of communication whereby the authors describe the process of communication as a linear process in which there is a source of information that sends a signal though a channel to a receiver, thus arriving at

Communication Studies

its destination and in which “noise” (anything added to the signal during the process and not intended by the source) represents one of the main problems in the transmission. Although the Shannon-Weaver model has been highly criticized for its linearity and lack of cultural depth, it represents the major reference point for the subsequent development of other “processual” conceptions of communication (see Fiske 1982). While the early study of communication in the United States developed a functional relationship with journalism, commerce, and governmental institutions, in Europe a more critical and pessimistic reflection about the role of mass media communication developed. Indeed, in Europe, eclectic writers and artists contributed to developing a debate about new communication technologies, as in the case of the German comediographer Bertold Brecht, who debated the educational and civil role of radio in the 1930s. Brecht also influenced the work of Walter Benjamin, who first questioned the negative role of new reproduction technologies and their impact on European cultural traditions and aesthetics. It was from this perspective that the critical tradition of the Frankfurt school developed, especially with the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on the role of the culture industries and the negative political effect of the new forms of communication, which were characterizing the modern twentieth-century capitalist society. Despite the different interpretations given to the changes around the time of World War II, mostly shaped by increasing technological innovations in the ways people communicate, communication became a relevant and recurrent issue in human and social science, opening the doors to the centrality of communication in social theories in the 1960s and 1970s.

Communication at the Center of Sociocultural Analyses of Society During the 1960s, communication and mass media acquired a crucial role in several explanations of the sociocultural changes that were taking place. The most relevant attempt that has been made to explain the changing postwar Western society through communication processes is that developed by the Toronto school of communication, which started with the work of Harold Innis and Eric A. Havelock and developed and became famous with the work of Marshal McLuhan. More specifically,

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the tradition started with Innis’s work Empire and Communication (1950), in which he describes how communications media influence the rise and fall of empires, tracing the role of media such as stone, papyrus, and paper from ancient times to the modern age. This tradition, characterized by the evident attention being paid to means of communication was further developed by McLuhan, who became the most wellknown of the academics in the field of media and communication studies, gaining huge popularity even beyond an academic audience. McLuhan recognized that the evolution of communication played a crucial role in the human historical development and that social changes following the World Wars were directly connected with the rising of electrical communication technologies, which contributed in transforming the world into a “global village.” Moreover, McLuhan’s contribution is also associated with his famous phrase “the medium is the message,” coined to argue that the characteristics of the medium itself strongly influence the content of communication and the ways in which this content is perceived by the audience. The influential tradition of the Toronto school and of the McLuhan approach has been carried on by other academics, such as Joshua Meyrowitz, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Derrick de Kerckhove. It was with the popularity of McLuhan’s work that communication became a crucial term and concept in modern Western society. In the 1960s and 1970s, another major reference point in the development of communication studies developed in Europe with the tradition of British cultural studies. Cultural studies are important for communication studies because they take a rather interdisciplinary approach toward the areas of culture and communication, in so doing providing convergence between a humanistic textual approach and a more ethnographical and socio-anthropological tradition. Stuart Hall, the key figure in cultural studies, made a particularly strong contribution to communication studies with his definition of the “encoding/decoding model of communication.” This model insists on the fact that the decoding of messages does not follow inevitably from the process of encoding, thus highlighting the importance of an active interpretation by the audience. It is also to be noted that, during the 1980s, academics in the field of cultural studies strongly helped to establish communication studies as a coherent and well-defined academic field, one example being their contribution

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to defining a critical reconstruction of the traditions and historical perspectives of communication studies. One of the main contributions in this sense is the work of John Fiske on communication and popular culture, which illustrated the relevance of the interdisciplinarity of the field, the centrality of signs and codes, and the dominant role of communication in the entire cultural system of modern Western society. At the same time, a more pessimistic perspective on the role of mass communication in society also emerged among European, and most notably French, theorists, such as Jean-Françoise Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard described how new communication technologies contributed, together with other sociocultural processes, to produce the end of comprehensive explanations of the social experience at the basis of the modern age, arguing that the collapse of these modern “meta-narratives” produced the rising of a new “postmodern condition.” Notably, Lyotard was the first to introduce the idea of “postmodernist” in the fields of philosophy and social science, influencing in a decisive way the intellectual scenery of the next two decades. Baudrillard developed an even more relativist view of the role of communication, arguing that, in postmodern society, electronic media are generating “simulacra,” which are signs and symbols completely dissociated from reality. This perspective also informed Baudrillard’s account of the consumer society, which is characterized, for the French theorist, by the predominance of signs and symbols over the functional and economic value of commodities.

Audience, Participatory Culture, and Consumption In the last two decades, the field of communication studies has been characterized by a further fragmentation of theories and approaches, as well as the diffusion of its concept and perspective into other fields. More specifically, communication studies and the study of consumer culture have interacted at different levels. On one level, there is a direct connection that consists of the study of the consumption of media and communication and audience research. In this subfield, historically we find two different tendencies: the first one, developing the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school tradition, stresses the power of media and cultural industries and considers the audience as passive; and the second one, which stresses the active aspect of the consumption of media, where the audience is able to give different meanings, as well as use the media and their contents

in different ways. British academics such as Roger Silverstone and David Morley developed the study of media consumption, particularly in relation to television, and defined a new way of dealing with the study of communication, integrating different approaches in communication studies, especially the anthropological perspective. From a methodological point of view, in the 1980s, communication studies started to incorporate ethnography as a tool for studying communication processes and the role of media in society. This perspective also produced a renewal of part of the field, paying more attention to the material and situated dimension of media consumption, for example, as in the case of the symbolic dimension of household communication technologies (Silverstone and Hirsh 1992). Another level regards the appropriation of consumer culture issues into the debate concerning the change in the use of media and communication processes. With the diffusion of new forms of communication that blur the preceding boundaries, such as those between face-to-face communication and mass media communication, the analysis of active participation by people in the consumption of media communication became crucial. In recent years, new forms of interpersonal communication, such as social networks, mobile phones, and personal communication devices, have clearly shown a convergence between media and technology-based communication and ancient and traditional interpersonal communication, inducing media academics such as Henry Jenkins to highlight the active nature of the audience in the resulting new participatory communication culture. Finally, another means of interaction between communication and studies on consumption consists of the permeation of concepts and theories from communication studies into work that is explicitly rooted in consumer culture. For example, Celia Lury, faced with the notion of “brand” and its role in consumer culture, brought the centrality of communication and media environment to the center of the explanation of consumption processes. More generally, concepts, theories, and references belonging to the fragmented field of communication studies often have an ever greater role in the study of different forms of consumer culture and practices. Paolo Magaudda See also Audience Research; Broadcast Media; Content Analysis; Cultural Studies; Internet; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; Print Media; Semiotics

Companies as Consumers

Further Readings Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Carey, James. Communication as Culture. London: Routledge, 1989. Cooley, Charles. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York: Scribner, 1909. Fiske, John. Introduction to Communication Studies. London: Routledge, 1982. Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham, UK: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1998. Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1950. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Katz, Elihu, and Paul Lazarsfeld. Personal Influence. New York: Free Press, 1955. Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Morley, David. The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding. London: British Film Institute, 1980. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949. Silverstone, Roger, and Steve Hirsh. Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. London: Routledge, 1992.

COMPANIES

AS

CONSUMERS

This entry focuses on companies as buyers involving purchasing and related activities impacting on the supply side of firms. Purchasing and other activities influencing the supply side of companies are important in two respects. First, purchasing involves the operations necessary to supply a firm with its input in terms of materials, products, equipment, services, and so on. Efficiency and effectiveness in these processes are critical to the performance of the buying firm. Second, knowledge about the buying processes of a company is important to its

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suppliers. Such information supports ambitions of selling firms to influence potential buyers. Thus, the understanding of organizational buying behavior is a significant issue in the marketing literature. In this entry, attention is directed to the perspective of buying firms. What corporations buy is used in various ways. Some acquisitions are aimed at direct utilization or further processing in the operations of the company, for example, oil, pulp, steel plates, and such. Other items appear as identifiable parts of the buying company’s offerings to its customers. Some of these, such as the engine of a car or the processor of a computer, may be particularly significant to the functioning of the end product. These purchases are made on a continuous basis, which is also the case for items that are used in the manufacturing operations of the company, such as hand tools and fastenings. Other purchases are conducted on an irregular and less frequent basis, for example, large machinery and buildings. The variety in the nature of what is purchased calls for diversity in purchasing arrangements and supply strategies. In this discussion of corporations as buyers, the following issues are examined: the role of purchasing in the company, purchasing efficiency and the role of suppliers, frameworks for analysis of purchasing issues, and strategies for purchasing.

The Role of Purchasing in the Company Companies buy things to be used in their own operations. The purchasing department is therefore only one of the company functions involved in what is ongoing at the supply side. In many situations, the features of the purchased item are specified by the technical functions in the company. Both product development and production have considerable impact in this respect and may sometimes determine not only the specification of what to purchase but also from whom to buy. In decisions concerning what supplier to select, the viewpoints of other functions may be critical. The finance function will evaluate various alternatives in terms of price and financial stability. Logistics and quality give priority to suppliers depending on their capacity and reliability in delivery and supply consistency. In situations where the input is critical to the functioning of the products sold by the company, the marketing department will be influential in decisions concerning purchasing and supplier selection.

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Given the interdependencies between departments and their functions, the organization of the buying company impacts its activities at the supply side. There are two main organizational alternatives when it comes to the position of purchasing in the company: centralization and decentralization. Centralization makes it possible to concentrate the company’s resources for purchasing, primarily when it comes to human resources. The people involved in purchasing become specialized and are provided with accurate knowledge of available suppliers and their capabilities. The centralized purchasing department functions as a coordinator of the contacts between the buying company and its suppliers. The main drawback with a centralized organization is that purchasing is separated from the technical functions. The decentralized purchasing organization is the response to this problem. In these arrangements, purchasing is an integral part of the larger context with which it is associated. By being located in physical proximity to production and other functions, the individual purchaser will have more knowledge of the connection between what is purchased and how this is used. The main disadvantage with decentralized purchasing is that buyers will be less specialized and, in this respect, less professional. The buyer has to be a generalist with a broad competence area related to several functions and also to supplier markets of great diversity. The organization of purchasing has to reflect the organizational structure of the company as a whole, and so it would be impossible to have a centralized purchasing organization in a decentralized company. For long time, purchasing was considered mainly a clerical function, and a historical review claims that the purchasing department even in the 1970s was considered “not exactly a prestige position” (Morgan 1999, 73). Purchasing personnel processed procurement decisions that often were taken by other departments, such as production or top management. Igor Ansoff characterized purchasing as an administrative function rather than a strategic one. The increasing attention to outsourcing that started in the 1980s changed these conditions considerably. Outsourcing made it possible for a company to focus on the activities that are critical from a strategic point of view and for others to rely on suppliers with particular capabilities. Owing to these modifications, purchasing expenditures increased significantly, and for many companies, the costs of purchased goods

and services came to account for 60 to 70 percent of the total cost. The importance of suppliers is further accentuated by the fact that in many cases they serve as sources of technical competence and together these conditions have made purchasing a strategic function. The enhanced importance of the supply side affected not only the role and image of the purchasing departments; other modifications concern the view of efficient purchasing, the role of suppliers and the relationships with these.

Purchasing Efficiency and the Role of Suppliers Efficiency in purchasing can be considered from two perspectives. One point of view is to regard each purchase in isolation and make the best possible deal in this single transaction. According to this transactional view of efficiency, a buying firm should avoid becoming dependent on individual suppliers because such conditions constrain the buyer from “playing the market.” Moreover, independence from suppliers is supposed to encourage competition among them and also reduce the risks of becoming locked into the technology of a particular supplier. When the transactional view of efficiency is advocated, suppliers are considered exchangeable sources of standardized supplies. To be able to switch to another source when better conditions are available elsewhere, buying firms keep suppliers at arm’s-length distance and supplier evaluation is focused primarily on price. The transactional view of efficiency has its clear merits when it comes to isolated purchases of standardized offerings. However, for corporations as buyers, the situation is often quite different. A single purchase is normally part of a series of transactions over time, for example, a car assembler is continuously buying the same type of engine from its supplier over the lifetime of a specific model generation. Moreover, the individual purchase is only one of several others taking place at the same time, because the car assembler also needs bumpers, dashboards, and numerous other components and systems to supplement the engine. An alternative view of purchasing efficiency is, therefore, to consider the single purchasing decision in a context that is extended both in time and space. Promoting efficiency in a series of transactions over time requires the buying firm to abandon the view of supplier dependence as something that should be avoided. Joint action with suppliers in terms of product adaptations, technological

Companies as Consumers

collaboration, and logistics synchronization in terms of just-in-time deliveries are means of enhancing performance on the supply side. These cooperative efforts build on investments in relation to specific business partners. The role of these suppliers is significantly different from the role of those involved in transactional exchange. In this case, the supplier serves the buyer in a nonstandardized way, and both what is exchanged and the way it is exchanged may be tailor-made to specific requirements. Similar to other investments, the costs for these joint arrangements appear from the start, whereas the benefits materialize only over time. Therefore, high-involvement relationships tend to be long term, because switching to another supplier would turn the joint efforts into sunk costs and require investments in relation to a new source. In close relationships, the buyer is deliberately dependent on the supplier, because the benefits of collaboration cannot be obtained without dependence. At the same time, however, the supplier is dependent on the buyer owing to its own investments, making it a case of mutual dependence—or interdependence—in the relationship. Increasing involvement with suppliers is also a means to extend the view of efficiency in the space dimension, implying that a single purchase is one of several purchases at the same time. For example, at a construction site, numerous building materials and equipment are needed simultaneously. The main contractor could consider each purchase in isolation and turn to different suppliers to find the best deal. The alternative view of efficiency would suggest the contractor use a distributor to provide a whole package of these supplies at this construction site. An even more extended scope in the space dimension would be to use this distributor in a similar way at all the sites where this contractor is involved.

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uations a company should rely on vertical integration backward, and thus control its input within its ownership boundary—a strategic issue that will be further explored later in this entry. The second framework applied in the analysis of single purchases relates to models of rational decision making. Arjan van Weele describes the purchasing activities in these models as following a process from recognition of need, through specification of what to buy, locating potential vendors, and the evaluation of these. When the view of purchasing efficiency is extended, the scope of the framework must be adjusted as well. The focus on intraorganizational aspects, typical of TCA, has to be shifted to an interorganizational perspective where the involvement with suppliers is emphasized. Such a view will take the interaction between buyer and supplier and the business relationship between the two as the point of departure, as Richard Lamming found. However, what is going on in the relationship between two firms is considerably influenced by their relationships to other firms. The most obvious connections to the relationship between two parties are the customer’s customer and the supplier’s supplier. Including these firms and also companies further upstream and downstream provides a supply chain perspective on purchasing. Finally, not even supply chains appear in isolation. Efficiency and effectiveness in a particular supply chain is, to a large extent, dependent on how this chain is related to other chains. Analyzing the consequences of these connections requires a holistic perspective. Such a view is offered by Lars-Erik Gadde and Håkan Håkansson with the industrial network model and its analysis of business operations in three related dimensions: activities, resources, and actors, thus leading to a supply network perspective on purchasing.

Strategic Issues in Purchasing Frameworks for Analyzing Purchasing Issues The different perspectives on purchasing efficiency and the role of a supplier call for their specific theoretical models and analytical frameworks. With a focus on the single purchase, two particular approaches are emphasized. Models emanating from transaction cost analysis (TCA) make it possible to determine whether a single purchase is most efficiently undertaken by playing the market or developing a close relationship, according to Peter Kraljic. TCA also makes it possible to evaluate in what sit-

One of the first advocates of the strategic significance of purchasing was David Farmer, who criticized the passive role ascribed to the function at the time. Farmer claimed that any company that ignores potential supply strategies of a creative rather than a defensive nature is forgoing sources of efficiency and effectiveness. Over time, the importance of purchasing has been generally acknowledged, and this enhanced significance in turn called for strategies for handling purchasing, notes Björn Axelsson, Frank Rozemeijer, and Finn Wynstra. There is no general

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agreement about what specific aspects in purchasing and supply should be perceived strategic. The following discussion is based on three central issues: (1) what to purchase, (2) the involvement with individual suppliers, and (3) coping with the whole supplier base. The first issue—what to purchase—draws attention to a feature of corporations as consumers hitherto not touched on. In reality, corporations consume not only what they purchase; in their operations, they rely also on their own input, and so the question of whether to buy or to make what is needed has always been an important issue. Ambitions to strategically control input resources favor the make approach. On the other hand, investments in highly specialized resources may lock the firm into conditions that might become problematic as technology develops. Lacking in-house capacity and capabilities in comparison with those available from suppliers is another argument for outsourcing. The developments on the supply side mentioned earlier changed the nature of the make-buy decision. As long as critical resources were held internally, the decision whether to make or to buy could be changed from one year to another, since supplier contributions mainly concerned standardized input. When companies specialize and outsource to rely on the technological capabilities of suppliers, these decisions become more irreversible. This is because a main mission for the buying company is to focus on its core competence and thus to be able to avoid investments in knowledge related to what has been outsourced. The second strategic issue is concerned with the involvement with individual suppliers and thus the closeness of the relationship. With a lowinvolvement approach, the buying company escapes dependency on suppliers, which provides certain benefits as expressed earlier. On the other hand, high involvement is a prerequisite for gaining benefits potentially available from exploitation of suppliers’ resources. The benefits from a relationship can be enhanced through increasing involvement, thus making resource sharing and activity synchronization possible. However, these benefits are associated with increasing costs since high-involvement relationships are always resource demanding. The buying firm therefore has to carefully scrutinize what relationships to prioritize in terms of high involvement. Moreover, the outcome of these partnerships has to be continuously monitored to secure that the

resource input into a relationship is more than outweighed by benefits, since conditions for joint actions may change considerably over time. The third strategic issue concerns the configuration of the supplier base. Any supplier base shows significant variety in terms of relationship involvement. With some suppliers, the buying firm prefers an arm’s-length distance, since increasing involvement would not pay off, while other relationships are characterized by close proximity. The low-involvement approach normally leads to quite a large supplier base since ambitions to promote competition require a multiple sourcing strategy, implying that the buying firm relies on a number of suppliers for each item. The reorientation of purchasing considerably impacted on the view of the supply base. As claimed earlier, highinvolvement relationships are costly, and so companies have reduced the number of suppliers by turning to single sourcing. Moreover, the extended scope of purchasing decisions affects the features of the supplier base. By consolidating purchases of different items to one supplier, the buying firm can substantially reduce both its supplier handling costs and the number of transactions. Furthermore, the size of the supplier base has been reduced through a shift from component purchasing to system sourcing, meaning that a buying company, rather than sourcing five components from five suppliers, appoints one of these (or another company) to purchase the components and then assemble these and supply an integrated system.

Conclusion The exposé of corporations as buyers illustrates the strong interdependencies between the various aspects of purchasing arrangements and supply strategies. There are clear connections between the role of purchasing in the company, the view of efficient purchasing, the role of suppliers, and the relationships with these. Moreover, the standpoints taken in these respects will impact both on what analytical conceptualizations of purchasing are appropriate and the strategies for purchasing. The discussion of changes over time concerning these issues relates to the major reorientation on the supply side of companies during the late 1900s. However, these changes should not necessarily be seen as a definite trend for the future. To a large extent, these changes are explained by the overall strategy of companies to specialize and consequently outsource activities to suppliers. The strong reliance

Comparing Consumer Cultures

on outsourcing in the beginning of this decade makes it highly relevant to pose the question of whether outsourcing has been driven too far. In fact, there are clear indications of an overexploitation of outsourcing, and many companies therefore have turned their attention to insourcing. Such a shift will impact on the conditions at the supply side and modify current trends in purchasing arrangements. The historical review mentioned previously (Morgan 1999) shows that both the significance of purchasing and the arrangements at the supply side are characterized by variation over time, depending on general business conditions and the overall strategy of companies. Lars-Erik Gadde and Håkan Håkansson See also Consumer Demand; Cycles of Production and Consumption; Delocalization; Industrial Society; Innovation Studies; Markets and Marketing; Network Society; Outsourcing

Further Readings Ansoff, Igor. Corporate Strategy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. Axelsson, Björn, Frank Rozemeijer, and Finn Wynstra, eds. Developing Sourcing Capabilities: Creating Strategic Change in Purchasing and Supply Management. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2005. Christopher, Martin. Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Creating Value-Adding Networks. London: Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2005. Farmer, David. “Developing Purchasing Strategies.” Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management 14 (Fall 1978): 6–11. Gadde, Lars-Erik, and Håkan Håkansson. Supply Network Strategies. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2001. Kraljic, Peter. “Purchasing Must Become Supply Management.” Harvard Business Review 60, no. 5 (1982): 109–117. Lamming, Richard. Beyond Partnerships: Strategies for Innovation and Lean Supply. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Prentice Hall, 1993. Monczka, Robert, Robert Handfield, Larry Giuinipero, and James Patterson. Purchasing and Supply Chain Management. London: Cengage Learning, 2008. Morgan, Jim. “Purchasing at 100: Where It’s Been, Where It’s Headed.” Purchasing Magazine 11 (November, 1999): 72–94. Sheth, Jagdish. “A Model of Industrial Buyer Behavior.” Journal of Marketing 37, no. 4 (1973): 50–56. van Weele, Arjan. Purchasing and Supply Chain Management. London: Thomson Learning, 2005.

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COMPARING CONSUMER CULTURES Comparative accounts of consumer cultures represent attempts to contrast or compare consumer practices and behaviors across different national contexts. They can demonstrate global cultural patterns, such as Americanization, convergence, and differentiation, and reveal qualitative breadth in consumer cultures, past and present. The Americanization thesis holds that consumer culture is a phenomenon definitive to the United States, spreading through globalization processes, including mainstream and niche cultural channels as well as trade and international retailing. Similarly, convergence is the idea that these forces homogenize, so that societies increasingly resemble one another in a common consumer culture, usually implicitly based on Western Europe or the United States. Differentiation or diversification argues rather that cultural differences are more striking or persistent than similarities, due to national institutional arrangements and preexisting cultural values. While in some discussions consumer culture is taken to mean the varying extent to which societies demonstrate “consumerist” values, other discussions highlight qualitative differences in the kind of consumer culture that is found in different contexts. In addition to contributions to mainstream debates about globalization, studies comparing consumer cultures can complement analysis of economic and social conditions across countries and abstract indicators of well-being, such as growth and gross domestic product (GDP). Comparing consumer cultures may provide comparative information on the use of time, money, and leisure, illustrating differences in the performance of social practices and experience of daily life. A consumption-oriented perspective also connects geopolitical and socioeconomic trends relating to welfare and international trade with smaller-scale economic and sociological processes. Comparing consumer cultures, like the study of consumer culture, is relatively new, but relevant cross-national analysis of consumer behavior and retailing strategy date from the 1950s. Studies such as James B. Jefferys and Derek Knee’s (1962) Retailing in Europe: Present Structure and Future Trends and Robert Bartels’s (1963) Comparative Marketing: Wholesaling in Fifteen Countries reflect on the changing landscape of shopping in different societies, despite overtly focusing on production and distribution data. Early trends noted were the

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increasing size of shops and accompanying increases in retail sector work and consumption, the authors predicting that as sales made per person increase, so would consumption per head. In other words, consumerism booms with efficiency savings made in goods provisioning; especially when employment in retail becomes widespread. Comparative historical and sociocultural accounts of consumer culture date mainly from the 1990s onward and can be split roughly into three main types. Edited books containing geographically specific case studies of consumer culture are common, and many provide historical accounts of certain time periods as well as focusing on particular countries. These give a diverse and kaleidoscopic vision of consumer cultures and offer qualitative explorations of niche consumption practices or discuss formative stages in the development of consumerism. Examples include the focus on U.S. and Western European consumption in Getting and Spending (Strasser, McGovern, and Judt 1998) and, in the edited collection The Making of the Consumer (Trentmann 2006), the understanding of key moments and features of consumer cultures development across various countries is highlighted. Other collections, such as Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan’s (2006) The Ambivalent Consumer, offer comparisons within chapters. These books often make clear that consumer cultures are plural and multiform, with historical and geographical contingency rendered explicit through anthropological analysis of specific consumer groups and consumer goods. Peter Stearns (2006) notes that new cultural values are adopted, refined, and resisted in a combination of convergence and differentiation, distinct between and even within societies. Methods are most often qualitative, with archival research particularly common in historical accounts. As Susan Strasser and colleagues have noted, the overall impression becomes “not so much a separate field as a prism through which many aspects of social and political life may be viewed” (1998, 1). The potential for edited book collections on consumer cultures thus remains in drawing out some of the cultural and social processes rendered visible by closer analysis of consumption. Quantitative analyses typically compare more general aspects of consumer culture over a larger number of national contexts. These accounts use household spending data from sources such as Eurostat and Eurobarometer and time-use surveys

such as the Multinational Time Use Survey. Though limited by availability, data for a range of countries over several decades allow patterns in consumer behavior and time use to be identified. Works such as Jonathon Gershuny’s (2000) Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society provide good indications of broad intercontinental trends in consumer culture. Contribution toward convergence and differentiation debates can also feasibly be made. Göran Therborn (1995) shows that spending on food and housing decreases over time with respect to spending on recreation and culture across a large number of European countries. The identifying of this common trajectory supports a perceived cultural convergence, while closer analysis of time-use data alongside spending patterns show divergences in the detail of practices attributable to institutional differences, such as continuing disparities in time spent watching television between countries (Gronow and Southerton 2010). Jukka Gronow and Dale Southerton also find that individuals in more affluent countries participate in more varied leisure activities than those in less affluent countries. In sum, comparative studies based on large social surveys are good for understanding general similarities and differences between countries and for identifying different typologies of consumer cultures. A third form of comparing consumer cultures combines the depth of qualitative snapshots of consumer culture with the range and power of quantitative studies. These book-length comparative analyses tend to focus on particular social practices in consumer societies (for trust in food, for example, see Kjaernes, Harvey, and Warde 2007). They use a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data to offer substantial interpretation and discussion of trends across different countries. Such work relies on teams of researchers and, methodologically, tends to draw on new or existing survey data in conjunction with focus groups or qualitative interviewing. Global perspectives on consumer culture have led to a questioning of some common assumptions. In particular, the convention of taking the United States as the historical birthplace and definitive iteration of consumerism contradicts findings from both historians and cultural analysts. The development of consumer culture stems from colonialist trade and the consumption of these goods by early Western European aristocracy. Important consumer institutions, such as the chain and department store,

Confectionery

originated in the United Kingdom and France and in the 1790s and 1830s, respectively. Peter N. Stearns (2006) estimates that the influence of American consumer culture only began to influence Western Europe, rather than the other way around, from the 1880s onward. The development of mass consumption, however, as demonstrated by penetration rates of significant consumer durables, such as the radio, car, and television, occurs most distinctly in the United States (Therborn 1995). These devices, argues Therborn, foster cultural changes, such as “the walled-off individual/family rather than the collective circle and public dialogue” (145), while Colin Campbell (1987) traces the roots of this perceived individualism back to Enlightenment ideas about material progress and a new sense of self brought about by the Romantic ethic. The point is not to favor one or the other, but to recognize the contingency of both Europe and the United States in the development of the consumer. Acknowledging this common bias and pointing out American exceptionalism, Garon and Maclachlan’s The Ambivalent Consumer takes Japan as the reference point in an excellent analysis of East Asian consumption. It is perhaps in approaching new environmental and political imperatives where the comparison of consumer cultures has the most potential. Decreasing political accountability in many countries due to globalizing trade and the deregulation and the neoliberal privatization of much business is said to spur new forms of consumerist resistance (Harrison, Newholm, and Shaw 2005). These include boycotts and other forms of critical consumerism, such as fair trade and culture jamming, and cross-national analysis of such movements offers clues to understanding how to engage and mobilize citizen consumers. Consumption, meanwhile, is identified by governments as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as central to problems of sustainability, not least in the incompatibility of production-linked growth to cutting energy usage and carbon pollution. Analysis of consumer behavior, roles, and responsibility with regard to these agendas is ongoing, and future work should continue to reflect their global nature. Luke Yates See also Americanization; Consumer Expenditure Surveys; Consumption and Time Use; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Globalization;

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Inequalities; McDonaldization; Political and Ethical Consumption

Further Readings Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Gronow, Jukka, and Dale Southerton. “Leisure and Consumption in Europe.” In Handbook of European Societies, edited by Stefan Immerfall and Göran Therborn, 355–384. New York: Springer, 2010. Harrison, Rob, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw. The Ethical Consumer. London: Sage, 2005. Kjaernes, Unni, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde. Trust in Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Stearns, Peter N. Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire. New York: Routledge, 2006. Strasser, Susan, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt, eds. Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Therborn, Göran. European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000. London: Sage, 1995. Trentmann, Frank. The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

CONFECTIONERY Confectionery is the generic term for all foods composed mainly of sugar. While its history is connected closely to the process of industrialization and nineteenth-century changes in taste, the history of sugar and sweetness began much earlier. Sugar—in the sense we are familiar with today—goes back to the early Middle Ages and the Arab occupation of Spain (700–1492). “Sugar,” says the most prominent sugar historian, Sidney W. Mintz, “followed Koran” (1985, 25). Looking at the history of the Americas, it is also true to say “sugar followed Christianity,” because it was the Christian conquerors who first introduced sugar plants to the continent in the early sixteenth century. Up until the nineteenth century, world sugar consumption depended on growing sugar on plantations; and this was combined mostly with exploitation, child and slave labor, and a worldwide division of labor. Sugarcane plantations in, for

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example, Brazil or the Caribbean produced only the raw sugar that was then shipped to the metropoles. These not only held the monopoly on refining sugar but also constructed and delivered all the necessary machines and instruments for the production of sugar. The only colonies that refined sugar and distilled rum for themselves were the English ones in North America—perhaps a first hint of their move toward independence. In early modern times, sugar was a luxury good. It entered the tastes and recipe books of the rich during the sixteenth century. At this time, its main use was not for the production of confectionery, but as a spice or preservative. Sugar was also a main component of medicine: sugar sweetened otherwise bitter pills and liquids. The etymology of confectionery traces back to the Latin word confectionaris originally used to designate a pharmacist. Sugar was not the only sweetener during that epoch. The common people obtained their sweet flavors from fruit or honey. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, sugar consumption had already increased dramatically and reached thirteen pounds per capita in Great Britain. The triumphal procession of sugar and confectionery through the nineteenth century was accompanied by other profound changes in diet and taste, and it is connected to the history of chocolate and cocoa. Cocoa entered Europe as a luxury drink when Hernán Cortés brought it back from the Aztec Empire. However, it only met European tastes when mixed with sugar or other ingredients. In early modern times, cocoa became increasingly prominent as a luxury drink at the European courts. Due to its nutritional value, it also gained popularity among ordinary people as a medical treatment. Chocolate for eating instead of drinking was a product of the early nineteenth century. Napoleon’s continental blockade of England in 1806 interrupted the distribution of raw cane sugar from the colonies. Continental manufacturers started to invest in extracting sugar from sugar beets— something that had not been profitable before. This was the time in which a new professional group started to play an important role in the processing of modern food: the food chemists. They were the ones who defined national standards for chocolate and other confectionery at the end of the nineteenth century. Solid chocolate only became possible through a conjunction of technical innovations, changing standards of nutrition, the birth of food chemistry, and an

army of female workers. As sugar became cheaper, small confectioners sold sweetmeats for a local market. However, due to the small profit margin in the candy business, larger businesses took over control of the regional supply. The production of chocolate was more interesting for them, because it required extensive investment in equipment. This rapidly forced small businesses out of the market. It was probably the Dutchman Coenraad Johannes von Houten who first introduced two new procedures into chocolate production: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a hydraulic press to help reduce the fat in cocoa by 50 percent through extracting the valuable cocoa butter; and, some decades later, so-called alkalization. Both innovations helped to make cocoa more soluble and easy to digest. The Englishmen Joseph S. Fry, who took over his mother Anna’s chocolate firm, did not just mix the pulverized cocoa beans with sugar, but he also put back the cocoa butter that had been extracted. He then pressed the viscous substance and formed slabs of chocolate. It was the invention of new machinery (to perform conching) and new procedures (mixing with pulverized condensed milk) that made chocolate what it still is today: a mixture of cocoa, sugar, milk, potash for alkalization, and different spices. During the nineteenth century, consumer markets changed profoundly. Sugar and sweetmeats became ubiquitous—and not just as providers of quick energy and cheap calories for industrial workers. “Sweetness” developed from characterizing a certain (nonbitter) taste into a personal attribution of children and middle-class female consumers. These newly constructed “sweet” consumers became the main target group of confectionery. The leading British confectioner, Cadbury Brothers, was the first to emphasize the connection between boxes of chocolate and romance. Chocolate, however, went on to conquer further consumers: it was sold to armies and distributed to soldiers to boost their energy in emergencies. Most European chocolate businesses— family enterprises such as Cadbury, Rowntree’s, Suchard, Lindt, Stollwerck, and many others—made their biggest profits during wartime. Even though many family enterprises retained their independence up until the late-twentieth century, very few parent companies still dominate the market today. The confectionery industry registers its strongest growth in profits through functional food—a development that can be traced back to the early history of sugar as a medicine. Nonetheless, the bitter

Conspicuous Consumption

taste of chocolate still accompanies sweet products today: it remains a product of inhuman labor conditions on cocoa plantations. Angelika Epple See also Colonialism; Dieting; Food Consumption; History; Innovation Studies; Luxury and Luxuries; Obesity; Sugar

Further Readings Fitzgerald, Robert. Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution, 1862–1969. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. MacLeod, Murdo J. “Cacao.” In The Cambridge World History of Food, edited by Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, 635–641. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985. Mintz, Sidney W. “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness.” In Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 357–369. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik. The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. 2nd ed. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006. Woloson, Wendy A. Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in 19th Century America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION Conspicuous consumption is the use of commodities and possessions to display and demonstrate financial and social standing. The concept of conspicuous consumption was coined, theorized, and popularized by Thorstein Veblen. An economist, sociologist, and a pioneer in the study of consumption, Veblen was a key figure in the development of sociology in America. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899/1970) is his treatise on the effects and influence social and cultural change has on economic changes in society. In this work, Veblen demonstrates the increasing importance of money as a means to rank people, and as a measure of social standing. One of the first major contributions to the literature on consumption, this book provides the classical sociological account and analysis of conspicuous

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consumption. Veblen developed an important concept by drawing attention to the role consumption plays as the key way of gaining and indicating social status in modern societies. Veblen shows how rare, expensive, and highly visible commodities are acquired for their social and cultural value, rather than for useful purposes, and how they are a means by which elite social groups mark their existence and privilege to other groupings. His focus was the emergent American nouveaux riches of the late-nineteenth century. This new social group of newly rich individuals was an element of the upper classes, who Veblen famously called the “leisure class.” This social group publicly demonstrated their status through the use of consumer goods in leisure practices and also practiced a conspicuous absence from all useful employment, in other words they engaged in “conspicuous leisure.” Leisure here is not laziness or indolence, instead, what it refers to is time that is consumed nonproductively. This enables the leisure classes to demonstrate their financial ability to afford a life of idleness, and reflects their belief in the “unworthiness” of productive work. The “conspicuous abstention from labor therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability” (Veblen in Lerner 1948/1975, 86). However, for conspicuous consumption and leisure to be effective, there needs to be an excessive consumption of resources and an explicit display of waste and wastefulness, one that requires an individual to have a circle of others around himself or herself to consume this excess vicariously. These individuals, family, friends, servants, or competitors, act as vehicles through which to display prodigious wastefulness. As Stephen Edgell has noted, there are three key factors that contribute to conspicuous consumption. First, there is cost or conspicuous expense. Second, there is the abstention from productive work, or what Veblen calls conspicuous leisure. Third, there is the extravagant consumption of resources, or what can be termed conspicuous waste. In short, conspicuous consumption can be characterized as the conspicuous consumption of money, time, and resources. In outlining his theory of conspicuous consumption, Veblen notes that in every society there are two types of economic activity, that which involves “workmanship” or “serviceability,” and consequently enhances material life, and that which involves “predation” or which exploits and enhances social repute.

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With regard to the production of goods and services, this dualism leads Veblen to identify two types of work, industrial and nonindustrial occupations, and two types of commodities, useful and wasteful. Useful commodities are vital to sustain human life, whereas wasteful commodities are crucial to sustaining social status and social standing. Veblen argues that in the early stages of the economic evolution of societies, the differentiation of production and consumption in terms of useful and wasteful activities reflects gender divisions in society, with women dominant in serviceable activities, and men in predatory ones. However, in the later stages of economic development, this differentiation begins to reflect class divisions too, as the lower classes concentrate on useful activities, whereas the upper classes dedicate themselves to wasteful activities. Veblen suggests that in economically abundant modern societies, there is a heightened competition for social status, and the key means of indicating social standing is financial or pecuniary. This takes the form of the conspicuous consumption of goods and services directly or vicariously: “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure” (Veblen in Lerner 1948/1975, 117). Reputation is associated with appearances, and people seek to outwardly show their wealth through the possession and display of items that are expensive and valuable. This is found first among the upper classes but it then spreads to all classes in modern societies; Veblen called this process “emulation.” Veblen saw social hierarchy as a continuum from rich to poor, with the subordinate classes tending to emulate, assimilate, or take on the traits, practices, behavior, and values of the rich, or the leisure class. Veblen argues that in communities dominated by workmanship, emulation is of an industrial kind, and not very pronounced, but in societies where predation dominates, emulation is financial and is more marked. Hence, displays of “good” taste (as represented by the purchase of costly and prestigious items) are copied, as those lower down the social hierarchy adopt the consumption patterns of the social upper classes. This is sometimes called the “trickle-down effect,” as it captures how the practices and preferences of the elite can trickle down to other social groupings. The higher social groupings, however, continually update their consumer patterns to distinguish

themselves from those further down the social ladder. Implicit within this theory is the belief that there is a degree of agreement over which items are desirable and prestigious in society. Veblen uses the example of expenditure on clothing and fashion as an illustration of the key characteristics of conspicuous consumption, such as emulation, wastefulness, and evidencing one’s pecuniary standing and repute. He considers “dress” a particularly apt example because it is always in evidence, and can indicate financial standing to everyone at a first look. A feature of fashion is the rapid and continual changing of styles, and Veblen suggests that an elite group can mark itself off from neighboring classes by wearing dress that is seen as stylish and distinctive. The fashions of the elite will then trickle down to, or be emulated by, the other classes. When other classes copy these fashions, the elite will adopt a new one to ensure their distinctiveness from those lower down the social hierarchy. As Edgell has highlighted, Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption has been subject to a deal of criticism, in particular for having limited historical relevance, lacking currency, and also contemporary applicability. Furthermore, it has also been suggested that the theory is oversimplified, incomplete, and that in Veblen’s conceptualization, there is a lack of attention to the role that pleasure plays in consumption. Colin Campbell has drawn attention to the lack of clarity in Veblen’s theorization of the concept and points to the difficulties in empirically researching conspicuous consumption, especially as it is something that people may be unwilling to admit to engaging in. Yet, the concept of conspicuous consumption is still cited and deployed in a range of academic contexts, to explain and inform our understanding of consumer culture and the consumption of various goods and services, from food and schooling to fashion and tourism. In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu’s landmark study of class and cultural consumption in France in the 1960s, there is an emphasis on economic and cultural capital and on the display of taste as a means of classifying social groups, ideas that seem to have drawn on Veblen’s insights. Veblen has shown how commodities were mobilized by the American leisure classes to demonstrate social distinction and rank, and he identifies a complex and elaborate social hierarchy based around consumer patterns and choices, one that is still resonant today. Although Veblen’s identification of the social and

Consumer Anxiety

cultural significance of consumption is something that contemporary scholars of consumer culture take for granted, when he first outlined it, more than a hundred years ago, he was breaking a path for the developing sociology of consumption and consumer culture to follow. Gaynor Bagnall See also Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Fashion; Leisure; Lifestyle; Positional Goods; Social Distinction; Status; Taste

Further Readings Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Campbell, Colin. “Conspicuous Confusion: A Critique of Veblen’s Theory of Conspicuous Consumption.” Sociological Theory 13 (1995): 37–47. Edgell, Stephen. “Veblen’s Theory of Conspicuous Consumption after 100 Years.” History of Economic Ideas 7, no. 3 (1999): 99–125. Edgell, Stephen. Veblen in Perspective: His Life and Thought. New York: M. E. Sharp, 2001. Lerner, Max, ed. The Portable Veblen. New York: Viking, 1975. First published 1948. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Unwin, 1970. First published 1899.

CONSUMER ANXIETY Consumer anxiety refers to the theory that personal consumption can sometimes provoke anxiety for an individual because of the perception that others will judge his or her consumption choices negatively. The existence of consumer anxiety is premised on the concern that one’s publicly visible and personally identifiable consumer practices, such as styles of dress, adornment, hairstyles, or living spaces, are open to judgment by others. While the theory rests on processes of judgment or evaluation in the context of individual and group interactions, it also unites the visual, aesthetic, and moral dimensions of social life. The possibility of consumer anxiety is also a reflection of larger scale, background, cultural processes. From a theoretical perspective, the essence of the theory is that in consumer societies, the proliferation of consumer choice leads to uncertainty about the

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nature of a socially correct choice and the related fear that others may negatively judge an individual on the basis of the consumer choices he or she makes. The thematic core of the theory can be found in a variety of key texts in classical and contemporary theories on social change, consumption, and lifestyle, and especially in the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens. The concept was brought to recent prominence as a contemporary problem in consumption studies in a key article by Alan Warde and an empirical follow-up by Ian Woodward. Within business and marketing studies, the existence of risk as an element of consumer behavior has been acknowledged for somewhat longer, though in this field it is more frequently conceptualized through psychological models of behavior (Taylor 1974; Bauer 1960). The existence of consumer anxiety is a result of the interplay of both social and individual processes. According to the theory, consumption can be a type of social risk, whereby one’s social status may be challenged or eroded because of negative judgments others make about the things one consumes or the way one consumers them. These negative judgments may also lead to relatively minor or transient types of psychological pain, such as self-doubt, loss of selfesteem, or embarrassment. For example, individuals may be sanctioned because they are judged as wearing the wrong color to a particular social setting, such as a funeral, or because they show too much of their body relative to what might be considered generally appropriate in certain social settings. Consumer anxiety may also arise from the economic implications of one’s consumption habits, such as personal overspending, or from the morally evaluated dimensions of one’s personal consumption, such as perceived greed, or the environmental consequences of personal consumption choices. Within the domain of consumption, which is to some degree based on matters of aesthetics, personal taste, knowledge, and expertise and skills of judgment, it is possible to identify how anxiety could come to be played out in a range of fields of consumption. Consumption choices, styles, and possible tastes have multiplied exponentially and change their characteristics and meanings rapidly to the extent that keeping up is difficult. On the face of it, there are few authorities to consult on such choices that can be seen by individuals, after all, as matters of individual taste. In this context, it is worth revisiting Bauman’s observation on the dilemma associated

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with freedom in postmodernity as it perfectly captures the uncertainties individuals may face in relation to such choices—“It means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything and the mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it” (Bauman 1992, vii). In what might be thought of as the structural elucidation of the theory of consumer anxiety, Warde argues that consumption choices can be problematic, risky, or anxiety provoking, though this will depend on social context, the relative cultural authority of the person who is selecting and consuming the good, and the degree of importance the person invests in his or her own and others’ perception of personal consumption choices. Warde’s analysis offers a social-structural theoretical model of the processes and forces that may shape potentially risky consumption selections. The theoretical groundwork for his model is articulated in the writings of Bauman, Ulrich Beck, and Giddens, in the tradition of British and European postmodern social change literature of the 1980s and 1990s. Structural variants of the theory, such as Warde’s, embed consumer anxiety within larger discourses on the existence of uncertainties in the contemporary era and highlight the ways anxiety and larger contexts such as risk, uncertainty, and threat have been a dominant thread in recent theories of social change. For this structural model of consumption anxiety, the institutional reasons for such feelings of doubt and uncertainty are fundamentally congruous, resting on a thesis concerning the dissolution of the importance of traditional institutional influence on cultural life and an associated intensification in the importance and weight given to individual responsibility and biography in assembling social identities. Both of these processes—increased personal responsibility and choice and the diminished role of authority in social relations—accord consumption greater weight in constructing identity, but also make it a domain of risk. Based on an appropriation of the Durkheimian typology of suicide, Warde goes on to argue that for those who are predisposed to experience anxiety, adequate “insurance” is generally found by investments in specialist bodies of knowledge that assist in dampening perceptions of danger and providing expert justifications for aesthetic choice; for example, advertising, peer groups, and magazines. On the other hand, there are those who feel no such anxieties, are relatively disengaged from the game of status

and identity-driven consumption, and are seen to have little personal interest invested in their choices. This group, less invested in the external evaluation of their choices and more independent of status games, is less likely to experience anxiety. Woodward proposes a social performance perspective on consumer anxiety. He argues that it is only in the space of social performance that anxiety can surface, whereby an actor’s taste credentials—his or her degree of knowledge, competence, or aesthetic skill—comes into question. Using social performance theory, Woodward argues that there must be an aesthetic fusion between the material and discursive; a coming together of actors, objects, scripts, and audience where consumption performances are experienced as convincing or authentic by the participant. But, alongside any performance is contingency and open-endedness, where scripts or narratives can break down or go awry and lose their communicative efficacy. It is in the process of displaying the veracity or finesse of one’s aesthetic choices that anxieties or uncertainties about one’s performative mastery of various consumption scripts and props can surface. He also points to the existence of different types of anxiety, premised on whether apparent anxieties relate to external factors, such as social status, or internal factors, such as self-identity. Anxiety is an important subject in consumption studies. One theory is that certain social fractions are more prone to experience anxiety as an element of their consumption style, and that this is, in fact, one important element driving their high levels of ongoing discretionary, “expressive” expenditure. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, vividly illustrates the possibility that anxieties afflict social fractions differentially in his dissection of the consumption patterns of the petite bourgeoisie class. He suggests that the petite bourgeoisie have an obsession with stockpiling cultural symbols, identify culture with mere knowledge, and adopt a strategy of overearnest cultivation. He says that the petit bourgeoisie are caught in an “anxious quest for authorities and models of conduct” (1984, 331), whose fatal cultural move is to combine a hunger for consuming with anxiety to demonstrate their competence. Alternatively, another possibility is that certain anxieties underpin all consumption acts, irrespective of social class or background. That is, acquisitiveness as a cultural practice may be associated with a form of anxiety—what has been called “the consuming desire of consuming” (Bauman 2001, 13).

Consumer Apathy

Consumer societies thus very rarely satisfy needs, and if they do, it is often only temporarily. In fact, through their constant rejuvenation of fashion, style, and wants, consumer society actually multiplies scarcities, and as a result, it also multiplies anxieties through the stimulation of continuously unfolding desires. Ian Woodward See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Consumer Society; Individualization; Lifestyle; Postmodernism; Risk Society; Social Distinction; Taste

Further Readings Bauer, R. A. “Consumer Behaviour as Risk Taking.” In Dynamic Marketing for a Changing World, edited by Robert S. Hancock, 389–398. Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1960. Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1988. Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London; Routledge, 1992. Bauman, Zygmunt. “Consuming Life.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1, no. 1 (2001): 9–29. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Taylor, James W. “The Role of Risk in Consumer Behavior.” Journal of Marketing 38 (April 1974): 54–60. Warde, Alan. “Consumption, Identity-Formation and Uncertainty.” Sociology 28, no. 4 (1994): 877–898. Woodward, Ian. “Investigating the Consumption Anxiety Thesis: Aesthetic Choice, Narrativisation and Social Performance.” The Sociological Review 54, no. 2 (2006): 263–282.

CONSUMER APATHY There are two senses in which the consumption activity of individuals tends to be described as apathetic. The term consumer apathy is sometimes used in marketing studies and financial journalism to classify certain forms of consumption decision making that result in consumers failing to respond to marketing messages. More generally, notions of consumer apathy are invoked in the context of political and ethical critiques of consumer culture, especially those discussing barriers to change in the nature of contemporary consumption in the developed world.

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As an occasionally invoked marketing term, consumer apathy is used in a contestably apolitical manner to describe the tendency of consumers to resist changing from one product or brand to another. Similarly, consumers might be described as apathetic if they eschew particular forms of consumption activity (such as online shopping) or refuse to purchase certain products or brands for reasons of unfamiliarity, suspicion, or “laziness.” Used in this manner, consumer apathy merely describes, albeit in pejorative language, a key aspect of consumer behavior: our tendency to consume habitually in the sense of becoming comfortable with known products, brands, and ways of shopping. For marketers, this presents as a problematic of consumer complacency in which the adoption by individuals of new products or new ways of consuming is undercut either by their consumption habits or by a consumer malaise whereby individuals feel overwhelmed by consumer choice and marketing messages and thus stick to familiar consumption practices. Beyond the realm of marketing there is a much more widespread concern with consumer apathy in contemporary critical literature on consumer culture and among activists and advocates involved in movements for sustainability and responsible consumption. Here, apathy is once again understood as a complacency by individual consumers (and by consuming populations) toward change and alternative action. However, this is interpreted as a political and ethical complacency driven by a refusal to accept and/or act on the need for personal and social change in what and how much is consumed, particularly in wealthy nations. Western citizens, it is argued, routinely fail to “consume with care” despite living in a world where levels of consumption far exceed what is environmentally sustainable and where rich world populations enjoy grossly unequal access to the global production of consumer goods and services. Contemporary consumption critics and activists identify three key aspects of responsible and sustainable consumption. First, consuming sustainably expresses an ethic of care toward the natural environment; an environment that provides the resources consumed now and in the future and that must accommodate consumer waste. Second, consuming responsibly engages with the local and global ethics of market exchange by recognizing the need for fair terms of trade between developed and developing nations, the importance of maintaining

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local, small-scale economies, and the imperative to guarantee equal access of people globally to the goods and resources necessary for a flourishing life. Finally, critics argue that we must also attend to the social and cultural implications of uncontrolled levels of consumption, insisting that consumeristic attitudes and behaviors undermine social cohesion by privileging a consumption-based individualism and valorizing material greed. Clearly, a consumer apathy can be said to be present only at the point where individuals are aware of and concede (or at least partially concede) these and other potential environmental, global, and social implications of their consumption behavior but disregard or avoid the imperative for personal change. There is some empirical evidence to suggest a generalized disjunction between an awareness of the impacts of consumption on the one hand and people’s everyday consumption decisions on the other. Surveys in a range of wealthy nations, for example, have indicated a relatively high public awareness of and belief in the probable environmental and ethical implications of personal and household consumption. Nevertheless, this high awareness tends not to translate into actual buying behavior. Most individuals continue to opt for cheapness and ease of purchase and use over and above explicit political or ethical considerations in their consumption decisions. This is true both in terms of the purchase of material goods and the use of energy resources. Similarly, while ethical products (such as free-range eggs), fair exchange goods (such as fair trade tea and coffee), and sustainable items (such as recycled paper) are now a routine presence on supermarket shelves in countries such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere, such goods have usually captured only a small share of their respective product markets. Thus, even when presented with alternative consumption possibilities, only a minority of Western citizens seem to opt for these alternatives. Given this evidence, it would appear that political apathy (and a level of hypocrisy) certainly goes some way to explaining why individuals may at the same time be aware of and even accept arguments for consumer change but fail to translate this into everyday consumer practices. Nevertheless, any simple designation of consumers as apathetic by those advocating change is of limited analytical use. Though contemporary critics might lament a trend toward consumer apathy, they have more vigorously identified deeper

sociological factors underlying globally dominant forms of consumption. An influential and accessible body of contemporary social critique has reemphasized socialization and emulation as the drivers of first-world “hyperconsumerism.” Far from being merely apathetic, critics argue, the consciousness of first-world citizens has been resoundingly shaped by a culture of marketing and consumerism. As a result, individuals are addicted to the competitive pursuit of social status and personal identity through material acquisition. This return to manipulationist explanation has, however, been conjoined with a more optimistic identification of a groundswell of resistance to the consumerization of life. An increasing proportion of Western “consumers,” critics insist, are seeking alternatives rather than sinking into apathy, a fact that is demonstrated by the number of Western citizens who opt to “downshift” (that is, voluntarily earn and consume less). In a somewhat different vein, the ideology of individualism implicit in the charge of consumer apathy has been contested by others. One of the central criticisms made of calls for sustainable and responsible consumption is that they often reduce a politics of change to individual political will. In the process, what is interpreted as consumer apathy may in fact speak of the systemic constraints placed on people, particularly through low income and inflexible systems of provision, to transform their consumption practices. Notions of consumer apathy are implicitly contested also in contemporary scholarship on the dynamics of consumption. Recently, scholars have sought to understand consumption decisions and the maintenance of cultures of consumption by variously emphasizing the social, technological, emotional, and phenomenological context of material practices. Rather than reduce consumption decisions to a question of straightforward manipulation, emulation, or socialization, emphasis has been placed on comprehending the emotional and psychophysical importance of objects in people’s lives, as well as the manner in which much consumption activity is systemically bound up with changing social conventions and customs, as well as constant technological innovation. This does not negate calls for change in the nature of commodity use or deny the role of individuals in consuming differently. Rather, it grapples with the complexity of factors underlying our attitudes and actions toward the material world and renders

Consumer Behavior

the process of change collective and structural rather than principally a product of individual behavior. Although consumers, particularly in wealthy nations, thus remain open to the charge of political and ethical complacency, a politics of consumption that rests on the conventional dualism of individual action versus apathy remains interpretatively limited in comprehending how consumption might be transformed. Kim Humphery See also Affluent Society; Alienation; Citizenship; Consumer Anxiety; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Fair Trade; Political and Ethical Consumption

Further Readings Dant, Tim. Materiality and Society. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2005. De Graaf, John, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor. Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2001. Harrison, Rob, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw, eds. The Ethical Consumer. London: Sage, 2005. Humphery, Kim. Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Princen, Thomas, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, eds. Confronting Consumption. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. Shove, Elizabeth. Cleanliness, Comfort and Convenience: The Social Organisation of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR Consumer behavior is a field of study that generally falls under the umbrella of marketing and is associated with consumer research. Consumer behavior is defined as being concerned with “individuals or groups acquiring, using and disposing of products, services, ideas or experiences” (Arnould, Price, and Zinkhan 2002, 5) and as “the study of the processes involved when individuals or groups select, purchase, use or dispose of products, services, ideas or experiences to satisfy wants and needs” (Solomon et al. 2006, 6). Consumer behavior can be regarded as

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having evolved from buyer behavior and a concern with rational buyer decision making, often typified by an interest in cognition, affect, and behavior. The shift in title from “buyer” to “consumer” often represents a broadening of interest beyond constituting the subject as prospective buyer of interest to profitmotivated marketing managers, toward a more general concern with what the consumer might be and how he or she engages with and is engaged by community and context. Hence, the study of consumer behavior is increasingly interdisciplinary and draws from a broad range of social sciences, including economics, anthropology, culture studies, media studies, sociology, as well as literary theory, art history, and philosophy. A foundational framework within consumer behavior is the so-called C-A-B model, which is the process-flow from cognition to affect to behavior; a model that aids variable analysis toward the object of predicting buyer behavior (Howard and Sheth 1969). An influential iteration of this core model is Gary Armstrong and Philip Kotler’s buyer decision process, which charts the flow of rational buyers as they move from need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and ultimately postpurchase evaluation. Other influential studies within this general body of research include the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986), which adjusts the C-A-B model to note that consumers’ antecedent level of involvement (the degree of past involvement in product information) will mediate their likelihood of engaging with product information, and also the servicescape model (Bitner 1992), which updates the C-A-B model to include insights from environmental psychology, such as the mediational influence of tangible cues like store layout and intangible cues like background music. A criticism of such a theoretical approach is that it tends to portray consumers as passive individuals who simply respond to environmental forces that operate largely beyond their control and implies that the predictive mechanics of purchase decisions are somehow made in isolation from a social world. In addition, that consumer behavior may not always be an entirely rational affair that can be predicted and explained by positivistic models, which was argued by Morris B. Holbrook and Elizabeth C. Hirschman, who called for a more experientialist understanding of hedonic (e.g., pleasurable) consumer behavior (refers to the richness of the consumption experience

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and the fantasies, feelings, and fun often contained therein). This approach, coupled with a contemporary interest in importing insights from humanities and anthropology, may be regarded as contributing to a shift in the study of consumer behavior beyond positivistic concerns, a shift acerbated by the growing influence of postmodern theory in the mid-1990s, an increased sensitivity of critical perspectives, and a convergence of interest in studying consumption with other subject areas outside of marketing. An iconic work that has led the way in respect to studying consumers in their everyday environments was the so-called consumer behavior odyssey embarked on by Russell Belk and others in 1986. Over twenty consumer researchers conducted qualitative research as they traveled between the East and West U.S. coast in a giant recreational vehicle. This epic adventure ambitiously sought fresh ways of acquiring knowledge about the nature and experiences of consumer behavior and did so in rich contexts from which to generate new theories about the following: marketplace interactions and brand communities, the power of the past in terms of memories and collections, the consumption patterns of upper-middle-class females, and the secularization and sacralization processes at work in contemporary society. The odyssey might be regarded as revolutionary in that it broke boundaries and stimulated substantive theoretical insights through the use of innovative research methods and was an empirical rejection of narrow managerial concerns; a methodological rejection of quantitative, experimental, and sample-based studies; a metaphorical rejection of information-processing, cognitive-affect-behavior modeling paradigms; and a rhetorical pioneering of new forms of research representation, including photos and films. A further seminal inquiry into the multidynamism of consumption was presented by Douglas Holt’s typology, which he derived from a longitudinal study of baseball spectators in Chicago. Further to the hedonic categorization of consumption as a rich site of experiencing fantasies, feelings, and fun, Holt noted that consumption could also be a form of integration as consumers manipulate the meaning of objects and use these objects to classify themselves and others. Studies such as the consumer behavior odyssey and Holt’s typology of consumer behavior in addition to the general influence of poststructuralist and multidisciplinary approaches have created space within consumer behavior for investigating cultural components

that provide rich accounts of the lived experiences that regularly define consumption. This cultural perspective shifts the focus from a narrow concern with purchasing acts toward broader conceptualizations of the experiences embodied in consumer behavior. Consequentially, a series of alternative methodologies were developed and imported from other disciplines and these have included introspection, ethnography, as well as methods developed within literary theory. As the subject area evolves, there is increased interest in sociocultural, experiential, and symbolic aspects of consumption as well as the complex dynamics among consumer identity projects, popular culture, marketplace structures, emergent sociohistoric patterning of consumption, and marketplace ideologies (Arnould and Thompson 2005). Crucially, this body of work is decreasingly concerned with developing research purposeful for marketing practice and increasingly in conversation with related subject areas, as evidenced by the output of such interdisciplinary journals as Journal of Consumer Culture and Consumption, Markets & Culture. An implication of the postmodern turn within consumer behavior in addition to the development of interest in areas such as consumer tribes is a growing recognition of how consumption activities can also be productive. Hence, just as the subject area evolved beyond its previous name of buyer behavior, Fuat Fırat and Nikhilesh Dholakia speculate that the term consumer behavior might well be redundant and a new terminology required. Alan Bradshaw See also Advertising; Bounded Rationality; Cognitive Structures; Desire; Markets and Marketing; Methods of Market Research; Psychology; Theory of Planned Behavior

Further Readings Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An Introduction. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. Arnould, Eric, Linda Price, and George Zinkhan. Consumers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. Arnould, Eric, and Craig J. Thompson. “Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (March 2005): 868–882. Belk, Russell. Highways and Buyways: Naturalistic Research from the Consumer Behavior Odyssey. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 1991.

Consumer (Freedom of) Choice Bitner, Mary Jo. “Servicescapes: The Impact of Physical Surroundings on Customers and Employees.” Journal of Marketing 56 (April 1992): 57–71. Firat, Fuat, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. Consuming People: From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption. New York: Routledge, 1998. Hirschman, E. C. “Ideology in Consumer Research, 1980– 1990: A Marxist and Feminist Critique.” Journal of Consumer Research 19 (March 1993): 537. Holbrook, Morris B., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman. “The Experiential Aspects of Consumption: Consumer Fantasies, Feelings and Fun.” Journal of Consumer Research 9 (September 1982): 132–140. Holt, Douglas. “How Consumers Consume: A Typology of Consumption Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research 22 (June 1995): 1–16. Howard, John A., and Jagdish Sheth. Theory of Buyer Behavior. New York: John Wiley, 1969. Petty, Richard, and John Cacioppo. Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986. Solomon, Michael, Gary Bamossy, Søren Askegaard, and Margaret K. Hogg. Consumer Behaviour: A European Perspective. 3rd ed. Harlow, UK: Financial Times/ Prentice Hall, 2006.

CONSUMER (FREEDOM

OF)

CHOICE

Freedom of choice is one of the core ideas underpinning the functioning of (post)modern society. Although choice means different things to different people in various points in time, its positive connotations are rarely questioned. Whether it is conflated with consumerism, market, or individual autonomy, choice stands for much wider social, political, and philosophical conditions. The origins of the idea can be traced back to the Western tradition of moral philosophy and, later on, to economics. Recently, though, it has been extended to almost every aspect of life as a part of reflexive postmodernity where everything is negotiable and a matter of individual choice. However, choice is also an ideological proposition. It is firmly rooted in neoclassic economics and is central to market liberalism given its focus on property rights, individual freedom, competition, and self-interest as it was first conceptualized by moral philosopher Adam Smith, who is also considered the father of modern economics. The idea of freedom of choice is also at the heart of the libertarian social theory developed by Austrian school economists

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Friedrich Hayek and his colleagues (Ludwig von Mises and Israel Kirzner) in the 1940s and during the postwar period. In this context, choice stands for the archetypal normative idea and one of the grand narratives dominating public discourse. Furthermore, normative judgments about the value of choice as a manifestation of personal autonomy are still central to moral philosophy concerns, ranging from neoAristotelians (e.g., Alistair McIntyre) to neo-Kantian contractarian theorists (e.g., John Rawls). One way to distinguish between different approaches to choice is to separate normative and descriptive theories concerned with choice by positioning them alongside a continuum that ranges from a priori reasoning of how people ought to make choices to how choices actually happen in reality. Ethics (moral philosophy), jurisprudence, political philosophy, and theology fall into the former category, whereas cognitive psychology and decision science, offering descriptive empirical accounts of how choices are made in real-life settings, belong to the latter. Many economic theories, including rational choice, public choice, and consumer choice theory, occupy a middle ground between normative and empirical accounts, as some of their underlying assumptions of how choices should be made have been disproved; many more remain unverified. To economists, choice is premised on the belief that the individual is all-knowing, calculating, and an inherent utility maximizer, and thus the best judge of his or her own well-being, and that consumer sovereignty and giving people choice will force them to reveal their preferences. According to these beliefs, choice is best served through the development of active, critical consumers, even if they cannot always act as perfectly knowledgeable agents. Neoclassical economics and their various derivatives (consumer choice or public choice theory) do not claim to literally describe the deliberations that most individuals actually make conscious choices. They rather postulate the deliberations that, if an individual had ever actually made them, would have led to the choices that economic theory predicts. Consumer choice theory, for example, defines rational consumer choices as those that lead the consumer to maximize his or her utility (satisfaction, happiness). It assumes that utility is derived by getting more of the goods that express the buyer’s preferences. Although the marginal benefit of each additional unit of goods or services successively declines, consumer choice theory assumes it is always

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positive and never reaches zero. Thus, consumers are not only unsatiated, but they are actually insatiable. For them, more is always better. Rational consumer choice thus consists of adjusting the pattern of one’s spending to maximize one’s utility. To describe and explain in a mathematically coherent way how consumer choices aggregate to form market demand, consumer choice theory has to make many ancillary assumptions. These include the assumption that consumers (or at least, rational ones—consumer choice theory does not consider irrational consumers or their choice, except to dismiss them as “irrational” or an “imperfection”) have well-defined and complete preferences. Because it is difficult to give the concept of utility a plausible evidential basis, variants of consumer choice theory have been developed that, as far as possible, either refine the assumption of utility maximization or replace it. Public choice theory, on the other hand, is a branch of economics developed after studying spending and the way large bureaucracies function. It applies to collective decision making the same analytic principles that economists use to analyze people’s actions in the marketplace. Public choice theory assumes that people are motivated mainly by self-interest. Although most people base some of their actions on their concern for others, the dominant motive in people’s actions in the marketplace—whether they are employers, employees, or consumers—is a concern for themselves. Public choice economists make the same assumption: that although people acting in the political marketplace have some concern for others, their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest. Of the vast array of ethical and political theories that are concerned with the diverse and often conflicting assumptions about the nature and process of choice, neoclassic economics have arguably had the greatest influence on the development of public policy in the last two decades. The more recent shifts to individual choice and the language of consumerism in public services can be traced back to the new public management discourse and its reliance on business philosophy to improve the performance of public agencies. In this context, the active consumer armed with the power of exit is instrumental to improving the quality and efficiency of services offered. These assumptions have been traditionally opposed to collectivist values, such as equity and the supremacy of community-defined needs, where individual choice is superseded by the notion of the public good. The

concept of demand denoting what users of services are prepared to pay for is replaced by that of needs, implying what services or goods citizens think they may require at someone else’s expense. Choice, defined as the consumer power of “exit” from the system, is then opposed to “voice” as a mechanism for citizen participation that diminishes if choice is fully exercised, as theorized by American economist Albert Hirschman. However, more recently it has been suggested that policies aimed at the well-informed, empowered, and autonomous citizen who is able to choose from a range of available alternatives in public sphere, need not necessarily be an expression of the market ethos designed to serve the individualistic goals of an increasingly business-minded society. Thus, the interest in using choice and competition in public policy arguably represents an attempt to reconcile what is considered to be an “artificial dichotomy” of “exit” or “voice” by many (third way) governments. This rationale is premised on the assumptions of contestability (the threat of competition) rather than competition per se, although most of these policies are underpinned by normative assumptions whereby the role of evidence is limited to assessing their feasibility for policy purposes. Whereas many theorists and, increasingly, policymakers justify choice as a necessary response to consumerist users’ expectations, they assume that individuals act as if they were perfectly rational and well informed. Others have questioned premises on which the freedom of choice and autonomy are based. The assertion of people choosing rationally, which presupposes that utility is derived by getting more of the desired goods, demonstrates a superficial understanding of human motivation in economic thinking and renders these assumptions paper-thin, according to contemporary British economist, Ben Fine. Economics offers an undersocialized account of choice that is devoid of psychological depth. However, choices are socially constructed and emotionally determined, and hence they depend on what is offered and who chooses what, when, and why. The process of choice itself occurs via highly imperfect processing of accessible information, as clinical psychology and decision-making science have demonstrated, and is also subject to the conscious as well as unconscious psychological conditioning. The consumerist approaches in public services have also been criticized with regard to both their appropriateness and effectiveness. First, consumerism is about allocating privately produced goods or commodities via market pricing mechanisms to willing

Consumer Co-Operatives

buyers and not about generating public goods. If left to the market alone, some public goods, such as welllit public streets, may not be produced at all. Second, public goods are noncompetitive and nonexclusive, since one person’s consumption does not exclude that of another. Moreover, their effects also extend to both users and nonusers. Immunization is a classic example of such an effect, known as an externality to economists. Also unlike in consumerism, user-provider collaboration is often crucial to public service outcomes involving an element of coproduction. Consumer choice appears to be an important value in society; however, it cannot be harnessed to deliver public goods or to improve equality because of differences in individual abilities and preexisting inequalities of income, education, and access unless it serves the purpose of enacting social fantasies that are disguised as policies. Marianna Fotaki See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Sovereignty; Economics; Lifestyle; Moralities; Preference Formation; Seduced and Repressed; Self-Interest

Further Readings Buchanan, James, and Gordon Tullock. The Calculus of Consent. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962. Fine, Ben. The World of Consumption. London: Routledge, 2002. Fotaki, Marianna, Alan Boyd, Liz Smith, Ruth McDonald, Adrian Edwards, Glyn Elwyn, Martin Roland, and Rod Sheaff. Patient Choice and the Organisation and Delivery of Health Services: Scoping Review. A report to the National Institute for Health Research, Department of Health. London: National Institute for Health Research, 2006. Hirschman, Albert O. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47 (1979): 263–291. Kirzner, Israel. The Economics Point of View. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1976. First published 1960. McIntyre. Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. First published 1981. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. Sen, Amartya. “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (1977): 317–344.

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Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: A Selected Edition. Edited by Kathryn Sutherland. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. von Hayek, F. Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1944. von Mises, Ludwig. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. London: Hodge, 1949.

CONSUMER CO-OPERATIVES Consumer co-operatives are enterprises owned and controlled by their members and run primarily for the mutually beneficial provision of goods or services. The most common forms of consumer co-operatives are grocery retailers, pharmacies, credit unions and banks, health and welfare co-operatives, housing cooperatives, and utility providers. Co-operatives are distinguished from normal businesses by democratic forms of governance, by equity capital not being listed, and, in the case of consumer co-operatives, by usually distributing profit in proportion to patronage. Membership is usually open and normally one member has one vote. Costs of membership may be nominal or require significant capital investment. Organizational structures and legal forms vary, even within jurisdictions. Consumer co-operatives are as varied as “community supported agriculture” schemes, where consumers collectively buy direct from farmers; agricultural supply, services, and marketing co-operatives, commonplace in both North America and Europe; Japanese mass membership “joint buying” clubs; and renewable energy cooperatives, such as the significant Danish co-operative wind turbine sector. Innovative examples include Canada’s Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) and Seattle-based Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI), both producers and chain retailers of outdoor clothing and sporting equipment, with membership in the millions; Co-operative Auto Network in Vancouver, a car-sharing scheme; and the UK’s Phone Co-op, which provides telephone and Internet services. Consumer co-operatives vary in scale from single retail outlets to the United Kingdom’s The Co-operative Group, the world’s largest consumer co-operative. As well as being the country’s fifth biggest grocery retailer, it includes pharmacies,

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travel agents, funeral services, banking, insurance and investment services, as well as being the United Kingdom’s biggest agricultural landowner. Mutual financial institutions have generally dominated the housing finance and life insurance markets in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as much of the developed world.

History of the Co-Operative Movement Organized co-operation around provisioning has been a central feature of all human societies. The modern co-operative movement is widely regarded to have originated in reaction to the increasing marketization of society and erosion of traditional community provisioning practices. The historical development of national co-operative movements closely followed the process of industrialization. Consumer co-operatives first appeared in England in the 1760s, among shipwrights, who bought and operated their own flour mills. The driving motivations were the increasingly widespread adulteration of flour and the profiteering of local monopolies of millers and bakers. Monopoly profiteering through the notorious “truck” system of capitalist-owned “company shops” was a key factor in the growth of co-operative retailing. In the Victorian era, Frank Trentmann notes, monopolies of gas and water motivated the establishment of utility co-operatives, which were formative of a British “consumer” identity. The Rochdale Pioneers are conventionally regarded as the founders of the co-operative movement. In 1844 in Rochdale, northwest England, a group of artisans established a co-operative shop selling flour, oatmeal, sugar, and butter, which became the prototype of the consumer co-operative. While co-operative experiments were taking place elsewhere in Europe at the same time, according to Johnston Birchall, it was only when existing co-operatives, such as the Zurich Consumverien, adopted the Rochdale system that national movements found widespread success. The key innovations of the Rochdale Pioneers (and central principles of the co-operative movement to this day) were distributing surpluses regularly in proportion to purchases (the “dividend” or patronage refund); fixed or limited return on shares, which remained at their original value; open membership; one member, one vote; and a principle encouraging investment in the education of members.

By the end of the nineteenth century, British co-operative societies had 1.7 million members, according to Birchall, and the Co-operative Wholesale Society (predecessor of The Co-operative Group) was one of the largest companies in the world and a major manufacturer, grower, and importer. By 1914, significant consumer co-operative sectors existed throughout Europe, Russia, and Japan; with the British being the largest, followed by the German. During the interwar period, the movement grew steadily in Western Europe and became more firmly established in North America, whereas in the fascist countries and Bolshevik Russia it was destroyed. From its zenith shortly after World War II, during which, Birchall notes, it provided nearly a quarter of all British groceries and provisions, the retail cooperative movement in Europe began a long decline. Having to a large degree invented modern retailing, this decline, suggests Peter Gurney, represented an inability to compete with the new, spectacular consumerism of the chain stores. From the 1980s there was also a strong trend in the English-speaking economies toward de-mutualization in the financial sector. However, consumer co-operatives flourished in Japan, strengthened by the rapid growth of joint buying groups (han) from the 1960s onward. The 1960s and 1970s saw the “new wave” of consumer co-operative whole foods stores in Europe and North America; and, following a period of decline, the growth of ethical consumerism, organic agriculture, and the fair trade movement has driven the growth of the “alternative” grocery sector and with it consumer co-operatives (see Lang and Gabriel 2005, 48–53). Restructuring and consolidation has seen a revival of some mainstream European movements more recently, which have also exploited and fostered the new consumer interest in sustainability and ethical consumption. The Co-operative Group in the United Kingdom is notable for its development of ethical and environmental policies informed by regular membership surveys. Since the financial crisis of 2008, consumer co-operatives have reported increased turnover, according to Birchall and Lou Hammond Ketilson, and financial co-operatives, generally, remain financially sound.

Consumer Co-Operatives Worldwide Consumer co-operatives are commonly affiliated with national co-operative federations, and ultimately the

Consumer Co-Operatives

International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), the global union of co-operative federations. The ICA claims to represent over 800 million worldwide, including 18 consumer co-operative federations from 16 countries, in Europe, as well as Russia, Canada, and Japan. The European Community of Consumer Co-operatives states it represents 3,200 co-operatives with a turnover of more than 70 billion euros and 25 million members. The largest supermarket chains in Italy (Coop Italia) and Switzerland (Migros) are consumer co-operatives. Scandinavian consumer co-operatives also have significant market share of the retail sector. According to Birchall and Ketilson, co-operative banks in Europe have a market share of 20 percent and serve 159 million customers, among them Rabobank, the largest agricultural bank in the world, which counts 50 percent of Dutch citizens as members. Elsewhere, while Japan has a highly developed consumer co-operative sector, they exist on a smaller scale in the United States, although they have and continue to play a significant role in agriculture, where they often function as both producer and consumer co-operatives. Other significant forms of consumer co-operatives in the United States include credit unions (similar to British building societies), housing co-operatives, and co-operative electric utilities. Consumer co-operatives also play a significant role throughout the developing world. Birchall notes the important role played by savings and credit co-operatives in development, a role recognized by the United Nations.

Workers and Consumers in the Co-Operative Movement While consumer co-operatives are distinguished from workers’ co-operatives, where membership is restricted to the workers in an enterprise, workers in consumer co-operatives are usually both members and consumers of its goods and services. As Lang notes, the co-operative movement of nineteenth-century England made no distinction between people as consumers and as producers, regarding the separation as a ruse of capitalism. Consumption was the medium, as Trentmann puts it, for strengthening the brotherhood of workers. While the co-operative movement valorized the consumer, Gurney notes, historically this was sometimes to the neglect of the conditions of workers. This emphasis on consumption is reflected in a complex and often antagonistic historical relationship

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between the co-operative movement and the socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist movements.

Contemporary Relevance and Theoretical Issues Against historical and political stances critical of the significance of the co-operative movement, Gurney argues that practices of the movement, such as distributing dividends, alongside the “practical socialism” of working-class educational initiatives and female participation amounted to a “culture of cooperation,” which offered an emancipatory alternative to mainstream capitalism. Both the history and contemporary scale of consumer co-operatives, operating outside of mainstream economic logic while participating in the real economy, challenge a commonplace oversimplification in social science that interprets modernity as a process of increasing marketization. While the origins of consumer co-operatives lie in response to marketization and industrialization, the movement’s newer forms and contemporary revival can be related, suggests Lang, with consumer disenchantment with conventional modes of market relationship. Dan Welch See also Alternative Consumption; Capitalism; Fair Trade; Political and Ethical Consumption; Prosumption; Responsible Consumption; Voluntary Associations

Further Readings Birchall, Johnston. The International Co-operative Movement. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997. Birchall, Johnston. “Consumer Co-Operatives in Retrospect and Prospect.” In The New Mutualism in Public Policy, edited by Johnston Birchall. London: Routledge, 2001. Birchall, Johnston, and Lou Hammond Ketilson. Resilience of the Cooperative Business Model in Times of Crisis. Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2009. Black, Lawrence, and Nicole Robertson, eds. Consumerism and the Co-operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009. Gurney, Peter. Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996. Lang, Tim, and Yiannis Gabriel. “A Brief History of Consumer Activism.” In The Ethical Consumer, edited

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by Rob Harrison, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw, 39–54. London: Sage, 2005. Trentmann, Frank. “The Modern Genealogy of the Consumer: Meanings, Identities and Political Synapses.” In Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, edited by John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, 19–70. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

mass consumption began with the “civilizing” projects of colonial states and mission groups. The ways in which consumption has diffused throughout the continent has been influenced by African consumers’ differential access to the power and economic resources accompanying state formation and missionary work, according to Timothy Burke.

Diffusion of Imported Luxuries

CONSUMER CULTURE

IN

AFRICA

Consumer culture has consumed Africa, but as with other invasions, Africa has also consumed consumer culture in ways both familiar and exotic in comparison to developments in the West. Focusing primarily on consumer culture in sub-Saharan Africa, a continental region of some 750 million people, this entry draws out key issues relating to the diffusion of luxuries, the endurance of local practices, creolization, parallel modernities, adverse consequences, and anticonsumerist trends. The discussion excludes Arab North Africa because the forces in play are different there.

Economic Backdrop Conventional measures provide a generally bleak portrait of African economies; the continent hosts the world’s poorest countries (“Facts on Africa” 2000; United Nations 2003). Further, the distribution of incomes is skewed, creating small segments of wealthy and large segments of very poor consumers (e.g., Burgess, Harris, and Mattes 2002). Even in Ghana, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is just over US$400, and in South Africa, over 60 percent of rural households remain unelectrified (Madubansi and Shackleton 2006). However, while standard economic indicators are not false, they tend to conceal more than they reveal about Africa’s vibrant consumer culture. For example, cell phone coverage has been widely extended with dramatic positive consequences for improvements in communication and the flow of information, including market information. In the precolonial period, commerce was spotty, and thus mass consumption was often limited to that which was regionally or locally produced, even as caravans and, on the coasts, ocean-going ships traded high-value consumer goods between urban centers over long distances. Many agricultural commodities from Asia and the New World diffused rapidly in Africa, however,

Three intertwined themes concern Africa’s engagement with consumer culture. First, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Africa was incorporated into the global economy through the sales of raw materials or labor to Western interests, novel consumer goods allowed some people to emphasize individual identity at the expense of forms of identity based on groups such as lineages and clans. Today, imported consumer goods from Europe and more recently from Asia provide vehicles for constructing “modern” cosmopolitan consumer lifestyles and identities. Exotic consumer goods from the metropolitan countries are now used widely to convey status and prestige. Cars (see the “mama Benz” of Togo or the wa-Benzi of East Africa), clothing, and buildings, both private homes and public buildings such as mosques, become important indicators of status. This engagement with exotic consumer goods has been fueled by the diffusion of sophisticated market apparatus, transportation, and communications, and the flow of migrants between Africa and Europe, not to mention the “prosperity doctrine” of some missionary churches. The economies of some countries are dependent on the production and export of one or a few commodities. Thus, the economies of Zambia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo are largely dependent on minerals exports. Nigeria has become a major petroleum exporter, while the economy of Cote d’Ivoire is largely dependent on cocoa, coffee, and palm oil. This concentration of production is coupled with an uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power. Those people who manage production and export are often elite consumers. Their luxury consumption patterns continue to be influenced by the colonial experience. French-speaking Africans consume a higher proportion of French luxuries, and English-speaking Africans consume more of the English variety. The bulk of consumers, however, controls a relatively small share of their nation’s total purchasing power. Their consumption behavior is molded by

Consumer Culture in Africa

more local tastes and preferences and constrained by limited purchasing power. Malnutrition, especially among women and children, remains a problem even in wealthier countries. Nonetheless, particularly through the vehicle of life cycle celebrations, and often via the situational influence of young brides and their families, many imported goods have diffused widely throughout African communities. Often this troubles both public authorities and the populace because of the exceedingly high costs of marriage.

Enduring Local Tastes Second, longstanding precolonial consumption practices typically remain strongly rooted, even as contemporary practices associated with the colonial and postcolonial experiences are layered over them. Thus, studies of household expenditure patterns in Ghana, Tanzania, and Cote d’Ivoire show that the share of household expenditures on food remains relatively high, even at higher levels of income, although Engle’s law suggests that the share of income spent on food should decline with income increases. Likely explanations, according to Christopher Udry and Hyungi Woo, are relative poverty, the weakness of formal financial investment opportunities, and the normative importance of social investments in networks of kin, credit, and cult; in other words, in social capital as a source of security and status. Consumption of traditional products has, in many cases, persisted and indeed thrived. Fish from the inner delta of the Niger and the east African lakes, livestock and hides produced in semiarid regions, salt and dates produced in desert oases, kola nuts from the Guinea Coast, and the mildly narcotic khat in the Horn region, for example. Kola nuts, widely traded in West Africa, continue to play an important role in symbolizing hospitality, marital alliance, political affiliation, and ritual obeisance. Throughout contemporary African communities, both rural and urban— from the Haya in Tanzania to the Bobo in Burkina Faso—locally brewed beers and palm wine are ubiquitously marketed. Among the poorer consumer segments, consumption choices are often embedded in patterns of behavior that are perceived to be traditional. For many, motivations driving consumption are achieving increased family solidarity or social standing within local networks of prestige, not individual consumer prestige. For example, with remittances from male kinsmen working abroad, female elders in Wolof

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Murid communities in Senegal not only finance consumption associated with baptisms, weddings, and funerals, but also acquire the clothing and the coiffure that indexes their prosperity and draws newcomers into their networks of exchange. . . . Female elders participate in exchange contests driven by ostentatious displays of wealth and conspicuous consumption. For women, value is action, the capacity to move money through commercial and ritual circuits and to achieve social, economic and biological production. (Buggenhagen 2001, 393–394)

A key role for consumer goods in Africa is their ability to display wealth, life force, and status and exert power over others when given as gifts. Consumer goods are important insofar as they tell a tale about the resources available to the broader kin group.

Creolization Creolization describes consumption patterns that combine elements of local and foreign consumption traditions, and this is ubiquitous. For example, there has been an explosion of fast food in African countries. In Nigeria, foreign fast food is a predominantly urban phenomenon, whereas traditional fast food is found everywhere. Traditional fast food is mainly prepared with indigenous ingredients and conforms to local taste. Foreign models are more diversified, as urban populations embrace consumption patterns broadly similar to cosmopolitan ones, under the impetus of resource availability and following modern trends (Olutayo and Akanle 2009, 210). Proliferating fast food can be found in most of the larger African urban centers. African ideas of the body are very important in accounting for African consumption of creolized clothing and cosmetics. Self-respect, kinship status, wealth, and identity are bound tightly together with the wearing of clothing, particularly on public occasions. In clothing consumption Africans generate, concretize, and experience meaning, significance, and value. Handmade “traditional” garb becomes a luxury. Made-to-order clothing combining metropolitan and local materials and aesthetics is a significant component of most household expenditures. Creolized clothing consumption may reach its apogee in the behavior of Congolese sapeur, who participate in elaborate rituals of conspicuous consumption of French fashions that incorporate traditional ideas about the accumulation of life force. In addition, the

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countries of sub-Saharan Africa form the world’s largest secondhand clothing destination, receiving close to 30 percent of total world exports in 2001, with a value of US$405 million in 2003 (United Nations 1996, 2003). Throughout Africa, consumers incorporate secondhand clothing into their dress universe. Cosmetics and skin care products have been widely marketed. In East Africa, Unilever has effectively employed gender and class market segmentation. L’Oréal has developed a line of inexpensive shampoos, soaps, and shower gels to emphasize skin softness, something to which West African women are sensitive. Finally, Africans have become avid producers and consumers of creolized music and video products. A host of pop music hybrids include Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, and Mali as major sources with Madagascar, Nigeria, and South Africa close behind. Nigeria is a major video producer. Popular varieties range from staid recordings of Islamic sermons to soap operas that deal with social and political controversies; both often offer consumers rather explicit didactic lessons about modernity and its discontents.

Parallel Modernities A third trend is African consumers’ imaginative engagement with alternative modern worlds that are different from their own but also without the ideological and political baggage associated with the former colonial powers. The Islamic Middle East and Hindu South Asia offer alternative models of consumption. In immediate sub-Saharan Africa, Islamic practice, dress, and ornament has become de rigueur for political and commercial elites. South Asian consumer styles diffused through Bollywood films contain a focus on kinship and marriage and resilient, conservative moral codes and provide an alternative to local “tradition” and Western modernity alike that many find appealing. Indian films have been valued consumer goods in offering a long running and evolving commentary on gender relations, materialism, and love.

Consequences One consequence of Africans’ participation in global consumer culture is “accelerated consumerism, . . . producing consumers without affordability and affordability without the typical signs of effort. Everyone seems gripped by ‘the allure of accruing

wealth from nothing’ or of spending without earning, as ‘the will to consume outstrips the opportunity to earn.’ . . . Selling adults and children into slavery and prostitution, migrating in search of greener pastures, . . . and seeking magical solutions to material predicaments . . . are increasingly attractive options” for less fortunate Africans. “Accelerated consumerism . . . heighten[s] the uncertainties in African lives” and increases the helplessness of socially marginal people, especially children and women (Nyamnjoh 2005, 296). Property crimes have become rife in Africa’s bigger cities. Certain long-standing values, such as the equation of feminine beauty and weight in a context of changing foodways, are leading some Africans into health problems associated with obesity. Thus, adverse effects accompany the spread of consumer culture in Africa. A complicated relationship between consumerism and white racial attitudes and African reactions is evident, especially in eastern and southern Africa. There, marketing campaigns associated with cleanliness and “decency” have tended to incorporate white racist attitudes. Concomitantly, the diffusion of Western commodities “has frequently been regarded in southern African societies as a negative and oppressive experience,” part of an overall pattern of “submission to white authority” (Burke 1996, 203).

Anticonsumerism Anticonsumerist movements—indirect responses to International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programs, direct responses to rapid social change—exist in sub-Saharan Africa as they do elsewhere. In general, anticonsumerist sentiments are bound up with rejection of the foreign, usually the Western. One current is associated with fundamentalist Islamic movements; another with Pentecostalism, which paradoxically adopts both a gospel of prosperity and a distrustful attitude toward foreign commodities that Pentecostals link to a spiritual struggle against satanic forces. In both cases, a solution to the dangers of Western consumption is sought through spiritual practices and the control of desire. A third response is the expansion of occult claims, specifically witchcraft accusations, that are often associated with jealousy and envy directed toward the haves by the have-nots, but also represent a dialogue about wealth, poverty, morality, and modern consumerism. Eric J. Arnould

Consumer Culture in East Asia See also Caribbean and the Slave Trade; Colonialism; Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer Culture in Latin America; Glocalization; Inequalities; Measuring Standards of Living; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings Buggenhagen, Beth Anne. “Prophets and Profits: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Vision in Senegalese Murid Households.” Journal of Religion in Africa 31, no. 4 (2001): 373–402. Burgess, Steven M., Mari Harris, and Robert B. Mattes. SA Tribes: Who We Are, How We Live and What We Want from Life in the New South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa: New Africa Books, 2002. Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. “Facts on Africa.” Jeune Afrique (November 2000): 7–13. Madubansi, M., and C. M. Shackleton. “Changing Energy Profiles and Consumption Patterns Following Electrification in Five Rural Villages South Africa.” Energy Policy 34 (2006): 4081–4092. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. “Fishing in Troubled Waters: Disquettes and Thiofs in Dakar.” Africa 75, no. 3 (2005): 295–324. Olutayo, A. O., and Olayinka Akanle. “Fast Food in Ibadan: An Emerging Consumption Pattern.” Africa 79, no. 2 (2009): 207–227. Udry, Christopher, and Woo Hyungi. “Households and the Social Organization of Consumption in Southern Ghana.” African Studies Review 50 (September 2007): 139–153. United Nations. 1995 International Trade Statistics Yearbook. Vol. 2, Trade by Commodity. New York: Author, 1996. United Nations. World Economic and Social Survey 2003. New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, 2003. Weiss, Brad. “Northwestern Tanzania on a Single Shilling: Sociality, Embodiment, Valuation.” Cultural Anthropology 12 (August 1997): 335–362.

CONSUMER CULTURE

IN

EAST ASIA

The purchase of products for other than utilitarian reasons is a benchmark indicator of a modern consumer society. In this sense, the consumption practices found in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong are distinctly modern. Throughout East Asia, the assimilation of European

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and American products and practices as well as the adaptation of these products and practices to local conditions has been a hallmark of the consumption process. This phenomenon of borrowing and adapting dates back to the earliest years of the Meiji era (1868–1912) in Japan. By the 1920s, baseball, jazz, and Western clothing and hair styles were common in urban Japan. However, Simon Partner notes that in postwar Japan, an intensive industrialization effort supported by the United States led to the growth of a large middle class and the emergence of mass consumption. Similar economic policies in South Korea and Taiwan, in turn tied to the end of military rule in both states and the development of vibrant civil societies in the 1980s, led to a similar result. It is worth noting that in all three of these states, the emergence of a mass consumer society occurred during years of an overt American military presence. However, it would be an error to conclude that East Asian societies became consumer societies as a result of occupation and subsequent Americanization. Instead, it is more accurate to say that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan transformed American concepts and products into distinctly local “things” within a strongly Confucian moral framework. East Asian state policies and social norms have historically encouraged savings and thrift, and consumer credit was, until relatively recently, much more restricted than in the United States. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century, the Japanese government encouraged citizens, particularly women (who generally controlled family spending) to save through a national postal savings system as a means of helping the state to grow militarily and economically. After World War II, consumer credit first appeared in the form of installment payments in large Japanese department stores, while bank credit for individuals was legally limited. During the 1980s, Japan and the United States were sharply at odds over credit issues, with American officials arguing that Japanese credit policies encouraged consumer savings and discouraged the consumption of foreign goods and services. Japanese officials, in contrast, argued that American consumers lived beyond their means by relying on easy credit. In the wake of an economic downturn that began in the late 1980s, the Japanese government ended limits on revolving credit in 1992, which enabled citizens to roll over their monthly credit debts. In South Korea, the government of President Park Chung-Hee (1961–1979) emphasized patriotic

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consumerism in the service of national development. Imports of consumer goods were strictly limited, while domestic productions focused on exports. This left Koreans of all social classes tied to a shared narrative of a future time of greater consumption. However, as the economy boomed in the 1980s, domestic consumption sharply increased, along with visible social inequities. A resulting “eliminate excessive consumption” campaign launched by the government and supported by mass media was highly gendered, targeting the presumed waste and excess of women, according to Laura Nelson. Korean women, like Japanese women, are popularly viewed as the managers of family money and hence the primary consumers in a household. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis from 1997 to 1998, the South Korean government stopped campaigning against conspicuous consumption and instead began to encourage the “appropriate” consumption of domestic goods as a means of strengthening the economy. As in Japan, this policy shift has resulted in the rapid growth of credit card use among South Koreans, with all of the attendant side effects, including bankruptcy. In China, consumption practices have followed a very different path. After 1949, urban housing was nationalized, as were most factories and businesses. Even basic goods were rationed, including rice, meat, and oil. By the time of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), consumerism as a practice had largely disappeared, as had the ability of most people to travel and consume. Following the start of reform policies in 1979, the Chinese Communist Party encouraged foreign investment, particularly from its East Asian neighbors, in export-related light industries, such as textiles, toys, and electronic products. As late as 1989, most urban residents still lived in state housing, worked for state companies, and had little disposable income. However, in the last two decades, most state housing has been privatized, the state employment sector has shrunk dramatically, and both domestic and foreign companies produce consumer products for the domestic market. Today, both urban and rural residents have access to durable goods, such as televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, and now automobiles, along with private housing estates and travel. Consumer behavior in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and increasingly China looks much like consumer behavior in the United States. Citizens increasingly use credit cards instead of cash, and

personal debt continues to rise. However, while mass consumption is clearly a fact in East Asia, the social norms that guide consumer behavior, popular views about savings and credit, and the place of community and nation in individual consumer choice are very different than in the United States. First, the notion of the consumer as sovereign king, or the measure of public good defined as individual consumer choice, is not as evident. Instead, a dynamic tension remains in Confucian-dominated societies such as Japan, South Korea, and China over the issue of consumption and how to pay for this. According to Sheldon Garon and Patricia Maclachlan, these societies exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward conspicuous consumption, especially when it is seen to infringe on morality, community, and the nation. In all of these societies, individual consumer choices have for more than a century been linked to issues of patriotism and national unity. As Japan rapidly modernized in the early decades of the twentieth century, citizens were instructed to consume Japanese products. Similarly, in Republican China, consumption was explicitly linked to an emerging national identity, Karl Gerth reports. Indeed, in the years preceding the Japanese invasion and occupation that lasted from 1937 until 1945, Chinese consumer boycotts of Japanese products were a tool of resistance and a means of cultivating a national identity. The role of consumption in the building of a nation has been especially important in the Republic of Korea. Classified as one of the poorest countries in the world in 1960, South Korea by 2000 has the thirteenth largest economy in the world. Yet until the early 1990s, Japanese mass media products were banned, a by-product of the Japanese occupation that lasted from 1905 until 1945, and calls to “buy Korean” are frequently voiced in the media. This societal tendency to consume as citizens of a collective society rather than as autonomous individuals is manifested in debates over imported products such as beef, fruits, and rice in Japan and South Korea. Indeed, it is increasingly clear to researchers that Korean, Japanese, and to some extent Chinese consumers make choices based not simply on their individual self-interest in the form of lowest prices, but instead on a more complex set of factors that take account of, broadly, national interests, but also the personal interests of their fellow countrypeople. In short, personal consumption that is too personal is morally suspect, particularly in Japan and South

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Korea, and hence to be questioned. The distinct shift in the past decade in both state policies and social attitudes toward credit-driven consumption has heightened this debate, particularly in regard to the role of youth. This leads to a final issue, that of the cultural effects of increased consumption, especially of foreign goods and services. As noted at the beginning of this entry, Western consumer products, fashions, and styles have been part of East Asian consumption patterns for almost a century. Nevertheless, worries about cultural degradation continue. The effects of conspicuous consumption on the moral worth of Korean women and youth is a common media topic in South Korea, according to Nelson, while the Chinese government launched a campaign against “spiritual pollution” in 1983 and again following the 1989 Tiananmen events. However, unlike in South Korea, Japan, and to some extent Taiwan, the Chinese government shows little concern for the cultural impact of heightened consumerism. Instead, both the government and the Communist Party appear more focused on the potential empowerment of consumers. Robert J. Shepherd See also Americanization; Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumption in Postsocialist China; Inequalities; Japan as a Consumer Culture; Licensing of Clothing Brands; National Cultures

Further Readings Garon, Sheldon, and Patricia Maclachlan, eds. The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of a Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Maclachlan, Patricia. Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Nelson, Laura. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Nishimura, Takao. “Household Debt and Consumer Education in Postwar Japan.” In The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West, edited by Sheldon Garon and Patricia Maclachlan, 260–280. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

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Partner, Simon. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer. Berkeley: University of California, 2000.

CONSUMER CULTURE LATIN AMERICA

IN

Latin America, the region including Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, is undergoing rapid changes in consumer-based identities, consumption practices, and material culture. Over time, its peoples have developed “hybrid” consumer cultures combining European, North American, indigenous, and African goods, rituals, and attitudes and reflecting the region’s political and economic subordination to Europe and the United States. Scholarship on consumer culture in Latin America began in earnest in the 1980s, though observations regarding consumers appeared earlier. The region is of interest because it evidences patterns found in wealthy countries—individualization, ownership concentration in the media industry, modern retail formats, and consumers’ quest for authentic experiences—while retaining its distinct cultures and history. The region’s history and consumption patterns are reviewed alongside the case of Chile, a country whose free market policies significantly altered its consumer landscape. Suggestions are offered for further research.

Historical Features Spain and Portugal (and to a lesser extent, Britain, France, and the Netherlands) colonized Latin America beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Europeans found a sophisticated material culture, especially within the Aztec and Inca Empires. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Europeans brought African slaves with distinct cultures to the continent. During the colonial era, Europeans, native peoples, and Africans formed families, forming a hybrid culture including elements from each group. Arnold Bauer’s Goods, Power, History contends that during the colonial era (1492–1824), Europeans attempted to impose their food, dress, town planning, and religious rituals on mixed-race (mestizo) native peoples. Many members of the latter groups attempted to imitate the Europeans through dress or behavior to improve their quality of life (or in the case of native peoples, to escape labor and tax

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obligations). Still, many indigenous and African communities retained precolonial dress, food, adornment, and rituals, while others adapted imported goods to local contexts. After the Latin American independence wars (1810–1824), Latin American-born “creole” elites emulated French and British elites’ consumption styles to distinguish themselves from their mestizo, indigenous, or black countrymen; mestizos emulated elites; and rural native peoples living in separate communities retained consumption traditions. Following the onset of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1931, Latin American governments sought to reduce their reliance on export sales to gain hard currency needed to purchase imported manufactured goods, adopting policies that protected or helped create local manufacturers. These “import substitution industrialization” policies coincided with elites’ increased support for national identities defined as “mestizo” rather than “white.” The era witnessed the standardization of domestic consumer goods and government promotion of locally based cultural activities and products (particularly film and folk arts). Since the 1970s and 1980s, policies reducing government controls over production and trade contributed to the increased influence of U.S.-based products, retailers, brands, and multimedia entertainment, reflecting the process of globalization— increased economic, political, social, and cultural connections across regions and nations.

Contemporary Patterns Current research asks the following questions: (a) Is globalization changing Latin American cultures through the introduction of North American and European models of consumption? (b) Are new forms of consumption making Latin Americans more individualistic, oriented toward private life, and politically apathetic? (c) How do new forms of consumption intersect with social inequality? Néstor García Canclini’s Consumers and Citizens contends that Latin American tastes in entertainment products are becoming more “Americanized” and privatized. The author uses survey and interview data to argue that social identities formerly rooted in political participation (through unions, associations, or parties) are increasingly linked to membership in global consumption-based communities, such as groups of rock music fans. This change reflects decreasing state support for domestic entertainment

industries, declining popularity of political ideologies promoting social change, and more concentrated U.S. corporate ownership of entertainment industries. He finds variations in consumer tastes in film, television, and art across age groups and social classes, but notes that Latin Americans mostly watch U.S. film and TV programs in their homes. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld’s The Native Leisure Class analyzes native people in the city of Otavalo, Ecuador, and argues that globalization has promoted the revival of indigenous culture. Native weavers and merchants have gained commercial success selling local and regional crafts to U.S. and European customers seeking “authentic” goods. They display growing wealth by sponsoring traditional fiestas, wearing expensive native dress, and building homes in their native city. Their increased wealth has intensified class divisions in Otavalo. Richard Wilk’s Home Cooking in the Global Village, a history of food in Belize (the former British colony in Central America), shows that since Europeans’ first arrival to its territory, Belize has relied on both imported and domestic ingredients in foods. However, most Belizeans rejected native dishes until the late-twentieth century. British colonial officials encouraged local employees to consume imported processed foods, giving imports high status among middle- and upper-class Belizeans (though the latter secretly enjoyed “bush food,” traditional rural cuisine using locally based ingredients), while poor Belizeans developed unique recipes mixing local and imported ingredients. When Belizeans migrated to the United States during the 1970s, they missed local foods and opened restaurants selling national dishes. U.S. tourists in Belize sought “unique” local food, and returning Belizeans opened restaurants there while taking pride in local dishes. Contemporary globalization created the conditions through which local foods became popular among Belizeans. Maureen O’ Dougherty’s Consumption Intensified studies how Brazil’s middle class coped with that country’s extremely high inflation during the 1980s. The author finds that members of this group went to great lengths to maintain their socioeconomic status. They purchased foreign goods during trips to the United States, visited Disneyworld, and bought imports in illegal Brazilian markets, all to retain their membership in Brazil’s middle class. Each of these studies shows the complex and unpredictable effects of contemporary globalization on local subjects.

Consumer Culture in the USSR

Consumer Culture in Chile Because of its free market economic policies, Chile would seem the most likely Latin American country to embrace American and global consumer products, images, and ideas. Beginning in the 1970s during General Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian rule (1973–1990), the government applied free market policies, such as privatization of businesses and services, tax reductions on imports, and deregulation of urban land markets. Since the late 1970s, but most forcefully after 1990, Chile has witnessed a boom in shopping centers, big-box stores, gated communities, and credit card use; as well as the consumption of American, European, and Japanese television, film, music, and products. Scholars have competing interpretations of these developments. Tomás Moulian’s El Consume me Consume contends that Chileans are status conscious consumers caught in a cycle of debt and spending who find an outlet for hedonistic desires through shopping mall visits. In contrast, Eugenio Tironi’s La Irrupción de las Masas y el Malestar de las Elites views growing purchases among low- and moderateincome Chileans as evidence of the democratization of consumption. In a third view, the Programa de las Naciones Unidas Para el Desarrollo’s (PNUD) Nosotros, los Chilenos argues that Chileans develop their identities through consumer goods and images, reflecting the “aestheticization of everyday life.” Others question the view that Chileans are increasingly individualistic consumers. Heidi Tinsman’s “Politics of Gender and Consumption in Authoritarian Chile, 1973–1990” finds that female agricultural workers used earnings to gain independence from husbands, give gifts to friends, and challenge traditional gender norms. Joel Stillerman’s “Gender, Class and Generational Contexts for Consumption in Contemporary Chile” found that working-class male wage earners largely control family budgets, while men and women exhibit distinct priorities for household expenses. Spouses restrict personal consumption to provide for children and elderly parents and to uphold the moral value of self-control.

Conclusion Like the rest of Latin America, Chile provides ambiguous evidence regarding the effects of globalization on consumer practices and identities. Survey research and comparisons within and beyond the region will

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illuminate the attitudes and practices of consumers across social groups while rooting analyses in comparative and theoretical debates. Ethnographic, audiovisual, and autobiographical inquiry will provide insight into consumer subjectivities and the integration of consumption into everyday routines. Examination of youth subcultures, digital cultures, and variations across racial and ethnic groups will enrich our understanding of diverse consumer groups. Joel Stillerman See also Anthropology; Colonialism; Ethnicity/Race; Food Consumption; Globalization; Individualization; Inequalities; National Cultures

Further Readings Bauer, Arnold. Goods, Power, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi. The Native Leisure Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. García Canclini, Néstor. Consumers and Citizens. Translated and Introduction by George Yúdice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Moulian, Tomás. El Consumo me Consume. Santiago, Chile: LOM ediciones, 1998. O’Dougherty, Maureen. Consumption Intensified. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Programa de las Naciones Unidas Para el Desarrollo (PNUD). Nosotros, los Chilenos. Santiago, Chile: Author, 2002. Stillerman, Joel. “Gender, Class, and Generational Contexts for Consumption in Contemporary Chile.” Journal of Consumer Culture 4, no. 1 (March 2004): 51–78. Tinsman, Heidi. “Politics of Gender and Consumption in Authoritarian Chile, 1973–1990.” Latin American Research Review 41, no. 3 (2006): 7–31. Tironi, Eugenio. La irrupción de las masas y el malestar de las elites. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Grijalbo, 1999. Wilk, Richard. Home Cooking in the Global Village. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

CONSUMER CULTURE IN THE USSR Soviet culture of consumption sounds paradoxical to those who associate culture with civilized manners and consumption with abundance of goods and service. What many people from the Soviet Union (or, formally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,

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or USSR) and other socialist countries remember are shortages, long waiting lines, and crude service personnel in the shops and restaurants. They can, however, also cherish the memories of such services and such consumer goods that they cannot afford any longer under the new conditions of the market economy. These two seemingly contradictory experiences had one and the same cause. The Soviet economy was a centrally planned economy. Therefore, the great majority of consumer goods were not sold to the customers for their market prices. Prices were determined by the state planning offices and, in the last instance, by the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Therefore, in socialism supply did not meet demand. Many ordinary consumer goods, food included, were often scarce (“deficit”) and in great demand. Money alone was no guarantee of such goods. More important was the “privilege of access.”

Access to Goods In a centrally planned, socialist economy, one could get access to deficit goods by one of four ways: first, one could wait for them—either concretely by standing in a line, often for hours or even overnight, whenever the desired goods happened to be available in the local shops. Second, one could have access to such goods due to one’s social position or one’s workplace. Until the very end of the Soviet Union, many consumer goods and durables from better food to cars and refrigerators, as well as, for instance, new apartments and summer cottages, were distributed through the workplaces and other official social organizations. The consumer, as a rule, had to pay the full, official price for them, which the state planning offices had determined. The main difference was that they were either not at all available or sold only very irregularly in the ordinary Soviet shops. Third, one could buy them in the local kolkhoz market, where peasants sold the produce of their small private plots. The prices of these, mainly food items, came closest to the “real” market prices. They were usually much higher than the prices in the stateowned or co-operative food stores. The main difference was that, on the peasant markets, they were available without long waiting lines. These peasant markets selling food products grown on very small peasant plots of land catered to the Soviet consumption of many major food items, from milk and eggs to fresh vegetables and meat.

Finally, one could buy consumer goods, food included, on the black market. Although official statistics do not exist, it can be estimated that the share of the black market in the distribution of many consumer goods was quite remarkable. Black market prices were often quite out of proportion. For instance, for a pair of illegally imported American jeans, one would have to pay almost the whole monthly wages of an industrial worker. The products sold on the black market came basically from two sources: they were either stolen from the state economic organizations or illegally imported from abroad. A third alternative was that people who had access to them due to their privileged position sold them further to other private customers. The Soviet system of consumption had another important feature: large regional differences in the availability of almost all consumer goods but in particular more highly valued fashionable items and novelties. These were heavily concentrated in the big cities and in Moscow in particular. To get access to such goods, people often had to travel long distances. Numerous are the stories about the long “shopping lists” that anyone visiting the capital from the provinces on work or pleasure was expected to bring back home to their friends, neighbors, colleagues, and relatives.

Infrastructure of Consumption The basic infrastructure of Soviet consumption was created in the 1930s, almost twenty years after the October Revolution, at the time of the consolidation of Stalin’s power. The Soviet distribution chain consisted of several types of stores and service units. The so-called commercial shops, restaurants, cafés, and canteens were open to anyone who had money to buy their products and services. They sold their goods for officially established state prices. Gastronom and Bakaleya food stores, as well as the central department stores in bigger cities, represented the upper end of this commercial system of distribution; rural cooperative shops and local canteens, its lower end. Prices differed between these institutions but so did the quality and the selection of goods on sale. The closed system of distribution was an equally important source of consumption at these commercial shops. It consisted of stores, restaurants, canteens, and other service centers open only to a limited clientele attached to a ministry, factory,

Consumer Culture in the USSR

a railway depot, an educational or a research institution, and so on. Many important goods, from better, festive food items to highly valued durables, were distributed through such closed outlets. The higher functionaries of the central party organizations, the more important ministries, and the state police had their own closed shops and fashion ateliers. Bigger and more prosperous factories and other workplaces could also provide food for their workers with lower, subsidized prices than the commercial shops. Most important, to be attached to one of these closed outlets was often the only way for an ordinary Soviet citizen to get access to better quality consumer goods. Since these economic, educational, and administrative organizations greatly differed in their economic and political importance and had quite varied resources at their disposal, the type of organization to which a consumer was officially attached through his or her work or study place made a major difference in his or her living standards. It was quite common, for instance, that the workers at a strategically important economic organization that was situated in far corner of the country could be compensated by the special distribution of such highly valued and rare goods as, for instance, imported Italian boots or fresh vegetables all year around. The goods distributed through these closed outlets could be of high quality, luxury goods but, at the same time, the customers always had to be satisfied with the limited “nomenklatura” of goods available in their own particular closed shop or restaurant. If not satisfied, they could not simply go to another shop with an assortment of goods better to their liking. The illegal economy, black markets, and the economy of favors plagued the Soviet Union and all socialist countries until their very end. The authorities declared, mostly with limited success, campaigns against economic corruption. It was a natural consequence of the planned state economy with administratively strictly fixed prices and quantities of products. As some researchers have claimed, corruption was both deeply rooted in the system and quite necessary to its functioning. This nonofficial system of distribution compensated for the rigidity of the official economy and made it run more smoothly. Equally important was that almost everyone was, in one way or another, involved in the dealings of this informal and often illegal economy, which consisted of anything from doing a favor for a friend or a relative (e.g., servicing a car ahead of the line or selling a

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fashionable dress “under the counter”) to large-scale financial operations by organizing private production and distribution of goods on the side (e.g., car spare parts or fur coats and hats). Black market deals did not restrict themselves to the relations between the producers and their private customers. Such operations were common in the nonofficial exchange relations between big factories, which took place alongside the annual plans. The authorities fought regularly against this illegal economy and corruption by organizing campaigns of discipline, publishing news about illegal activities, imposing heavy punishments after court cases. During Leonid Brezhnev’s government, the illegal economy became an inevitable part of the planned economy. As long as it was kept within the “normal” limits, it was tolerated, and only cases of excessive accumulation of private wealth were publicly condemned and actively prosecuted. Since almost everyone was involved, the strict following of the written law and effective control would have made everyone a criminal. Quite often, the members of the Communist Party caught in the “normal” illegal activities were, for instance, simply reprimanded by their workplace party organization. Being a successful consumer in the Soviet Union was often a whole-day profession. To get access to the fashionable and valued rare goods, one had to have either a lot of time to stand in a waiting line, the right connections to the right people, or a lot of money to buy it on the black market. Soviet citizens with a lot of time at their disposal, such as retired people, could—by standing in waiting lines for others—make a remarkable difference in their otherwise meager economic conditions. One could also improve one’s economic position by selling such valuable goods, like private cars or fine clothes, for a higher price than one had paid for them. Despite the quite remarkable postwar rates of economic growth and the rapidly rising living standards of the Soviet citizens, shortages did not disappear. On the contrary, it looked as if the more the country produced, the bigger the shortages and waiting lines became. In many cases, the demand for consumer goods was almost endless, and the Soviet consumers were never satisfied. Paradoxically, at the same time goods could remain unsold on the shop shelves due to their inferior quality or unreasonably high price. The Soviet Union enjoys the questionable reputation of being the only country that introduced the

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rationing of the basic foodstuffs under peace time conditions. After the October Revolution of 1917 and the following civil war, the Bolsheviks made serious concessions to their ideological goals by allowing small-scale private enterprises and peasant farms. This period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) ended with the introduction of the first of the Five Year Plans in 1928 to 1929. By the end of the 1920s, all private economic enterprises, in manufacturing, trade, and service, had been closed and the violent collectivization of agriculture started. Together with the program of forced industrialization, which concentrated all the economic resources of the country into building the basics of “heavy” metallurgical industry and electric power stations, collectivization lead to the starvation of millions of people in the early 1930s. Those who survived lived under very meager conditions on the limited rations of food they received from the state, which depended on the presumed importance of their contribution to the Soviet economy. The kolkhoz peasants mostly had to make do with the produce of their small private plots since the whole agricultural product of their kolkhozes went directly to the state. The strict rationing of basic foodstuffs ended first in 1936, only to be start again after the outbreak of World War II. After the war, it took a long time for the Soviet economy to recover and return to “normalcy.” The prewar standards of consumption were reached first in the second half of the 1950s. Therefore, despite the fact that many basic institutions of Soviet consumption, such as the “commercial” Gastronom and Bakaleya food stores and the state department stores, were established before the war, one can, with good reason, start counting the history of the Soviet system of consumption from the end of the 1950s. The postwar decades witnessed the gradual, limited opening of the Soviet economy to international markets. The founding of the COMECON, the economic organization of the East European communist states, created a common internal Eastern European market for planned economies. Even though never totally abandoning the doctrine of socialist selfreliance and the primacy of the needs of “heavy” (machine building) industry, the Soviet Union started to import consumer goods from the West. To many ordinary Soviet citizens, Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to import grain from the United States was a crucial sign of policy change. The threat of large-scale

famines, which plagued the country in the early 1930s, was thereby avoided. The inefficiency of the domestic, collectivized agriculture left Soviet citizens at the mercy of the annual variations in domestic harvests. Even though Soviet citizens did not have to suffer from pure hunger anymore, they had, as a rule, no guarantees of the regular supply of many of the basic agricultural products, which led to their hoarding, which further interfered with their regular supply to the customers. The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s are generally regarded as the golden years of the Soviet economy, when its economic growth was rapid and the general standard of living grew faster, only to start slowing down in Brezhnev’s later years, generally known as the period of the “stand-still.” The Soviet Union declared an open and peaceful competition with the leading countries of the West, with the United States, the richest and biggest capitalist economy, as the main competitor. The leaders of the Soviet Union promised that due to the superior effectiveness of its planned economy, the country would reach and overstep the standards of living of the most advanced capitalist countries. Khrushchev boasted notoriously of overcoming the per capita production of meat in the United States. In declaring this open competition, the Communist Party implicitly acknowledged that many features of the Western consumer society were worth copying, from American fast food to Paris fashion, from supermarkets to private, family cars. Despite great efforts, the Soviet economy lagged substantially behind in the per capita consumption of many items of individual consumption, from meat and milk to private cars and living space. Soviet households kept pace with the “workers living under the yoke of capitalism” as far as the ownership of the radios, TVs, refrigerators, and sewing machines was concerned. Many of these items of home technology were, in addition, produced in a variety of models and prices. Such quantitative comparison, however, does not tell anything about the quality of the available products, a permanent source of worry to Soviet planners and consumers. Not to speak of the availability of, say, more fashionable and varied clothing. The process of urbanization was exceptionally rapid in the Soviet Union, with tens of millions of people within a short period of time moving from the countryside to the new suburbs of the cities, with their shopping and service centers. The 1970s saw

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the establishment of huge service centers, with fashion ateliers, dry cleaners, hairdressers, photo ateliers, and so on, in bigger cities and suburbs all over the country. The theories of convergence popular among social scientists in the West—and living “undercover” even in the East—seemed to have much to say for them. The living styles as well as the future hopes of the suburban middle class, or as it was called in the Soviet Union, the “intelligentsia,” as well as those of the qualified industrial workers had much in common in the East and the West.

Ideological Factors As the Soviet ideologists repeated, such comparisons did not really do justice to the living standards and the real quality of life of the Soviet citizens. The conditions under which Soviet consumers lived differed remarkably from those under capitalism. Instead of private consumption, more collective forms of consumption were to be preferred. The Soviet citizen had, for instance, a right to free, state-financed education and health care. All forms of collective traffic, planes to buses, were subsidized and promoted. Most notably, such vital communal services as housing, electricity, and telephones were cheap and heavily subsidized. The local authorities had a responsibility to offer a suitable living space to their inhabitants. Long waiting lines and serious shortages were, again, the other side of the coin. Even though the Soviet government since the 1960s increasingly invested in big urban housing projects, most Soviet citizens lived either in very small apartments or shared a room in a dormitory. One important ideological factor promoting the collective forms of consumption was the promise to liberate Soviet women from the slavery of housework. The Soviet family was encouraged to eat out in a public canteen and the Soviet housewife to order a new dress from the local fashion atelier rather than sew it herself. That the Communist Party never could keep its promise of liberating women from the burden of housework and, in fact, by idealizing the role of the woman as a mother rather petrified the traditional gender roles, is another story. This was by far not the only unsolved tension inherent in the building of socialism. The opening of the two large car factories in the beginning of the 1970s marked both ideologically and in practice an important shift toward the Western ideals of consumerism. Now, for the first

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time in Soviet history, it became possible for an ordinary worker to think about buying a private car of his or her own. Even though the car density in the USSR never reached that of the United States, Germany, or the United Kingdom, the “automobilization” of the Soviet citizens had far-reaching ideological and practical consequences. First, the freedom of transport made Soviet citizens less dependent on the authorities. A private car also opened up new economic opportunities to private citizens. Second, in addition to new and better roads, the millions of new cars needed garage space, service and repair stations, as well as huge amounts of spare parts, the production of which lagged badly, creating a huge black market of “favors.” Since the Soviet society claimed to be an egalitarian society—privileges had to be earned—all the goods of life had, in principle, to be available to all the decent and hard-working Soviet citizens at the same time. If a new consumption good was taken into production, it should be available to everyone and not only to those with money, as was the case in capitalism. This meant that everything had to be mass produced, in millions and millions of similar, standardized copies available all over the Soviet Union, from Vladivostok to Riga, from Tashkent to Murmansk. This made the introduction of novelties a big problem in the Soviet economy and seriously limited the variety of the available consumer goods. All novelties had to be accepted into the economic plan and their price centrally set in Moscow. Therefore, it was often easier to fulfill the existing quantitative plans. At the same time, as the planning authorities admitted, novelties and a greater variety of goods were in great demand. There was a basic tension in the official ideology of the Soviet consumption. On the one hand, the party promised its loyal and hard-working citizens increasing material well-being. The Soviet worker would, in the near future, enjoy all those pleasures that their comrades living under the yoke of capitalism could only dream of. On the other hand, petit bourgeois philistinism posed the greatest threat to the building of the new communist society. The Soviet citizen was expected to care for the higher, spiritual values of life and to be dedicated to the building of socialism instead of being tempted by material consumption. In the last instance, the Soviet government and the Communist Party preserved—through their planning offices—for themselves, the right to decide

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which needs and desires deserved to be satisfied and which not. This was a task too demanding to be left to the individual consumer. Thus, a strong collectivist ideology permeated the society. The promise of gratifying all the rational needs of its consumers was one of the major pillars of legitimating the socialist rule in the USSR as well as in other socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Consumption was a permanent source of dissatisfaction as well as an officially tolerated and even actively encouraged target of citizen’s complaints. With the gradually increasing material well-being and rising standards of demand, the concrete objects of complaints naturally changed too. Whereas customers in the immediate postwar years could complain about light summer shoes, which were on sale only for the left foot, in the 1970s and the 1980s the long lines and the long waiting time to get the right to buy a private car annoyed the Soviet citizens. To the authorities’ surprise, customers did not necessarily become more satisfied as a consequence of the rapidly increasing production figures of many consumer goods. Under socialism, the government and the Communist Party took the full responsibility for the satisfaction of the needs of the citizens, a promise that became all the more difficult to keep with the continuously growing needs and increasing individualization of demand (Bauman 1990–1991). Jukka Gronow See also Citizenship; Comparing Consumer Cultures; Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe; Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War; Industrial Society; Informal Economy; Socialism and Consumption; Systems of Provision

Further Readings Bauman, Zygmunt. “Communism: A Post Mortem.” Praxis International 10, nos. 3–4 (1990–1991): 185–192. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of Good Life in Stalin’s Russia. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Hanson, Philip. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945. London: Longman, 2003. Harrison, Mark. “Economic Growth and Slowdown.” In Brezhnev Reconsidered, edited by Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle, 38–67. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Hessler, Julie. A History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices and Consumption, 1917–1953. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Osokina, Elena. Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. Millar, James R. “The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism.” Slavic Review 44, no. 4 (1984): 694–706. Millar, James R., ed. Politics, Work and Daily life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Siegelbaum, Lewis. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

CONSUMER DEMAND Economists have looked at consumer demand both at the macro- or aggregative level and at the level of individual choice (microlevel). At the aggregative level, beginning in the 1930s with the first systems of national accounts, consumption spending, private investment, government outlays, and net exports were dubbed the components of overall demand. Private consumption alone, in recent years, has exceeded two-thirds of all spending in the U.S. economy. John Maynard Keynes, in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), explained the depth and persistence of unemployment in the Great Depression as a failure of confidence reflected in too little business investment and private consumer spending. He suggested that consumption depends on current income, and made much of what he called the marginal propensity to consume, or the ratio of consumption to income, which he took to be less than one. If, through a shock to confidence, a negative change in income occurs, this translates into a negative change in investment or consumption, but that causes a drop in the incomes of those who depend on consumption spending, and so on, through many rounds. The total loss of income here exceeds that of consumption, and both will exceed the initial changes if the marginal propensity to consume is less than one. This is known as the multiplier effect. It works negatively, accentuating downturns, but also positively; and Keynes urged that governments engage in stimulus spending to offset shortfalls in private consumption and investment. Even if this increases the fiscal deficit, the multiplier effect on incomes and thence on tax revenue means that a public stimulus can be self-financing over time.

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Argument ensued over the size of the multiplier and as to whether the exogenous income variable should be absolute or relative income. Milton Friedman (A Theory of the Consumption Function, 1957) mounted a more basic challenge, urging that rational economic agents do not respond to current income but spend out of so-called permanent income: the discounted value of expected future income, including years of active earning and years during which savings are drawn. Rational people therefore do not rush to spend a one-time government payment in time of recession. They might spend, but in principle, it will be only that small fraction of a government stimulus that is appropriate after folding the one-time largesse into lifetime income, and bearing in mind that future tax rates may have to be increased to eliminate the government debt issued to cover the one-time outlay. This thinking applies symmetrically to saving, or nonspending, with the implication that such things as the setting up and management of retirement accounts can safely be left to citizens themselves. Almost eighty years of empirical research on these issues has not proved univocal. Despite the more immediate policy implications coming out of the macroanalysis of consumption, probably more effort in the twentieth century went into the analysis of consumer choice at the microlevel. This was part of bringing consumer choice under the umbrella of rational (that is, utility maximizing) decision making. In the 1860s, William Stanley Jevons (in The Theory of Political Economy, 1871) asked how individual consumers could maximize the utility derived from their spending. He arrived at a simple and elegant rule: a person should spend in each desired direction up to the point where incremental (marginal) utility is just equal to price. Since budgets are finite and if, as Jevons believed, the marginal utility of at least basic goods decreases as more is consumed, this in-principle solution also seems practical. But there is a serious problem: the utility involved is subjective and individual utilities are not comparable between people. To avoid this difficulty, Vilfredo Pareto, at the very end of the nineteenth century, opted for ordinal measurement, applied the notion of indifference to the ordering of preferences, and dispensed with “utility” as a motivating and determining factor in consumer choice (see Ranchetti 1998). Desired goods might be more or less preferred, or judged the same as alternatives, all without numerical measurement and without an appeal to “utility.”

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Like-minded economists in the 1930s, such as Paul A. Samuelson, influenced by operationalist thinking, took Pareto’s concepts further, looking only to the actual choices of individuals, and reducing these to the observables price and quantity. Samuelson and a whole generation of economic theorists after him sought ways to order preferences by restricting them in various ways—for example, insisting that there is a (consistently) most-preferred bundle, and that indifference curves are strictly convex—so as to make them consistent with both rational, maximizing behavior and with basic economic notions, such as that demand curves slope downward (less is bought when price is raised). This combination has numerous practical implications, such as what can be expected of motorists and of rational buyers of motor vehicles if oil prices quadruple. An important aspect of this line of analytical development is that preferences came to be treated as a primitive: changes in prices and income are examined for their impact on behavior, taking preferences as given. This element of a methodological credo was articulated sharply by George Stigler and Gary Becker. They made the strong claim that virtually any economic behavior can be explained using only relative prices and income (or wealth), without gratuitous appeals to changes in preferences or to nonrational behavior. The aim was to avoid turning the analysis of choice into a tautology. To illustrate the point: for consumers to use store-sponsored Christmas funds rather than leaving the same amount in interest-bearing savings accounts involves them in loss. It might be suggested that funds are used nonetheless because people do not trust themselves to have the savings designated for Christmas gifts when the time comes. Such an explanation, however, invokes loss of willpower as a purely arbitrary stop gap, one that works ex post yet empties the theory of predictive power. It is better then to frame an observable outcome due to change in a strictly economic variable. Thus, for example, if interest rates on savings accounts were to increase, we should expect a reduction in the use of Christmas accounts. This makes use of the economists’ preferred variables: relative prices and the impact on wealth as what ultimately matters to a rational individual (Stigler 1966). The story so far has modern economists shunning the investigation of consumers’ motivations and turning away especially from psychological, sociological, and cultural explanations. It was not always so. In

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the eighteenth century, it was common to analyze sentiments. The division then was between those who deplored “unnecessary” consumption and those who argued that, with necessities readily obtainable for most people in “civilized” countries, almost all goods were nonnecessaries anyway. This was the position of physician–social critic Bernard Mandeville, who held that goods of the mind—wants, as distinct from strict needs—are infinite, and our tastes infinitely varied. Hence, since we can provide ourselves with only a tiny portion of the things we would like to enjoy, we are dependent on others for the rest. Social relations thus arise out of our need to persuade others that they serve themselves in serving us. But the driving force is our desire to consume. Adam Smith, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, turned this into a theory of economic specialization and progress. He wrote about capital and production, but insisted that, since we produce only to consume, it is imperative that producers know what is wanted. Smith made it his own business to explore the characteristics of goods that give us pleasure. Operating at a fairly high level of abstraction, he identified four pleasure-yielding attributes: form, coloration, novelty, and rarity or uniqueness. Smith’s focus on the pleasure-yielding characteristics of goods was lost, partly due to John Stuart Mill’s mid-nineteenth-century removal of consumption from the body of economic principles, replacing it with distribution. It was revived in the 1960s by psychobiologist D. E. Berlyne. Common to Smith and Berlyne was the notion that, above some threshold level, pleasure varies with the intensity of a stimulus, increasing with complexity, challenge, interestingness, and so on, but only up to a point: it declines again as these become overwhelming. In the 1950s and 1960s, the view that we buy not goods but bundles of pleasing characteristics was offered as a new way to think about consumer demand by economists Bernard Houthakker and Kelvin Lancaster (see Lancaster 1966), but realized its potential more in the applied field of measuring the impact of product improvements on living standards than in the economic theory of optimal consumer spending. In the last three decades, the Stigler-Becker view on what counts as an acceptable economic explanation of consumer behavior has been challenged by a wide range of experimental evidence showing that, while the older tradition supplies a coherent normative account, actual human beings consistently

behave in ways that differ from that model. The consistency of the deviations and thus the predictability of actual behavior in a variety of settings has given rise to a new category, the “regular yet nonrational,” or quasi-rational agent (Russell and Thaler 1988). Richard Thaler and others in the field known as behavioral economics do not dismiss the value for normative purposes of assuming fully rational agents, but urge that descriptive accuracy requires that we also allow for psychological findings that enrich the range of behaviors asking for analysis. They argue for replacing the individual’s utility function with a psychologically richer “value” function, which allows for “noise” traders in financial markets along with the “smart” money. The former act on sentiment, whim, perhaps follow the herd, and so on, whereas the latter try to act on full information. They also insist that findings such as the following be taken seriously: that individuals seem regularly to regard gains differently from losses; they view out-of-pocket costs differently from opportunity costs, underweighting the latter in the same way as they value goods possessed more highly than their actual costs; they prefer binding themselves (as to a Christmas fund) because commitments made at a long temporal distance tend to weaken as the moment of real choice approaches; and so on. Clearly, the implications of such findings complicate as they also enrich the traditional microeconomic analysis of consumer choice and acceptance is hard won, though formal professional recognition gained some ground with the 2002 award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics to the experimental psychologist Daniel Kahneman, cofounder of this line of research with Amos Tversky. Neil De Marchi See also Bounded Rationality; Economics; Income; Innovation Studies; Keynesian Demand Management; Preference Formation; Price and Price Mechanisms; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings Berlyne, D. E. Aesthetics and Psychobiology. New York: Appleton-Crofts, 1971. Lancaster, Kelvin. “A New Approach to Consumer Theory.” Journal of Political Economy 74 (1966): 132–157. Ranchetti, Fabio. “Choice without Utility? Some Reflections on the Loose Foundations of Standard Consumer Theory.” In The Active Consumer: Novelty

Consumer Dissatisfaction and Surprise in Consume Choice, edited by Marina Bianchi, 21–45. London: Routledge, 1998. Russell, Thomas, and Richard H. Thaler. “The Relevance of Quasi Rationality in Competitive Markets.” In Decision-Making: Descriptive, Normative and Prescriptive Interactions, edited by David E. Bell, Howard Raiffa, and Amos Tversky, 508–524. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Samuelson, Paul A. “Consumption Theory in Terms of Revealed Preference.” Economica 15 (1948): 243–253. Stigler, George J. The Theory of Price. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Stigler, George J., and Gary S. Becker. “De gustibus non est disputandum.” American Economic Review 67 (1977): 76–90. Thaler, Richard H. “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 1 (1980): 39–60. Thaler, Richard H., ed. Advances in Behavioral Finance. New York: Russell Sage, 1993. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science 211 (January 1981): 453–458.

CONSUMER DISSATISFACTION Within the context of consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction (CS/D), dissatisfaction is the attitude that a consumer develops after he or she has evaluated his or her consumption experience of a product or service. Dissatisfaction can arise from the failure of a product or service to meet a consumer’s expectations, from negative perceptions of the performance of a product or service during consumption, from negative feelings experienced during the consumption of a product or service, or from a combination thereof. Much of the psychology-based research into consumer dissatisfaction falls under the umbrella of CS/D. Consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction draws on a number of different psychological theories to explain the attitudes that individual consumers develop in reaction to their experiences with specific goods and services. These theories include expectancy disconfirmation, attribution theory, and equity theory. There is increasing evidence, however, according to Wayne D. Hoyer and Deborah J. MacInnis that dissatisfaction can also be generated by postpurchase feelings that are independent of disconfirmation judgments, and according to John C. Mowen and Michael Minor,

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that involve experientially based affective feelings (i.e., the positive or negative feelings that flow from our experiences with products and services). Also, Susan Fournier and David G. Mick have challenged the applicability of the dominant comparison standards paradigm for explaining all cases of CS/D. The early work on CS/D built on Rolph E. Anderson’s 1973 study on disconfirmed expectancy and Richard L. Oliver’s 1980 expectancy disconfirmation model. Drawing on four psychological theories (cognitive dissonance-assimilation; contrast; generalized negativity; assimilation-contrast), Anderson illustrated how customer dissatisfaction occurs at the point when the increasing disparity between expectations and actual product performance can no longer be accepted by consumers. Building on this work, Oliver argued that consumer expectations can be seen as not only providing the foundation for attitude formation, but also serving as an adaptation level for subsequent satisfaction decisions. There are three possible outcomes using this comparison standards approach. First, if product or service performance exceeds expectations, then positive disconfirmation occurs. Second, if product or service performance equals expectations, then simple confirmation occurs. Third, if product or service performance is worse than expected, then negative disconfirmation occurs. Dissatisfaction flows from the failure of a product or service’s performance to match a consumer’s expectations. Sarah Fisher Gardial and colleagues have noted a variety of standards for evaluating product performance. However, according to Hoyer and MacInnis, postdecision feelings can also occur independently of disconfirmation judgments, whenever consumers’ feelings about a product or service arise directly from their experience of using it. Negative feelings generated by using a product or a service encounter (e.g., anger, distress, frustration) can also lead to feelings of dissatisfaction, according to Robert Westbrook and Oliver. Dissatisfaction can also be explained by attribution theory (i.e., how individuals try and account for events), as shown by Valerie S. Folkes. Three factors influence individuals’ explanations of events: stability, focus, and controllability. Stability is about whether or not the cause of the event is temporary or permanent. Focus is about whether the problem relates to the marketer or the consumer. Controllability is about the extent to which the event is under the

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marketer’s or the consumer’s control. Hoyer and MacInnis found that dissatisfaction is more likely to arise in cases where the cause of the problem is perceived to be permanent, beyond the customer’s control, and related to marketers’ actions. Equity theory is the other main source of explanations for CS/D and complements the dissatisfaction paradigm. Central to equity theory is the perception of fairness from both the buyer’s and seller’s perspectives. Equity and disconfirmation processes can often coexist. Whereas the former processes are more concerned with interpersonal aspects and the outcomes for the seller as well as the buyer, the latter processes focus on expectations and performance, according to Hoyer and MacInnis. Research by Fournier and Mick challenges the applicability of the dominant comparison standards paradigm for explaining all cases of CS/D. Their research indicates that there are some cases of CS/D where the CS/D model of preconsumption standards is insufficient to explain satisfaction/dissatisfaction. From their results, they propose (1) an inverted form of the ED [expectations-disconfirmation model of satisfaction response] model in which the disconfirmation of expectations promotes satisfaction; (2) an extended version of the desires model, which includes the life themes, life projects, and current concerns that propel product desires; (3) the induction of a new experience-based norms standard that underpins a unique dependency model of satisfaction; (4) expanded conceptualizations of the relief and novelty satisfaction modes, including awe, trust, helplessness, resignation and love. (Fournier and Mick 1999, 14–15)

Most important from the point of view of marketing managers, dissatisfaction is seen to deter repurchase behavior, while satisfaction drives repurchase behavior. Marketing managers need to understand CS/D because consumers’ evaluation of products and services during the postpurchase/consumption stage feeds directly back into future purchase behavior and provides the basis for building customer loyalty and longer-term relationships between firms and their customers. Significantly, Charlotte Klopp and John Sterlicchi estimate that only one in twenty-six dissatisfied customers complains; that twelve positive experiences are required to counter one negative experience; and that it is five times more expensive to

attract a new customer than to keep an old one. Only a minority of dissatisfied customers seeks redress or complains to an outside body. Many do nothing at all because they do not believe that it is worth the time and effort, or they are not convinced that they will be able to find anyone interested enough in helping them resolve their complaint. However, although dissatisfied consumers often do not complain officially, they are likely to avoid the product or service in the future (or that particular brand or service provider), and may also spread negative word of mouth to friends. The Internet has opened up many new possibilities for consumer-to-consumer contact and grievances over a transaction or marketers’ activities can spread quickly, gaining momentum as they are publicized through social networks. In the future, it is likely that researchers will have to pay more attention to macrolevel dissatisfaction issues, such as consumers’ negative reactions to the marketplace itself, and to theories that draw on sociological understanding of group behaviors and economic theories about the nature of exchange (e.g., boycotting and downshifting). Margaret K. Hogg and Pauline Maclaran See also Attitude Theory; Consumer Apathy; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Moods; Emotions; Methods of Market Research; Psychology; Store Loyalty Cards

Further Readings Anderson, Rolph E. “Consumer Dissatisfaction: The Effect of Disconfirmed Expectancy on Perceived Product Performance.” Journal of Marketing Research 10, no. 1 (February 1973): 38–44. Folkes, Valerie S. “Recent Attribution Research in Consumer Behavior: A Review and New Directions.” Journal of Consumer Research (March 1988): 548–565. Fournier, Susan, and David G. Mick. “Rediscovering Satisfaction.” Journal of Marketing 63 (October 1999): 5–23. Gardial, Sarah Fisher, D. Scott Clemens, Robert B. Woodruff, David W. Schumann, and Mary Jane Burns. “Comparing Consumers’ Recall of Prepurchase and Postpurchase Product Evaluation Experiences.” Journal of Consumer Research 20 (March 1994): 548–560. Hoyer, Wayne D., and Deborah J. MacInnis. Consumer Behavior. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Klopp, Charlotte, and John Sterlicchi. “Customer Satisfaction Just Catching on in Europe.” Marketing News 24, no. 11 (May 1990): 5.

Consumer Durables Mowen, John C., and Michael Minor. Consumer Behavior. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. Oliver, Richard L. “A Cognitive Model of the Antecedents and Consequences of Satisfaction Decisions.” Journal of Marketing Research 17 (November 1980): 460–469. Oliver, Richard L. “Cognitive, Affective and Attribute-Bases of the Satisfaction Response.” Journal of Consumer Research (December 1993): 418–430. Westbrook, Robert A., and Richard L. Oliver. “The Dimensionality of Consumption Emotion Patterns and Consumer Satisfaction.” Journal of Consumer Research (June 1991): 84–91.

CONSUMER DURABLES Industrialized societies are characterized by a proliferation of consumer durables, defined as goods used repeatedly or continuously in a domestic context. Such goods include: vehicles, major household appliances, house and garden tools and equipment, furniture and furnishings, carpets and other floor coverings, major recreation goods, telephones, clocks, jewelry, watches, and audiovisual, photographic, and information processing equipment. Reference to being used “repeatedly or continuously” indicates that the distinction between durable and nondurable goods is not based on physical durability (e.g., coal is highly durable in a physical sense but can be burned only once). This proliferation of goods both underpins and shapes our consumer culture. The life spans of different consumer durables are variable, although such products are characterized by relatively long periods between purchases. The definition used in the international standard classification for individual consumption expenditure (Classification of Individual Consumption by Purpose, or COICOP) refers to such goods being used “over a period of a year or more,” assuming a normal or average rate of physical usage (United Nations 1993). Other authorities apply a threshold of three years and the category “semi-durable” is sometimes used to describe products for which the expected life span is not substantially more than a year. Examples of semi-durable goods include clothing, footwear, household textiles, small appliances, household utensils, sports and camping equipment, games, and toys. Nondurable goods (often described as consumables, disposables, or

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perishable items) are, by contrast, either used up after a single use or within a year.

Emergence of the Consumer Society Rising demand for consumer durables is not only a recent trend, European historians have traced a “remorselessly creeping demand for more and better consumer goods” (de Vries 1993, 101), notably kitchenware, tableware, furniture, and furnishings, since the early modern period (late-fifteenth to lateeighteenth centuries). Toward the latter stages of this period, in particular, there was a diffusion of new goods, increased quantities of familiar items, and more luxurious versions of others. Some of these changes led to reduced durability, as when glass and pottery replaced wooden and pewter tableware. There were also more frequent changes in fashion— and these were not limited to clothing but applied other goods such as china. There is evidence that the price of clothing and many consumer durables fell substantially in this period, at least in Britain and America, which increased access to such items. As a consequence, the share of wealth accounted for by consumer durables, as revealed through probate inventories, did not change much. From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, new materials, such as plastic, vulcanized rubber, photographic film, and, early in the twentieth century, artificial fibers such as rayon and nylon, provided opportunities for new or improved products, and consumer demand was fueled by a growth in advertising and the emergence of department stores. In the period following World War I, there was a notable shift in family budgets, with the proportion of expenditure on food falling while that on consumer durables increased. Cars increased in popularity, labor-saving products transformed households, and televisions not only brought a new form of entertainment into people’s homes but also, through advertising on commercial channels, stimulated demand for more consumer durables. Planned obsolescence, notably through periodical changes in style, led to shorter product life cycles. Such changes intensified after World War II, as consumerism encroached into new territories within society and attitudes changed to the use of credit. The prevailing level of ownership of consumer durables in different countries around the world reflects substantial variations in income and wealth.

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For example, in developing countries at the turn of the millennium only one in five people owned a radio, one in seven owned a television, one in twenty had a telephone, and one in sixty owned a car, goods considered necessities by most people in industrialized nations. Around a billion people live with few, if any, consumer durables. Meanwhile, people in the United States, accounting for 5 percent of the global population, were consuming 30 percent of the world’s energy resources. Between these extremes, a consumer-oriented middle class emerged during the twentieth century in many regions beyond the West, notably India, Brazil, Mexico, and countries in the Far East, such as Japan and, more recently, China.

Consumption, Need, and Well-Being Consumer goods have a critical role in reflecting modern culture; they represent the “visible part” of culture, acting as a concrete and public record of the ideas, categories, and principles that make up culture. Sociologists and social anthropologists have drawn attention to the ways in which consumer goods, including both durables and semi-durables, do not merely satisfy people’s functional needs but communicate meanings and shape identities. This is especially true of clothing and accessories but also of many other items, notably portable communications devices, such as the iPhone. There is an extensive and growing literature on the social dimension to consumption, from the development of early concepts, such as conspicuous consumption, to more recent work on positional goods, which suggests that the acquisition of consumer durables is determined as much by a desire to establish distinction between people as by functional requirement. Historically, the possession of consumer durables was associated with the fulfillment of needs and, by implication, increased well-being. As affluence has grown, however, such relationships have increasingly been questioned through discourse on the nature of needs (as distinct from wants) and the relationship between economic growth and quality of life.

Sustainability The proliferation of consumer durables has attracted considerable attention in contemporary debate on sustainable development. Consumption in industrialized nations is widely regarded as unsustainable but

there remain differences of opinion on whether sustainable consumption could be achieved by changing the type of products (e.g., through increased energy efficiency, recyclability, and miniaturization) or demands a reduction in the number consumed. Many argue that the finite reserves of raw materials, such as metals, make it impossible for current levels of consumption typical of the lifestyles of those living in the industrialized world to be maintained should those lifestyles be adopted by those living in industrializing nations. In response to concern about mounting levels of waste, the European Union included vehicles and electrical and electronic equipment within its designated “priority waste streams” and passed legislation aimed at increased recycling and the removal of hazardous materials. Since the early 1990s, household appliances and consumer electronics had to be labeled according to their energy efficiency and, in the case of refrigeration equipment, a minimum performance is required. Other countries are similarly introducing measures to reduce the environmental impact of consumer durables. In Japan, the Top Runner Programme identifies the most efficient model on the market and then stipulates that its efficiency must become the industry standard within a certain number of years. Recent interest in resource productivity has drawn attention to the fact that the utilization rate of many consumer durables is low. In other words, many such products are only used infrequently, notably vehicles and household appliances. This is particularly significant when the product is subject to technological advances, such as improved energy efficiency. The debate on whether, from an environmental perspective, consumer durables that are old and relatively inefficient but still function should be discarded is unresolved and depends on the likelihood of future improvements in efficiency.

Product Life Cycles and Product-Service Systems Research into the whole life span of consumer durables (i.e., acquisition, use, and disposal) has taken on a growing significance through this debate. A wide range of methodologies is relevant, including surveys, ethnographic techniques, and life cycle analysis. Each raises problems, whether privacy concerns relating to ordinary domestic situations; the need for

Consumer Education

longitudinal research, which is costly and demands stable research teams; or the data requirements of life cycle analysis. Discretionary replacement of consumer durables has become increasingly common as producers have increased the reliability of products such as televisions, and the replacement timing of such products, particularly in saturated markets, has attracted interest from different disciplines. Marketing researchers have long been interested in how to accelerate the timing of buyers’ replacement decisions while, more recently, product design researchers have explored how users might be encouraged to keep functioning products. Designers with an interest in sustainability have begun to question their role in the proliferation of products and concepts, such as design for longevity, and productservice systems have emerged as a response to unsustainable consumption. Product-service systems take as a starting point the idea that users are not concerned so much with the product itself as with the service that it supplies: the user of a washing machine does not desire a rotating drum but clean clothes. This, in turn, has led to suggestions that a new business model, in which people pay for the service provided by products instead of paying to own them, would be more efficient. Critics have responded that this appears similar to leasing or rental and, contrary to intention, may lead to users updating products even more regularly to take advantage of the latest technology.

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See also Consumer Demand; Domestic Technologies; Eco-Labeling; Household Budgets; Industrial Society; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Planned Obsolescence; Waste; Well-Being

Further Readings Bayus, Barry L. “Accelerating the Durable Replacement Cycle with Marketing Mix Variables.” Journal of Product Innovation Management 5, no. 3 (September 1988): 216–226. de Vries, Jan. “Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods.” In Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 85–132. New York: Routledge, 1993. Gordon, Robert B., Marlen Bertram, and Thomas E. Graedel. “Metal Stocks and Sustainability.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 1209–1214. McCracken, Grant D. Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Shammas, Carole. The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Stearns, Peter N. Consumerism in World History. New York: Routledge, 2001. United Nations. System of National Accounts 1993. http:// unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/docs/1993sna.pdf. United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report 1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Van Nes, Nicole, and Jacqueline Cramer. “Conceptual Model on Replacement Behaviour.” International Journal of Product Development 6, nos. 3–4 (2008): 291–309.

An Ethical Future? The emergence of ethical criteria in decision making, both by producers and consumers, is a further key market development. Many consumer durables are made by major international companies, who are facing demands from investors for practices compatible with corporate social responsibility. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of consumers are using ethical criteria in their purchasing decisions, and this is influencing contemporary retailing, with sales of consumer durables produced and marketed on the basis of environmental and social criteria becoming increasingly significant. The development of secondhand markets such as eBay enables the reuse of unwanted goods while reflecting the excesses of contemporary consumerism. Tim Cooper

CONSUMER EDUCATION Although people have been consuming goods and services in the marketplace for years, the terms consumer culture and consumer education only came into use at the beginning of the twentieth century. Transacting in the global marketplace of the twentyfirst century is a complex, nuanced process necessitating special training and socialization processes, available through consumer education. Over the past fifty years, efforts to conceptualize consumer education have become more refined, progressive, and innovative. Starting with the seminal work of Rosella Bannister and Charles Monsma, conceptions of consumer education are traced up to 2009, drawing

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on work from Canada, the United States, and the European Union. Bannister and Monsma tendered the most enduring understanding of consumer education, published in a monograph containing a classification system of 154 consumer education concepts. Through consumer education, people accumulate, in a progressive, empowering manner, the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors considered necessary for (a) managing resources, (b) engaging in rational consumption behavior, and (c) taking actions as citizens. Using their model, conventional consumer education programs assumed there were three major market players, each with different roles and interests: consumers (including consumer organizations), businesses, and governments. It is assumed that businesses have the advantage over consumers, necessitating government rules and regulations to protect people in their consuming role. To ensure that the interests of consumers were respected, consumer educators planned curricula that taught skills and knowledge pertinent to (a) decision making; (b) resource management (financial planning, shopping for goods and services, and conserving); and, (c) participating in the marketplace. The latter included both (a) consumer protection, rights, laws, and assistance and (b) consumer advocacy and representation of consumers’ interests relative to business. The intent of consumer education was to help people get the best value for their money by making reasoned purchase decisions, complaining if they did not get their money’s worth, taking action on behalf of other consumers, and appreciating how the economy worked so they could function efficiently as consumer agents. Such educated consumers were considered to be “empowered” market players. In the 1980s, three key consumer education initiatives began to shift the field’s focus. First, the International Organization of Consumer Unions (IOCU, now called Consumers International, CI) created a charter for consumer action, comprising five consumer responsibilities. This educational tool augmented the prevailing focus on consumer rights. Second, hand-in-hand was IOCU’s publication of Promoting Consumer Education in Schools (remaining one of today’s gold standards). The boundaries of consumer education were pushed beyond the focus on interests and rights to include an understanding of the impact of consumption decisions on the lives of others and about how to act and behave

conscientiously. Third, in 1985, the United Nations released its Resolution for Guidelines for Consumer Protection. It strongly advised consumer educators to include the environmental, social, and economic impacts of consumer choices and promote sustainable consumption patterns. These three previous initiatives were precursors for another shift in consumer education, a move from consumer rights and privileges to socially and environmentally responsible consumption. A 1999 update of IOCU’s Promoting Consumer Education in Schools included global citizenship, a concern for society at large, conscientious decision making, sustainability, solidarity with underprivileged members of society and nature, and a moral dimension. As well, a subtle shift was occurring in how consumer educators understood the term consumer empowerment. Earlier and current versions of consumer education assumed that consumers were empowered if they could use information and take advantage of the competitive market by being knowledgeable, confident, assertive, and self-reliant. With the right information, people could make the right purchase decisions, thereby driving competition, innovation, and choice in the market. Moving past this position, a 1999 U.K. initiative developed a Framework for the Development of Consumer Skills and Attitudes, predicated on the belief that consumer education should benefit society as a whole; instead of serving self-interest, it should serve societal and environmental interests. Now, an empowered consumer was someone who had found the inner power and agency to effect change in the marketplace for the betterment of others and the ecosystem. To achieve this new objective, consumer educators in many countries embraced another innovation in the mid-1990s. By integrating consumer education with global and citizenship education, they identified synergies such that people were prepared to be citizens first and consumers second; that is, consumercitizens. Using this conceptualization better ensured the transformation of the consumer culture so that people were provoked to reach out of their private worlds to the shared, public, global community. Motivating consumers to participate in the marketplace as active and informed citizens become a major goal of consumer education. The Consumer Citizenship Network (CCN) actively promoted this approach. It was keen to translate ethical, sustainable, and citizenship values into everyday practice

Consumer Education

through conscientious participation in the market. CCN believed any conceptual framework for consumer citizenship should be democratic, experimental, holistic, and humanistic. In this vein of thought, Sue McGregor, in 2002, tendered the idea of participatory consumerism as a way to teach consumer education for the betterment of the human family and its home, the earth. By marrying participatory development theory with citizenship education, a new form of consumer education was developed that involved vulnerability, risk-taking, trust, cooperation, public discourse and dialogue, openness with healthy suspicion, and patience with impatience. Perceiving citizens as participating consumers was a powerful way to extend consumer education to include (a) sustainable consumption, (b) the promotion of human dignity and quality of life (human and social development), and, (c) the perspective of interdependence. In 2002, Victoria W. Thoresen (the founder of CCN) prepared a Resource Handbook for Consumer Education. A rich pedagogical tool, it is prefaced with an accounting of how she conceptualized consumer education. Her approach encompasses a connection to the management of the global society’s collective life (in addition to individual responsibility); it deals with sustainable development—human, social, economic, and ecological; it assumes consumer education is an essential aspect of becoming liberally educated (critical thinking and processes, insights into choice consequences); it inherently requires an integrated, holistic, interdisciplinary approach; and, finally, it is concerned with the just distribution of the world’s resources. In 2002, McGregor expanded consumer education into the realm of peace education, whereby people in their consumer role would learn to adhere to social values including justice, tolerance, respect, solidarity, nonviolence, security, equality, and peace. From a peace perspective, consumer education shifted from preparing people to function in a free market to functioning in a fair trade market structure. Ultimately, society would create and function within economies of care, moral economies that would replace the current capitalistic market maintained by consumer capitalism and a consumer culture. Jennifer A. Sandlin retheorized consumer education using cultural studies. She positioned consumer education as a political site of resistance against the consumer culture. Assuming all educators and learners are social activists and political agents, consumer

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education could facilitate the struggle for knowledge and power. Through a more critical consumer education, with a focus on the intersections of power and consumption, consumer educators gained the potential to open the door for democracy and social justice. To that end, Sandlin proposed they need to be aware of three orientations to teaching about consumption: (1) embracing consumption as a desired activity, (2) individually questioning life in a consumer culture, and (3) collectively politicizing and fighting consumerism. In 2005, McGregor extended Sandlin’s typology, adding (4) the empowerment approach for mutual interest. In 2006, McGregor developed a moral consciousness approach to consumer education whereby educators problematize the morality of consumer choices. They could augment curricula by adding the affective domain of learning (focused on values), by giving more credence to the care and justice concepts of morality, and by using established moral development models to build a principled conscience in consumers. To that end, McGregor developed the idea of five orders of consumer adulthood. This theory assumes that people grow through increasing levels of competence, care, and concern for others while consuming (from first to fifth order): me (impulse and emotions); me (self-centered, imperial self); us (defined by peers); all of us (able to create and sustain a consumer self); and, other-global (morally responsible to world and all of life). The pressures of the modern consumer culture require people to operate at the fourth order because the third order is inadequate for meeting the complex moral demands of consumer adulthood in the twenty-first century. Most people function at the second level (focus on “me”), meaning they are not prepared for the complex reasoning inherent in judging purchases in a global marketplace. Using this conceptual innovation, consumer educators can quit blaming unethical consumers, start appreciating they cannot be held responsible for what is beyond their current mental capacity, and then teach accordingly. In 2007, McGregor positioned consumer education at the interface between social learning theory (SLT) and the principles of education for sustainable development (ESD). SLT assumes that people learn by observing or modeling others’ behavior. This interface enabled consumer-citizens to appreciate diversity, participation, shared power, interconnectedness, and interrelatedness. Consumers could value

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systems thinking and multiple perspectives, and appreciate that people learn sustainable consumption “by watching others.” In 2009, she created the idea of transdisciplinary consumer citizenship education. Sue McGregor See also Citizenship; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer Socialization; Higher Education; Moralities; Motivation Research

Thoresen, Victoria W. Consumer Citizenship Education Guidelines. Vol. 1, Higher Education. The Consumer Citizen Network, 2005. https://www.hihm.no/content/ download/4916/43166/file/4%20guidelines.pdf.

Website The Consumer Citizenship Network. http://www.hihm .no/concit.

CONSUMER EXPENDITURE SURVEYS

Further Readings Bannister, Rosella, and Charles Monsma. The Classification of Concepts in Consumer Education. Monograph 137. Cincinnati, OH: South-Western, 1982. European Module for Consumer Education: The Final Report. London: University of North London, 2001. Hellman-Tuitert, Grada. Promoting Consumer Education in Schools. 2nd ed. London: Consumers International, 1999. http://www.ciroap.org/ce/doc/pces_grada.pdf. International Organization of Consumers Unions. Consumer Action in Developing Countries: A Consumer Action Charter. Consumercraft 1. Penang, Malaysia: Author, 1980. http://www.scribd.com/doc/133236/ Consumer-Action-Handbook. Lusby, Linda A. Consumer Decision Making in a Global Context. Wolfville, NS: Acadia University, 1992. http:// eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED346313.pdf. McGregor, Sue L. T. “Consumer Citizenship: A Pathway to Sustainable Development?” Keynote at the International Conference on Developing Consumer Citizenship. Hamar, Norway: Hedmark University College, 2002. http://www.consultmcgregor.com/documents/keynotes/ norway_keynote.pdf. McGregor, Sue L. T. Consumer Education as a Site of Political Resistance: 50 Years of Conceptual Evolutions. Monograph 201001. Seabright, NS: McGregor Consulting Group, 2010. http://www.consultmcgregor .com/documents/publications/monograph_consumer_ education_2010.pdf. McGregor, Sue L. T. Consumer Moral Leadership. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2010. Sandlin, Jennifer A. “Culture, Consumption and Adult Education: Refashioning Consumer Education for Adults as a Political Site Using a Cultural Studies Framework.” Adult Education Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2005): 165–181. Thoresen, Victoria W. Resource Handbook for Consumer Education. Oslo, Norway: Consumer Council of Norway, 2002. http://forbrukerportalen.no/filer/fil_ handbook.pdf.

Consumer expenditure surveys (CES), or family expenditure surveys (FES) as they had been called in Britain until recently, are studies that primarily aim to collect data related to household expenditures for goods and services used in everyday life. The British former FES was taken over by the Expenditure and Food Survey, at the merger with National Food Survey in 2001, and was renamed the Living Costs and Food Survey in 2008. These U.S. and U.K. surveys and their equivalents in other countries are conducted by the statistical departments of the central governments and provide information on household incomes and expenditures, as well as demographic and economic characteristics of household members. The collected data are used to calculate, in official terms, the weights for an index of prices, which are applied as a deflator for incomes and costs of living. They also provide timely and detailed information on spending patterns of different types of households that can meet the data needs of the researchers and students of consumer culture. One of the oldest of such data-collecting exercises was carried out in 1888 to 1891 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics under the leadership of Carroll Wright. There had been a few experimental surveys of the standard of living of the poor conducted by the forerunning European researchers in the midnineteenth century, such as Frédéric Le Play, Edouard Ducpetiaux, and Ernst Engel. In Britain, while the classic poverty surveys of London by Charles Booth in 1886 to 1899, and of York by Seebohm Rowntree in 1899 to 1900, provided the backdrop, the first official national survey was conducted by the Board of Trade in 1904. Several attempts to update the cost-of-living index followed the initial enquiries on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1930s and after World War II, in tandem with the development of the method of large-scale sample survey throughout this

Consumer Expenditure Surveys

earlier period. The current practice of continuous annual surveys was established in 1957 in Britain and in 1979 in the United States. Other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries also established a similar practice around this period: Italy in 1968, Canada in 1953, Germany in 1962, France in 1965, and Japan in 1946. The surveys are conducted quinquennially in France and Germany. Consumer expenditure surveys, in current forms, provide essential information on consumption patterns that can be compared statistically over a long period of time and also across different countries. The basic framework of the surveys usually consists of the diary survey and the interview survey. In the United States, the two surveys—diary and interview—employ a different data-collection technique and sample. In the interview survey, each family in the sample is interviewed every three months to recall large expenditures and regular payments over five calendar quarters. In the diary survey, which is particularly designed to collect detailed expenditures on food, the respondent family is asked to keep records of expenditures daily for a two-week period. In Britain, on the other hand, the interview and diary surveys are both collected from the same sample of respondent households. The Household Interview Survey is designed to collect information about regular household bills and expenditure on major but infrequent purchases. The diary survey is used to collect data on personal expenditure, and is kept by each household member for two weeks. The two-week survey periods are rolled over throughout the year to cover seasonal variation in expenditures. This unique characteristic of the U.K. survey provides an opportunity for the data reusing researchers to analyze the purchase frequency and the expenditure level separately. In the U.S. survey, not all items are recorded on the detailed expenditures level in the diary survey, except for food. Even when the coverage overlaps between the interview survey and the diary survey, the data from the two survey components sometimes present different results. In the case of the U.K. survey, the unique characteristic of diary surveys (often called the “zero expenditure problem,” i.e., that a zero expenditure is recorded for goods with longer purchase cycles in case the survey period did not coincide with an actual purchase) provides a useful measure in drawing out more illustrative aspects of consumer behavior.

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Since the inception of the surveys, the resulting data have been used by economists to improvise their theoretical models of income and expenditure and to perform aggregate demand analyses, but the data have not been used as much by sociologists and historians. The survey data are of value to those interested not just in economic welfare but also in cultural tastes and lifestyles of particular segments of the population, such as elites and professionals, the elderly and the young, low-income families, urban families, and rural residents, those earning millions of dollars and those receiving state benefits. Deeper analyses of consumer culture can be made using individual demographic data, which are collected alongside information on incomes and expenditures, including those on age, sex, marital status, employment status, region, and occupational class. Recent usages of consumer expenditure surveys include: research on generational gap in car ownership, meat consumption, vegetarianism, social mobility, child poverty, baby boomer lifestyle, purchase of console computer games by teenagers, Internet usage, retirement, drinking habits, and fashion consumption by men and women. The important point is that those consumer expenditure data that on the surface appear to be rather impersonal lists of arbitrary numbers can in fact be used to illustrate the social and cultural aspects of human lives—what people like and what people desire. By analyzing the expenditure data, or even the electronic point of sales (EPOS) data if available, researchers can reveal the shape of the social space that creates “distinction” and also test whether the marketing cliché “you are what you buy” actually applies. There are some unique methodological techniques that can be used to determine consumers’ tastes and choices from numerical figures on spending. Among the examples are two-stage analysis and multivariate analysis, which can be performed using leading statistical data analysis packages, such as Stata and R. Two-stage analysis and its allied techniques (such as Heckman sample selection model, double hurdle model, and two-part model) are used to treat the zero expenditure problem and to measure consumer demand in two stages: (1) frequency of purchase, and (2) the level of spending at each transaction. These are based on different decisions, influenced by different factors. An interesting case, for example, is the case of fast fashion: considering the changes over the years, shopping frequency may be influenced by the shift

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to a faster fashion cycle, while expenditure levels are affected by clothing price deflation and casualization of styles. Although part of the same trend, expenditure level is negatively related to this trend, while shopping frequency is positively related to this trend. Spending data thus can also be seen to manifest subtle changes in the direction of fashion that on the surface may appear difficult to numerically conceptualize. Two-stage analysis is an effective technique for focusing on one category of shopping items at a time, and multivariate analysis and its allied techniques, such as factor analysis, correspondence analysis, and principal component analysis, are useful methods to reveal social norms and customs associated with shopping habits over multiple items. These methods have been used in pioneering studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, which graphically visualized the differences in taste among people with different economic and cultural capitals, and also in Arnold Mitchell’s “Psychographics,” which revealed the multiplicity of American lifestyles. Although these pioneering works used attitudinal survey data (e.g., likes and dislikes of certain consumer items) to reveal social disparity in consumer preferences, numerical data, such as the Household Expenditures Survey, can also be used to analyze the differences in tastes and lifestyles among surveyed consumers. One example is the case of changing social space of British consumers. Using factor analysis, researchers can obtain the correlation among multiple shopping items, ranging from bread and butter to taxi and dental services, factored in terms of spending as proportion of the total household expenditure. They can then plot these resulting figures on to multidimensional space, as a map of shopping items. Spending data can therefore be a valuable source for the analysis of consumer culture when used with care and appropriate statistical techniques. Shinobu Majima See also Clothing Consumption; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Econometrics; Economics; Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS); Food Consumption; Measuring Standards of Living; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

Further Readings Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1989.

Brown, Clair. American Standards of Living, 1918–1988. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994. Hoinville, Gerald. “Methodological Research on Sample Surveys: A Review of Development in Britain.” In Essays on the History of British Sociological Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Kemsley, W. F. F., R. U. Redpath, and H. Holmes. Family Expenditure Survey Handbook: Sampling, Fieldwork, Coding Procedures and Related Methodological Experiments. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1980. Majima, Shinobu. “Affluence and the Dynamics of Spending.” Contemporary British History 22, no. 4 (2008): 573–597. Mitchell, Arnold. The Nine American Lifestyles: Who We Are and Where We’re Going. New York: Warner Books, 1984.

CONSUMER ILLNESSES AND MALADIES Consumer illnesses and maladies include consumption practices that medical professionals, as well as society in general, consider to be a sickness or addiction, usually characterized by individuals’ inability to control their consumption. The types of consumption that fall in this category include eating disorders (binge eating, bulimia, and anorexia); addictions to sex, gambling, and work; compulsive buying; kleptomania; and hoarding. More recently, the category of consumer illnesses has been widened to include other types of illnesses, such as addiction to the Internet. “Compulsive consumption” is a label often used to refer to all of these consumer illnesses, and is defined as “a response to an uncontrollable drive or desire to obtain, use, or experience a feeling, substance, or activity that leads an individual to repetitively engage in a behavior that will ultimately cause harm to the individual and/or to others” (O’Guinn and Faber 1989, 148). Psychiatrists classify consumer illnesses as mental disorders, usually obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), impulse control disorder (ICD), or a combination of both. Researchers have studied these disorders largely in postindustrial Western societies and generally agree that these disorders are a product of—or can best find expression in—consumer societies. In the mid-1980s, researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, marketing, and economics,

Consumer Illnesses and Maladies

began publishing studies on compulsive buying in attempts to define and classify this consumer illness, measure its prevalence in the United States, and explain the underlying causes of compulsive consumption. Some medical professionals have examined genetic and neurological factors of consumption addiction, whereas psychiatrists tend to focus on an individual’s childhood experiences and self-esteem. Social scientists, particularly anthropologists and sociologists, have examined consumer illnesses in the context of the consumer societies in advanced liberal societies, noting that as consumption is an important part of defining selfhood and identity creation in latemodern societies, consumer illnesses are intimately linked to issues of identity and the self.

Consumer Illnesses and Addiction One of the main problems in the scholarship of consumer illnesses lies in the issue of defining addiction in the first place. In a strictly biological definition, addiction refers only to psychoactive substances (such as drugs, alcohol, and tobacco) that produce chemical alterations in the brain. However, even those studying addiction at the cellular and genetic level agree that psychological, social, and cultural factors play a role in drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions. What is uncertain is the degree to which these factors are responsible for triggering or leading to an individual’s addiction to a particular substance. Current research has yet to pinpoint the nature of addiction or resolve the extent to which addiction can be identified with brain dysfunctions, as evidenced in the title of a volume on the most recent addiction research, What Is Addiction? (Ross et al. 2010). Many psychiatrists have eschewed the term addiction altogether in favor of dependence; and substance dependence is the phrase used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), as opposed to addiction. A philosophical issue with the notion of addiction is the question of the extent to which addicts can or cannot control their behavior, or the question of free will versus compulsion. Scholars from a variety of disciplines note that most people diagnosed as addicts break their dependence on their own, without any sort of assistance. This suggests that addicts can exercise a measure of control over their behavior, albeit with difficulty. However, scholars also note that unless the individual’s underlying emotional

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and psychological issues (usually anxiety and/or depression) are resolved, he or she will likely relapse. Gene M. Heyman attempts to apply the same psychological principles used in everyday decisions to addiction; in other words, he views addiction as an inherent outcome of choice. He argues that because hard drugs—particularly cocaine and heroin—bind directly to receptor sites in the brain, the intoxication effect undermines the appeal of other options to the point that addicts adopt a local frame of reference that prioritizes immediate gratification over consideration of long-term well-being. In concluding that drug addiction is a matter of chemical reactions in the brain that reorient consumers to an immediate frame of reference that is blind to negative consequences, Heyman suggests that treatment should decrease the reward value of the drug and increase the reward value of abstinence, thereby repackaging “global bookkeeping” (long-term evaluation of aggregated choices) to appear as immediate benefits. Although Heyman’s model of drug addiction as choice offers an explanation of how addiction works, it does not address the question as to why some people become addicted to drugs and others do not. Some scholars have identified common themes in the lives of drug addicts that may indicate personal and social factors that lead to drug addiction. Dysfunctional family life (either present or past), low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety are personal characteristics that are highly prevalent among identified drug addicts and alcoholics. Unlike Heyman, Elizabeth C. Hirschman argues that although addictive consumption behavior may stem from a desire for pleasure for some, it is also a response to a need to reduce emotional stress, which can be triggered by anxiety-inducing situations and events. In her comparison of addicted and nonaddicted drug users, Hirschman argues that nonaddicted drug and alcohol users are better at managing their consumption because they have greater emotional stability and self-esteem. In correlation to this, she found that among the drug and alcohol users she interviewed, addicted consumers suffered from greater emotional problems than nonaddicted consumers before their first use of drugs. Neuroscientists argue that aside from drug and alcohol addiction (and perhaps pathological gambling and binge eating disorders), other consumer illnesses such as compulsive buying do not qualify as true addictions because there is no evidence that

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these phenomena share the same behavioral or neurobiological features. In contrast, social sciences studying compulsive buying observe that from a phenomenological perspective, the experience of compulsive buyers is very similar to that of drug addicts. Hirschman also demonstrates that not only do many drug addicts simultaneously engage in other types of compulsive consumption behavior (such as ritualistic exercise and shopping splurges), but they also overcome their addictions by rechanneling their compulsions to other, usually more socially acceptable, consumption behaviors. She relates the story of a former methamphetamine addict who was able to quit using drugs, but now watches television for sixteen hours a day, randomly changing the channel every few minutes. In 1995, Ronald Faber and colleagues conducted a study that found the comorbidty of binge eating disorders and compulsive buying is statistically significant, indicating that both binge eating and compulsive buying are similar responses to the same set of problems. Hirschman argues that, ultimately, the underlying problems that lead to disordered consumption are incomplete, inadequate, or inauthentic self-identities. In dysfunctional families, children learn to separate themselves from their true feelings. As these children grow up, they come into contact with drugs and alcohol, which can provide a feeling of comfort and security, however temporary. Just as Hirschman found that drug addicts often engage in other forms of compulsive consumptions, other scholars have linked many of these same issues of incomplete identities to compulsive buying and hoarding.

Compulsive Buying and Hoarding In the early twentieth century, the term oniomaniacs was coined by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin to refer to compulsive buyers and was included among a variety of impulse disorders that also included pyromania, kleptomania, and extreme collecting, or hoarding. Although some social scientists see compulsive buying as an outcome of late modernity, Faber wonders if compulsive buying is a problem that has been truly increasing only in the past couple of decades, or if it is just recently receiving widespread media and scholarly attention. One problem with defining compulsive buying is the various labels scholars use, such as shopping

addiction, compulsive shopping, excessive buying, and uncontrolled buying. Some researchers use the terms shopping and buying interchangeably, while others make important distinctions between the two. Researchers agree that compulsive buying is a behavior that occurs repetitively, is considered excessive, and has negative consequences. For compulsive buyers, going on shopping trips is a response triggered by a certain set of feelings or circumstances; and according to Faber, compulsive buyers report going on compulsive buying trips two to three times per week. In making this observation, however, most psychiatrists do not consider compulsive buying to be a type of physiological addiction, but rather consider it to be a mental disorder. Nancy Ridgway and colleagues observe that while most researchers classify compulsive buying as an impulse control disorder, ICDs are defined as irresistible impulses to perform harmful behaviors. On the other hand, most definitions of compulsive buying include descriptions that characterize it as an OCD; that is, obsessive thoughts and compulsions that cause distress and interfere with a person’s everyday functioning. Ridgway and colleagues note that researchers more recently view ICD and OCD as two extremes on a continuum of an obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum. Compulsive buying and other consumer illnesses, such as Internet addiction and pathological gambling, exhibit characteristics of both disorders and fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Ridgway and colleagues go on to observe that most definitions of compulsive buying confound outcomes of the disorder—financial and emotional harm, damage to social relationships—with characteristics of the disorder; they argue that people with higher income levels may engage in compulsive buying without necessarily suffering from financial consequences. Although compulsive buying is highly associated with issues of identity, the act of buying does not have the same function for all compulsive buyers. Some compulsive buyers indicate that the items they purchase are not important in themselves and have little to do with the compulsion; rather, they find the experience of buying itself, not possession of the object, provides the temporary relief and enjoyment they seek (O’Guinn and Faber 1989). In contrast, hoarders who are also compulsive buyers tend to be much more emotionally attached and invested in the objects they purchase than the average consumer. A key characteristic connecting pathological

Consumer Illnesses and Maladies

consumption to incomplete or inadequate identities is fantasy. Some scholars have linked a high frequency of fantasizing to compulsive consumption, whereas others see fantasy as a way to engage in denial of one’s consumption addictions. Researchers have identified some consumer illnesses as being highly skewed toward one gender or another, such as compulsive gambling (men) and compulsive buying (women). Some researchers explain such gender specificity of these compulsions as a product of gender socialization: young girls are socialized with a “shopping” orientation, whereas society considers gambling a more appropriate activity for men. However, some researchers suggest that men who are compulsive buyers are often underrepresented in studies because they are less likely to identify their problem as such or they are less likely to seek treatment. Hoarding as a consumer illness has attracted even less attention from researchers than compulsive buying, despite increasing attention to the topic in popular media. Hoarders have immense difficulties throwing away anything that they acquire, and their homes are so filled with “clutter” that there is often only a narrow path of space for people to navigate through rooms; some rooms may become so filled that they are impossible to enter altogether. The most obvious signs of hoarding, then, are an inordinately excessive acquisition and accumulation of things. However, Randy Frost and Gail Steketee define hoarding not by how many possessions a person has, but as excessive acquisition of possessions that causes distress and impairs normal functioning. Hoarders feel an enormous amount of attachment to their possessions, and do not distinguish between what appears to be junk or trash to most people (empty cereal boxes, expired coupons) and valuable possessions, such as tax returns or a car title. In their study, Frost and Steketee found that common characteristics among hoarders include perfectionism, indecision, a highly active imagination, and powerful beliefs about and attachments to objects. As in other types of consumer illnesses, Frost and Steketee found that hoarders suffer from emotional problems, low self-esteem, come from dysfunctional families, and suffered some kind of trauma or abuse. Many hoarders exhibit other kinds of consumption illnesses, such as compulsive buying, kleptomania, and binge eating disorders. Like other researchers, Frost and Steketee maintain that hoarders have to address their underlying

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emotional issues, sense of identity, and relationships to their possessions before they can recover.

Consumer Illnesses and Society In arguing why compulsive gambling should be considered a “true” addiction as opposed to so-called sex, work, and shopping addictions, Don Ross and Harold Kincaid observe that the late-twentiethcentury view of addiction as a disease has enabled the medicalization of more mundane practices, so that addiction is relative to the point of view of the observer. To complicate matters, Shirley Lee and Avis Mysyk state that compulsive buying ought to be considered an addiction, against Ross and Kincaid’s admonition. In their terms, Lee and Mysyk see the terms compulsion and addiction in opposition, with the former representing a wider, social origin and the latter representing a medical condition. They argue against labeling compulsive buying as a mental disorder because they see it as a social disorder, arising from the Western consumer-driven economy, with the attendant ease of access to credit and credit cards. Lee and Mysyk note that the surge of interest in compulsive buying beginning in the mid1980s coincided with the economic crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. As personal bankruptcy rates in North America rose throughout these two decades, the media applied metaphors of illness to the phenomenon. Ultimately, the “jobless recovery” of this economic crisis did not come from investments by businesses, but by consumers. Lee and Mysyk suggest that the low self-esteem and anxiety present in compulsive buyers may stem from living in a consumer society that encourages consumption while simultaneously blaming them for doing so. Gerda Reith agrees that a medicalization of addictive consumption is an important feature of popular discourse in Western societies, but she widens the historical scope beyond the economic crisis of the late-twentieth century. She uses Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality to frame her discourse analysis of addiction and consumption in late modernity. She argues that the lack of public regulation of individuals in our neoliberal society is compensated by the regulation of personal choice through market options. Using Foucault’s theory of governmentality, Reith argues that in a society that enacts governance through freedom, where freedom means choosing among vast arrays of commodities

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and experiences, the addict refuses this “freedom” by refusing to choose. Although Reith agrees with other consumer culture scholars that consumer illnesses are intimately linked to issues of the self and identity, she asserts that, ultimately, consumer pathologies are the embodiment of the tensions inherent in the use of consumer “freedom” as a form of social control. Like Heyman’s model of addiction that focuses on individuals’ frame of reference, Reith’s social discourse analysis of addiction demonstrates how and where addictive consumption originates, but does not offer an explanation of why some people become addicted consumers and others do not, nor why or how many addicts break their addictions on their own. The wide range of disciplines involved in the research of consumption illnesses suggests that consumer illnesses stem from the interaction of a variety of factors at individual and social levels. Jessica Chelekis See also Addiction; Anorexia; Consumer Society; Desire; Gambling; Governmentality; Identity; Psychoanalysis

Further Readings Belk, Russell. “Are We What We Own?” In I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self, edited by April Lane Benson, 57–104. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Faber, Ronald J. “Self-Control and Compulsive Buying.” In Psychology and Consumer Culture: The Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World, edited by Tim Kasser and Allen D. Kanner, 169–187. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003. Faber, Ronald J., Gary A. Christenson, Martina de Zwaan, and James Mitchell. “Two Forms of Compulsive Consumption: Comorbidity of Compulsive Buying and Binge Eating.” Journal of Consumer Research 22 (December 1995): 296–303. Frost, Randy O., and Gail Steketee. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Heyman, Gene M. “Addiction: A Latent Property of the Dynamics of Choice.” In What Is Addiction? edited by Donald Ross, Harold Kincaid, David Spurrett, and Peter Collins, 159–190. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Hirschman, Elizabeth C. “The Consciousness of Addiction: Toward a General Theory of Compulsive Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 19 (September 1992): 155–179.

Lee, Shirley, and Avis Mysyk. “The Medicalization of Compulsive Buying.” Social Science and Medicine 58 (2004): 1709–1718. O’Guinn, Thomas C., and Ronald J. Faber. “Compulsive Buying: A Phenomenological Exploration.” Journal of Consumer Research 16 (September 1989): 147–155. Petry, Nancy M. Pathological Gambling: Etiology, Comorbidity and Treatment. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005. Reith, Gerda. “Consumption and Its Discontents: Addiction, Identity and the Problems of Freedom.” The British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004): 283–300. Ridgway, Nancy M., Monika Kukar-Kinney, and Kent B. Monroe. “An Expanded Conceptualization and Measure of Compulsive Buying.” Journal of Consumer Research 35 (December 2008): 622–639. Ross, Don, and Harold Kincaid. “Introduction: What Is Addiction?” In What Is Addiction? edited by Donald Ross, Harold Kincaid, David Spurrett, and Peter Collins, vii–xi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

CONSUMER INTERVIEWS Interviews with consumers are an increasingly relevant methodology within consumption studies and consumer research that either replace or complement other data collection forms, such as quantitative or observational research. Consumer interviews can be defined as direct research encounters between researchers and either individuals or groups, characterized by research subjects being encouraged to give extended or reflective verbal answers to researcher questions. Consumer interviews are mostly done in face-to-face settings where researchers and interviewees are in direct physical proximity, though they can also be done remotely, for example over the Internet or by telephone. Though consumer behavior studies are sometimes done in interview format via extended surveys, what distinguishes consumer interviews is the fact that they allow for reflective, individualized responses to a relatively unstructured or semi-structured interview format. Furthermore, a significant point of difference is that survey type interviews are often extensively based on closed questions, referring to questions with a limited number of predefined answer options. In contrast, many consumer interviews have encouraged further probing, extension, and flexibility on the part of the interviewer, meaning there is greater opportunity for interviewees to give individualized responses.

Consumer Interviews

The Rationale for Interview Research in Consumer Studies The dominant paradigm of research in studies of consumer behavior has been influenced by quantitative, behavioral, and positivistic methodological approaches, frequently derived from research styles in business studies and psychology. Consumer researchers have traditionally tended to prefer quantitative over qualitative approaches. They have operated with the assumption that representative population surveys using closed questions, rather than face-toface interviews, was the best way to access reliable forms of behavioral data that could inform models of consumer behavior and choice. Much of this genre of research is associated with marketing, business, and consumer research studies, most strongly developed in North America, with the main aim to apply scientific research techniques to understand, predict, and attempt to manipulate consumer behavior. However, in recent decades, there has been an important developing paradigm shift based on a growing awareness of the importance of qualitative, interpretive, and meaning-based approaches in studies of consumer behavior. Though methodological innovators within consumer research have often come from, or been inspired by, related fields of consumer research within sociology or anthropology, this methodological shift has occurred not just within these fields but also in the traditional core fields of marketing and business studies. Rather than being mere complements to traditional approaches or exploratory projects, many researchers across the entire consumer studies field now acknowledge that qualitative approaches are essential in allowing researchers access to various types of information, perspectives, and data that would be impossible to gather using traditional quantitative survey approaches. Consumer interviews should be considered as part of the broad tradition of qualitative social research. Qualitative research is a diverse field that has been historically constructed through a range of unique and often dispersed methodological traditions, such as symbolic interactionism, ethnography, visual research, and even conversation analysis. Yet, at its heart, what is common to this type of research is the researcher’s commitment to interpreting and understanding a person’s reasoning for his or her actions and beliefs. Qualitative researchers often take sociologist Max Weber’s methodological platform

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of verstehen as a fundamental point of inspiration for their research methods. The verstehen idea refers to the goal of understanding the basis of human actions using the reasoning perspectives of people themselves. It is held that this approach yields deep insights into the meaningful basis of social action and its consequences. Consistent with this goal, qualitative research is most often presented in textual rather than numerical form so that the content and context of interviewee’s comments are preserved, as much as possible, in original transcribed form, allowing maximum interpretive scope for the analyst. Interview of research is also often conducted using an inductive approach, meaning that the researchers go into their project with a broad sense of their research questions and goals, but often without firm hypotheses and rigid question agendas, which are seen to limit the interviewees’ capacity to give their own accounts. This relatively open-ended approach can lead to significant in-depth insights for researchers, allowing access to consumer’s own lines of commonsense reasoning. Yet, on the downside, such insights are unlikely to be statistically robust findings, and so they cannot be taken as the representative views of a population.

Types of Research Interviews There are a number of major types of research interviews that are typically used in consumer research. First are structured types of interviews. Structured interviews involve asking a series of questions in strict order with little or no room for spontaneity, innovation, and further exploration of answers, or for altering the questions that are asked. Rather than a conversation, this type of interview can often resemble a simple question and answer session, with the researcher asking a precalculated series of questions and the interviewees given little encouragement to go further than their initial thought or response. This type of closed questioning often resembles a social survey questionnaire, though of course it can provide more information, such as nonverbal cues or the use of visual or material prompts. The major advantage of the structured and closed interview is that it reduces possible interviewer effects on the responses and achieves a high degree of uniformity in research procedures across the interview cases. At the other extreme are unstructured interviews. In an unstructured interview, the researchers may begin with an awareness of the types of topics they

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wish to broach in an interview and perhaps a few general questions. However, in this type of interview, there is a conscious effort to explore a topic without predetermined questions that can lead interviewees to matters they may not have raised or considered important. So, this type of interview is very much interviewee led, meaning the interview structure is completely flexible and the interviewee can determine its direction more so than the interviewer. The major advantage of this style of interview is that it can lead to a fertile type of free association on the part of the interviewee, so that many issues can be raised that the interviewer and interviewee would likely never have thought of, let alone verbalized in a more structured interview setting. The downside of this interview style is that there is little uniformity across interviews, potentially causing problems of comparison and making generalization difficult for the researcher. Between these two extremes is the semi-structured interview. In this type, the interview begins with a series of questions or broad topic areas that are generated and directed by the project’s research questions, though there is considerable opportunity to go outside and beyond these questions and to let the interviewees take the interviews in any direction they may, much like a conversation. In fact, the semi-structured interview is often characterized as conversational in nature. The major advantage of this type of interview approach is that the interviewers will often discover aspects of the topic and its relation to other facets of behavior or beliefs that they had not conceived of at the start of their research. By intentionally not delimiting topics, nor how interviewees may freely associate them with other topics, the researchers may be able to access a universe of symbolic meanings and interpretations they may never have imagined. Rather than necessarily be considered “off topic” or irrelevant, if they are encouraged by the researcher, such meanderings can generate unexpected, intriguing, and often innovative research findings.

a severe questioning of the value of traditional methods. In the main part, this questioning of traditional data collection methods such as the interview relates to a larger, multifaceted challenge to the knowledge claims traditionally made within the social and behavioral sciences. In the context of the interview, such questioning asks whether the research interview is in fact a simple vessel for transferring objective knowledge from interviewee to interviewer, or whether it is a social setting where what is produced as knowledge is a direct product of the research process itself. Thus, the question is whether data collected in a research interview be regarded as either unobtrusively “found” by the researcher, or “made” within the research context itself and therefore not objective or independent. To recognize they are “made” acknowledges they are texts that are actively constructed within the research interview, both embedded within and a product of wider discourses, including discourses of research and data collection, which are the basis of its construction. These matters, however, have not meant that the interview has completely fallen out of favor in consumer studies, but that researchers use it more carefully and reflexively. Ian Woodward See also Consumer Behavior; Conversation Analysis; Ethnography; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Photography and Video; Surveys

Further Readings Belk, Russell W. Collecting in a Consumer Society. New York: Routledge, 1995. Denzin, Norman. Interpretive Interactionism. London: Sage, 1989. Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. “Active Interviewing.” In Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by David Silverman, 113–129. London: Sage, 1997. Woodward, Ian. “Domestic Objects and the Taste Epiphany: A Resource for Consumption Methodology.” Journal of Material Culture 6, no. 2 (2001): 115–136.

Current Issues in Interview Research Though the research interview in its various guises has been a stalwart method in the social, behavioral, and business sciences for some decades, in recent times its usefulness and general applicability has been questioned. This questioning has come generally from the point of view of the postmodern and cultural turn in the social sciences, which has led to

CONSUMER MOODS Consumer moods are the phenomenological properties of individual consumers’ affective states. For example, a consumer may be in a good mood or a cheerful mood. Such moods are subcategories of

Consumer Moods

feeling states, where feeling states are general and pervasive affective states. They can be contrasted with feelings directed toward an object or product, which are associated with product attitudes. Consumer moods are transient and mild, and so can be contrasted with feelings that are more stable and permanent, such as those associated with dispositions or neuroticisms. They can also be distinguished from emotions that are more intense, attention-getting, and disruptive of ongoing processing and behavior. The word mood has many interpretations in common parlance and many usages in consumer culture. For example, one might refer to mood as a property of a consumption environment, and describe one store as having a “funky mood” and another as having an “opulent mood.” Alternatively, one might refer to mood as a property of a consumption-related message and describe one advertisement or pointof-purchase display as having a “playful mood” and another as having a “melodramatic mood.” In addition, one might refer to mood as a property of an object of consumption, and refer to one automobile as having a “youthful mood” and another as having a “serious mood.” Finally, mood can be used to describe the affective tone of the consumer population in the aggregate with respect to specific economic conditions or their expectations for their own future economic well-being. This usage is common in the popular press, which periodically refers to consumers as being in a “cautious mood” when spending is relatively low and as being in an “optimistic mood” when spending is relatively high. Specific moods can be differentiated phenomenologically and conceptually, and have been investigated along three dimensions: pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Of these dimensions, pleasure has received the most attention, and the great preponderance of the research has investigated the effects of consumers’ positive and negative moods, either relative to each other or relative to a neutral (control) mood. In all domains of life, people try to read and anticipate each other’s moods and use that information to facilitate social and professional interactions. For example, someone might consider a friend’s mood before asking to borrow her car, and one might consider one’s own mood before deciding whether to eat ice cream. Analogously, knowledge of consumers’ moods provides insight into their cognitive, decision-making, and behavioral reactions.

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Consumers’ moods are an important aspect of consumer culture because they are easily influenced by aspects of the consumption environment and interactions with marketers, and because they have important effects on consumers’ thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Because moods are omnipresent and affect consumer behavior across a wide range of internal states and external behaviors, and because they can be easily influenced by aspects of the consumption environment, it is important to understand both the processes and outcomes they influence and the ways aspects of the consumption environment influence moods.

Effects of Positive Moods on Attitude Formation, Cognitive Organization, and Flexibility The earliest work on the effects of feeling states found that mood states often bias evaluations of novel and familiar stimuli in mood-congruent directions and bias judgments of the likelihood of moodcongruent events in mood-congruent directions. Findings also revealed that mood during exposure to information enhances recall of mood-congruent information and mood during retrieval of information from memory enhances recall of moodcongruent items, and a match between exposure and retrieval moods enhances recall. Investigations by Alice M. Isen and her colleagues have found that positive moods appear to trigger retrieval of broad categories of information in memory, and that the influence of positive mood depends on situational factors. Although those in positive moods often evaluate stimuli more favorably, they do not do so blindly. Positive mood leads to positive evaluation of neutral stimuli, but does not influence the evaluation of clearly positive or negative stimuli, and positive mood improves satisfaction with an interesting job, but not a boring one. Findings indicate that positive moods enhance the likelihood of performance of behaviors with positive expected outcomes but decrease the likelihood of performance of behaviors with negative expected outcomes. Experiments have shown that positive mood fosters social responsibility, helpfulness, improved social interaction and functioning, and provides evidence that such prosocial behavior is due to flexible thinking and problem solving rather than being caused by giving in or social compliance. Finally, findings indicate that positive mood is associated with creativity,

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flexible thinking, and willingness to pursue unusual, but not too risky, alternatives. Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues built on this research to investigate the implications of positive affective states over time. They developed and tested the “broaden-and-build” theory, which posits that although positive moods are short-lived, their effects are cumulative and durable. Each instance of positive mood results in increased personal resources, which accumulate and function as reserves that help individuals manage future threats and enhance personal growth and resilience. Thus, the broaden-and-build theory suggests and evidence supports that the effects of positive moods accumulate and compound over time, so that experiencing good moods makes people more knowledgeable, better integrated socially, more effective, more resilient to future problems, and generally healthier.

Affect Infusion Model Joseph P. Forgas and his colleagues have developed and tested the affect infusion model (AIM). The model assumes that the nature and magnitude of the role of affect on processing depends on the kind of processing strategy used, and that people will tend to use the easiest strategy that will give them a response. They conceptualize strategies as varying along the degree of effort involved and the degree of openness or constructiveness of the information-search strategy. The two dimensions define four processing styles: substantive processing (high effort/constructive), motivated processing (high effort/closed), heuristic processing (low effort/constructive), and directaccess processing (low effort/closed). According to AIM, affect is unlikely to influence the attitude elicited when attitude is based on merely closed tasks (i.e., motivated or direct-access processing) and more likely to affect the attitude elicited when constructive processing is used (i.e., substantive or heuristic processing). The motivated processing strategy involves highly focused and selective thinking that is dominated by a specific motivational object. For example, when asked to evaluate how a particular pair of jeans looks on his wife, a husband’s response is likely to be dominated by the motivation to produce an acceptable response. According to the AIM, he is unlikely to use constructive processes to form his attitude and is unlikely to be influenced by his momentary mood. The direct-access strategy involves the direct retrieval of a preexisting response,

and is most likely when one has already formed an attitude, and when there is no reason (cognitive, affective, situational, or motivational) to do anything other than retrieve the stored response. Under such circumstances, AIM would argue that a consumer will simply retrieve his or her attitude and that it will not be influenced by the consumer’s mood. Heuristic and substantive processing requires more open-ended information search, and AIM predicts that such processing will involve more influence of affect. Heuristic processing is used when consumers have little motivation, opportunity, or inclination for more detailed processing (e.g., when asked to respond to survey questions). Consistent with the feelings-as-information approach (see the next section), heuristic processing can reflect the influence of affect when feelings are used as a simple inferential cue to indicate how consumers feel about products. Substantive processing is used when the other three types of processing prove inadequate; it requires consumers to actively combine novel information with memory-based information to produce an attitude. Such processing is likely when consumers are ready, willing, and motivated to engage in effortful, open attitude formation. AIM predicts, and empirical findings support, greater affect infusion and mood congruence when substantive processing is used relative to the other processing strategies. In an article in Psychological Inquiry titled “Missing in Action in the AIM: Positive Affect’s Facilitation of Cognitive Flexibility, Innovation, and Problem Solving,” Isen argues that the AIM does not adequately account for findings that show that positive affect leads to thorough, adaptive, creative decision making.

Feelings-as-Information Norbert Schwartz, Gerald Clore, and their colleagues have developed the feelings-as-information approach to understanding mood effects; and Michel Tuan Pham has expanded and extended its implications for consumer behavior by developing and testing the generalized affect-as-information model (GAIM) of judgment. This perspective suggests that individuals use their apparent affective response to target a basis for judgment. Thus, when a consumer is shopping, she might ask herself, “How do I feel about this product?” A crucial finding of the feelings-asinformation school of research is that it is difficult for people to distinguish their preexisting feelings from

Consumer Moods

their affective responses to a product under consideration. Thus, they are likely to evaluate any product more favorably when they are in positive rather than negative moods. When they are aware that their feelings are due to a source unrelated to the product under consideration, such mood-congruent effects on attitude formation disappear. This helps explain an apparent paradox: Even though intense emotions are, by definition, stronger than moods, they are less likely to be misattributed to target objects because they are more salient and because consumers are able to differentiate them from their feelings toward target objects. The feelings-as-information hypothesis has been demonstrated to influence judgments in ways consistent with the goals associated with feelings, the ways in which feelings are perceived, the dimensions of feeling states, and the nature of feelings triggered. Since moods are an ever-present aspect of all phases of the consumption process, feelings may be used as information while consumers are evaluating their needs, products, retailers, consumption uses, and disposal options. The feelings-as-information model would suggest that awareness of their moods may enable consumers to make more objective choices throughout all phases of consumer behavior. On a more global level, Pham has suggested that the misattribution of incidental mood states may explain the effect of the weather on the stock market. The above-average stock market performance on sunny days and the below-average performance on rainy and winter days may be due to good weather putting investors into good moods that are misinterpreted as optimism about the stock market and inflated attitudes toward investing and bad weather putting investors into negative moods that are misinterpreted as pessimism about the stock market and depressed attitudes toward investing. Rajagopal Raghunathan and Pham used the affect-as-information perspective to investigate the impact of sadness and anxiety on decision making. Findings indicate that sad people were biased in favor of high-risk, high-reward options because sadness primes an implicit goal of reward replacement, and that anxious people were biased in favor of low-risk/low-reward options because anxiety primes an implicit goal of uncertainty reduction. Findings also revealed that feelings led to choices that enabled people in both conditions to anticipate feeling better. Raghunathan, Pham, and Kim Corfman replicated

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and extended these findings and documented what they called “displaced coping,” where affective states with salient sources influenced decisions that were seemingly but not directly related to the source of the affective state. Dacher Keltner and Jennifer Lerner have proposed and found support for the appraisal tendency framework to understand the effects of specific negative feeling states. The framework suggests that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events and objects in ways that are consistent with the original cognitive-appraisal dimension of the emotion. Consistent with the appraisaltendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgments of future events and risk-averse choices, whereas angry people made optimistic judgments and risk-seeking choices. Also consistent with appraisal-tendency theory, disgust resulted in reduced selling and choice prices and eliminated the endowment effect; and sadness reduced selling prices but increased choice prices, producing a reverse endowment effect in which choice prices exceeded selling prices. Although conceptualized with regard to emotions rather than moods, the appraisal tendency framework is consistent with the feelingsas-information approach and is likely to have implications for consumer mood effects. In addition to influencing decision making in mood-congruent directions, the feelings-asinformation perspective suggests and findings support that mood influences the strategy of information processing people are likely to adopt. Because negative moods are associated with difficulties, they tend to elicit decision-making styles that involve attention to specific aspects of the apparently difficult situation. Because positive moods are associated with benign environments, they signal that it is okay to rely on usual routines and preexisting knowledge structures. This is consistent with evidence that positive moods are associated with evaluating brands using global processing strategies and negative moods are associated with using detail-oriented brand evaluation strategies. Interestingly, use of the dominant strategy for each affective state results in better postdecision mood than use of the nondominant strategy, suggesting mood management advantages of using the “right” processing strategy. Consistent with the other findings for feelings-as-information, mood effects on processing style are eliminated when the informational value of the information is called into question.

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Mood Management There is anecdotal, experiential, and laboratory evidence that people deliberately manage or adjust their moods to improve task performance and for hedonic satisfaction. Thus, consumers may deliberately moderate their positive moods or assuage their negative moods when doing so will enable them to make better choices. In addition, some consumers use shopping itself to manage their moods, and for compulsive shoppers, compulsive buying occurs in response to negative emotions and results in a decrease in the intensity of the negative emotions. If consumers believe their feelings are fleeting, those who are happy engage in affect regulation in an effort to extend the good feelings, while if consumers believe their feelings are lasting, those who are unhappy engage in affect regulation in an effort to repair their moods. Harri T. Luomala and Martti Laaksonen analyzed consumption behaviors to identify their mood-alleviating therapeutic powers, the mood-alleviating power of self-gifts, and the differences in mood regulatory activities across cultures. They have found that mood-regulatory activities are less consumption-oriented, have more socially based emotional consequences, and are more easily pursued and more effective in collectivistic cultures as opposed to individualistic cultures. Finally, research has found support for the existence of both automatic cognitive strategies for affect regulation and strategies involving conscious sequencing of consumption choices (e.g., listening to music).

Personality Traits as Moderators of Mood Effects Findings indicate that personality traits moderate the effects of mood states. People who are lower in need for cognition and those who are higher in opennessto-feeling may be more influenced by the effects of their moods. In addition, the effects of affective states may be attenuated for individuals who are high on need for approval and Machiavellianism. Finally, low self-monitors feel more distinctive from their environment than high self-monitors when asked to imagine a context that differed in valence from their mood, and these feelings lead them to prefer contexts that are congruent in valence with their moods. In contrast, high self-monitors prefer contexts that differ in valence from their mood. The Following Affective States Test (FAST) can be used to ascertain

which individuals use their current feelings as a basis for their judgments. Since stable individual difference factors and transitory moods interact to affect consumption-related thoughts and behaviors, consumer education programs may enable consumers to assess their own sensitivity to specific mood effects.

Future Research In addition to ongoing research in all of the areas discussed in this entry, psychobiologists are working on understanding the core mechanisms underlying the interrelationship among mood states, internal processes and states, and behavioral action. Piotr Winkielman, Brian Knutson, Martin Paulus, and Jennifer Trujillo provide insights from biopsychological models that shed light on how moods influence processes that are relevant to consumption culture, including values, perception, attention, memory, judgment, and choice. Their work suggests that the interface between behavior science and neuroscience may be a fruitful area for research to better understand the complex interactions and their role in consumer culture. Meryl Gardner See also Cognitive Structures; Consumer Behavior; Emotions; Methods of Market Research; Motivation Research; Neuromarketing; Well-Being

Further Readings Forgas, Joseph P. Handbook of Affect and Social Cognition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001. Fredrickson, Barbara. Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive. New York: Crown, 2009. Gardner, Meryl P. “Mood States and Consumer Behavior: A Critical Review.” The Journal of Consumer Research 12, no. 3 (December 1985): 281–300. Isen, Alice M. “Missing in Action in the AIM: Positive Affect’s Facilitation of Cognitive Flexibility, Innovation, and Problem Solving.” Psychological Inquiry 13, no. 1 (2002): 57–65. Keltner, Dacher, and Jennifer S. Lerner. “Emotion.” In Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey, 5th ed., 317–352. New York: John Wiley, 2010. Lewis, Michael, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. Handbook of Emotions. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2008.

Consumer Nationalism Luomala, Harri T., and Martti Laaksonen. “A Qualitative Exploration of Mood-Regulatory Self-Gift Behaviors.” Journal of Economic Psychology 20, no. 2 (April 1999): 147–182. Moore, Bert S., and Alice M. Isen. Affect and Social Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Moore, William N. Mood: The Frame of Mind. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989. Peterson, Robert A., Wayne D. Hoyer, and William R. Wilson. The Role of Affect in Consumer Behavior. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1984. Pham, Michel Tuan. “The Lexicon and Grammar of Affect as Information in Consumer Decision Making.” Social Psychology of Consumer Behavior (2009): 159–192. Raghunathan, Rajagopal, and Michel Tuan Pham. “All Negative Moods Are Not Equal: Motivational Influences of Anxiety and Sadness on Decision Making.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 79, no. 1 (July 1999): 56–77. Raghunathan, Rajagopal, Michel Tuan Pham, and Kim Corfman. “Informational Properties of Anxiety and Sadness, and Displaced Coping.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (March 2006): 596–601. Schwarz, Norbert, and Gerald L. Clore. “Mood as Information: 20 Years Later.” Psychological Inquiry 14, nos. 3/4 (2003): 296–303. Winkielman, Piotr, Brian Knutson, Martin Paulus, and Jennifer Trujillo. “Affective Influence on Judgments and Decisions: Moving towards Core Mechanisms.” Review of General Psychology 11, no. 2 (2007): 179–192.

CONSUMER NATIONALISM Consumer nationalism combines two of the most important historical forces in modern history: the advent of consumerism and nationalism. Consumerism refers to consumption of branded, mass-produced goods and services and the orientation of social life around them. That is, consumerism involves the creation or reproduction of social identity through the consumption of mass-produced, branded, and advertised things. Consumer nationalism refer to efforts to define buying and using (or consumption) as a political statement through the nonconsumption of things from an offending country or countries and the consumption of one’s own nationally produced goods and services. Consumer nationalism often has two sides: nonconsumption of imports and consumption of

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domestic goods and services. Of the two, boycotts are the most visible and common form of consumer nationalism. Boycotts have been a central part of nationalist movements since at least the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when American colonialists destroyed crates of tea imported by the British East India Company to protest disadvantageous British tax policies. Since then, boycotts have been used by consumers in innumerable countries to express nationalism. Consumer nationalist boycotts have been launched against citizens of the same nation for a perceived injury by other members of that nation, including periodic boycotts by Americans of companies sponsoring “un-American” movies or the Nazi-led boycott against Jewish businesses in 1933. Such boycotts have been used frequently by consumers against targeted foreign countries. Boycotts against Japan, for instance, figured prominently in international relations on the eve of World War II, as consumers in countries such as the United Kingdom and United States launched boycotts to protest that country’s policies in China.

Consumer Nationalist Movements The modern Chinese experience reveals the range of consumer nationalist activities, ranging from boycotts led by individuals to state-enforced consumption of domestic products. Such activities in the era of imperialism precipitated or accompanied major turning points in relations between imperialist powers and their colonies. China had significant anti-imperialist boycotts in 1905, 1915, 1919, 1923, 1925, 1928, 1931, and then nearly continuously into the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Such boycotts may have even provoked the war with Japan, which sought to ensure continued market access. After the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, Chinese leaders finally and completely gained control over tariffs. Within a few years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government effectively banned the importation of virtually all consumer goods, particularly those from capitalist countries. Chinese consumers had little choice but to “buy Chinese.” Thirty years later, China dramatically changed course. With the initiation of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, China slowly began to import consumer goods. As the range and volume of imports have grown with global trade liberalization since the 1990s, consumer nationalist exploitation of the historic tension

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between “domestic products” and “foreign products” periodically reemerges, even as the foreign/ domestic categories of products become obsolete. In the Chinese case, with the lead up to its ascension to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, there have been at least three reasons for renewed consumer activism. First, China’s WTO commitments allow easier market access for multinationals, rendering countless domestic enterprises uncompetitive and creating millions of unemployed workers. Second, a new generation of patriotic students continues to invoke the language of economic nationalism and call for boycotts, as did those participating in the widespread boycotts of the French retailing giant Carrefour in China in the spring of 2008 in retaliation for the disruption of the Olympic torch relay in Paris. Finally, domestic consumers periodically call for boycotts of specific foreign products when they feel consumers collectively have been treated poorly or differently by multinational companies. China has not been the only country with consumers who have attempted to combine nationalism and consumerism. The swadeshi (“belonging to one’s own country”) and noncooperation movements in India (1904–1908, 1920–1922) are the best-known and best-studied equivalents of China’s consumer nationalism. As noted, Americanists have been aware of links between consumerism and nationalism since late colonial times, through the anti-Japanese boycotts of the 1930s and the boycotts of French products in 2003 to protest French opposition to the Iraq War. Likewise, Japan, Ireland, Korea, Britain, France, Germany, Nigeria, and Spain, among other countries, also experienced similar consumer nationalist movements with varying intensity in nation-making projects from late colonial times to the present. Movements of consumer nationalism in these countries generated their own vocabularies, vocabularies used both by contemporary participants and in later scholarly studies, including terms such as nationalizing consumer culture, indigenization, indigenism, domestication, import-substitution, decolonization, autarky, and de-foreignization. Similar to the concept of modern nationalism, the ideas and practices of consumer nationalism have spread from country to country. Before World War II, Chinese consumer nationalists, for instance, regularly sought to inspire consumers with reports on the activities of similar efforts in other countries. Consumer nationalism, thus, is best seen as a

transnational phenomenon. That is not to suggest these movements unfolded in a uniform way. What makes, for instance, the Chinese case particularly interesting for comparative purposes is that the country was not formally colonized yet lacked many aspects of sovereignty, including the ability to set tariffs, which forced consumer nationalist efforts to be directed against foreign countries directly rather than at national policymakers. Likewise, as China was, to use the common Chinese term for its situation, “semi-colonial,” consumer nationalist efforts were not, nor could have been, solely state directed.

Historical and Contemporary Investigation Consumer nationalism is a potentially rich field of historical and contemporary investigation. Despite the emergence of consumer nationalist movements throughout the world, historians have neither devoted much attention to them nor suggested that they are key aspects of nation-making. When mentioned at all, the nationalization of consumer culture is treated as a natural by-product of the creation of nation-states. In fact, the causes and consequences of nationalizing commodities played a crucial role in creating nations. Perhaps modern nation-states did not precede the notion of each nation having its own “national products.” Rather, these two constructs may have evolved together. Nation-making included learning, or being coerced, to shape preferences around something called the nation and away from items deemed “foreign”—a problematic process reinforced by institutional elaborations. Consumer nationalists drove such elaborations. The notion of “consumer nationalism” complicates the study of consumerism. Discussions of consumerism rarely address the place of nationalism. Rarely do studies of India, the most promising parallel to China, provide comprehensive accounts of a consumer nationalist movement. These studies generally subordinate aspects of the national products movement to either business strategy (e.g., attempts by Bengali textile producers to preserve their market share) or Mohandas Gandhi’s attempt to promote spiritual revival through self-reliance. Likewise, there is more than one kind of consumer nationalism. The Chinese case, which promoted consumption, provides a sharp contrast to Gandhi’s emphasis on simple living and tradition. Despite Gandhi’s emphasis on limiting material desires and creating

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self-sufficient villages, his ideas overlapped with the dominant Chinese linkage on one fundamental issue. Both rejected a simple embrace of capitalist relations that privileged price over provenance. Criticizing those who argued that the use of home-spun was costlier than mill-made cloth, Gandhi said that if expense were the most important issue, then, by the same logic, we should kill our aged parents and children “whom we have to maintain without getting anything in return.” Similarly, fusing the concepts of “consumerism” and “nationalism” also complicates the study of nationalism, which rarely addresses attempts to nationalize consumer culture. Studies of economic nationalism focus on the political discourse of economic and political leaders rather than on a widespread and multidimensional social movement. Moreover, some studies recognize “nationality” as a significant category of consumption without explaining the historical origins. Studies that do integrate consumerism and nationalism should emphasize the range of participation, from voluntary to coerced to violently enforced. Consumer nationalism often sanctions coercion, and attempts to restrict consumption exclusively to “national products” may include violence, particularly during boycotts. U.S. congressional representatives backing a boycott of the French in 2003 settled for simply changing the name of “French fries” to “Freedom fries.” But for Chinese consumer nationalists in the first half of the twentieth century, by contrast, it was not enough for citizens simply to read the same nationally circulated newspaper and imagine the same national events. To be Chinese, one had to buy Chinese.

Current Trends Consumer nationalism continues to evolve. The latest forms explicitly promote consumption—the more, the better—as a way to help the country. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, for instance, U.S. President George Bush and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani called on Americans to express their patriotism by spending money, preferably in New York City. And, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, China’s leaders have called on its citizens to rescue the country (and the world) by making up for American and European export markets with domestic consumption. Karl Gerth

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See also Citizenship; Collective Identity; Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer Policy (China); Italian Fascism and Fashion; National Cultures; Orientalism; Postcolonial Theory

Further Readings Adedeji, Adebayo, ed. Indigenization of African Economies. New York: Africana, 1981. Bayly, C. A. “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 285–321. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Breen, T. H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Chandra, Bipan. The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership, 1880–1905. New Delhi, India: People’s Publishing House, 1966. Frank, Dana. Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Friedman, Monroe. Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change through the Marketplace and the Media. New York: Rutledge, 1999. Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Hilton, Matthew. Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Misra, Om Prakash. Economic Thought of Gandhi and Nehru: A Comparative Analysis. New Delhi: M D, 1995. Nelson, Laura. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Orlove, Benjamin S., ed. The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Sarkar, Sumit. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Trentmann, Frank. Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

CONSUMER POLICY (CHINA) Since 1949, consumer policy in China has been closely connected to the ideological direction of ruling Communist Party elites. After the establishment

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of the People’s Republic of China, a command economy was established that went much further toward controlling all aspects of everyday life than found in the former Soviet Union. On gaining power, the Chinese Communist Party nationalized urban land and businesses and collectivized farmland. In addition, all citizens were limited in their movements by strict residency laws (known as the hukou system) that defined where a person could live and work. Within urban areas, production was organized around work units (danwei), distinct spatial compounds designed to house, feed, entertain, educate, care for, and monitor residents. In addition to their role as the state-in-practice, work units served as the primary social web for members and as a foundational aspect of identity, according to Joe C. B. Leung. In rural areas, social control was centered on communes. However, unlike urban residents, rural peasants did not receive access to subsidized basic goods and services. At its height, this command economy transformed all consumer products and services into planned productive sectors, with access primarily via a ration system. This system was strained by the side effects of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), during which time production of both foodstuffs and consumer products was disrupted by political in-fighting and ideological campaigns. Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the ascendancy to power of Deng Xiaoping, economic reforms aimed at dismantling the command economy were instituted. Known in Chinese as ga˘igé k¯aifàng (reform and opening), these ongoing policies have encouraged foreign investment, effectively privatized agricultural production, pushed state enterprises to be competitive, allowed private production, and eliminated production and price controls. These policies have also aimed at shifting welfare provisions, particularly housing, from work units, communes, and cooperatives to private citizens. Housing reforms in urban areas began with an experimental program in Xian and Nanjing in 1979 to construct and sell new housing at cost. This policy failed because few people could afford to purchase a new apartment at cost, according to Xing Quan Zhang. Next, a subsidized program was tried in Zhejiang and Hubei Provinces in 1981 to 1982. Under this program, new housing stock was jointly funded by the central government, work units, and individual occupants, with each contributing

one-third of the construction cost. This program was rapidly expanded to approximately three hundred cities by 1986, including Beijing. In 1988, state ownership of land was legally separated from individual use-rights. This law was further revised in 1990 to allow anyone who held use-rights to transfer or sell these. In a 1991 decree, the State Council institutionalized the tripartite investment structure for new housing stock between central government organs, work units, and work unit members. These initial reforms focused on increasing the supply of housing not through privatization but through what the government termed commoditization, in which private citizens became, in effect, partners with their work units and central state ministries. This joint funding program enabled residents without access to subsidized housing to gain access to a different sort of subsidized housing, in which they held limited use-rights, in exchange for a third of the cost of this housing. More complicated was how to apply housing reforms to already-existing state housing, most of which was located within state-owned enterprises (SOE). Beginning in the early 1990s, work units transferred use rights of apartments to their occupants at fixed prices. In 1995, the State Council legalized the construction of commercial housing (shangpin fang) for sale at market prices as well as “economical” housing (jingji fang) for lower-middle-class residents. In 1997, new regulations required that work-unit-funded housing units be sold at “cost price,” which carried full property rights for buyers. Finally, in 1998, all state-affiliated enterprises and institutes were prohibited from constructing any further housing. The reform period has brought significant changes to work units. Initial reforms that were designed to introduce competition into the production process, increase economic efficiency, and eliminate nonproductive and inefficient work units had the paradoxical effect of strengthening some forms of work units, particularly service-oriented units. Because these initial reforms allowed administrators to keep a larger percentage of the revenue they generated, well-run work units could invest in social services and housing for their members, increasing dependency on work units. Indeed, while many industrial state enterprises have struggled to adapt to market-driven administrative logic, others, usually service or educational institutions in desirable locales, have thrived. These schools offer Chinese language training to foreign

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students and foreign languages to Chinese students through a strategic marketing of their own status. Schools that have been most adept at adapting to this language market have generated sufficient revenue to maintain foundational aspects of state socialism, such as subsidized food, medical care, and (for certain employees) housing. Beyond housing, government policies have increasingly encouraged mass consumption, as domestic consumption is now seen as a means of offsetting China’s reliance on export-driven growth. Important to note, the Chinese government shows relatively little concern for the cultural impact of heightened consumerism. From the National Basketball Association to McDonald’s, South Korean and Taiwanese pop music to French and Italian fashions, Chinese citizens consume foreign products. This is in part connected to the fact that much of what on the surface is foreign is actually produced in China. Moreover, research suggests that even the consumption of the seemingly most foreign of products involves a dynamic process of adapting to local social and cultural norms, and hence becoming “local.” For example, in the case of McDonald’s, this corporation succeeds in East Asian societies such as China precisely because it functions not as a symbol of American culture but as a sign of domestic modernity, notes James Watson. Similar findings are evident in Deborah Davis’s study of more general eating habits, fashion, and entertainment. Rather than being concerned about the cultural effects of increased consumption, both the government and the Communist Party appear more focused on the potential empowerment of consumers and how this might affect party rule. This concern focuses on two main areas, real estate disputes and the growth of private housing estates, and consumer anger at tainted products. While state officials have sought to implement rules that mandate market value compensation for land seizures, disputes continue, especially in core urban centers. Displaced residents, usually working class, often complain that the compensation they receive for their lost housing only allows them to live in suburban areas, and public protests are increasingly common. In new private housing developments, voluntary homeowner associations now exist as a potential voice to channel the demands of increasingly affluent middle- and upperincome residents. In both cases, these issues become public through the mass media, which, despite being

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nominally government controlled, is largely driven by consumer demand. These two factors intersect in the case of public anger at dangerous consumer products, such as the widespread media attention within China given to tainted baby formula in the fall of 2008. This in turn relates to increased demands by consumers for new government oversight over production, a key sign of a potential consumer-driven emergence of a civil society within China. The China Consumer’s Association (CCA), established in 1984, is designed to protect and promote consumer rights while publicizing consumer safety issues. CCA functions as an umbrella organization for over 3,000 local consumer organizations. Although these local groups are largely nongovernmental organizations, CCA is linked with the Chinese Communist Party and acts as a facilitator at the national level, as well as a vehicle for maintaining Chinese Communist Party control over potentially explosive social issues. It thus functions as more of an educational organization than an activist group, avoiding direct conflict with state institutions. CCA is credited with the development of the first consumer rights legislation in the People’s Republic of China, the Law for the Protection of Consumer Rights, implemented in 1993. It also publishes a monthly magazine that publicizes product safety warnings, offers product testing and analysis, and investigates product recalls. It thus serves as a good example of how rights-based institutions function in today’s China. Yet the success of the CCA points to another key fact, according to Pun Ngai: the shift from a command to a consumer-driven economy has led to the reemergence of a stark class divide between the relatively few who have become consumer citizens and a larger majority who produce so others may consume. It is this latter group, consisting of peasant migrants who fill low-wage factory and construction jobs, serve the new elites as nannies and cooks, and are most affected by the erasure of state welfare policies that poses the most significant potential threat to the post-Maoist regime. Robert J. Shepherd See also Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer Culture in the USSR; Consumer Nationalism; Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumer Policy (United States); Globalization; Mass Production and Consumption

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Further Readings Bray, David. Social Space and Governance in Urban China. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Davis, Deborah, ed. The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Dittmer, Lowell, and Lu Xiaobo. “Personal Politics in the Chinese Danwei under Reform.” Asian Survey 36, no. 3 (March 1996): 246–267. Leung, Joe C. B. “The Transformation of Social Welfare Policy: The Restructuring of the Iron Rice Bowl.” In China in the Post-Deng Era, edited by Joseph Y. S. Cheng, 617–644. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998. Naughton, Barry. “Danwei: The Economic Foundations of a Unique Institution.” In Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective, edited by Lu Xiaobo and Elizabeth Perry, 169–194. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Ngai, Pun. “Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in ‘Globalizing’ China.” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2004): 469–492. Wang, Yaping, Wang Yunlin, and Glen Bramler. “Chinese Housing Reform in State-owned Enterprises and Its Impact on Different Social Groups.” Urban Studies 42, no. 10 (2005): 1859–1878. Watson, James, ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. First published 1997. Zhang, Li. “Forced from Home: Property Rights, Civic Activism, and the Politics of Relocation in China.” Urban Anthropology 33, no. 3 (2004): 247–281. Zhang, Xing Quan. Privatization: A Study of Housing Policy in Urban China. New York: Nova Science, 1998.

CONSUMER POLICY (EUROPEAN UNION) The European Union (EU), and in particular its executive arm, the European Commission, is considered to be the foremost champion of consumer rights in the world as of 2010. The commission’s latest action program (2007–2013) in the field of consumer policy (Decision No 1926/2006/EC) contains numerous proposed legislative measures to add to an already large array of EU consumer protection legislation. The program is backed by 156.8 million euros of funding and details its main objectives as being: (1) “to ensure a high level of consumer protection, notably through better consultation with consumers

and better representation of their interests”; and (2) “to ensure the effective application of consumer protection rules, in particular through cooperation on enforcement, information, education and redress.” The program thus not only signals a willingness to take action in favor of the consumer, but also provides the material means for consumer protection and confirms the EU’s commitment to democratic innovation in the matter of policy formation. Given the substance of European consumer policy, it is perhaps surprising that the history of consumer protection within the EU is a relatively recent and troubled one. Notwithstanding the release in 1975 of a European Economic Community (EEC) Council Resolution on a Preliminary Programme for a Consumer Protection and Information Policy (OJ 1975 C92/1), the European treaties, first established the EEC (in the Treaty of Rome, 1957) and, second, the European Union (in the Treaty on European Union, TEU, 1992, now the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, TFEU, 2010) only endowed the supranational body with an explicit competence to pursue consumer protection policies in 1987 (in the Single European Act, SEA). The 1975 resolution declared that it would provide the European consumer with an ambitious set of rights: the right to protection of economic interests, the right of redress, the right to information and education, and the right of representation. However, and despite its rhetoric, the resolution was merely a statement of intent and the subsequent history of the development of EU consumer policy is better described as an accidental process, caused by judicial and legislative spillover from European efforts to establish a common and then a single market. Equally, the establishment of EU consumer protection policy has been characterized by tensions between the need to protect the European consumer from the potential ill-effects of market integration and the desire to encourage the European citizen to adopt the mantle of an economic citizen to confidently engage in European market building. The primary and founding tension between the EU’s vision of its citizens as, on the one hand, economic units with the necessary freedom to engage in the process of market building, and, on the other, as individuals who must be protected from any harm that might be caused by market integration, is still to be found within the language deployed by the commission directorate general responsible for health

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and safety and consumer affairs. According to its director, consumers are essential to economic growth and job creation. Yet, across the European Union, consumers lack confidence in cross-border shopping. As a consequence of such formulations, it is perhaps all too easy to begin to question the commitment to consumer policy within the EU: are European policymakers less concerned with protecting consumers from harm and more concerned with encouraging individual Europeans to act as units of economic integration? This tension and struggle to define the role of the European consumer has haunted each of the three historical stages of the evolution of European consumer policy: (1) a period encompassing judicial efforts to overcome national barriers to trade and to give the market consumer an appropriate “European character”; (2) a period of European re-regulation, led by the commission that sought to ensure a high level of legislative protection for European consumers; and (3) a final period, during which the EU is seeking to respond to an apparent loss of confidence of European consumers through intensified efforts to ensure a measure of consumer representation within policy making.

Negative Integration, Deregulation, and Judicial Activism The story of the period of judicial activism that spanned the 1980s and saw the European Court of Justice (ECJ) give decisive impetus to the establishment of an integrated European market is also one that is indicative of the political lack of will that retarded achievement of the goals laid down by the EEC treaty. The Council of Ministers was required by the treaty to legislate to harmonize the market regulating provisions of the member states. Predictably, national resistance to specific instances of change, taken together with the sheer mass of national regulation requiring harmonization, determined that this strategy of positive integration would fail to meet the target of the creation of a European market by 1969. Following a period of economic stagnation in the 1970s, however, the general political and economic recognition of the failings in national economies perhaps convinced the ECJ to make use of its own powerful and liberalizing legal mechanisms to give birth to the European market through the deregulatory setting aside of national regulatory provision. The notion of European legal

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supremacy and the direct effect of European provisions within the legal systems of the member states thus allowed the court to give full effect to provisions such as the free movement of goods and the nondiscrimination principle (Article 34 TFEU), the freedom to provide services (Article 53 TFEU), and European competition law (Article 101 TFEU), in the service of negative integration, or a judicially established single market. The corollary of such market-building deregulation, however, was an inevitable series of encounters between the ECJ and individual national citizens, in their guise as consumers, during which the court struggled to identify an appropriate character for the European consumer. “The member states must not crystallize given consumer habits so as to consolidate an advantage acquired by national industries concerned to comply with them” (Commission v. Germany [1987] ECR [European Court Ruling] 1227). Thus spoke the ECJ in relation to German beer purity laws. All protest by the German government that provisions restricting the ingredients in beer served a legitimate consumer protection aim fell on deaf judicial ears as Article 34 was deployed to unpick the complex of national standards applied to production processes. Certainly, consumer protection remained a legitimate legislative goal of the member states and would also remain a guiding feature of internal market policy. Yet, the vital legal principle of proportionality would be wielded by the court to review national standards: does national legislation really serve the aims it is designed to pursue; could less restrictive measures be applied to achieve the same goals? In other words, the German consumer would be relieved of culturally set standards determining the nature of beer and would be exposed to products labeled “beer” by “foreign” cultures. By the same token, however, labeling and information on the ingredients of beer would not only be an adequate means to protect the “de-cultured” German consumer, but would simultaneously serve consumer protection through the widening of consumer choice, as all beer-drinkers throughout the community might decide for themselves which cultural form of beer was most palatable to them. In addition to championing consumer choice, the court was quick to add the concept of the entrepreneurial consumer as Article 53 TFEU was held to require that large-scale consumers, with access to legal advice, could not be bound by national

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provisions designed to protect the “average” insurance consumer (Commission v. Germany [1986] CMLR [Common Market Law Reports] 69). At the same time, competition law could be deployed to break down rate-setting cartels in fire insurance markets, which likewise constituted a barrier to cross-border consumer choice (Sachverband der Deutschen Feuerversicherer [1987] ECR 405). Certainly, this radically deregulating court remained interested in consumer protection. However, consumer protection was similarly subordinated to the goal of creation of the integrated market: “Free movement of goods concerns not only traders but also individuals. It requires, particularly in frontier areas, that consumers resident in one member state may travel freely to the territory of another member state to shop under the same conditions as the local population” (GB-INNO-BM v. Confederation du Commerce luxembourgeois [1990] ECR I-667). Accordingly, the major aim of consumer protection within the court’s jurisprudence was the creation of an informed and confident consumer: under community law concerning consumer protection, the provision of information to the consumer is considered one of the principal requirements.

Executive Re-Regulation The limits to such deregulatory judicial activism, however, were always readily apparent. EU member states still retained a great deal of competence to regulate national areas of life, and the court likewise reined in its “confident” and “informed” consumers on a number of occasions to avoid contentious issues. Thus, for example, it declined pleas to overturn Sunday trading legislation that was founded in the demand that consumers should have seven-day-aweek access to goods. It similarly approved national measures demanding stricter tobacco labeling requirements than the European norm and restricted the jurisdictional reach of Article 34, applying it only to processes of production and not to selling arrangements. Most notably, it has latterly begun to restrict the jurisdictional reach of the European consumer within national orders, refusing, for example, to apply the Doorstop Selling Directive (ECC Directive no 85/577) to third-party bank guarantees with the “classical” contractual argument that the third guarantor was not privy to the consumer contract (Bayerische Hypotheken und Wechselbank AG v.

Edgar Dietzinger [1998] ECR-I 01119). Where the “frontier” European consumer has already played its vital part in creating the internal market, the ECJ is no longer willing to intervene to define his or her more substantive characteristics, leaving us with a question of whether executive action within the EU has more clearly defined the positive contours of European consumption. As the ECJ withdrew from its central role in creating the European consumer, the European Commission readily filled the gap. Always highly aware of the legitimation potential of direct appeals to the European citizen, a long-standing interest of the commission in consumer affairs was strengthened by the necessarily deregulatory tendencies of ECJ jurisprudence. Although liberalization was required to effect market integration, the interests of the newly established European market were not necessarily wholly liberal, at least in matters of regulatory policy. Thus, member states retained a legitimate interest in regulation in defense of the consumer’s health and safety (Article 36 EC). As the ever-growing list of cases before the ECJ attested, they were still prepared to defend such interests vigorously. Some form of harmonized regulation would accordingly be necessary to avoid the myriad inefficiencies of tortuous court proceedings. Equally, however, regulatory standards common to all the member states may be and are demanded by business itself, to facilitate the growth of integrated markets and efficiencies of scale. Taken together with an undoubted consumer interest in the ability of harmonized standards to ensure the transparency of transactions of a cross-border character, the benefits of re-regulatory harmonization within the newly founded market were highly convincing. Accordingly, new strategies were developed to secure a measure of harmonization within the new internal market. First came The New Approach. Given the failure of traditional political harmonization, the commission’s Green Paper on the completion of the internal market of 1985 adopted a different strategy. Mindful that a succession of Councils of Ministers had failed to agree on the provisions of directives regulating individual market sectors, the commission evolved the concept of framework directives, whereby the European Council would devolve to the commission general regulatory powers for broader economic areas. In turn, the commission, together with committees of member

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state representatives, scientific experts, and consumer interest groups, would concretize individual regulatory standards to combat individual sectorial dangers. Second, however, the commission also concerned itself with protection. The high level of protection guaranteed to consumers by the SEA heralded the first explicit development of a European competence in consumer affairs. The commission, having the sole European competence to make legislative proposals, was accordingly free to begin to suggest to the European Council a series of direct legislative mechanisms in protection of the consumer. The fruits of this effort to concretize the commission’s character as “friend of the European consumer” are accordingly to be found in the Directive on Consumer Credit (87/102), the Directive on Doorstop Selling (85/577), the Directive on Package Travel (90/314), the Directive on Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts (93/13), and the Protection of Consumers in Respect of Distance Contracts (97/7).

A Politicized European Consumer Given this veritable avalanche of regulatory standards, as well as of corrective interventionist provisions of contract law, it might be assumed that the notion of the European consumer and European consumer law has come of age. In other words, surely we can now say that a distinct body of European law promotes a particular view of the European consumer? The answer to this question, however, is no. European policy making is still marked by tension between the goals of market building and the notion of a high-level of protection for the consumer. Accordingly, although the rhetoric of the European Commission appears to support “rational” market regulation, or notions of the confident and informed consumer, some of its measures seem to have gone beyond what is necessary to ensure information flow to the consumer, and have instead begun to shape the product offered (e.g., unfair contract terms regulation). On the one hand, this may be a legitimate measure of consumer protection. On the other, however, it has also drawn much criticism, both within the member states and within the ECJ, who have argued that such measures represent too great an inroad into the private law autonomy of the member states (see Bayerische Hypotheken und Wechselbank AG v. Edgar Dietzinger [1998] ECR-I 01119). By the same token, the scientific presence within committees

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seeking to ensure the health and safety of consumers may ensure that rationality is the guiding principle for the creation of standards to be applied to modes of production. Equally, however, in areas such as the regulation of genetically modified organisms, a politically oriented commission interest may also be argued to have resulted in the erection of new European “cultural” standards of production. So what is the exact character of the modern European consumer? One possible, though tentative, answer might be that the European consumer is now also a politicized consumer. Alternatively, it may be argued that we have now entered a third period within the story of the European consumer, heralding the evolution of a political conception of consumption in the EU. Thus, the 2007 to 2013 action program also commits the European Commission to a clear definition of consumer policy that distils out considerations of the protection of health and safety to the general regulatory framework and instead locates the core of consumer policy in efforts to unite the forces of a “diffuse” consumer interest with the interests of the market. Building both on the strengthening of established European standardization bodies maintained by European industry and on the release of framework consumer policy directives, the program distances member state authorities from the day-to-day governance of consumer affairs within the EU. Instead, the program represents an intensification of commission efforts to establish the character of the citizen consumer through the direct democratization of the market. No longer should standards be imposed by political legislation. Instead, partnership within the modes of production between industry, consumers, and the executive (commission oversight of the standardization procedure and of standard-setting committees) will, if successful, bring consumers into a direct relationship with the European market. With this, the political character of the commission’s current consumer policy strategy is readily apparent as the character of European market– citizen consumer steps up to represent diffuse consumer interests. Interaction between consumer interests groups and industry standard setting bodies should represent an advance beyond an informational model that places its regulatory faith in market transparency and provision of information to the consumer by the distribution network at the point of sale. Instead, consumers will themselves be

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pivotal in the matter of creating products by virtue of their presence within standardization processes, thus democratizing the market.

Conclusion Markets are always socially embedded—this insight derives from the political economist, Karl Polanyi. In the terms of this short contribution, this means that the European consumer was originally embedded within the integrationist logic of a European legal system dedicated to creation of the internal market. With time, however, the confident and informed consumer also began to be embedded in a scheme of executive regulatory action, which sought—and still seeks—to offer the consumer a high level of protection. Nonetheless, in the wake of consumer scandals, such as the failure of the EU to prevent the spread of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), tension has grown between the original consumer function of building the internal market and demands that consumer protection within the single market be intensified. The commission’s answer to this tension is manifested in its desire to create a politicized European-market citizen consumer who might be politically involved in every stage of the production of goods and services within Europe. Nonetheless, we must wait and see whether this reliance on the strength of European civil society (industry and consumers) will suffice to maintain confidence in the single market and protect its consumers. Michelle Everson See also Consumer Education; Consumer Nationalism; Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; European Union

Further Readings Bamforth, Nicholas. “The Limits of European Union Consumer Contract Law.” European Law Review 24, no. 4 (1999): 410–418. Howells, Geraint, and T. Wilhelmsson. “EC Consumer Law: Has It Come of Age?” European Law Review 28, no. 3 (2003): 370–388. Weatherhill, Stephen. EC Consumer Law and Policy. London: Longman, 1997. Weatherhill, Stephen. EU Consumer Law and Policy. London: Elgar European Law Series, 2008.

CONSUMER POLICY (JAPAN) Consumer policy in Japan began under U.S. occupation in 1947 with the Prohibition of Private Monopolization and Maintenance of Fair Trade Act (commonly known as the Anti-Monopoly Act) and the Food Sanitation Act. Reflecting the struggling economic state of the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which, as John Dower describes in his book Embracing Defeat, unemployment was a major issue and a strict retrenchment policy was implemented, the initial development of consumer policy was slow. Only two more sets of laws were added during this period, namely the Japanese Agricultural Standards Act (JAS Act) of 1950 and the Regulations for Receiving Capital Subscriptions, Deposits, and Interest on Deposits Act of 1954. The break out of the Korean War (1950–1953) changed the course of the Japanese economy, setting a path to the so-called high economic growth period (1955–1973). Japan’s average annual growth rate during this period was 9.1 percent, and Japan’s gross national product (GNP) per capita ranked the second highest after the United States in 1968. Consumption played a major and vital role in realizing this rapid and what is often-described as “miraculous” economic growth. For example, many households eagerly purchased electric appliances such as washing machines, televisions, and fridge-freezers in the 1950s and 1960s. According to statistics released by the Cabinet Office, the ownership rate of fridge-freezers increased from 10.1 percent in 1960 to 89.1 percent in 1970. The first recorded entry of color televisions (0.3 percent) was only made in 1966, but by 1970, the figure had risen to 26.3 percent. While Japan was quickly becoming a mass consumption society during the high economic growth period, rapid and aggressive economic development also caused a series of consumer problems resulting from industrial accidents, corporate malpractice, and environmental destruction. The cases of Minamata disease caused by methylmercury pollution in the 1950s, arsenic-contaminated powdered milk produced by Morinaga in 1955 as well as thalidomide in 1962, and Kanemi yusho incident (PCB-tainted oil syndrome) in 1968, to name but a few prominent examples, brought large-scale and tragic harm to many victims, including small children. These

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problems energized consumer movements, often organized by married women, which demanded that the national government implement measures to tackle consumer issues. The national government also acknowledged the need to update consumer policy to respond to the development of a more affluent mass consumer society. As a result, the Basic Law for Consumer Protection that prescribed the framework of consumer policy until the 2000s was established in 1968, while new laws such as the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act (1960), the Installment Sales Act (1961), and the Law for Preventing Unjustifiable Extra or Unexpected Benefits and Misleading Representation (1963) were introduced. In addition, the Food Sanitation Act was amended in 1957. The government also undertook major institutional reforms of the consumer administrative system. In the early 1960s, multiple ministries set up a division to work on consumer issues, for example, the Consumer Affairs Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (1964), the Consumer Affairs Department of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (1965), and the Quality of Life Bureau of the Economic Planning Agency (1965). In addition, the government launched the National Consumer Affairs Centre of Japan (1970), whose local branches continue to provide consumer information, deal with consumer complaints, carry out product tests, and conduct consumer training programs. The development from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, in particular the implementation of the Basic Law for Consumer Protection, certainly advanced consumer policy administration at both the national and local levels in Japan, while, as Patricia L. Maclachlan discusses, consumer movements organized by mainly married women exercised the limited but positive political influence. Yet the new administrative system also contained some structural problems. First, a “Basic Law” in the Japanese legal and political system tends to project political goals and ideals to be achieved through administrative activities, rather than provide provisions to tackle concrete issues and problems. This was very much the case for the Basic Law for Consumer Protection. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the Japanese consumer society matured further, new types of consumer problems emerged, for example, problems caused by multiple debts and asset-building, and the government had to legislate for individual cases a posteriori.

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Second, the institutional arrangement of the National Consumer Administration was highly fragmented, with a multitude of departments, bureaus, and commissions being scattered across different ministries. When a major institutional reform of the National Consumer Administration was discussed in the 2000s, ten different government bodies (Cabinet Office, one commission, six ministries, and two agencies) all supervised different aspects of consumer policy, but often with overlapping roles (International Affairs Office 2006). Finally, the different divisions that oversaw consumer policy were generally marginalized in their respective government bodies, reflecting the position of consumer issues in the Japanese political system. Not to mention the iron triangle’s (the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in office since 1955 except for 11 months in 1993–1994, the national bureaucracy, and big business) long-standing policymaking bias toward producers, which often prioritized economic interests over consumer welfare. It was in the 2000s, with the impact of globalization and the changing environment surrounding Japanese consumers, when the Japanese government at last started to overhaul the consumer administration system rooted in the 1960 and 1970s. The Consumer Policy Committee of the Quality of Life Advisory Council (attached to the Cabinet Office) published a report titled “The Ideal Consumer Policy for the 21st Century” in May 2003. The report made the following three recommendations for consumer policy reform. First, it stated that consumers should be viewed as “independent subjects” who can responsibly organize their own consumption patterns rather than as “those who are protected.” Second, it asserted that consumers have a right to secure a safe lifestyle and should be able to access the information necessary for making appropriate product choices. Industries are now obliged to play a role in achieving this goal, along with both administrative bodies and consumers. Third, the report argued that consumer policy should effectively utilize the market mechanism rather than applying extant regulations. In line with these recommendations, the Basic Law for Consumer Protection was revised in June 2004 to become the Basic Law for Consumers. In particular, the new law emphasizes the idea of the “independent” and “responsible” consumer, and the National Consumer Affairs Centres across Japan

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have been repositioned as institutions for providing training and support for such “consumer citizens.” Indeed, the latest White Paper on the Quality of Life introduces “consumer citizenship as ‘an emerging trend in Western societies’ and advocates the importance of ‘re-envisioning the nation from the perspective of consumer citizens’” (International Affairs Office 2009, 167). The institutional reforms of the early 2000s left untouched the issue of the fragmented nature of the National Consumer Administration system. Yet a series of food scares related to imported food products that happened in the mid to late 2000s led to growing public anger over the government’s handling of food safety issues. In particular, in January 2008, ten people across Japan were poisoned by frozen dumplings imported from China. This incident, which remains unsolved to this day, shed light on the institutional problems rooted in the disjointed administrative system. The underlying lack of coordination caused delay in information circulation and cooperation between government bodies and retailers, and intensified the degree of anxiety over food safety. The then national government, which was already suffering from a great deal of unpopularity stemming from public dissatisfaction over life-related issues, such as medical insurance, reacted to the situation by establishing in September 2009 a new Consumer Agency with the capacity to comprehensively deal with matters related to consumer safety. Takeda Hiroko See also Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies; Japan as a Consumer Culture

Further Readings Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II. London: Penguin, 2000. International Affairs Office, Quality-of-Life Policy Bureau, Cabinet Office. “Consumer Policy Regime in Japan.” 2006. http://www.consumer.go.jp/english/cprj/index.html. International Affairs Office, Quality-of-Life Policy Bureau, Cabinet Office. Kokumin seikatsu hakusho [White paper on the quality of life]. Tokyo: Shadan H¯ojin Jiji Gah¯osha, 2009.

Maclachlan, Patricia L. Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Mukaida, Naonori. “21-seiki no sh¯ohisha-h¯o to sh¯ohisha seisaku” [Consumer laws and consumer policy in the 21st century]. Nihon Keizai H¯ogaku Nenp¯o [The Annual of the Japan Association of Economic Law] 29 (2008): 1–14. Vogel, Steven L. “Can Japan Disengage? Winners and Losers in Japan’s Political Economy, and the Ties that Bind Them.” Social Science Japan Journal 2, no. 1 (1999): 3–21.

CONSUMER POLICY (UNITED STATES) Consumer policy is the domain of public policy devoted to addressing the marketplace problems of buyers of goods and services. Consumer policy is made in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government and at the local, national, and international levels of government. Whereas individuals decide every day through their purchases what they perceive to be in their personal consumer interest, consumer policy represents a collective interpretation of what constitutes and promotes consumer welfare. Consumer policy thereby reflects deeply held cultural values regarding the rights and responsibilities of consumers and the various businesses with which they transact. The primary goals of consumer policy are to assist consumers in making sound decisions and in resolving any problems that arise after purchases have been made. Policies that require information on package labels or prohibit businesses from colluding to raise prices reflect the first goal; and policies setting minimum standards of product safety or establishing small claims courts for consumers to quickly and inexpensively seek redress exemplify the latter goal. Industries that, over time, have been most visibly influenced by consumer policy involve food, pharmaceuticals, motor vehicles, tobacco products, and credit. Examples of federal statutes controlling these industries stretch from, in 1906, the Pure Food and the Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act to, in 2009, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act and the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act.

Consumer Policy (United States)

The first step in the process of creating a consumer policy is placing an issue on the policy agenda, the list of problems that people inside and outside government believe require serious attention at any given time. The work of placing problems on the policy agenda is accomplished by what Michael Pertschuk calls policy (or social) entrepreneurs. Whereas business entrepreneurs drive innovation in for-profit organizations, policy entrepreneurs seek transformational change that will benefit broad groups (such as consumers) and/or society at large. Consumer policy entrepreneurs have contributed to fundamental shifts in cultural definitions of consumer problems. The most basic change occurred around the turn of the twentieth century and involved a transition from caveat emptor, the notion of buyer beware, to an acceptance of some degree of government responsibility for consumer welfare. Consumer policy entrepreneurs have also brought about other dramatic cultural shifts. For example, until the 1960s, automobile-related accidents were considered the fault of “the nut behind the wheel.” Consumer activists, led by Ralph Nader, successfully promoted the idea that changes in car design could reduce the number and severity of automobile-related accidents. Similarly, antismoking activists initially faced a culture that denied the dangers of cigarette smoking or, paradoxically, blamed any adverse health outcomes on people who should have realized the obvious dangers of smoking. Consumer policy entrepreneurs, over a period of several decades, changed the culture of smoking to the point where cigarettes are viewed as inherently dangerous and meriting tight control, including restrictions on marketing them to children. An accident, tragedy, or scandal will often catapult a consumer problem onto the policy agenda, but such events are rarely sufficient to create a consumer policy. Policy entrepreneurs must also offer specific and credible policy proposals, mobilize public support, effectively lobby policymakers, defend their proposals against groups who might oppose them, master the art of compromise, ensure proper policy implementation, and evaluate policy effectiveness. Often, by the time the policy process has run its course, the original consumer problem has morphed and requires renewed attention from policy entrepreneurs. Consumer policies aim to change the behavior of businesses or consumers, or both. The primary tools for bringing about these changes are information/

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education, financial incentives, and direct behavioral controls. Policies that provide consumers with basic knowledge (education) or product-specific details (information) are typically the least controversial form of consumer policy because they preserve freedom of choice and action. Compare, for example, nutrition labels on beverage packages versus a tax on high-sugar beverages versus a ban on sodas. Typically, only when information/education policies have failed to achieve a given policy objective are stronger forms of consumer policy considered legitimate. In addition to valuing individual freedom of choice, U.S. culture favors free markets and limited government intervention. Hence, consumer policy entrepreneurs must present a compelling argument in favor of government intervention in markets on behalf of consumers. One approach is to argue in terms of consumer rights, as President John F. Kennedy did in 1962. Kennedy asserted that consumers had the right to be safe, the right to be informed, the right to have choices, and the right to be heard by government decisionmakers. The concept of rights is problematic inasmuch as rights presume a shared sense of fairness, but people vary in their sense of what is fair. One person might consider it fair and a matter of common sense that drugs be extensively tested for safety before being released on the market. Another person might feel it is unfair and life-threatening to someone suffering from an incurable disease to subject new drugs to excessive testing. Because of the potential weakness of arguments based on rights, consumer policy entrepreneurs frequently combine references to rights with additional, more economically grounded justifications for the enactment of consumer policies. One such argument is that free markets are indeed fine guarantors of consumer welfare, but free markets often do not exist. Instead, markets are often controlled by a single firm or a few large ones, with the results that prices are high, quality is low, and innovation is slow. A century ago, this monopoly (or oligopoly) argument was leveled at “trusts” in the oil, coal, meat, and sugar industries; today, complaints against Microsoft have a similar basis. A second rationale for consumer policy is that, even when markets are competitive on the sellers’ side, buyers can lack the information necessary to play their proper role in the free enterprise system. Efficient markets presume informed consumers who

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reward firms offering good value to the consumer and withhold their dollars from firms offering poor quality products at excessive prices. In some cases, the ideal of the well-informed consumer is impeded by deliberate deception on the part of some sellers. When this occurs, it is fairly easy for consumer policy entrepreneurs to justify strong prohibitions against deceptive advertising and misleading sales practices. Consumers can be poorly informed, however, in the absence of any misconduct by sellers. It is often not feasible for consumers to be well informed before making important decisions. Without supportive consumer policies, for example, how is a consumer supposed to know whether a pharmaceutical product will be safe and effective or whether a set of tires will be free of defects? The consumer would have to purchase and use a product to find out. (Even then, the quality of the product might not be apparent for a long time.) George A. Ackerlof notes that when such “informational asymmetries” exist in consumer markets, buyers may pay too much for low quality and not enough for high quality. Supportive consumer policies can remedy this situation. A final justification for consumer policy is the inability of markets to operate properly, even when sellers are numerous and buyers are studious. Markets are well-suited to consider the costs and benefits experienced by buyers and sellers, but markets have no inherent mechanism for taking into account any “external” costs and benefits that accrue to third parties. These externalities can be substantial, as in the case of a gas-powered lawnmower that belches air pollutants or a car that runs over a pedestrian. It requires consumer policy to curb these externalities and create a situation that makes sense for all parties, not just the buyer and seller. Legislators rely heavily on justifications of fairness and properly functioning markets in pressing for consumer statutes. Accordingly, the title of a piece of proposed legislation will typically contain one or more of the following unassailable words: fair, equal, truth, accurate, or accountable. Once a statute has been passed and signed, consumer policy often shifts to regulatory agencies or courts, where the meaning of such high-sounding terms is made more precise. In the United States, neither regulators nor judges are supposed to go beyond the intent of Congress, but in practice, both actors make consumer policy via their decisions. The boldest headlines are generated by

multibillion dollar class action settlements, such as those involving cigarette, drug, and car manufacturers, but consumer policy is made quietly on a daily basis in agency hearing rooms and judicial chambers. Once consumer policies have been agreed on and implemented, a final task remains: determining whether policy goals have been successfully achieved (effectiveness) at a reasonable cost to society (efficiency). Policy proponents tend to focus on effectiveness and critics on efficiency. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) touts the hundreds of thousands of lives saved by safety features such as seat belts, air bags, and child restraints. Annual safety inspections for vehicles, in contrast, appear to save only a few lives and at a very high cost per life. Evaluating consumer policies is a challenging scientific task. Experimental designs appropriate to laboratory settings can rarely be applied to consumer policies. Studies that compare before and after a policy’s implementation are unable to control for other changes that might have taken place during the study period. Similarly, research comparing jurisdictions with and without a particular policy cannot rule out the possible effect of other differences across locations. Despite these difficulties, evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of consumer policies provides scientists with an important avenue by which to contribute to the consumer policy process. The first national consumer policies were enacted in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. A century later, consumer policy remains a vibrant domain of public policy in the United States, whether the topic is identity theft, mortgage modification scams, bank overdraft fees, health care privacy, or food safety. Moreover, consumer policy is deeply connected to other policy domains, including safeguarding the banking system, providing adequate retirement income, striking a balance between international trade and national sovereignty, and curbing climate change. Consumer policy can play an important role in helping society meet all these challenges and will therefore retain a prominent position on the U.S. policy agenda. Robert N. Mayer See also Consumer Nationalism; Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies; Media Convergence and Monopoly

Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization)

Further Readings Ackerlof, George A. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500. Kennedy, John F. Special Message to the Congress on Protecting the Consumer Interest. March 15, 1962. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9108. Pertschuk, Michael. Revolt against Regulation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

CONSUMER POLICY (WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION) In its original constellation as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the system for regulating world trade had little if any impact on the consumers of its own member states. The main objective of GATT was simply the reduction of protective trade tariffs. Although GATT may have impacted on the pricing of “foreign” products and services bought by consumers beyond their own domestic markets, the system it sustained did not require alterations in domestic product and product process regulation. Accordingly, consumer goods and services were fashioned by national regulation and thus remained identifiable “national” goods from distinct “national” producers. From the 1970s onward, however, intensification of domestic economic regulation, especially in the fields of health and safety and consumer and environmental protection, led to a shift of emphasis to nontariff barriers to free trade. From the 1980s onward, the political-economic consensus within the developed world that national regulation was now damaging to economic development intensified pressure on the old regime. Accordingly, in 1994, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established with a distinct aim, not simply to enable world trade, but to enable “free” world trade. The most important reforms introduced by the WTO included overhaul of procedures of dispute settlement and the conclusion of special agreements concerning nontariff barriers to free trade, such as the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS), the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), as well as trade rounds dealing with provision of services. These agreements aim to balance the global

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economic objective of free trade with the domestic regulatory concerns of WTO members by laying down the forms of regulation of domestic products that are acceptable within the world trade regime. An enlightening parallel that might be drawn is thus between the WTO regime and the integrated European market within the European Union, and, in particular, with Articles 34 and 36 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Just as Article 34 of the TFEU sought to open up a European market to free trade, the WTO order would likewise open up a world order to trade. Equally, however, just as Article 36 of the TFEU balanced the free trade aim against the “necessary” regulatory measures taken by EU member states in pursuit of consumer, environmental, and health and safety protection, the SPS and TBT agreements would give effect to the same balance at international level. By the same token, the WTO order would thus likewise intervene into national orders, reproducing a European constellation by directly testing national regulation for its appropriateness within a global free trade order. It would thus begin to change the product and product process regulation maintained at national levels, impacting the characteristics of the particular good that consumers might buy, and—ultimately—would also shape the nature and perceptions of the global consumer. Here, however, all parallels with the European experience end. WTO members did not confer “positive” regulatory powers on the organization, although they did agree that WTO law should restrain the exercise of domestic regulatory powers. The WTO itself does not have its own government or executive branch. Accordingly, neither does it have re-regulatory competences comparable with those found within the EU, which allow that organization to harmonize the consumer protection laws of its own member states. As a result, the process of the reshaping of product and product process regulation has been at the global level, and thus the process of the creation of a distinct global consumer has not been a matter for political discussion. Instead, it has primarily been for the panels of the WTO—the individual judicial bodies who decide in international trade disputes—as well as for the Appellate Body of the WTO to decide which measures of national protective regulation are compatible or not compatible with the WTO system. In this endeavor, panels and the Appellate Body have

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also drawn heavily on the work of nongovernmental international bodies and governmental actors who engage in quasi-legal norm-production at the international level, especially so in the field of product safety; bodies such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (of the UN), the Codex Alimentarius (a standardization body set up to govern international food production standards), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Health Organization. The situation whereby the compatibility of national measures for the protection of the consumer with the WTO free trade regime is assessed without reference to a political process in which citizens might express their ethical and social concerns about global consumption has created a great deal of concern. Where consumer protection is a matter for judicial bodies at the global level and, sometimes quite obscurely for semigovernmental organizations, the fear is raised that far too great an emphasis will be laid on free trade and far too little respect will be shown for “consumer protection,” or, more particularly, the notion that consumer goods should, in some way, also reflect the ethical, social, and political concerns of the societies in which they originate. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, has denounced global consumption, deeming it to be a product of the U.S. emphasis on free trade regimes, stating that “American consumerism threatens the globe” (“Consumerism Threatens Globe: Chavez” 2006). Chavez’s concerns, however, are likewise shared by more mainstream academic thought, as authors such as John Rawls have declared that “[T]he long-term result of this—which we already have in the United States—is a civil society awash in a meaningless consumerism of some kind” (Rawls and van Parijs 2003, 9). The charge that it is promoting “meaningless consumerism” is thus one that is often leveled at the WTO. Similarly, however, some commentators applaud its ability to maximize consumer utility by setting aside restrictive and outmoded schemes of national regulation. However, given the relative youth of the WTO, its lack of a political executive, and equal lack of a clear political position on the nature of consumption, it is little wonder that the WTO’s relation with the consumer and consumption is far more complex. Instead, review of the reports of WTO panels and those of the Appellate Body reveals that there

is a conflict within the organization with regard to its treatment of consumption—that is, with regard to the question of whether measures maintained at the national level for the protection of consumers should be assessed with simple regard to “scientific” evidence of their effectiveness or otherwise, or whether, by contrast, some degree of political control should be exercised over consumer protection regulation at member state level, such that the global consumer also retains a “political character.” Two particular cases are discussed briefly to illustrate this point. The latest panel decision on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the latest Appellate Body decision on the use of hormones in cattle are exemplary of the confusion still visible within the WTO regime. Both cases concern disputes (primarily) between the United States and the European Union, and in particular between their diverging views of consumption and the appropriate nature of consumer protection. Equally, both cases demonstrate the heavy reliance of the WTO on quasi-governmental norm production and, in particular, the production of norms to govern the scientific analysis of risk to the consumer. Finally, the cases come to very different conclusions concerning the degree of political intervention that may be allowed at the national level in protection of the consumer, or construction of the act of consumption.

The Dominance of Science: Genetically Modified Organisms The dispute between the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Argentina on the legitimate or otherwise use of GMOs in foodstuffs is important for a variety of reasons. Foodstuffs generally are highly politicized consumer products and have been generally subject to regulatory supervision; GMOs are likewise the most technologically advanced and most controversial of all foodstuffs, if not of all consumer products. Thus, technologically advanced GMO production is led by the United States, but has also been mastered by countries such as Brazil and India, giving rise to ambivalent socioeconomic implications as development imperatives clash with agrarian employment concerns. The most intensive debate, however, focuses on the risks posed by GMOs. Both GMO skeptics and adherents agree that there is little evidence that GMO food poses a positive risk to health. Nonetheless,

Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization)

the major concern remains that non-GMO crops will be contaminated by GMOs released into the environment. Likewise, conflict rages on the meaning of consumer anxiety and choice: do we have a right to know what we are eating; might governments demand GMO labeling since the majority of their citizens refuse to accept them; is the European Union correct to have included ethical issues within its GMO authorization regime? The substance of the case revolved around the acceptability of the EU authorization system for GMOs and, in particular, the principle of precaution, which allowed EU member states to refuse to market products where there was some indication that they might pose risks to consumers or to the environment. U.S. authorities often approve products unless scientific evidence exists confirming risk. Italy and Austria, among other EU member states, had made use of their right to reject various GMO products (modified maize products) on the basis of concerns that they might be a danger to consumers and the environment. The complainants, led by the United States, argued that the European Union had imposed a de facto moratorium on approvals of biotech products, tolerating “national marketing and import bans on biotech products.” The legal point at issue was one of whether the EU authorization system—in particular, its precautionary approach—was compatible with Articles 5.1 and 5.7 of the SPS agreement, which demanded that national regulatory measures be based on a risk assessment (5.1) and also that a risk assessment be “adequate” in cases where science was still developing and was not able to give a full and final appraisal of the risk posed. The WTO Panel deciding the case in 2006, however, was unconvinced by European arguments. Conceding that the area of GMOs was one where science and scientific assessment of risk was still evolving, the panel nonetheless drew heavily on the work and reports of quasi-governmental bodies at the international level (WTO, Codex Alimentarius, Food and Agriculture Organization) to support its conclusion that individual European countries had not engaged in adequate risk assessment of the products to be marketed. The crux of the problem was the precautionary principle. The European Union argued that the notion of “adequate” should include the levels of protection politically demanded by the legislature at the national level, such that even slight indications of potential harm might trigger a ban under

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the precautionary principle. For the panel, however, this amounted to confusion between processes of risk assessment (wholly scientific) and processes of risk management (political decision on how risk is best to be managed). Drawing on the distinction made by international bodies between risk assessment and risk management, the panel stated that the process of risk assessment could not be influenced by the precautionary principle.

Politicized Perceptions of the Consumer: Hormones in Cattle The refusal of the WTO Panel to recognize the relevance of the EU’s precautionary principle within the assessment of the risks posed by GMO products might thus be taken as an indication that the WTO system is hostage to “meaningless consumerism.” The principle is political in nature, strongly influenced by ethical and social concerns that place the act of consumption in a wider political environment that seeks to regulate goods, not simply because they have proven to be harmful to individuals, but because they are also to be shaped by the perceptions of the political community as a whole. Where science is given dominance, ethical and social concerns must perforce cede to its rational arguments that no harm is visible. Yet, GMOs are not the end of the story. Instead, the 2008 decision of the WTO Appellate Panel on the banning by the European Union of certain hormones within cattle has demonstrated a wholly different WTO approach to the act of consumption. European regulatory treatment of hormones in cattle is motivated by the same concerns that underlie its GMO authorization regime. Again, precaution is not simply about preventing the harm that can be proven to be caused to individual consumers within the food chain. Instead, it is also about the ethical and social construction of the food chain with reference to the value established within the political process. Once again, it was thus not surprising that bans on hormones drew complaints from the United States. However, in this case, the WTO Appellate Body determined that risk is not only “ascertainable in a science laboratory operating under strictly controlled conditions, but also risk in human societies as they actually exist, in other words, the actual potential for adverse effects on human health in the real world where people live and work and die” (European Commission 1998, 187). Stating clearly

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that the interests of the legislature must be taken into account within risk assessment (co-originality of risk assessment and management), the Appellate Body firmly placed the act of consumption in the society in which it was performed. Consumer goods may be shaped by wider social and ethical concerns.

Future Directions How will the WTO regime develop in the future; and how will it contribute to the shaping of the nature of the act of global consumption? It is still far too early to say with any certainty. However, the WTO will likely always be confronted by issues of consumption. Michelle Everson See also Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies; European Union; Global Institutions

Further Readings “Consumerism Threatens Globe: Chavez.” The Hindu. January 28, 2006. http://www.thehindu.com/2006/01/ 28/stories/2006012802941400.htm. European Commission. “Measures Concerning Meat and Meat Products (Hormones).” Report of the Appellate Body, DSR 1998:I, 135, February 1998. Joerges, Christian, and Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, eds. Constitutionalism, Multilevel Trade Governance and Social Regulation. Oxford: Hart, 2006. Rawls, John, and Philippe van Parijs. “Three Letters on The Law of Peoples and the European Union.” Revue de philosophie économique 7 (2003): 7–20. http://www .uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/etes/documents/ RawlsVanParijs1.Rev.phil.Econ.pdf. Scott, Joanne. The WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures: A Commentary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. World Trade Organization Panel. “European Communities—Measures Affecting the Approval and Marketing of Biotech Products,” WT/DS291/R, WT/ DS292/R, WT/DS293/R, September 29, 2006 (06–4318). World Trade Organization Panel. United States—Continued Suspension of Obligations in the EC—Hormones Dispute (AB-2008–5), WT/DS320/AB/R, October 16, 2008 (08–4928).

CONSUMER PROTEST: ANIMAL WELFARE Animal welfare, meaning a human concern for the physical and psychological state of nonhuman animals, remains one of the most controversial moral, political, and cultural issues in contemporary consumption. Animal welfare illustrates that consumer mobilization is not only about rights, but also about social responsibility. This seems to represent a widening and generalization of issues that have been raised under the headings of “political” and “ethical consumerism.” Theoretically and empirically, animal welfare connotes a variety of core debates within the study of consumption as it draws attention to the political foundations of consumer mobilization, challenges the conventional idea of consumer rights and responsibility, and constitutes a marker for the evolvement of alternative consumer identities. Although consumer concerns for animal welfare are associated with a number of issues, including the condition of farmed animals and fish, the concern for wild animals, and the treatment of laboratory animals, farm animal welfare appears as the most important topic since it questions eating habits as core activities of everyday life.

Human-Animal Relations To understand animal welfare as a consumer concern, attention has been directed to how the humananimal relationship is embedded in cultural and religious understandings. Tim Ingold contends that with the emergence of pastoral societies, humans’ relationships with animals shifted from being based on a principle of trust to that of domination— humans must care for animals, but that does not necessarily question the human as the master. The treatment of an animal, and in particular how it is killed, cannot take place without symbolic precautions. Mythic and religious domains here are important to understand the process of legitimizing the killing of animals for food. Some religions treat animals as the property of their owners, codifying rules for their care and slaughter—often referred to as ritual slaughter—intended to limit the distress and pain animals feel under human control. Claude Fischler, among others, suggests that science has undertaken

Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare

the role of legitimizing killing for food by objectifying animals through processes of “de-animation.” “In the food business,” he argues, “the animal has become an object or rather less than an object: just stuff” (Fischler 1990, 133). As animal welfare began to take a larger place in Western public policy in nineteenth-century Britain, particularly with the emergence of the animal rights movement, the idea of animals as things or “animal machines”—as Descartes expressed it—was challenged. Since then, the welfare approach has had human morality and human behavior as its central concern. The issue of animal welfare is, however, still debated. Animal welfare can be seen as a position where it is morally acceptable for humans to use nonhuman animals, provided that adverse effects on animal welfare are minimized as far as possible. Critics have suggested that animal welfare—as a pragmatic and reformist approach—is contrasted to the animal rights and the animal liberation positions, which hold that animals should not be utilized by humans, and should not be regarded as their property. Issues of legitimacy therefore still remain high on the agenda. The cultural influences on human-animal relations (such as the personification of animals) as well as modern production systems as such seem to produce an opening-up regarding the societal handling of animals for food, questioning norms as well as organizational procedures.

Animal Welfare as a Consumer Concern Consumer protest can be expressed in various ways, according to Michele Micheletti: by refusing to buy products they find harmful to themselves or others, by deliberately choosing specific products to support the principles under which they have been produced, or to protect themselves or others from harm. This may take the form of preferring (buycott, for example, those that are labeled as animal friendly) or avoiding (boycott) products. The response may also be more drastic, by declining to purchase and eat certain product categories and being a vegetarian to protest against the mistreatment of animals. Animal welfare and the way it is associated with political consumerism challenges the idea of the choosing self in the study of consumption. The current focus on animal welfare is frequently categorized as “ethical choices,” often with an

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ideological and moral framing of individual rational choice. In this perspective, animal welfare as a consumer concern can be seen as consistent with classical liberalistic approaches, where consumers are perceived as voters who, through their purchasing power, prize or penalize producers or products. Consumer initiatives, then, are echoed by welfarespecific labeling schemes among retailers and manufactures. Against this position is a growing literature arguing that instead of representing individual acts of decision making in the market, consumption should be regarded as sets of institutionally and normatively embedded social practices. Pet-keeping practices, where animals may enter the sphere of family as “companion animals,” affect our distinction between human and nonhuman beings, notes Donna Haraway. From this point of view, animal friendliness can be seen as a practice by which social and individual identities have first been explored and expressed through consumption, translated into demands, and then become the basis of voice and mobilization for single-issue politics. Within the international consumer movement, there was growing concern already in the 1960s against its emphasis on the right to choose as a framework for consumer empowerment. Regarded as the collective representative of the consumer interest, the consumer movement was criticized for addressing mainly marketplace concerns and distancing itself from the need for social responsibility, such as human rights, animal welfare, gender equity, and so on. There are tensions, however, between caring for animals and consumer interests related to food policy issues, such as nutrition, hygiene, and taste. In a wider perspective, animal welfare activism draws parallels with environmental activism, antiglobalization, and anticonsumerism in its critique of affluent society and the condemnation of modern corporations and neoliberal capitalism. Although controversial in the consumer movement itself, animal welfare has become one of a number of new issues that reframe consumer rights, as well as adding to the range of issues included within the consumer interest.

Consumer Protest and the Politics of Animal Welfare Animal welfare, and particularly the well-being of farm animals, emerged as an issue of concern in the early 1990s, and in the early twenty-first century it

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seems to be on the public agenda of many Western countries as a social problem, a problem that society needs to address. Governments are increasingly approaching people—and their purchasing power— as a part of public policy solutions in terms of “new governance” or “public-private partnerships.” Recent surveys in seven European countries have demonstrated that although a large portion of people investigated is concerned about the welfare of farm animals, consumer activism and protesting varies across national borders (Kjærnes et al. 2008). This study suggested that high levels of consumer activism in terms of boycotting and buycotting seem to correspond with how the responsibility for animal welfare is acknowledged between the consumers, market actors, and the state. In countries such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, animal welfare is a mobilizing issue and seems to have become a part of normal consumer practice in conjunction with animal rights mobilization and the emergence of animal welfare labeling schemes. In Scandinavia, where animal welfare concerns associated with purchases appear to be relatively new, consumers expect the state to take a larger responsibility. The extent to which consumers express their animal friendliness through consumer practices is therefore highly variable, dependent on what the market offers them, and the interest among farmers, industry, food retailers, nongovernmental organizations, and state legislation at varying national levels. The case of animal welfare illustrates how consumer protest is affected by institutional contexts. Although it can be said that animal welfare and consumer mobilization have benefited from each other, there are ethical and political controversies as well. The animal rights movement argues that the focus on animal welfare in the form of marketbased initiatives not only fails to challenge animal suffering, but may actually prolong it by legitimizing the property rights over animals. Animal rights advocates, such as Tom Regan, argue that the animal welfare position (advocating for the betterment of the conditions of animals, but without abolishing animal use) is inconsistent in logic and ethically unacceptable. Consumers mobilizing for animal welfare challenge fundamental religious practices, such as ritual slaughter. There is a growing tension between animal welfare advocates on the one hand, arguing

that forms of ritual slaughter are inconsistent with humane killing methods, and religious leaders, particularly among Jewish and Muslim communities, on the other, who hold that ritual slaughter is crucial for religious and cultural identity. There are political controversies as well, particularly related to the division of responsibility between the state, producers, and the consumer. When governments rely on consumers’ willingness to pay for the more animal-friendly product as a means to improve animal welfare standards, consumers may be expected to take on new responsibilities without being equipped to do so. This places responsibility for achieving animal welfare on the shoulder of the individual rather than on the state, questioning to what extent demands for reform can be channeled through consumer practices. Arne Dulsrud See also Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest: Environment; Consumer Regulation; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Food Consumption; Political and Ethical Consumption; Rituals

Further Readings Fischler, Claude. L’homnivore: le goût, la cuisine et la corps. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Ingold, Tim. “From Trust to Domination: An Alternative History of Human-Animal Relations.” In Animals and Human Society: Challenging Perspectives, edited by Aubrey Manning and James Serpell, 1–22. London: Routledge, 1994. Kjærnes, Unni, Bettina Bock, Emma Roe, and Joek Roex. Consumption, Distribution and Production of Farm Animal Welfare: Opinions and Practices within the Supply Chain. Welfare Quality Reports No. 7. Cardiff, UK: Cardiff University, 2008. Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Warde, Alan. “Consumption and Theories of Practice.” Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 2 (2005): 131–153.

Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism

CONSUMER PROTEST: ANTICAPITALISM People often deploy their consumer choices to make their voices heard for a number of global political, humanitarian, or ecological issues. Against traditional critical views of consumption as an alternative to political rebellion, the sphere of consumption can constitute itself as a space for forms of political action. For example, as early as the late-eighteenth century, English women used their consumer power to support abolitionism, notes Kate Davies. Later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the National Consumer Leagues appeared in the United States and were mostly concerned with using manifestations and boycotts on the part of consumers to exert indirect pressure on specific enterprises denounced as both producers and employers. Founded by Florence Kelley and inspired by the Progressive movement, social justice was their utmost purpose, that is, they published “white lists” of manufacturers who treated their workers fairly. They anticipated the sequence of mobilizations against the rising cost of living that sprang up around World War I in many Western countries often led by housewives organizations. The French Ligue Sociale d’Acheteurs, for example, was influenced by its American counterpart and was likewise created for the ethical education of consumers, with the aim of bringing about changes in working conditions by developing a sense of responsibility in buyers for the treatment of workers, portraying consumers as citizens who had the “right to intervene in capitalism” (Chessel 2006). Broadly speaking, those movements were successful in inspiring changes in legislation regarding work or price control, and they effectively offered women a possibility to speak out and act in the public sphere; in their capacity as consumers, women claimed the responsibility and right to intervene in masculine territories such as work, trade unionism, and local and national politics. Early examples of consumer protest were consolidated in the postwar period with the adoption by various international bodies of consumer rights. Such a blend of consumerism is largely internal to existing market relations and concerned with valuefor-money and information transparency. However, still today this is clearly not the only way for consumers to associate. Especially after the World

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Trade Organization (WTO) 1999 protests in Seattle, the political investment of the consumer has become more explicitly geared against capitalism as we know it. Global capitalism has tended to raise local hackles, provoking resistance in many different forms, including fundamentalist ones. As globalization proceeds, it is especially large multinationals that have become the targets of growing critical attention, within environmentalist organizations and the alter-global movement. Economic globalization has highlighted a number of external diseconomies that derive from market expansion as currently managed (such as pollution, the inequality between consumers, the widening gap between North and South, food scares, etc.). In introducing innovations that alter the routines of consumption and expand the geographical range of social group interaction, globalization creates a space to bring into question the naturalized boundaries of the market, giving way to a number of grassroots movements that have organized not only boycotts of particular products, but also powerful symbolic protests. The spread of McDonald’s on the world scale, for example, has stimulated numerous hotbeds of resistance that have often taken on global dimensions but press for local control of resources. In particular, since 1985, the London-based group of the international environmental movement Greenpeace has promoted an anti-McDonald’s campaign, a boycott day that is held every autumn in a growing number of countries. The growing success of this initiative is also due to the massive public resonance of the libel case that McDonald’s brought against two Greenpeace activists for their distribution of protest leaflets. The leaflet maintained that the American giant exploited children with its advertising and its employees with low pay, promoted unhealthy eating, damaged the environment through encouraging the deforestation of Amazonian lands to produce low-cost forage, and treated animals in inhumane fashion. The so-called McLibel case, still the longest running case in English legal history (from 1994 to 1997) was a public relations disaster for McDonald’s, which, despite its skilful lawyers, was unable to win on all items (Vidal 1997). Internationally, protests against McDonald’s have generally been nonviolent but none the less emblematic: for example, in France, McDonald’s were filled

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with apples, occupied by farmers with chickens, ducks, and geese, covered with dung, and so on. Some of these actions were guided by the farmer and tradeunionist Joseph Bové, who reached international fame destroying a barrel of his precious Roquefort cheese in front of a McDonald’s during the antiglobalization protest in Seattle 1999. Bové’s actions can be seen as part of the French tradition that has given a patriotic cast to the development of agricultural policy and ties gastronomy to the safeguarding of the national territory. Yet it transcends the particular to promote local and sustainable agriculture at the international level. In the logic of Bové’s protest, production and consumption are not separated: both are political questions since the counterpart to exploited workers are said to be the consumers, for whom it is ever harder to find genuine products. Traditional farming and the defense of local specificity is often implicated in anticapitalist protest movements that address consumers and marshal their power in defense of biodiversity and territory. This is the case of Navdanya (“nine crops”), a movement founded in India in 1987 by economist and social ecologist Vandana Shiva. In Europe, Italy has given birth to Slow Food, an association specifically dedicated to the safeguarding of typical local produce. As such, Slow Food acts as a cultural intermediary that both campaigns for local, small-scale, sustainable, and quality-driven agriculture as against heavily industrialized capital-driven agriculture, and as an economic intermediary effectively promoting certain commodities as high value. Similar initiatives, as well as the increasing diffusion of fair trade or green products, are clearly interfacing with the market logic: they appear to negotiate with capitalism from within, trying to include in the picture a host of diverse issues, such as pleasure, sustainability, and frugality. The purchase of alternative products, such as ethical finance, organic food, artisanal local products, or fair trade goods, has been branded as “positive political consumerism” (Micheletti et al. 2004) or “buycotting” (Friedman 1999), as opposed to the boycotting of global brands and the flourishing of symbolic initiatives against multinational corporations and the ethical and ecological effects of their economic practices, themselves branded as respectively “negative” and “discursive” political consumerism. The latter represent more blatant forms of anticapitalist protest. Among them are counter-publicity

and a number of subadvertising organizations, such as Adbusters. Based in Canada, Adbusters publishes an anticonsumerist magazine and has created ironic and desecrating campaigns against McDonald’s, Calvin Klein, Benetton, and other global brands. The target of similar symbolic campaigns may be the product itself (coming clean on its process of production or stressing its various externalities from environmental effects to costs in terms of human or animal rights), the advertising imaginary that surrounds it or, more widely, consumer culture as a way of life. Overall, according to Jo Littler, they promote an imagery of brand subversion that is the counterpart of the pervasiveness of branding and that deploys irony, pastiche, and the carnivalesque to contest the lifestyles associated with global brands that often encode sexism, racism, homophobia, disrespect for environment, and so on. Adbusters also launched a global anticonsumerist initiative, such as the Buying Nothing Day (BND). This is a day of boycotts, events, and abstention from purchase, which is now celebrated in over 50 countries around the world on the day after Thanksgiving Day in the United States and Canada and the last Saturday of November in Europe. BND is important on at least two accounts: first, the form of protest. Relying on Internet connections as well networking as host of local environmental, consumer, and development associations, BND exemplifies a blend of technology, globalization, and localization, which has been considered an important feature of new social movements and which characterizes anticonsumerist, anticapitalist protest. Besides, its protest techniques are located in symbolic subversion: the basic idea is to play with culture and try to get the message across through surrealistic actions that unveil the commercially led nature of global cultural imaginary production. The second reason BND is important is the content of protest. The themes articulated in the protest illustrate current anticonsumerist and anticapitalist narratives. BND campaigners ask each individual to be “a consumer-hero” rather than a “consumer-zero” by “standing up against the pressure to buy.” This is presented as a “simple idea”: “challenging” consumer culture by “switch(ing) off from shopping for one day” with the hope that this will provide a “lasting experience” and a moment for redressing our lifestyles considering that consumer spending is, contrary to standard capitalist wisdom, the root of

Consumer Protest: Environment

global disaster. Concerns over public issues, such as environmental consequences, fairness, and the distribution of wealth, as well as over more personal issues—such as how to spend one’s own leisure time to increase happiness and sociability—are at the core of similar anticonsumerist initiatives, which attribute to the consumer an uttermost political function and power. Roberta Sassatelli See also Alternative Consumption; Consumer Protest: Environment; Consumer Rights and the Law; Fair Trade; Globalization; McDonaldization; Political and Ethical Consumption; Social Movements

Further Readings Chessel, M.-E. “Women and the Ethics of Consumption in France at the Turn of the Century.” In The Making of the Consumer, edited by Frank Trentmann, 81–98. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Davies, Kate. “A Moral Purchase: Femininity, Commerce, Abolition, 1788–1792.” In Women and the Public Sphere: Writing and Representation, 1660–1800, edited by Elizabeth Eger and Charlotte Grant, 133–162. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Friedman, Monroe. Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change through the Marketplace and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1999. Glickman, Lawrence B. “Born to Shop? Consumer History and American History.” In Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, edited by Lawrence B. Glickman, 1–16. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Littler, Jo. “Beyond the Boycott: Anti-consumerism, Cultural Change and the Limits of Reflexivity.” Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (2005): 227–252. Micheletti, Michele, Andres Follesdal, and Dietlind Stolle, eds. Politics, Products and Markets: Exploring Political Consumerism Past and Present. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory, Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Sassatelli, Roberta, and Federica Davolio. “Consumption, Pleasure and Politics: Slow-Food and the PoliticoAesthetic Problematization of Food.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 2 (2010): 1–31. Vidal, John. McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial. New York: New York Press, 1997.

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Website Adbusters. www.adbusters.org.

CONSUMER PROTEST: ENVIRONMENT Consumers are increasingly aware of what choices are available to them and the impact that their choices can have, both environmentally and socially, and are ever more cognizant of the “ethical” dimension in their consumer purchasing habits. As such, awareness-raising campaigns—through various forms of either direct or indirect actions—are seen to have had a measurable impact on consumer behavior. This is particularly the case in relation to raising awareness about the environmental impact of both the production and consumption of goods, which has often involved diverse and imaginative forms of consumer protest and wider sorts of activism. This activism is often directed in two principal ways: first, it is directed at raising awareness among individual consumers, in the hope that they may be persuaded to change the ways in which they shop, either permanently or for a designated period of time, or in relation to a particular product or company; and second, it is directed at changing the practices of businesses and multinationals by raising awareness about the environmental impact of the production and trade of goods and services and subsequently increasing the pressure for far greater corporate social responsibility. The successes and failures of consumer activism and various forms of consumer protest in achieving these ends has been the subject of recent debate and analysis (Glickman 2009; Hilton 2009; Kendall, Gill, and Cheney 2007). To get a better sense of what’s involved, it is useful to briefly survey some of the main forms of consumer protest that have been informed by concerns for the environment. Perhaps the most renowned form of consumer protest is the phenomenon of the boycott. Monroe Friedman has defined a boycott as attempts “by one or more parties to achieve certain objectives by urging individual consumers to refrain from making selected purchases in the marketplace” (1995, 198–199). And, as Matthew Hilton has shown in his 2009 landmark work, consumers have protested against the abuses of the market by boycotting

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certain products and services and, in so doing, have challenged the very meaning of consumerism by raising awareness of how it increasingly shapes our social, cultural, and political life, as well as the more obvious area of our economic well-being. In essence, then, a boycott involves the act—or rather nonact—of refraining from purchasing certain goods and services from a particular organization or sector of the marketplace, typically as an expression of disaffection for the practices of those involved in their production or provision. Any given boycott can last for an indefinite length of time, although they tend to be unitary in the sense that they concern a single issue or problem, and the boycott will cease once this has been addressed by those targeted. That said, consumer boycotts are becoming increasingly more organized—especially with the advent of enhanced communications technology—and are beginning to focus on longer-term changes in the buying patterns of consumers to have a greater impact and thus more change of success in meeting the global challenge of climate change and protecting the environment. Useful examples of consumer protests via boycotts today can be found at the Ethical Consumer website on the Current Consumer Boycotts page. A further development in consumer protests is the more recent phenomenon of the “buycott,” whereby individual consumers are encouraged not to buy anything at all, rather than simply to cease from buying a particular good or a specific brand. Buy Nothing Day, for example, was first organized in 1992 and has subsequently been promoted as an international day of protest against global consumerism and typically falls each year in late November. This approach to consumer protest has been criticized, however, as by being focused on a single day of abstinence, it can only ever have a very limited impact and does little to dissuade consumers from heading to stores the following day. A final contribution to consumer protest in this area is the contribution that can be made by so-called positive buying, which is essentially individual consumers making decisions at the point of purchase that reflect a commitment to ethical and environmental goals. This is seen as a more positive form of consumer protest precisely because, rather than boycotting or buycotting a product or company of which one disapproves, it is a way of supporting more progressive companies that reflect shared

values and norms in terms of the identified aims of the protesters and activists. This is becoming far from straightforward, however. As mentioned earlier, although boycotts, buycotts, and so-called positive buying are targeted at changing individual consuming habits, they are also necessarily engaged in seeking to alter the behavior of businesses and multinational companies, either via a negative or positive association. It is in this push for greater corporate social responsibility—broadly understood as businesses proactively taking responsibility for the impact of their own practices on the environment and a variety of human stakeholders (e.g., consumers, employees), while at the same time both encouraging community growth and protecting the public sphere from narrowly private interests— that some companies have started to market brands that, although still a part of their operations, do not explicitly display reference to the parent company on labels or packaging. Some recent examples of this include Innocent Smoothies (Coca-Cola), Green & Blacks chocolates (Cadbury Schweppes), Pret a Manger cafés (McDonald’s), and The Body Shop products (L’Oreal). Activist organizations such as Ethical Consumer provide freely available information on which multinational companies parent own which particular brands and products, in the hope of helping to guide individual consumers through an increasingly complex and fluid marketplace. Indeed, the process of so-called greenwashing has become so widespread in recent times that social analysts and commentators are just beginning to move away from the terms green consumption or ethical consumption in favor of a broader form of responsible consumption. Mark Davis See also Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare; Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest: Water; Consuming the Environment; Eco-Labeling; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Political and Ethical Consumption; Social Movements

Further Readings Friedman, Monroe. “On Promoting a Sustainable Future through Consumer Activism.” Journal of Social Issues 51, no. 4 (1995): 197–215. Glickman, Lawrence B. Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Consumer Protest: Water Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Kendall, Brenden E., Rebecca Gill, and George Cheney. “Consumer Activism and Corporate Social Responsibility: How Strong a Connection?” In The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility, edited by Steven K. May, George Cheney, and Juliet Roper, 241–265. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Website Ethical Consumer. www.ethicalconsumer.org.

CONSUMER PROTEST: WATER Humans consume water in many ways. In addition to meeting essential daily needs, such as drinking, cleansing, cooking, or producing food, water is also consumed in leisure activities, such as fishing and other water-related sports, or through the enjoyment of urban waterscapes. In this general sense, human beings have always consumed water. More narrowly, the vending and consumption of drinkable water has also been long practiced by humans, as suggested by historical records of private water vending in societies as dissimilar as the Aztecs and the Arabs. However, in the context of this entry, we are only concerned with the emergence of the water consumer as a social category since the expansion of domestic urban water services from the lateeighteenth century onward. The emergence of a consumer culture in relation to basic urban services, such as water supply and sewerage, contributed to the rising awareness among the population about the material implications of the access to these services (e.g., for living standards), as well as about the social and political considerations associated with their organization and control. Thus, networked water consumption in urban centers opened new spaces for citizen participation, often in the form of social protest, as water consumers became increasingly aware of the potential political importance of their actions. It is worth highlighting that water consumption has not received much attention within the field of consumption research until recently, which may be explained perhaps by the fact that although water consumption is a permanent and universal human necessity, like breathing, it tends to be largely

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inconspicuous. In this connection, it is important to remark that the concept of “consumer” in relation to domestic water use has to be qualified, perhaps with the exception of bottled water consumption. This is relevant because one of the key characteristics associated with modern consumers, the capacity to make informed consumption choices between alternative products, has rarely been available to water users. This has been the case mainly for two reasons: first, humans cannot avoid consuming water; at best they can control the volumes and the quality of the water they consume. Second, the provision of water services has historically taken the form of a monopoly, whether publicly or privately owned and managed, which means that choice of provider has not been an option available to consumers. In fact, modern domestic water users have always been, for the most part, captive consumers, which has often prompted bitter social confrontations.

Early Development The emergence and expansion of the water consumer as a social identity is part and parcel of the development of capitalist forms of production and circulation of public services as commodities, including water supply and later also water-based sanitation services. England, especially, and also France were the pioneering examples of this development. However, the commodification of domestic water services and the creation of a consumer base for water-based commodities have been punctuated by recurrent social and political confrontations. Historically, these confrontations have flared up around a number of critical issues, including disputes over the ownership of water sources and infrastructures and over the funding for developing water services, resistance to compulsory household connections, and struggles over issues of service access, affordability, and quality. More important, political confrontations around the status of essential water services (if it is legitimate to treat these services as commodities, or they should be considered a social or public good or a citizenship right) have been a central feature of their development. With hindsight, the process of commodification of domestic water services has never been fully accomplished, has faced significant setbacks not least because of recurrent social protest and resistance, and its future development is rather uncertain.

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The best known modern examples of the commodification of domestic water services date from eighteenth-century London, where a number of small private undertakings to deliver fresh water to wealthy neighborhoods were set. By the mid-nineteenth century, the private delivery of water supply was well established in British cities and was under way in France, the United States, and other industrial countries. However, the expansion of commodified water services often faced the lack of interest of the potential consumers when not their open opposition. Thus, in the name of public health (but also for financial reasons), governments made the connection to networked domestic water services compulsory, which prompted much resistance among citizens who had alternative means of water supply, such as wells or other sources. Also, users who resisted (or were unable to afford) paying for the water delivered were prosecuted under new laws that criminalized the use of water without a contract with the private provider: in the process of creating water consumers, the system also created water thieves, according to Colin Ward. Water theft has been one of the expressions of popular resistance to the commodification of essential water services ever since. As a pattern, this early development of commodified domestic water services was characterized by the lack of regulation of the private providers, which were granted monopoly control over their service areas. Also, the tariffs were usually high while the quality of the services was irregular and often inadequate (i.e., low pressure and flow, intermittence and shortages, water quality problems, high levels of leakage), a situation that worsened as the nineteenth century progressed. This was compounded by the unforeseen outcomes of the introduction of waterbased sanitation since the early nineteenth century, which accelerated the pollution of water sources and also prompted recurring social unrest. Moreover, the most significant problem was that even in the latenineteenth century, only a relatively small minority was connected to the water services, and, strictly speaking, only a fraction of them could be formally considered water consumers, noted Frank Trentmann and Vanessa Taylor. This situation was intertwined with the increasing social inequalities and spatial segregation characterizing the development of urban areas in the nineteenth century, including the spread of inequality and injustice in the access to water services. As a result, by the turn of the century, most

domestic water and sanitation services in England, France, the United States, and other leading capitalist countries had been subject to strict regulation and public control or directly placed in public hands. The eventual municipalization, and later nationalization, of essential water services did not substantially change the agonistic aspects associated with water consumption. First, the full universalization of access in developed countries was only achieved after World War II, but even then, the essential attribute of captive clients characterizing water consumers remained unchanged. During the twentieth century, most water services continued to be delivered by monopoly providers, and for the most part, these remained unaccountable to citizens and consumers. Moreover, with rare and short-lived exceptions, full universal coverage for water services was not achieved outside developed countries until today. Despite the significant progress made since the late-nineteenth century, the main causes of water-related social conflict continue to be essentially the same.

The Pattern of Contemporary Water Protests There is a wealth of literature documenting the contemporary occurrence of water protests. In developing countries, a major reason fueling water protests continues to be the struggle by would-be water users to gain access to publicly provided water services, which encompasses a large part of the world population: around 17 percent lack access to a safe water supply, and 40 percent have no adequate sanitation. For the large proportion of the unserved population, water is often provided by mostly unregulated water vendors or directly taken from uncontrolled, frequently unsafe water sources. These are major causes of water conflict worldwide. However, water protests are also often carried out by users who have access to networked water services but are affected by a range of problems, including poor quality (intermittence, interruptions, unsafe water, etc.), unfair pricing and unaffordable tariffs, lack of accountability and power abuses by the providers, and so on. The protests take different forms, from peaceful demands to the authorities and public demonstrations, through civil disobedience (e.g., nonpayment of water bills), to open violence including water theft, the destruction of property, and the loss of human life. Owing, among other issues, to their historical role in relation

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to domestic water use, women are key actors in these different forms of water protest. Since the 1980s, governments in both developed and developing countries have introduced radical reforms in water and sanitation services oriented at transferring the responsibility for management, and often also the ownership, of these services to private companies. Although water privatization has often been promoted as a way to empower consumers, the introduction of privatization does not change the essential characteristic of water users as captive clients. Privatization has become a major source of water protest in all continents, and in countries as dissimilar as the United States and Bolivia. The main reasons behind the protests range from the open opposition to privatization of public water services to complaints about the lack of compliance with contractual arrangements, poor or lack of regulatory control, or problems with the quality, affordability, and accountability of privately provided services. A major bone of contention, as in the nineteenth century, concerns the status of the services: should water services be fully commodified or should they be delivered as a social or public good, a citizenship right, disengaged from the market? Given that the world is facing a worsening water crisis with direct consequences for the provision of essential water services, water protests are likely to play a major role in the twenty-first century. A crucial task for social scientists will be to better understand the politics of water consumption, and particularly the interweaving between the formation of consumer identities and the development of substantive citizenship in relation to the governance and management of water and water-related services. José Esteban Castro See also Citizenship; Commodification; Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest: Environment; Consumer Rights and the Law; Infrastructures and Utilities; Public Goods

Further Readings Barraqué, Bernard, ed. Urban Water Conflicts: An Analysis on the Origins and Nature of Water-Related Unrest and Conflicts in the Urban Setting. Paris: International Hydrological Programme of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 2006.

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Castro, José Esteban. Water, Power, and Citizenship: Social Struggle in the Basin of Mexico. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Ghosh, Nandita, ed. “Women and the Politics of Water: An Introduction.” Special issue, International Feminist Journal of Politics 9, no. 4 (2007): 443–454. Goubert, Jean Pierre. The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1986. Swyngedouw, Erik. “Dispossessing H2O: The Contested Terrain of Water Privatization.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 16, no. 1 (2005): 81–98. Trentmann, Frank, and Vanessa Taylor. “From Users to Consumers: Water Politics in Nineteenth-Century London.” In The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by Frank Trentmann, 53–73. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Ward, Colin. Reflected in Water: A Crisis of Social Responsibility. London: Cassell, 1997.

CONSUMER REGULATION Long-standing debates about the power of consumers, in relation to production, social distinctions, and global inequalities, are in many ways also debates about consumer regulation, about how people in their capacity as consumers are being formed, framed, influenced by, and influencing social institutions and processes. But, increasingly, regulation is used more narrowly, taken to represent mechanisms that intentionally steer people’s actions in certain directions. Such regulatory interventions are about disciplining and exercising power over people, making them more efficient and responsible as members of society. But they are also about welfare, protection, justice, and, closely linked to that, social order. The history of consumer regulation is a history where people’s loyalty and active support alternate with considerable creativity and resistance. The definition and understanding of consumer regulation depends not only on how we understand the concept of regulation but also on what is meant by “consumption” and “a consumer.” Theoretical and political approaches to regulation may have highly variable views on the interrelationships between regulatory agents and consumers. Regulation impacts on and represents an integrated part of consumer culture, the expectations, meanings, and habits of consumption. Some even

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claim that consumption only exists as regulation. In some sense, that is a useful starting point. Because what we do in everyday life is not to “consume.” We buy, drive, fill up, and maintain a car, and we shop for food, cook meals, eat meals, and dispose of food. Or we use collective transportation and eat out instead. Such activities are formed as and within social practices. Practices represent dependencies and power relations, as expressed in social, cultural, and economic distinctions, as well as in imbalances of power and knowledge in systems of provision. To regulate consumption means to influence concrete practices and the objects involved. Consumer regulation is closely associated with the construction of the consuming subject; an unwary yet rational figure to be protected. Yet to capture the specificities and power relations of consumer regulation, regulation and practices of consumption should be kept apart. John Searle makes a useful distinction between regulative and constitutive rules. Regulative rules regulate already existing action via different explicit rules, laws, and sanctions, whereas constitutive rules “create the very possibility of certain activities” (Searle 1995, 28). Constitutive rules are the “rules of the game,” sets of dispositions that develop through collective agreement and acceptance. People are typically not conscious of these rules, and they may also have false beliefs about them. This distinction between constitutive and regulative rules is a good opening for analyzing how practices regulate actions and, at the same time, that regulative rules are imposed on practices and become institutionalized. A discussion of consumer regulation is a discussion of the interrelationship between regulatory efforts and consumption practices: how regulative rules may be transformed into the constitutive rules of daily practices, how constitutive rules form taken-for-granted frames for regulatory intervention, and how resistance and creativity emerge against and in-between the rules.

Consumer Regulation in Social Science Regulation has not been subject to much attention in consumer research during the last decades. Until the 1980s, frequent references were made to policy making, first of all in the forms of state legislation and consumer education, often conceptualized in terms of specific consumer rights. Numerous studies addressed the use of legislation to protect consumers

in terms of welfare and safety. Others were concerned with consumers’ knowledge and competence, for example, with regard to nutrition and the understanding of product labels. There has been an American tradition of analyzing consumer regulation as a matter of legislative protection of consumers’ health and safety, although this concept does not have any particular meaning in European societies. In the mid-1980s, an abrupt drop in the interest in consumer regulation and consumer politics reflected neoliberal waves and skepticism toward state involvement. Attention was redirected toward commercial issues, on the one hand, and consumer culture, on the other. The academic interest in regulation continued, but not as part of the general consumer research agenda. Political economy, agro-food studies, and regulation studies in political science and institutional economics, for example, contributed to the understanding of shifting forms of market regulation during an era of liberalization and globalization. Focus was on the shift from state oriented “government” to multicentered “governance” and market-based regulation. A proliferation of studies of “consumer choice” within psychology and marketing research contributed to a dominant move toward individualistic and cognitive approaches to people’s more or less rational purchases. Visions of consumers were mostly schematic and undersocialized, consumers being either victimized, as in various critical theories, or individual “choosers” with sovereign powers, as in neoclassical economics. The new millennium has seen growing interest in regulation and politics in relation to consumption and consumers. This is evident in several disciplines and areas of research, such as social and economic history, studies of political and ethical consumerism (in philosophy, political science, sociology, etc.), and Michel Foucault–inspired discussions about selfregulation. There seems to be a move beyond an individual/system dichotomy, instead seeing regulation as part of the dynamics of social practices. A key question is what roles and capacities are assigned to consumers as social actors. But the debate is not at all clear, and the conceptualization of regulation and regulatory change is confusing. While some address modes or systems of provision and the junction between providers and consumers, others discuss consumer power more generally. The following text outlines some of the ongoing debates, without going very far in trying to bridge or reconcile them.

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Regulation in the Age of Neoliberalism Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a consensus emerged that so-called command-and-control economies should be avoided or at least supplemented. Privatization of ownership and production and globalization of trade developed parallel to the deregulation and re-regulation of social distribution systems, safety regulation, and a shifting emphasis toward the responsibilities of individuals. While the so-called rollback liberalism focused on privatization and deregulation, a new phase of rollout neoliberalization has emerged in which the state and other social agents aim at facilitating social change to take place via market-based processes. Regulatory changes from government to governance are captured in concepts such as deliberation, agencification, decentered regulation, (market) self-regulation, and stakeholderism. The changes do not imply that the role of the state has become insignificant or that regulatory interventions are generally reduced (perhaps more to the contrary), but they represent a break with welfare state market regulation and paternalistic care. Those to be regulated were increasingly seen as knowledgeable, responsible, and capable actors. Deregulation in association with globalization has been at the focus of attention. The conventional wisdom was that trade liberalization and agreements to promote free trade invariably undermined national health, safety, and environmental standards. This was, however, challenged by David Vogel, who claimed that liberal trade policies often produce precisely the opposite effect: that of strengthening regulatory standards, captured in the concept “trading up.” A strong global ideological movement has developed that stresses the role of markets not only in creating welfare, but also in solving problems with the side effects (externalities) of economic development. This is a form of soft market intervention demanded by a range of social actors, including those who are supposed to comply with them. Product labeling (e.g., energy labels, food standards) is part of new systems of rule making, closely linked to extensive efforts of standardization and auditing. Standardization deals with technical objects or systems, but increasingly also social and environmental matters. Through standardization and labeling, norms of good conduct are being made explicit, written, and codified. As such, these processes are therefore part of a gigantic rationalization project with large significance for

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consumer regulation and culture. They increase our freedoms as well as our dependencies. In between freedom and dependency, we often find intense focus on accountability and credibility.

Self-Governance and Consumer Choice Growing attention is directed toward the regulation of individuals qua consumers. State-centered policies emphasizing legislation, budgets, and educational campaigns usually saw consumption as an effect and consumers primarily in terms of their adoption of regulation. In contemporary regulation, people, as consumers, are more often seen as social actors, with expectations of responsibility taking, freedom of action, and active participation. The reframing of social and political issues as consumer choice and lifestyle politics has affected traditional issues, like alcohol and nutrition, as well as new issues of ethical or political consumerism, such as marine resources, child labor, and farm animal welfare. Moreover, deregulating markets formerly regulated by law and other state measures, such as the markets for financial services, energy, housing, and telecommunications, imply significant changes in consumer regulation. This shift in the role of consumers in regulation raises new and fundamental questions about power, interests, and legitimacy. The focus on lifestyle choices as a private matter and market freedom and consumer choice as dominant values represents an ideology of moral management of the self. This is a break with what Foucault characterized as the pastoral authority of the traditional welfare state. The turn toward indirect regulation, emphasizing the consumer-market relationship, consumer freedom, and responsibility, can be regarded as a disguise for the dissemination of a neoliberal ideology of market power. The liberal view is that diversity and choice mean less dependency on any one producer and thus represent consumer freedom and empowerment. But this empowerment has also been problematized and criticized. For example, Frank Trentmann contends that the contemporary rise of consumerist politics in part reflects imploding politicizations of consumption and a corresponding consumerization of politics. Putting politics into consumption can serve to focus on the individual at the expense of the collective and on immediate delivery at the expense of the broader parameters of provisioning.

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But this is not only about market actions. With reference to Foucault, Nikolas Rose suggests that new and very broad forms of regulation and authority have developed, characterized as government (a different use of the concept than in market regulation studies), including “all endeavors to shape, guide, direct the conduct of others, and the ways in which one might be urged and educated to bridle one’s own passions, to control one’s own instincts, to govern oneself” (1999, 3). The notion of governmentality implies a certain relationship of government to other forms of power, in particular to sovereignty and discipline. Sovereignty is exercised through the juridical and executive arms of the state over subjects. Discipline represents power over and through the individual, obtained through institutions such as schools, hospitals, and manufacturing enterprises. Power as government, on the other hand, sees living individuals as resources to be fostered, to be used, and to be optimized. Government is defined as a distinctively cognitive process, a government of the mind, which is meant to support rather than counteract individual freedom. People are, via various forms of information, to be morally convinced that they themselves need to take on responsibilities—for example, obesity as well as climate change. Government (in this sense) gives the state a less hegemonic role. The challenge of liberal political rationalities is committed to the twin projects of respecting the autonomy of certain “private” zones and shaping their conduct in ways conducive to collective and individual well-being. This takes place through procedures for shaping and nurturing those domains that were to provide its counterweight and limit—“governance at a distance” (similar to regulation studies). Consumer actions are seen as voluntary and private, but, at the same time, they are to be shaped to become so-called responsible. What is implied by being free and responsible is subject to considerable attention and controversy. The Foucault-inspired nondifferentiated understanding of power, from which there is no escape, has been criticized. When, in Rose’s words, “the power is in our freedom,” what is the space for resistance? How should we, for example, understand obesity? Is it a regulatory failure? Or is it a matter of limited individual power to change the situation? Or is it an expression of resistance? Even so, it is important to be aware of forms of power that are not overt and explicit; in fact, the most efficient ones are those that are not recognized.

This is pointing to important dynamics between power and freedom. We need to question broadly who is regulating whom and by which means in order for people as consumers to make the right socalled choices. For this to be a matter of freedom, that is, to represent some autonomy, we must also discuss how that freedom is exercised. While selfregulation may represent power over the self, that does not necessarily imply power over others. The relative impacts of these two aspects of individualized responsibilities, freedom from and freedom to, need to be explored critically and empirically. Rather than dismissing or assuming consumer agency, we need to problematize it, to ask questions about the potentials for people as consumers to be creative and to fight back.

Uncertainty, Distrust, and Resistance Individualized responsibilities may thus be taken to represent liberation from the repressive power of former times. However, many, like Ulrich Beck, claim that shifts in responsibilities associated with individualization, deregulation, and globalization may lead to uncertainty and powerlessness. People are unprepared for or possess insufficient powers to take on responsibilities and, as part of that, risk. Food is a good example, where labor within the household is taken over by large, complicated, sometimes global corporations. Imbalances of power and information may be enormous and people’s direct control has become substantially reduced. Health, safety, and environmental problems have been reframed as risks, often as represented by unintended side effects of the production of material welfare. There has been a shift of attention from consumer regulation to risk regulation, from consumer protection to individual uncertainty and distrust. A new politics of consumption has also emerged, including political and ethical consumerism, as well as collective actions and participation in alternative provisioning. As much as signifying individualized and privatized uncertainties, distrust and activism may represent politicization and participation and thus agency. Changes have given rise to the creation of new sites of resistance and the spread of globalization also involves the expansion of consumers’ information networks, which can lead to the forging of new political alliances and agendas. Some have argued that this is typically part of neoliberal forms of regulation, and people are becoming coproducers

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of regulation. Governmentality, a moral management of the self, is not only represented by commercially framed choices, but even includes alternative movements and communitarian initiatives.

and paternalist regulation of food in Norway, with much more passive consumers, becomes understandable in view of its specific history and current political context.

Contextualizing Consumer Regulation

Future Directions in Research

Consumer choice as regulation requires that the right kinds of options are available in the shop and there must be relevant information about them. This is not a neutral question about the number of extensively labeled items on the shelves. It represents a highly structured process with strong commercial and political interests involved. Above all, this is a matter of power and its expression in institutional arrangements. In that way, self-regulation by commercialized choices coincides with and is dependent on other regulatory processes. Individualized consumer choice cannot be detached from its socioeconomic basis on the consumer side or the effects that consumption has on others. Regulation by choice presumes sufficient purchasing power and abundant supplies. This raises questions of the distribution of material welfare and social justice. Responsible market choices are by their very nature exclusive, and consumer activism has been criticized for its middle-class character. On a larger scale, whether demand for cheaper products in competitive, global markets means that more or less poverty is an issue without simple answers; whether more “ethical” and “sustainable” purchases for sneakers and coffee can be a leverage to social development; or whether it is instead mainly a way to reduce competition, to the benefit of retailers and middlemen, are all questioned. The nation-state may no longer be the sole or main source of regulation of consumption, but that does not mean that regulatory change is uniform or detached from its specific context. Julie Guthman emphasizes the importance of observing disjunctures between neoliberal rhetoric and “actually existing neo-liberalisms.” Changes are highly variable across countries/regions and objects of consumption. Provisioning structures, consumer cultures, and regulatory traditions are not static, and new solutions are framed by and emerge from old ones. The neoliberal framing of new regulation of food in California can be understood on the basis of its social, political, and economic development. Its extensive consumer activism fits into the same picture. Likewise, the state-oriented, protectionist,

Consumer regulation is important as part of a changing consumer culture. There are many tensions and even contradictions in the emphasis on self-responsibility and the power of consumer choice. People face huge imbalances of power, combined with increasing dependencies. The power of corporate and state actors may for consumers represent discipline, perhaps abuses of power (including exploitation of consumer loyalty). But regulatory intervention can also provide predictability, protection, and systems to deal with malfeasance, efficiency, and dynamics that open for consumer agency. On the other hand, the continued importance of legislative and other consumer protection measures should not be overlooked. Nor should the significance of collective action. Many contributions on consumer regulation are very general, considering neither the specificities of regulation and consumption practices nor the institutional field in which regulatory initiatives emerge. This represents theoretical as well as methodological challenges. More needs to be done in terms of conceptualizing different forms of consumer regulation and their interlinkages with consumption practices and people as consumers. Power and resistance are key issues. Studies are called for of contemporary consumer regulation as distinct mechanisms and as part of consumer culture. This is all the more urgent in view of the rapid changes that are taking place in response to climate change and the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Unni Kjærnes See also Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer Sovereignty; Governmentality; Individualization; Inequalities; Political Economy; Systems of Provision; Theories of Practice

Further Readings Beck, Ulrich, and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage, 2002. Boström, Magnus, and Mikael Klintman. Eco-Standards, Product Labelling and Green Consumerism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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Daunting, Martin, and Matthew Hilton. The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5–21. Guthman, Julie. “The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance.” Antipode 39, no. 3 (2007): 456–578. Hunt, Alan. Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kjærnes, Unni, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde. Trust in Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Levi-Faur, David, and Jacint Jordana. “The Rise of Regulatory Capitalism: The Global Diffusion of a New Order.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 598 (2005): 200–217. Micheletti, Michele, Andreas Follesdal, and Dietlind Stolle. Politics, Products, and Markets: Exploring Political Consumerism Past and Present. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004. Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin Press, 1995. Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappells, and Bas Van Vliet. Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004. Trentmann, Frank. The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Vogel, David. Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Zukin, Sharon. Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004.

CONSUMER REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Consumer revolution in eighteenth-century Britain refers to an explanatory device historians have used to elucidate shifts in production, retail practices, and attitudes toward consumption that produced a “consumer revolution” in Britain at that time.

Explanatory Device The consumer revolution is a phenomenon of historical interpretation that has some basis in reality, but most historians now agree that its significance has been highly exaggerated. The concept of the consumer revolution came about because of failed explanations for the older debate about why the Industrial Revolution came to Britain first; the idea of consumer demand became a key explanation for the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The seminal work that identified a revolution in consumption practices originating in the eighteenth century is The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982). The book includes eight chapters about commercialization and the economy, politics, and society by editors Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb on topics as diverse as shaving, childhood, leisure, and Wedgewood pottery. In the book, McKendrick calls for scholars to turn away from studying changes in production and focus instead on shifts in consumption, which were a necessary complement to the Industrial Revolution. McKendrick argues that it was England’s closely stratified society that led to the consumer revolution; people strove for, and could attain, vertical social mobility, which led to emulative spending (social mobility). Objects that were previously only available to the rich were now within reach of the middle class because of a rising real family income throughout the eighteenth century. This, McKendrick maintained, caused a shift in consumer patterns in the eighteenth century, which he has coined the consumer revolution.

Conceptual Outline of the Consumer Revolution Historians have elucidated four major themes in the historiography of the consumer revolution. (1) The eighteenth century was a period of product innovation where an increased quantity and variety of objects were made in specialist workshops. (2) Consumption moved from the aristocracy to the middling and laboring ranks of English society. (3) There was a change in the distribution of goods from less formal market stalls to permanent shops. (4) The idea of luxury was reconceived so that it no longer had negative connotations of excess and vice and instead represented the increasing gentility of the English populace and fortunes of the British nation.

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Historians now acknowledge that the so-called revolution in consumption had a very long gestation period, which began in the seventeenth century. Sumptuary legislation was done away with in 1604, and by the 1690s, contemporaries began to remark on the changing consumption patterns of the middling rank, evidenced by the rejection of woolen fabrics for more varied clothing choices, including cottons and calicos, that offered more versatility in terms of color. Cultural historian Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace used concepts of emulation and conspicuous consumption to explain the rising demand for linen, china, books, clocks, and furniture outside the ranks of the aristocracy in the 1720s. These items were available to a wider range of people because of changes in the method of production. From the late-sixteenth century through the eighteenth century, tens of thousands of rural workshops made fashionable objects for the consuming public. At this time also, there was an increasing international trade in luxury goods. Historians also note changes in retail practices that encouraged heightened consumption, especially for the aristocratic and middle classes. There was a proliferation of shops that increasingly replaced older forms of spending, such as outdoor markets, fairs, and peddlers (though the laboring classes continued to consume in these venues). Shops engaged in techniques of display that increased the desirability of goods and allowed people to project their hopes and dreams onto objects in a way that they did not when things were acquired primarily for their use value. An increasingly active provincial press brought advertisements that delineated fashion trends to the far-flung areas of England. McKendrick argues that these changing commercial techniques helped to shift buying patterns away from purchases of necessity that might be bought once in a lifetime toward purchases of fashion, which were replaced with changing trends. Also, the verb “to shop” was coined in the eighteenth century, demonstrating the importance of this new leisure activity. Those from the lower orders reallocated family resources so that they could buy, barter, and exchange goods in the vast network of markets, peddlers, and fairs that made secondhand goods available throughout England. Although it is based primarily on conjecture, historians charting the consumer revolution note a new attitude toward consumption that emerged in the middling and working ranks. It is argued that the lower ranks no longer wanted primitively made

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objects and clothing and sought out foodstuffs from beyond local markets. By the eighteenth century, servants rejected livery, ancient uniforms of service, preferring to wear clothing that was handed down from master to servant or bought or traded as secondhand items. Objects such as cloth stockings, caps, buttons, and cutlery were now made professionally in local workshops, and sugar, tobacco, coffee, and tea were imported from overseas. Historians argue that these new consumption practices mark a transition in the values of early modern people. They suggest that an increase in conspicuous consumption at and below the middling rank acted as a challenge to the hierarchical system, which had once endorsed sumptuary laws. People increasingly sought to convey their individuality through the objects that they purchased, to create a sense of group solidarity via their consumption patterns, and to challenge the hierarchical status quo. Historians of luxury such as Maxine Berg, Christopher J. Berry, and John Sekora argue that in order for the consumer revolution to take hold, a change in attitude toward luxury had to prevail. What it meant for the population to be buying goods that had previously been thought of as opulent or luxury items was a source of heated debate in the eighteenth century. Berg, a leading scholar of luxury, suggests that before the eighteenth century, the term luxury took on negative connotations: it was associated with the sin of excess and the debauchery of the very rich. Discussions of lavishness in this earlier period often reflected fears about the staying power of social hierarchies. By the eighteenth century, sumptuous objects such as silk, porcelain, mahogany, sugar, tea, and chocolate, which were once considered luxuries of the rich, began to be available to the plebian classes. Berg argues that luxury goods helped the upper ranks to create new forms of civility, which were conveyed by eating and socializing in new ways. As a result of the increased availability of opulent goods and the new trend toward civility, moralists, economists, and novelists debated whether luxury goods were signs of extravagance and self-indulgence that would corrupt the populace, or if they were an improving force, which acted as an instrument and indication of progress in Britain. Social commentator Bernard Mandeville’s book, The Fable of the Bees (1714), represented a turning point in debates about luxury. Mandeville agreed with earlier interpretations that saw the negative aspects of luxury as

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encouraging vanity and envy, but more important, he argued that the pursuit of luxury by the wealthy was beneficial because it provided work for the poor. Later in the century, economist Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) put forward the argument that extravagant consumption was not a question of morality; rather increased consumption would benefit all classes by providing jobs for workers, and a reason for people to save so that they might be able to afford extra comforts. It was not until the later 1820s, however, that Mandeville’s and Smith’s ideas were taken up by a larger intellectual community. British political economists such as Archibald Alison, J. R. McCulloch, and Nassau Senior suggested that the intensifying global exchange of goods, better availability of luxuries to all classes, increases in wages, and the decrease in family size were all signs of the evolution and progress of the British people that would benefit the nation as a whole.

New Trends in Historiography As is the case with most historical works that proclaim a decided break from previous trends, McKendrick’s thesis that a consumer society was born in the eighteenth century was soon questioned and qualified by various historians. Jean-Christophe Agnew, for example, suggests that while the introduction of The Birth of a Consumer Society encourages scholars to look beyond the production side of the revolution, the essays contained within the volume are still focused on the supply side— looking at producers, stylists, and critics rather than at patterns of consumption or the lives of ordinary consumers. One essay in the volume, for example, focuses on Josiah Wedgwood as a promotional wizard who manipulated consumer desires to create new demand for his ceramics. Here we get the story of Wedgwood, the entrepreneur, who pulled the strings of demand, not his consumers who bought the products. Other historians hit the heart of McKendrick’s thesis by studying the wage increases of the eighteenth century. They found that for the first half of the century, real wages increased for both the working and middle class, but this trend was cut short by 1750, when accelerated inflation halted further wage increases until 1815. This evidence led Jan de Vries to argue that consumer demand grew, even as

real wage increases became stagnant, because households actively reallocated labor resources so that they might afford new goods. This is a significant argument because it suggests that agrarian workers and urban laborers were actively making choices in terms of consumption. Writing about Europe in general, rather than Britain in particular, de Vries argues that there was an “industrious revolution” evidenced by a reallocation of the productive resources of households: longer hours were worked at the expense of leisure, women and children’s work was reallocated to maintaining the household and men’s labor to goods production and farming that received monetary remuneration. This allowed families who had once put all their efforts into subsistence farming to be able to buy consumer items. Writing before de Vries, Beverly Lemire makes another important qualification to McKendrick’s thesis, arguing that those far below the middle were an important part of the changing attitude toward consumption. Lemire shows that even the humble of English society desired the new consumer goods. She looks at the informal trade of clothing among women hawkers, peddlers, dealers, and tradeswomen in the difficult economic period of the second half of the eighteenth century. Lemire finds that financial restrictions did not stop laborers from wanting to display the material symbols of respectability, and they were able to do this through secondhand trade. Lemire’s work also makes consumption practices particularly relevant to women by looking at consumer objects, such as clothing, that were important to women and by looking at women’s participation in the circulation of these goods. The scholars who write in response to McKendrick agree that while there were various changes in consumption patterns during the early modern period, to call this a consumer revolution is exaggerating the point. Another important trend in the historiography takes for granted the idea that there was a consumer revolution using the new discourse about luxury and consumption to discuss the place of women, the female body, and femininity. E. J. Clery and Kowaleski-Wallace argue that women embody British anxiety surrounding the consumer revolution, which either represented excitement about the transforming possibilities of consumption or revealed deep concern about the corruptive power of new luxury goods. Women were either praised for bringing new social refinement to the nation with

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their consumption for the tea table, of carriages and elegant dresses, or they were condemned for their voracious appetite for pretty things, which drained their men folk of resources, ultimately emasculating them. This body of work focuses on the cultural discourses surrounding consumption and interprets how anxieties about the consumer revolution play out over the bodies of women. The most recent historiographic trends have moved away from qualifying the existence of a consumer revolution and have begun to take stock of the material culture that came out of the eighteenth century and look at whether or not consumption affected all regions equally. Maxine Berg and Mark Blackwell call for scholars to move from a discussion of consumerism in general to looking at the specifics of the goods that were bought, used, and enjoyed by the eighteenth-century populace. Focusing on literature, Blackwell’s The Secret Life of Things (2007) seeks to find how narratives of the period helped to form new object-subject relationships. Going along with the idea that objects helped people to represent themselves, the essays in this edited volume take on the task of teasing out how people identified with (in)animate objects, such as lapdogs, hair, crystals, corkscrews, and diamonds. Berg’s latest book on luxury similarly focuses directly on the new objects of the period. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain (2005) outlines the characteristics of the products made in the period, their variety and diversity, how they were manufactured and in what amounts, how they were bought and the money people paid for them, and most important, why there was demand and desire for these goods up and down the social scale. The edited volume of Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory takes on the different, but equally important, task of pushing McKendrick’s thesis out of London, the economic and trading center, to see how the consumer culture in northeast England differed. Authors of this volume question how much regionalism and regional identity affected consumption. They find that certain goods represented prosperity in the northeast that did not take on this connotation elsewhere, that the northeast had different patterns of consumption when it came to books and chinaware, and that there was a greater discrepancy in ownership of goods in the rural and urban contexts than elsewhere. Following on these recent publications, future directions for research could expand on questions of

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regional diversity by studying consumption patterns in Scotland and Ireland. Drawing on the work of Berg and Blackwell, scholars might focus on the material culture of certain underresearched goods such as foodstuffs. Following research done by de Vries, more work must be done on consumption among the poor (perhaps focusing on the gin craze). Lemire has looked at women’s place in networks of consumption, and there is room also to look at men, the hidden consumers and distributors of goods. And finally, in opposition to the research about luxury goods that were coming into England, scholars might research the British export market to continental Europe. Ariel Beaujot See also Advertising; Fashion; History; Leisure; Luxury and Luxuries; Shopping; Social Class; Sumptuary Laws

Further Readings Agnew, Jean-Christophe. “Coming up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective.” In Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 19–39. London: Routledge, 1993. Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Berg, Maxine, and Helen Clifford, eds. Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999. Berry, Christopher J. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Berry, Helen, and Jeremy Gregory, eds. Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660–1830. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge, 1993. Clery, E. J. The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Edger, Elizabeth, and Maxine Berg, eds. Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debate, Desires and Delectable Goods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Lemire, Beverly. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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Lemire, Beverly. Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800. London: Macmillan, 1997. Lemire, Beverly. “Second-Hand Beaux and ‘Red-Armed Belles’: Conflict and the Creation of Fashions in England, c. 1660–1800.” Continuity and Change [Great Britain] 15, no. 3 (2000): 391–417. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Roberts, M. J. D. “The Concept of Luxury in British Political Economy: Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall.” History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 1 (1998): 23–47. Sekora, John. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Shammas, Carole. The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Stearns, Peter N. Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire. London: Routledge, 2006. Steele, Valerie. “Appearance and Identity.” In Men and Women: Dressing the Part, edited by Claudia Brush Kindwell and Valerie Steele, 6–21. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Thirsk, Joan. Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

CONSUMER RIGHTS

AND THE

LAW

The concept of law for the “protection” of the consumer raises one immediate question: who is the consumer that law seeks to protect? What is the particular character of the consumer, and which interests may be associated with this individual that require legal protection? This simple question, however, immediately confronts us with a philosophical debate on consumerism and a myriad of evaluations of the value or nonvalue of the figure of the consumer. To take but one infamous paring of the postwar period, we can compare and contrast the rational consumer who is a hero to the free market with the nightmare vision of a property-less individual, who is dedicated to “sacred” wealth accumulation, but who never achieves “true” ownership since the consumerism of advanced capitalism is a chimera, furnishing us only with goods that have no lasting or socially transcendent value (Arendt 1998, 61).

Seen in this complex light, the legal theory of the consumer is perhaps better addressed through the more pragmatic lens of the question of how— encountering the consumer—the law has applied theoretical constructions of consumption. Nonetheless, this approach raises its own problems. On the one hand, the figure of the consumer is not a monolith, but is instead only one of many roles played by any one human agent—as worker, producer, or economic agent—always with varied personal aspirations and views of the value of consumption in mind. Equally, the law is never simply law, but is also highly differentiated, breaking down into distinct areas of contract, regulatory, labor, and competition law, each with its own contradictory policy goals in relation to the value of consumption. The notion of a coherent “law of the consumer” will necessarily remain elusive as different human agents interact with distinctly programmed bodies of law, experiencing the law either as a weapon with which to pursue preferred patterns of consumption or as a constraint on economic behavior. However, one constant may be identified. For all that law is also prone to manipulation by extralegal forces of politics and economics, and for all of the fact that—when viewed as an autonomous social institution—it also faces considerable challenges of coordinating its various social steering mechanisms, law is nonetheless always concerned to maintain its internal normative integrity. Law is not simply a steering mechanism, but also aspires to normative status as a “good” mechanism. Applying this statement to consumption, law’s encounters with the consumer are thus also about the legal effort to translate the “fact” of consumption into a normative “good” of consumption: complex and flawed though they might be, legal encounters with the consumer are indelibly marked by an aspiration to establish a regulatory framework that appropriately reflects the social, political, ethical, and legal mores of the society to which it applies. The following traces out a model of legal encounters with the consumer, identifying three ideal types of legal consumer—the sovereign consumer, the citizen consumer, and the enabled consumer. The sovereign consumer and citizen consumer are children of national legal orders. The notion of the enabled consumer, however, has only recently been given a degree of concrete expression within supranational and global legal orders.

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The Sovereign Consumer and the Freedom to Consume The notion of consumerism—closely associated with the economic and political system of the United States as it seeks to influence the global order—has a modern air to it, seeming to encompass an unbridled commitment to freedom of consumption above all other social interests. In other words, theory is currently given to thinking about modern consumption in terms of utility and rational wealth maximization; or, as a series of individual acts that herald a final atomizing phase within the story of liberal individualism, whereby consumers are selfish beings. Nonetheless, seen through the eyes of law, a different and older story may be told. Consumerism—or, in its positive formulation, the idea that the act of consumption possesses its own egalitarian force—also has deep historical roots. More particularly, it is also to be found within nineteenth century (European) notions of contractual justice and equality that, although unable to recognize consumers as a distinct legal class, nonetheless assumed that contractual partners were fit and able to determine their own destinies. This contractual conception of consumption furnishes our first glimpse of an abiding encounter between law and the consumer, which is governed by a happy coincidence between law’s ancient mission to preserve its own (pre-political) legitimacy through the maintenance of formal legal rationality and the economic and social rationales that underpinned then-emerging European nation-states. As Max Weber teaches us, modern Western law was to be distinguished from its natural forebears by virtue of its refusal to promote any one vision of the legitimate nature of human organization. Instead, the legitimacy of law derived from its neutral mission to provide a formal framework of norms within which all human agents were assumed to be willing and able to act of their own volition. The cornerstone of this legal legitimation theory was formed by a private law doctrine of contractual privacy, which precluded any legal intervention within economic exchange relationships motivated by interventionist efforts to secure the particular status of any one contractual party (as consumer or others). The inspirational power underlying a legal refusal to recognize the consumer as a distinct legal class lay in the belief that once a formal legal framework had been established

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that would apply equally to all, regardless of status, the individual autonomy of all citizens would be ensured, leaving them free to pursue the productive economic activity that they favored. By the same token, formal rationality was to find much favor within emerging nation-states dedicated both to the destruction of the status-based relationships, which had seemingly retarded the economic and social development of their feudal forebears, as well as to the promulgation of the new and integrative powers of the national economy. Classical economic theory, the growing political preference for bourgeois patterns of social organization, as well as the national imperative for economic development, acted in concert to support and sustain a contractual autonomy, which assumed that individual economic sovereignty both legitimated law and founded an egalitarian society. A legally secured freedom to act within the market would sustain and be sustained by national solidarity and would further unleash the creative forces of talented citizens in service of the political and economic consolidation of the nation. The inspirational, egalitarian nature of contractual sovereignty explains why traces of formal equality can still be found in most Western legal orders. Most strikingly, however, the sovereign consumer now finds its most powerful contemporary expression within the consumerism that is attributed to emerging world trade orders. Alternatively, the inspirational roots of a freedom to consume still live on within a modern rhetoric of consumer choice that is now underpinned by a legal framework of individual legal rights. Seen in this light, consumerism is not simply an expression of cultural rootlessness, a meaningless consumerism within which the urge and ability to purchase unravels any deep-seated cultural perceptions about the nature of socially valued goods, but is instead an echo of the self-determining egalitarianism that marked the birth of the modern Western state. To the consumerist legal order, the notion of rights is determinative: evident weaknesses in formal legal rationality—abuse of power within contractual relations—can be compensated for by the recognition in higher (constitutional) law that all must be treated equally, regardless of race, religion, or national origin. By the same token, modern neoclassical economic theory, together with the self-determining and socially creative purchasing power of once disregarded minorities—women, blacks, gays, and the

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disabled—imbue the consumerist economy with an egalitarianism all of its own. Within this scenario, valued goods are no longer simply the product of the societies from which they spring. In stark contrast to a nightmare vision of consumerist poverty, they are not, and must not be shaped by a (prejudiced) culturally determined vision of what a “good life” should be. Instead, they are an immediate market response to the needs and self-expressed identities of sovereign consumers.

The Citizen Consumer and Freedom from Harm Although the notion of the sovereign consumer is thought to be most closely identified with the U.S. legal arena, ample evidence for the complexity of legal encounters with the consumer can likewise be derived from history and from the fact that the United States is also the cradle of a notion of consumer protection, which often places the status of the sovereign consumer in doubt. It was thus President John F. Kennedy, who, in the wake of the thalidomide crisis (thalidomide is a drug that was licensed in Canada during the 1950s that caused limb abnormalities in newborns of women who has taken it), began to encourage lawyers to review their age-old refusal to regard consumers as a distinct class requiring legal protection. Consumers were no longer to be seen as isolated purchasers of goods but were instead to be viewed as people who may be directly or indirectly affected by various aspects of consumption. Thalidomide exposed the myth that the modern industrial economy might simply be viewed as a forum for egalitarian economic exchange. By the 1960s, economic exchange was characterized by a large-scale imbalance in the relative bargaining powers of producers and consumers of goods: thalidomide revealed a wide-ranging disjunction between the profit motive driving modern production and the desire of consumers for safe goods. The time had come for the reevaluation of the place of the consumer within national society and for reconsideration of the notion that unfettered exchange could per se sustain a “just” society. Kennedy directly addressed the dilemma of the conflicting interests of modern consumers. Certainly, consumers possessed an interest in plentiful and cheap goods; however, as producers, workers, family members, and citizens, they also maintained a simultaneous interest in the

production of safe goods produced with due respect for the legitimate concerns of society. Public outrage coalesced into a demand for regulatory intervention. Accordingly, explicit legal recognition was at last given to the notion of the consumer. More strikingly, however, within European welfare states, the shift in emphasis from an isolated freedom to consume to an integrated conception whereby the state would act to ensure freedom from harm (Bollier and Claybrook 1986, 31) also formed a new legal encounter with the citizen consumer. Consumption would not be viewed as an autonomous act. Instead, consumption would be regulated in the light of the shared concerns of the citizens of the nation-state. The state would intervene widely within economic exchange to balance the character of the consumer against that of the worker, producer, or family member. The egalitarianism of redistributive European postwar welfare states was, in large part, facilitated by Keynesian theories of economic organization. At the same time, however, it also necessitated a reevaluation of the legitimate bases of national law. Whereas formal law derived its own legitimacy from its ability to impose one universal framework of norms on society, welfare state law now demanded that law should cede to purposive political direction, to treat different groups within society in different ways. The consumer would henceforth be recognized as a distinct class of citizen in need of particular protection; at the same time, the interests of consumers would also be balanced against the interests of the entire population. Legal encounters with the citizen consumer are consequently also marked by a high degree of what Weber termed legal materialization. The citizen consumer entails a series of positive values, which cannot be legitimated by formal dedication to contractual autonomy, but which must find their approbation in democratic discourse and the subjection of law to the political direction of the national welfare state. This democratization of the process of the legal identification of a normative good of consumption was undoubtedly of major benefit to the populations of postwar Western economies. Nonetheless, legal materialization and democratization of consumption also brought with it its own complex contradictions. Above all, legal materialization heightened the social steering difficulties faced by national legal orders. As legal autonomy ceded to political direction, disjunction between the policies pursued by partial segments

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of the legal order only intensified (competition law vs. labor law) to give rise, in its turn, to irrationality or incoherence in each national framework for consumption. Equally, as national regulatory frameworks fell victim to their own contradictions, distinct national regulations began to form an immutable barrier to consumption across national boundaries. Regional and global trade was foreshortened and, as much as the emergence of the figure of the citizen consumer heralded a democratic effort to determine a normative good of consumption, it also bore with it the seeds of its own destruction. Increasing and economically stagnating differentiation between national economies inexorably led to demands for economic liberalization within the ambit of regional organizations of economic integration such as the European Union (EU) and of global legal-economic orders, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The Enabled Consumer Consideration of the final ideal-type encounter between law and the consumer is set within the context of the novel legal orders established by supranational and global economic orders. As intimated, such orders are influenced by the concept of the sovereign consumer, with the utility-maximizing individual economic agent being a perfect liberalizing complement to the establishment of global free trade. De-socialized, or de-cultured, individuals may also be given a more positive, egalitarian character where they are conceived of as postnational global actors, expressing their identity through their own acts of consumption. In view of their undoubted contribution to the creation of a global civil society, it is little wonder that both EU and WTO law support, at a global level, sovereign consumers through measures that evaluate the legitimacy of national regulation that might restrict consumer choice, and does so through reference to the rationalizing criteria of economic theory and hard science. As a result, barriers to trade, and to the activities of the sovereign consumer, are swept aside as outmoded national claims, and consumer protection comes to be understood through modern economies theories that seek the least restrictive modes of regulation (see, e.g., Everson and Joerges 2007). Yet, postnational legal orders are not only host to sovereign consumers. Instead, the tension that now exists between the functional utilization of

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consumption preferences in service of the creation of the global economy on the one hand, and demands by global consumers that they be represented within the de-politicized global market on the other, are beginning to contribute to a new theoretical and legal paradigm of consumption: that of the enabled consumer. Thus, for example, with the commitment made by the European Commission in its 2007 to 2013 consumer action program to a partnership between industry and consumers, whereby consumers will be directly represented within market regulation, postnational law is beginning to directly democratize the market and thus to give shape to a once-esoteric concern of legal theory. Historically, the notion of the enabled consumer is only to be found within the writings of legal theorists, and then only fleetingly (see, e.g., Joerges 1986, 142–163). Until very recently, the concept was not a product of politics or economics, but was instead a manifestation of a legal preoccupation with the coherence of law. As brief discussion of the sovereign consumer and citizen consumer clearly demonstrate, Weber was correct to comment that law would forever be caught on the horns of a dilemma. Formal rationality within law, and with it the notion of a sovereign consumer, might draw its legitimating powers for apolitical notions of contractual autonomy, but it would always falter in the face of demands that social values be incorporated within it: what is the price of my freedom to consume if I am thus exposed to the dangers of unfettered economic exchange? Equally, material rationality within law, for all its democratic pedigree, is also subject to its own limitations: the notion that law can be directed by one (national) democratic will to furnish one (national) vision of the normative good of consumption is an illusion, subject always to distorting irrationality as law struggles to translate conflicting political goals within its limited and fragmented social steering capacity. To lawyers engaged in the eternal waltz between formal and material conceptions of law, the struggle to identify the legitimate bases of law is an existential one, and, within the specific context of legal encounters, with the act of consumption leads to a conclusion that it can never claim to have identified one “legitimate” ideal-type consumer. The process of legal transformation of the act of consumption into a normative good is not one that can be performed through recourse to a panacea of sovereign purchasing power; nor can it be secured by means

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of subordination of law to one set of consumption values. Instead, the only sustainable source of legitimacy that might be identified for law during its encounters with the consumer is procedural in nature. Law should not attempt to predetermine the normative good of consumption. It can only ever act to attempt to ensure that the social, economic, and political parameters within which each individual act of consumption occurs are continually drawn up with due regard for every interest on which the act of consumption impacts. Procedural law is the law of political discourse; an open-ended law that founds its legitimacy in the fact that substantive values are not the product of law, but rather the product of the political discourse that law facilitates. Seen in this light, nascent forms of postnational law that are not content simply to invest all their regulatory faith in a notion of the sovereign consumer, and instead attempt to reincorporate the political influence of the national citizen consumer within a postnational market, giving the consumer representative voice within market regulation, may yet prove to be able to fulfill law’s ancient mission of creating a normative good of consumption. In other words, although still in their infancy, the enabled consumers of global consumption may yet be in a position to confound pessimistic evaluations of impoverished consumption, playing a politically relevant role within the global market. They may yet contribute to the creation of a global civil society that can shape consumption in support of its own emerging values. Michelle Everson See also Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization); Consumer Regulation; Consumer Sovereignty; Global Institutions

Further Readings Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Bollier, David, and Joan Claybrook. Freedom from Harm. Washington, DC: Public Citizen Project, 1986. Everson, Michelle, and Christian Joerges. “Consumer Citizenship in Postnational Constellations?” In Citizenship and Consumption, edited by Kate Soper and Frank Trentmann, 154–171. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Joerges, Christian. “Quality Regulation in Consumer Goods Markets: Theoretical Concepts and Practical Examples.” In Contract and Organization, edited by Terence Daintith and Gunther Teubner, 142–163. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986. Kennedy, John F. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches and Statements of the President, Jan. 1–Dec. 31, 1962. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962. Soper, Kate, and Frank Trentmann, eds. Citizenship and Consumption. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Weber, Max. Rechtssoziologie. Edited by Johannes Winkelmann. 2nd ed. Neuwied, Germany: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1967.

CONSUMER SOCIALIZATION Consumer socialization is the process whereby one acquires the skills to consume, as well as the values associated with being a consumer. This can involve identification with the role of consumer in consumption society or a critical awareness of the problematic nature of being a consumer and of consumption society more generally. The socialization process is not necessarily limited to learning how to buy, but can also include how not to buy, how to limit consumption, or how to shop for a variety of purposes, such as economic value, status and distinction, or ecological sustainability. In one of the earliest studies, David Riesman and Howard Roseborough distinguished different contexts for socializing children into consumer behavior: home for goal-directed, peers for expressive, and school for adaptive elements of consumption. Scott Ward’s commonly cited definition of consumer socialization narrowed a general definition of socialization by O. G. Brim to “processes by which young people acquire skills, knowledge, and attitudes relevant to their function as consumers in the marketplace” (1974, 2). Ward focused on consumer socialization in childhood, though acknowledging it can be a lifelong process. Many studies, including Ward’s, have relied on Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, as Deborah Roedder John notes in a review of twentyfive years of research on childhood consumer socialization. A cognitive framework, though useful, may undervalue stages of emotional development and

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identity formation. In a broad review of consumer socialization studies, Karin Ekström has noted that the marketplace is too narrow a focus, and that consumer socialization needs to be understood in a variety of consumption and interaction contexts, life events, and socializing agents (including commodities and consumption zones), as well as through more varied theories and methods. Although increasing attention has focused on how children are socialized into the role of consumer, it is important to remember how the “consumer,” as a role to be socialized into, is a relatively recent phenomenon. By the end of the nineteenth century, the term consumption was increasingly used to mean the buying of goods, shedding its earlier connotations of destruction and sickness, of tuberculosis. Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, signaling the newer sense of the term, even while ironically drawing attention to the older sense with his parallel term conspicuous waste. The course of the twentieth century saw the change from production-centered to consumptioncentered societies. The mid-twentieth century not only saw the rise of the consumer, but also the rise of the use of the term consumer itself. As Raymond Williams (1985) noted, it was during this time period, predominantly in America but spreading quickly, that the term passed from a more specialized sense in political economy to general use, and increasingly displaced the term customer with its more personalized sense of regular continuing relationship. Postwar prosperity in the United States was instrumental in helping to shift spending from more frugal habits still in place from the Great Depression and World War II to a greater acceptance of consumption as a way of life. But prosperity alone was not enough, and intense marketing efforts were required to transform habits of frugality into spendthrift ways. Key to the advent of consumer culture was the diffusion of commercial television. In 1950, only 9 percent of American households had a television. By 1960, almost nine out of ten households had televisions. By 1972, half of American households had a color TV (Jordan 1996, 798). Television functioned as the major apparatus of socializing people into the role of consumers, as a new landscape of consumption began to emerge in the 1950s with the development of franchised businesses and shopping malls. The socializing effects of

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commercial television on children became a focus of consumer socialization research in the United States in the 1970s, and by 1978, the Federal Trade Commission attempted but failed to ban advertising directed at children under eight years old. Shopping malls spread globally, not only as destinations for consumption, but as socializing spaces in their own right, where people learned to spend time as well as money. Some consider that consumer socialization simply means acquiring skills to function with competence in the marketplace. Though not without merit, this meager definition does not address what “competence” means in the context of a marketplace aggressively marketing the message of further consumption. Still, skills are clearly required to negotiate the profusion of choices created by products marketed to appear differentiated from each other, no matter how similar they might actually be. Electronic devices such as computers or cell phones change so rapidly that consumers must virtually learn anew each time they make a purchase. Children need to acquire skills of relative costs of purchases. But again, these skills exist within an already actively socializing environment of marketing signs; of advertisements, commercials, product placements, all of which attempt to instill desire for products, usually with the message that purchase itself promotes competent skills and competent identities. In this sense, consumer socialization is not simply the utilitarian acquisition of skills to meet some given economic conditions of the marketplace. It is also a problematic process of acculturation to norms and values promulgated by markets and marketers that may be at odds with the requirements of the socialization of identity. Consumer socialization in this sense raises the question of socialization more generally: to what end are socialization processes directed? The socialization of children involves the development of cognitive and emotional abilities, moral values learned from family, school, peers, and the broader community, and identities involving gender, class, racial, and ethnic components. The process is presumably directed ultimately toward the development of autonomous adults, citizens capable of participating in the various facets of their society, including consumption. Consumer socialization is, in this sense, an aspect of more general societal socialization, given that consumption is a significant part of the culture. But it becomes problematic when consumption, a means of life, becomes a goal of life:

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the end of development becomes not autonomous citizens, but dependent consumers, a much more limited conception of identity than that of citizen, and a self that is dependent on continued consumption rather than on self-determination. Marketing to children has radically increased over the past generation, from $100 million in 1983 in the United States to almost $17 billion by 2007 (“Commercializing Childhood” 2008). Marketers have progressively targeted children for deliberate socialization into consumerism, from inculcating brands and product identification, to identifying with products as “cool,” to nagging their parents (Cook 2004). Young children are targeted through one of the most basic channels of general socialization: play. Through television and computer advertising, typically linked with cartoon characters, children learn to play through commercialized media and to desire commodities representing further play activities, namely toys, dolls, and so forth. As Juliet Schor notes, the United States consumes 45 percent of global toy production, despite having only 4.5 percent of the world’s population (Schor 2004, 27). A recent Kaiser Foundation study found that fully 61 percent of American babies one year or younger view TV or videos every day for at least an hour on average. Eighty-three percent of children under the age of six watch about two hours of combined screen media per day. Parents enthusiastically support the socializing effect of television, placing TVs in young children’s rooms so that family members can view their own shows, as more than 50 percent reported (Rideout and Hamel 2006). This exposure to commercial, socializing media is occurring during the crucial bonding with and separation from the mother, that developmental phase from between ages one and a half to three, wherein the bases for empathy and autonomy are established, potentially interfering with the biosocial requirements of the self. And it is reaching even further back to birth, intruding on the most basic development of the infant in establishing borders between itself and world (Halton 2008). Christmas and gift giving also function not only as major means of socializing children into the rites and values of materialism but as instruments of commodifying globalization, well beyond the bounds of Christian religious symbolism. As Junko Kimura and Russell Belk note, young couples in Japan exchange

expensive Christmas gifts and stay in expensive hotels. Such examples illustrate how rational capitalism connects with nonrational ritual conduct to foster consumer socialization. Eugene Halton See also Broadcast Media; Childhood; Conspicuous Consumption; Consumer Education; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling; Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Gifts and Reciprocity; Mimesis

Further Readings “Commercializing Childhood, the Corporate Takeover of Kids’ Lives: An Interview with Susan Linn.” Multinational Monitor 30, no. 1 (2008). http://www .multinationalmonitor.org/mm2008/072008/ interview-linn.html. Cook, Daniel. The Commodification of Childhood. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Ekström, Karin M. “Consumer Socialization Revisited.” In Research in Consumer Behavior, vol. 10, edited by Russell W. Belk, 71–98. Oxford: Elsevier, 2006. Halton, Eugene. The Great Brain Suck: And Other American Epiphanies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. John, Deborah Roedder. “Consumer Socialization of Children: A Retrospective Look at Twenty-Five Years of Research.” The Journal of Consumer Research 26, no. 3 (December 1999): 183–213. Jordan, Winthrop. The Americans. Boston: McDougal Littell, 1996. Kimura, Junko, and Russell W. Belk. “Christmas in Japan: Globalization versus Localization.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 8, no. 3 (September 2005): 325–338. Rideout, Victoria, and Elizabeth Hamel. “The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers and Their Parents.” Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, 2006. http://www.kff. org/entmedia/upload/7500.pdf. Riesman, David, and Howard Roseborough. “Careers and Consumer Behavior.” In Consumer Behavior. Vol. 2, The Life Cycle and Consumer Behavior, edited by Lincoln Clark, 1–18. New York: New York University Press, 1955. Schor, Juliet B. Born to Buy. New York: Scribner, 2004. Ward, Scott. “Consumer Socialization.” Journal of Consumer Research 1 (September 1974): 1–14. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Consumer Society

CONSUMER SOCIETY The term consumer society is commonly used to distinguish contemporary affluent societies from traditional agricultural or modern industrial societies, to emphasize the role of consumption as a factor in social structure and as an element of lifestyle.

History and Meaning of the Term The concept of the consumer society has been commonly used since the early decades of the twentieth century, originally in the United States, where the wealth of mass-produced consumer goods first became apparent. It designates the importance of consumption in everyday life, but it has also had ideological connotations, meaning that capitalist economies are overwhelmingly efficient in providing commodities at affordable prices to ordinary consumers. In social science discourses, it has suffered from ill fame. As a theoretical vision of advanced capitalism, it has an air of ideological complacency. This usage of the term was most apparent in the cold war period. Critics have argued that contrasted to “class society,” the notion of consumer society depicts consumers as a uniform albeit indeterminate group of people with similar interests instead of conflicting classes. It hints at general affluence and suggests that consumption, primarily of commodities, is the most important content of life and support of identity, but does not account for inequalities and other determinants of social structure, notably production and the labor market. On the other hand, the reality of consumer society has been the object of moral, economic, political, and general ideological criticism for giving priority to material values at the expense of spiritual, cultural, and social interests.

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industry-based consumer society in twentieth-century North America and Europe was a phenomenon of the masses and encompassed the structural foundations of industrial society. Although in retrospect the change was dramatic, bewilderment and disbelief about whether any improvement in “living standard” was actually taking place continued for a long time. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, the change was vertiginous seen backwards from the present, and even in the life course of one single generation, the improvements in nutrition, comfort, and the conduct of everyday life were concrete and noticeable. However, in the course of day-to-day living the change took place gradually, in small steps and one detail at a time. Young people had difficulty in making the distinction between the change in their own individual life from childhood to adults and the change that was taking place in their environment. The new technology of everyday life was revolutionary for their parents, who had recently returned to peace from the conditions of war, but was taken for granted by their children. The individual home in an apartment house near the city center, electricity, central heating, running water, refrigerator, washing machine, radio, and finally television were for the young an ordinary bundle of necessities, and the quaint country life of their grandparents without them seemed strange and distant. The individual car added to the spatial scope of the life sphere of individuals already immensely expanded by other means of transportation earlier in the century. It changed urban structures, made possible the growth of major cities, helped to concentrate production and distribution of commodities, and thus propelled the growth of consumption possibilities further. All this happened fast, but from an individual’s perspective, the change was piecemeal.

Historical Context The twentieth century produced in advanced Western countries a phenomenal growth in consumption possibilities that has no parallel in human history, not relatively speaking and certainly not in absolute terms. Often this phase is called the new consumer society. The earlier consumer booms of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in England and still in nineteenth century Europe were limited to small elites, but the development of the new

The Consumer Society and Social Structure In retrospect, this change was so drastic that it has been given a number of dramatic names, such as the golden era, the three glorious decades, or the second French revolution. It changed the makeup and technology of everyday life and reformatted both social structures and people’s way of thinking of themselves and of others. It brought to ordinary people a quantity and diversity of goods, pleasures, and uses

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of time that either had never existed before or had been accessible for only a few. Above all, it placed into the center of common men’s and women’s life a problem that among previous generations had to be faced by very few people: choice. Choice was no longer about puny details of everyday life, such as clothing, housing, and food—these had also been of limited selection still in the immediate postwar years. Now choice began to involve lifestyle as a whole. And this also changed the conception of time: past, present, and future. The beliefs that were taken for granted in the postwar “reconstruction period” in Europe—belief in progress, the ideal of the universal citizenship, and trust in the national welfare state— began to fall in doubt as the possibility and necessity of choice became apparent and pressing. The obligation to choose imposed itself not only in the area of consumption: lifestyle had far-reaching consequences for the life cycle of the person and the family, because the rise of the new consumer society could not have happened without enormous structural reorganization of the economies and the populations of rapidly industrializing countries, including the Soviet Union and affiliated states. These implied massive urbanization, great social mobility, and increase of secondary and gradually also higher education. Mobility in space involved massive migrations of people from less industrialized to more advanced countries but also within countries and between home and work space. Also commodities moved, which meant increasing plant size in industry and a far greater variety of available goods in most major local markets. Finally, ideas and information—culture—became increasingly mobile and global as a consequence of new communication technology. As a consequence, the traditional class distinctions of early industrial societies became blurred. For this reason, the new consumer society is often associated with the rise of the new middle class. The expansion of educated office workers or service job takers first occurred in the United States already in the 1950s, followed by Western European states a decade or two later. The idea of the consumer society gained new prestige from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that consumption, taste, and lifestyle are important factors in the reproduction of class structure. Elites recognize themselves by their commonly shared taste. They use taste as “cultural

capital,” which accumulates and can be transformed to other forms of capital: economic and social. In Britain, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies looked at consumption from the opposite perspective, studying how the working class reproduces itself through its choices and consumption patterns.

Critics Critics of the consumer society have argued that mass-production of consumer goods does not in fact serve the real needs of people, who could live comfortably with less if they did not have to work so hard to consume. Consumption is artificially stimulated by advertising and marketing, by lowering the durability of goods, and by useless innovations. The most important American critics have been Daniel Bell, C. Wright Mills, and Vance Packard. The influential book Monopoly Capital by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued that capitalism always produces more than it can consume. The quasi-monopolistic structure of American industry makes it possible to maintain artificially high price levels, which produces even more surpluses. These must be somehow destroyed, and one way is to make consumers spend more, save less, and even go into debt. In Europe, criticism of the consumer society arose in the new wave of Marxism in the 1970s. Theorists such as the German Wolfang Fritz Haug argued that the commodity form itself destroys the use values of goods by wrapping and masking them as attractive and appealing, although in reality there is nothing useful inside. Another Marxist criticism has been that although the quantity and quality of commodities available to common workers has grown enormously, the demands of the industrial working life have also increased the needs of workers. Therefore a reproduction deficit—a growing gap between needs and means for their satisfaction—is created. In recent years, the most fervent criticism of the consumer society has come from the frontlines of the ecological movement.

The Consumer Society and the Semiotic Turn in Sociology The sociology of consumption has grown as a consequence of the consumer society. It has contributed to policy issues and consumer awareness but it was also in a key position in what is called the semiotic turn in the social sciences. From the 1960s onward,

Consumer Sovereignty

researchers have paid attention to the symbolic dimensions of consumption. French sociologist Jean Baudrillard was influential in pointing out that we must replace the political economy of production by the political economy of the sign. Meaning and interpretation in social science became a recognized perspective largely through the debates on the consumer society. Pekka Sulkunen See also Americanization; Automobiles; Capitalism; Commercialization; Commodities; Globalization; Marxist Theories; Mass Production and Consumption

Further Readings Baran, Paul, and Paul Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay in the American Economic and Social Order. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. London: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Galbraith, Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican Books, 1962. Gronow, Jukka. The Sociology of Taste. London: Routledge, 1997. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Kritik der Warenästhetik [Critique of commodity aesthetics]. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1971. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. London: Abacus, 1994. McKenzie, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Sulkunen, Pekka. The Saturated Society: Governing Risk and Lifestyle in Consumer Culture. London: Sage, 2009. Sulkunen, Pekka, John Holmwood, Hilary Radner, and Gerhard Schulze, eds. Constructing the New Consumer Society. London: Macmillan, 1987.

CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY Consumer sovereignty is a fundamental principle used in economics and political science denoting the freedom of the individual to choose how his or her needs and wants are fulfilled. In a sociopolitical perspective, the concept emphasizes the role of the consumer as a market “sovereign” as regards the production of goods and services. In its broadest sense, it refers to the assumed power of consumers

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in free market economies to decide which goods and services—and in which qualities and quantities— are actually offered. A free market is defined as one where there is no collective control over the production or distribution of goods. The origin of the concept of consumer sovereignty can be found in the classic liberalism of Adam Smith. In his seminal work The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith explicitly developed the notion that the needs of the people can be best met in free markets if the supply of goods is steered by demand. The term consumer sovereignty itself was, however, only coined one and a half centuries later. William H. Hutt (“The Concept of Consumers’ Sovereignty,” 1940, 66) defined it as “the controlling power exercised by free individuals, in choosing between ends, over the custodians of the community’s resources, when the resources by which those ends can be served are scarce.” In economics, it was mainly the Austrian school of Friedrich Wieser, Carl Menger, and Ludwig von Mises that explicitly discussed the concept. In Western consumer culture, the idea became closely connected with freedom of choice and powerful consumers as the rulers of the markets. Ideologically, it supported the rise of a materialistic culture of consumption (Kasser and Kanner 2004). While the concept today is used in societal discourse and mainstream economics as a descriptive and largely unquestioned assumption, it is also a normative leitbild (i.e., model) for how consumers should behave in market economies to create or maintain fully functioning markets. The sanctioning power of the sovereign consumer lies in his or her purchase power and influence on the reputation of the supplier and its products. In political economy, these two sanction mechanisms of the demand side to force suppliers to correct quality losses have been referred to by Albert Hirschmann as “exit” and “voice.” The consumer has a double role to play: he is both a market actor (e.g., when the consumer switches his energy supplier and herewith “exits” as a customer) and a subpolitical “consumer-citizen” (e.g., when the consumer joins a boycott, complains to an airline, or to the insurance ombudsperson, or actively spreads negative word-of-mouth about a bad service received in a repair shop). The semantics of sovereignty are rich and purposeful: in a historical-political sense, a sovereign is an absolute ruler, often a king or a prince who only obeys his own rules. In a cognitive-psychological

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sense, to act in a sovereign manner also connotes to be self-determined and hence independent from any unwanted external influences such as peer group pressure, public opinion and mass media influence, governmental paternalism, or marketing activities. Herewith, the only criteria of consumer choice are the consumers’ own (preferences), which the consumer is assumed to know. The notion of sovereignty carries different symbolic meanings in different consumer cultures. For the former communist countries in Europe with a history of centrally planned economy and very limited consumer choices, consumer sovereignty embraces the promise of individual freedom, of the power of the masses, of emancipation, equality, and vertical mobility, as well as potential access to an unprecedented abundance of products and services. Similar hopes are pinned on the free market in transformation countries, the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and the “tiger” states worldwide (e.g., Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan). This glamour has long ceased in mature postmodern welfare societies of the West where the pitfalls of materialism and the McDonaldization of societies (the spread of rationalized and homogenous forms of consumption across the globe) are acknowledged as the downside of globalized consumerism. Lessons from the history of consumption show that the economic sphere and the cultures of consumption are closely interlinked with the respective political systems. For instance, women’s emancipation and liberalization have gone hand in hand with women gaining market power and gaining incomes.

Limits to Consumer Sovereignty Consumer sovereignty is the core value of welfare economics and underlies the most central goals guiding economic policy in Western industrialized advanced nations. However, limits to consumer sovereignty arise from both the macrolevel of the market and its institutions as well as from the microlevel of individual consumers. On the macrolevel, there is the problem of “market failures.” When a market failure occurs, the overall result of the individual choices of sovereign consumers pursuing their personal self-interest is not efficient but rather suboptimal from a societal perspective. In this case, societal welfare can be

improved by governmental intervention or collaborative actions of market actors. Market failures typically arise from one of the following: first, noncompetitive markets (e.g., natural monopolies in network-based markets such as energy markets); second, costs that are externalized on the natural environment and/or on society instead of being internalized in the product prices (e.g., carbon dioxide [CO2] emissions arising from production and consumption), and third, the nature of certain goods, mainly public goods and common-pool resources (e.g., fish stocks in the oceans that get overfished) that are prone to overuse, or credence goods (e.g., the long-term effectiveness of a medical treatment) that lead to informational asymmetry between supply and demand. More fundamentally, the underlying cause of market failure is often a problem of property rights. The existence of such market failures legitimizes governmental intervention in a particular market. Institutional economics and the economics of information have extensively dealt with these problems and have suggested solutions to correct these market failures. On the microlevel, there is the “problem” of the consumer who does not always react as suggested by the ideal type of the rational and sovereign consumer. As has been shown by economic psychology and, more recently, by behavioral economics (e.g., Thaler and Sunstein 2008), consumers are actually quite imperfect economic actors: they are “humans,” and not flawless and rational economic actors. This limits the prognostic power of policy models built on the notion of independent, rational, fully informed, preference-led actors. Empirical research—mainly based on experiments and behavioral decision research—has shown that in many consumer decisions, people systematically go wrong (e.g., they systematically discount future gains and overvalue risks), make decisions based on simplistic—but stable—biases and heuristics or rules of thumb (such as anchoring, availability, and representativeness), and, instead of being fully informed decision makers, are less well-disciplined in their goal striving than they themselves expect, are often weak in resisting temptations and deferring gratification, are stuck in (bad) habits, and are much less sophisticated in their decision making than is suggested by mainstream economics. Moreover, their capabilities to search for and process information as well as their ability to understand complex (financial) products are rather

Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies

limited. If this is true, how can they be the “absolute rulers” of markets? Research into the limits of consumer decision making and the following up of these decisions has cast doubt on the usefulness of the concept of consumer sovereignty as understood by mainstream economics and neoliberal politics. Increasingly, politicians and economists have called for an empirically based understanding of the concept. Based on empirical evidence, behavioral economics proposes to design policy strategies (e.g., to fight obesity, to reduce CO2 emissions, to increase pension savings) by acknowledging these systematic human shortcomings while, at the same time, consumers are empowered through information, education, and advice, and hence enabled to be free, competent, and motivated to act as sovereign consumers. Instead of assuming an unrealistic view of consumers as omnipotent decisionmakers, the idea of “libertarian paternalism” is to engage in thoughtful choice architecture that maintains or increases freedom of choice. The paternalistic aspect lies in the claim that it is legitimate for policymakers to try to steer people’s behavior in directions that make their life (and that of others) better—as judged by themselves; the term libertarian means liberty-preserving. Nudges are suggested as aspects of choice architecture that alter consumers’ behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their relative prices. Examples are default options, such as healthy food offered in school cafeterias and opt-out saving schemes. Such policies cost little or nothing and do not impose burdens on taxpayers. Moreover, they all have an opt-out option and hence fully preserve liberty. For most liberal economists and politicians, consumer sovereignty—here often reduced to “freedom of choice”—is an untouchable mantra of market economies. The basic policy approach following this mantra is to provide people as many choices as possible, and then let them choose the one they prefer. In neoliberal thought, the best consumer policy is a good competition policy with as little governmental intervention or nudging as possible. However, this is only true if one assumes that most consumers, most of the time, make choices in their best interest. In fact, consumers are not experts in all walks of life, and they are not necessarily the best choosers (as detailed earlier). This is why people actively rely on others (experts, consultants, salespeople, magazines, advertisement) in

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their choices. It is an illusion that it is possible to avoid influencing people’s choices—the question is really, who is in the driver’s seat and who is setting the influential contexts? Moreover, competition and choice alone do not necessarily lead to functioning markets. To the contrary, consumer research has shown that overchoice—in particular, of complex goods such as investment decisions—can be confusing and irritating for consumers, leading to shortened cognitive processes and suboptimal choices. Yet, despite conceptual shortcomings and lacking empirical evidence, the ideal of the sovereign consumer enjoys continued significance in studies of consumption. Lucia A. Reisch See also Bounded Rationality; Citizenship; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Demand; Consumer Regulation; Economics; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; McDonaldization

Further Readings Hirschmann, Albert. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Hutt, William H. Economists and the Public. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990. First published 1936. Kasser, Tim, and Allen D. Kanner, eds. Psychology and Consumer Culture. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004. Keat, Russell, Nigel Whiteley, and Nicholas Abercrombie. The Authority of the Consumer. New York: Routledge, 2003. First published 1994. Penz, G. Peter. Consumer Sovereignty and Human Interests. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. First published 1986. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

CONSUMER TESTING AND PROTECTION AGENCIES The consumer testing movement is concerned with the testing of branded goods and services to advise purchasers of their relative value for money. It began in the United States in 1927, when a civil servant for the Labor Bureau, Stuart Chase, and an engineer, F. J. Schlink, published Your Money’s Worth, a

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critique of the exploitation of the consumer in the modern marketplace. This led to the establishment of Consumers’ Research, which began publishing its Bulletin in 1929, though it was soon taken over in 1936 by Consumers Union (and its magazine, Consumer Reports) following a dispute over labor relations among Consumers’ Research staff. Both organizations were a product of a burgeoning consumer culture, though one in which affluent—if nervous—shoppers sought more guidance in consumption. The scientific testing of commodities, together with the identification of “best buys,” offered a means by which consumers could maintain their distance from modern commercial values and sales techniques. Following sustained economic growth in the post–World War II period, consumer testing took off across Europe too. In France, in 1951, the Union Fédéral des Consommateurs (UFC) was formed and began publishing its testing magazine, Que Choisir, in December 1961. In Germany, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Verbraucherverbände (Alliance of Consumer Associations) was established in 1953. In the same year, Consumentenbond began publishing Consumentengids in the Netherlands, and following its establishment in 1956, the United Kingdom’s Consumers’ Association launched Which? in 1957. The privately owned testing bodies proved tremendously popular. By the end of the 1960s, sales of Consumer Reports approached 2 million, sales of Which? topped half a million, and Consumentengids was calculated to reach one in every ten Dutch households. Most impressive were the Scandinavian countries: although their consumer magazines were published by the state rather than private testing organizations, subscriptions ran into hundreds of thousands, such that Norway could claim the greatest number of sales relative to households in the world. Many commentators have assumed that this form of consumer organizing was an essentially Western phenomenon. Indeed, some have suggested that rather than offering a critique of the capitalist marketplace, consumer testing agencies actually served to reinforce the tendency toward acquisitive individualism found within affluent societies. However, consumer testing constituted just one part of a wider movement of consumer activism that owed as much to the developing as the developed world. As early as 1956, the Indian Association of Consumers was

created, predating many equivalent organizations in Europe, though the real takeoff came across Southeast Asia. Throughout the 1960s, consumer groups appeared across Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, most prominently with the Consumers’ Association of Penang in 1969. In 1960, the Western consumer groups had come together to create the International Organization of Consumers Unions (IOCU, now Consumers International). By 1970, IOCU’s membership consisted of consumer groups across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, if only into the richest nations of these areas. By 1990, however, IOCU could claim to be truly global and today is represented in over one hundred countries. Much of its expansion had been overseen by Anwar Fazal, a product of the Malaysian consumer movement and president of IOCU from 1978 to 1984, though other developing world activists have subsequently directed the global consumer movement from Indonesia, Brazil, and Kenya. Undoubtedly, the major political impact of these organizations has been on the development of consumer protection regimes at the national level. Certain differences are apparent. The social democratic tradition of the Scandinavian countries has meant more state intervention has been evident. Sweden, for instance, had a state Consumer Council (Statens Konsumentråd) from 1957. It also pioneered consumer information labeling through its Institute for Informative Labelling (1951), and it developed the world’s first consumer ombudsman as well as a Market Court in 1971. In contrast, in Germany and Austria, a more corporatist set of consumer-producer mechanisms was adopted. In Japan, the consumer had to fit in with a strong state and the existence of great producer political power at the center. France and the United States have regarded the consumer as a political entity; the United States has sought, as with Britain, marketbased solutions to their grievances (e.g., legal redress mechanisms), while France, though sporadically and through much experimentation, has mobilized public sector, statist mechanisms to protect the consumer (e.g., the development the an extensive legal code and consumer affairs ministry). But the important point to note is that states did respond to the popularity of consumer organizing. In Germany, there were just 25 new laws relating to consumer protection from 1945 to 1970, but there were a further 338 adopted by 1978. In France, there

Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies

were similarly just 37 laws and ministerial decrees before 1970, a total that grew to 94 by 1978. In the United States, and in large part due to the activism of Ralph Nader, a flurry of consumer protection laws appeared in the late 1960s relating to the automobile industry, product safety, package labeling, and a whole host of other trade practices. Moreover, pressure has been exerted at the regional and global level as well as the national level. Consumer protection has been enshrined within the European Union since 1975, and much of the early work of IOCU was targeted toward establishing a consumer protection system at the United Nations (UN). This finally came into being in 1985, with the passing of the UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection, a document that has acted as a model law for consumer protection legislation in dozens of countries over the last quarter century. The sheer size, scale, growth, and spread of organized consumerism calls into question the nature of consumer agency. Agency, here, has been exercised more at the formal political level than that of individual lifestyles. And this agency has not been directed solely at the defense of individual economic interests. As organized consumerism has spread around the world, it has taken on board not only the agendas of the affluent, but those of the poor and disadvantaged too. As IOCU obtained its dynamism and momentum from the developing world, it led to new campaigns and initiatives that tied organized consumerism in with a whole host of other international nongovernmental organizations concerned with economic and social development. Through its establishment of networks concerned with pesticides, infant milk, and pharmaceuticals, it was able to lobby for and obtain, for example, international protocols regulating the sale of breast milk substitutes and procedures for warning consumers around the world of dangerous drugs. However, the success of the consumer movement has been limited by both its philosophy of consumerism and the opposition it has incurred, particularly from organized business and antiregulatory groups. The consumer movement has been largely predicated on a notion of rights. In March 1962, President John F. Kennedy set out four of these rights in his consumer address: to safety, to be informed, to choose, and to be heard. As developing world consumer activists became more prominent, the list of rights expanded to include not only further liberal individualistic

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rights, such as the right to redress and the right to consumer education, but the more declaratory statements concerned with economic and social justice: by the end of the 1970s, the consumer movement was campaigning also for the right to a healthy environment and the right to basic needs. Such rights committed the consumer movement to far more than that of offering guidance over best buys. Yet the problem with a rights-based perspective is that it essentially creates a shopping list of rights from which actors can pick and choose as they see fit. This became particularly acute by the 1980s, when other groups began to speak for the consumer. Organized business had long opposed the regulatory impulse of consumer protection. Concerted attacks were made on the U.S. consumer movement from its very inception: Consumers Union had to fend off repeated accusations of communist infiltration by those who wished to see it hauled up before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In the 1970s, Ralph Nader became a particular target of the antiregulatory movement, backed up by a revitalized political right and an organized business lobby in Washington. The economic problems of the 1970s meant regulation was seen to be too expensive and a campaign for a federal consumer protection agency was defeated. Once Ronald Reagan came into power, similar arguments were used in the international arena. In many ways, the UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection were the last hurrah of organized consumerism. IOCU’s efforts to obtain a Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations was spectacularly defeated. Not only did the U.S. administration oppose any such regulation of global business by the UN, but the Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations brought into existence a system of global governance (the World Trade Organization) that was especially unreceptive to the arguments of proregulatory groups such as IOCU. Finally, the modern marketplace has changed such that consumers do not look to the consumer testing movement in quite the same way. Although consumer testing is still popular, the consequences of shoddy and dangerous goods are either not so pronounced or are now covered by a range of government agencies. So pervasive has the concept of consumer protection become that it perhaps no longer needs a social movement to promote it. Indeed, consumers have turned their attention elsewhere, and it is to fair trade and ethical and green consumerism

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that that a new generation of affluent shopper now directs its energy. Matthew Hilton See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer Regulation; Consumer Rights and the Law; Consumer Sovereignty; Political and Ethical Consumption; Fair Trade

Further Readings Glickman, Lawrence B. Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Hilton, Matthew. Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hilton, Matthew. Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Mayer, Robert N. The Consumer Movement: Guardians of the Marketplace. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1989. Trumbull, Gunnar. Consumer Capitalism: Politics, Product Markets and Firm Strategy in France and Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

CONSUMING NATURE See Consuming the Environment; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption

CONSUMING

THE

ENVIRONMENT

It is commonly asserted by environmentalists that nature is being consumed by a vast array of cultural practices to the point that its very existence is under threat. This entry discusses this proposition in the light of analysis on the changing relationship between nature, consumption, and culture. One commonplace understanding of the relationship can be seen in the kind of millennial arguments proposed by Bill McKibben and his claims that we have now reached “the end of nature” (1989). McKibben claims that human activity, driven by the technological-industrial complex, has now altered whatever we once thought nature was. Wilderness

no longer exists in a pristine state, anywhere; forests and farmland has become thoroughly domesticated; marine and terrestrial environments have become polluted; even the climate appears to be altered, possibly irrevocably, as we face the threats of climate change. Nature is here confronted by an array of human-imposed threats, from acid rain to global warming, from the extinction of species to the destruction of the rainforest. A new variant emerges with the advent of new genetic and nanotechnologies, with their ability to alter and re-work DNA into new forms of life, evoking images of the “postnatural” and indeed, the “post-human” (Hayles 1999, McKibben 2003). Within this frame, nature, including human nature, is literally being consumed by culture and, in particular, by modernity’s rapacious capacity for depletion, exhaustion, improvement, and remaking. Consumption is pitted against nature, driven by selfpropelling logics of industrialism, materialism, and visions of economic progress. Closely aligned to such a discourse is a second story line of how the remains of nature are being consumed by and through representational practices. Denuded of any genuine authenticity and external referent, nature in this discourse becomes merely a sign, commodified and preserved by consumer culture, often Disneyfied, devoid of any legitimacy, according to Alexander Wilson. Research within this mode of thinking has examined the implosion of nature into artifice, and how this is achieved through myriad practices of commodification, fetishization, spectacular consumption, management, packaging, engineering, and other forms of mediation. An analysis of social practices of consumption is a particularly significant social pattern here. As the various entries in this encyclopedia testify, practices of consumption have had profound impacts on the structuring and self-definition of modern societies. Such changes include the following: first, a huge increase in the range of goods and services that are currently available, as markets and tastes have been significantly internationalized. Second, the increasing semiotization of products so that sign—rather than use value—becomes the key element in consumption. Third, the breaking down of some “traditionalized” institutions and structures so that consumer tastes become more fluid and open. And fourth, the increasing importance of consumption patterns to the forming of identity and hence some shift from producer power to consumer power.

Consuming the Environment

Zygmunt Bauman has argued that such changes amount to a structural shift in society as consumer conduct comes increasingly to provide the cognitive and moral focus of everyday life. The pleasure principle becomes a dominant and structuring idiom. Pleasure seeking becomes a duty since the consumption of goods and services has become the structural basis of Western societies. Social integration thus takes place less through the principles of normalization, confinement, and disciplinary power, as described by Michel Foucault or indeed by Bauman in the case of the Holocaust. Instead, it takes place through the “seduction” of the marketplace, through the mix of feelings and emotions generated by seeing, holding, hearing, testing, smelling, and moving through the extraordinary array of goods and services, places and environments, that characterize contemporary consumerism organized around a particular “culture of nature.” There is little doubt that some of these patterns of contemporary consumerism have had disastrous consequences for the environment. This is reflected in holes in the ozone layer, global warming, acid rain, nuclear power accidents, and the destruction of many local environments. Taken to its extreme, consumerism can also involve obtaining or purchasing new parts for the human body, or possibly in the near future, purchasing products for the enhancement of out-of-date or out-of-fashion bodies, a process that undermines a clear sense of the natural body inside as opposed to the unnatural body outside. And, as highlighted previously, such Western consumerism in which nature seems to have been turned into a mere artifact of consumer choice has become a core element in the critique of modernity by the environmental movement. But there is a further paradox here. This paradox is that the very development of consumerism has itself helped to generate the current critique of environmental degradation and the cultural focus on nature. The remainder of this entry examines elements of this paradox.

Consumerism and Environmental Reflexivity Environmentalism can be represented as presupposing a certain kind of consumerism. This is because one element of consumerism is a heightened reflexivity about the places and environments, the goods and services that are “consumed,” either literally, through a social encounter, or through visual consumption.

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As people reflect on such consumption, they develop not only a duty to consume but also certain rights, including the rights of the citizen as a consumer. Such rights include the belief that people are entitled to certain qualities of the environment, of air, water, sound, and scenery, and that these should extend into the future and to other populations. Contemporary Western societies have begun to shift the basis of citizenship from political rights to consumer rights, and within the bundle of the latter, environmental rights, especially linked to conceptions of nature as spectacle and recreation, are increasingly significant (for extensions of this argument, see Macnaghten and Urry 1998; Urry 2002). In their own research, Phil Macnaghten and John Urry have witnessed the growth of reflexivity as people confront the impacts of consumption practices in relation to other peoples (many of whom live in faraway places) and in relation to the long-term implications for future generations. Across numerous research encounters aimed at understanding the factors that shape environmental sensibilities, especially older and more socially mobile participants tended to express guilt that their own styles of consumption may have contributed, inadvertently, toward the worsening environment. As one woman perceptively said in a relatively recent research encounter: Female rural professional: In fact you always thought it was a good thing to be a consumer. That’s what they told us, keeping everyone in jobs. And now we realize it’s a double-edged sword.

Over the past two decades, there have been institutional attempts to mobilize such sentiment across an array of practices and initiatives aimed at developing greener, more ethical, and more sustainable forms of consumption. These range from the green consumer movement, to the consumer boycott movement, to the antiglobalization movement, to industry-led programs of corporate social responsibility, and to the success of a range of consumer products that are chosen for being fair trade (food products), organic (food products), locally produced (food products), humane (personal products and food products, such as free-range eggs), energy efficient (appliances and household products such as lightbulbs), and natural (personal and household cleaning products). Perhaps not surprisingly, such trends toward an enhanced environmental consciousness can be identified in attitude surveys that routinely draw out the fact that

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public attitudes toward environmental action are broadly positive, and that this appears to be true of both well-researched regions and the global context more generally. However, although an enhanced reflexivity may have helped constitute the environmentally conscious consumer, it can also be demonstrated that a more reflexive relationship with the environment may be generating a more complex and more contested politics of the environment. To understand this dynamic, one first needs to understand the specific historical contingencies through which modern environmentalism became constituted.

The Social Invention of Nature as Environment The contemporary configuration of nature as “the environment” in political and civic life is of relatively recent origin. The environment, as a set of diverse problems, had to be gathered up and presented as all symptomatic of a wider overarching global environmental crisis, according to Bronislaw Szerszynski. Beginning around 1962 with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the so-called prophets of doom helped formulate a language of the environment radically different from previous and largely disaggregated concerns over nature, where the environmental threat came to be regarded as of global proportions and as linked to dominant values of modernization and technological progress, notes John McCormick. What emerged from such processes was a dominant story line of the “fragile earth” under stress from human action and in need of care and protection from an imagined global community. Wolfgang Sachs calls this discourse of the environment as environmentalism framed through the “astronaut’s perspective”; of the environment conceived as a physical and global entity, maintained by a variety of biogeochemical processes rather than as a collection of states and cultures. What remains central to this perspective is the belief that we share the same global environment, that it comprises a set stock of issues, and that these are all symptoms of the same malaise, namely human society’s overexploitation and abuse of the natural world. The story line of the fragile and vulnerable earth has remained dominant in contemporary institutional framings of environmental policy and can be identified across a huge array of

sustainable development discourses emanating from the mass media, environmental organizations, government bodies, and corporations. Implicated in framing such a discourse are a wide variety of organizations and actors, including the global media, who have been of major importance to how people understand and make sense of environmental issues. Their role has been one not only of communicating and disseminating environmental information to the public, but also of actively constructing and even constituting the contemporary environmental agenda, partly in conjunction with environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This includes the complex interplay of narratives, story lines, images, icons, and metaphors through which environmental issues and events gain meaning. Indeed, throughout especially the 1980s and 1990s, environmental NGOs became increasingly adept at packaging powerful images for the national and international media. Reflexive to media requirement for novelty, drama, and human interest, pressure groups and par excellence Greenpeace, brought the global environment up close. Specifically, Andrew Ross describes a dominant genre of meaning in which the media have tended to frame environmental issues: In recent years we have become accustomed to seeing images of a dying planet, variously exhibited in grisly poses of ecological depletion and circulated by all sectors of genocidal atrocities. The clichés of the standard environmental movement are well known to all of us: on the one hand, belching smokestacks, seabirds mired in petrochemical sludge, fish floating belly up, traffic jams in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and clear-cut forests; on the other hand, the redeeming repertoire of pastoral imagery, pristine, green, and unspoiled by human habitation, crowned by the ultimate global spectacle, the fragile, vulnerable ball of spaceship earth. (1994, 171)

Consuming Personal Natures In 2003, Macnaghten examined how people responded to the global iconography of the environment and whether a scope for an embryonic and more reflexive politics of the environment could be identified. This research examined how people in fact responded when they were presented with a variety of global icons of “the natural environment.” Images included a number of physical threats such as

Consuming the Environment

deforestation, oil pollution, and dolphins caught in drift nets, juxtaposed with images of “pristine” and “independent” nature, including those of whales, tigers, and bears in the wild. At the bottom of the board was a further set of images of the globe with captions including, “It’s in our hands” and “Handle with care and it will last forever.” To what extent were such images able to perform a global nature in which people could unite as a shared imagined global community? To what extent did people feel part of the same global environment? Indeed, how did people respond when presented with such icons? The findings include the following: global icons of the natural environment had initial emotive appeal but tended to remain distant and abstract. People recognized such iconic images and their implied relationship to global threats—such as global warming, ozone depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and resource depletion, and so on—but tended to perceive such threats as a problem “out there,” detached from everyday life, making it easy for them to turn off. This was not due to a lack of knowledge of the scope and extent of global environmental issues. Indeed, the reality of an impending global environmental crisis appeared to have become commonplace for the research participants, providing a backdrop to a generic pessimism that pervaded discussions about the future. Added to this was the sense that little could be achieved—either at the level of the individual or through existing avenues for collective action—to mitigate such threats. This perception of a fundamental lack of agency in the face of global environmental threats permeated all the groups. Individual action was seen as largely ineffective and at best symbolic, both due to the global scale of the problems and to the perception of powerful commercial interests intractably embedded in systems of self-interest antithetical to global sustainability. However, what appeared distinctive in these discussions were the strategies adopted. In different ways, people were now reflexively choosing not to dwell on global environmental threats, as a pragmatic response to apparently intractable problems, and to maintain a positive outlook on life. An added complexity was that people themselves felt implicated in global environmental problems. Although, on occasion, this led to a sense of the need for shared action, more commonly this led to feelings of resignation and detachment. For many people,

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there were no easy answers; there was no longer a clear good guy and bad guy, nobody to blame and no one beyond blame. Constrained by everyday pressures of work and parenting, people accepted their own partial guilt as consumers, as motorists, as employees of business, and so on. All people could do was their (little) bit, thinking more about (manageable) local issues than (unmanageable) global ones. So far, this entry has suggested that the idea of a global environmental agenda appears distant and abstract, and unlikely to engage people in their dayto-day activities. This does not imply that people are no longer engaged or interested in environmental issues but that the reflexive character of public concerns toward environmental issues may be subtly altering. Thus, issues such as whales, the Amazon, and acid rain, that were prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, have, according to Michael Jacobs, migrated toward issues that impinge more directly and more immediately on “me,” my body, my family, and my future—such as allergies, traffic, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and genetically modified foods. Jacobs suggests that this shift in orientation, directly associated with sociological trends toward individualization, consumerism, and globalization, changes how the environment is experienced and how people are likely to collectively respond to environmental initiatives and campaigns. Macnaghten and Urry found that the environment is experienced most intensely when it is part of the personal realm of everyday life. The local and personal environment tends to “hit home” and matter more. Indeed, it is often through personal, rather than mediated, encounters that people become involved in environmental matters. Nevertheless, this does not imply a straightforward move from mediated to unmediated encounters with the environment. The personal dimension to environmental risk is often itself more or less completely indebted to mediation. Rather, it suggests a move toward a media situation in which concerns for the “distant other” connect to everyday proximate concerns, notes Luc Boltanski. People may want to be a small part of the imagined community concerned about the plight of the Amazon rainforest, international whaling, the burning of fossil fuels, and so on, but such concern appears fleeting and short-lived if it remains dislocated from everyday life concerns.

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Consumption and Time Use

It has been suggested here that the environment is commonly experienced, not as a set of physical issues, but tangled up as part of social life in which matters of consumption play an ever-widening role. The “human” and “relational” aspects of the environment are often what are resonant. The environment becomes meaningful when it engages with life, inhibiting or facilitating the development of ongoing human relationships, whether in the context of the family, friends, or communities of interest. In this sphere, consumption will continue to play a role as a vital and enduring space through which ethical choices are determined in the pursuit of a fairer, more sustainable and better world. Phil Macnaghten See also Body, The; Commodification; Consumer Protest: Environment; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Happiness; Political and Ethical Consumption; Risk Society; Social Movements

Further Readings Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1992. Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Jacobs, Michael. Environmental Modernisation: The New Labour Agenda. London: Fabian Society, 1999. Macnaghten, Phil. “Embodying the Environment in Everyday Life Practices.” Sociological Review 51, no. 1 (2003): 63–84. Macnaghten, Phil, and Urry, John. Contested Natures. London: Sage, 1998. McCormick, John. The Global Environmental Movement. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1995. McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Viking, 1998. First published 1989. McKibben, Bill. Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human Nature. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Ross, Andrew. The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society. London: Verso, 1994. Sachs, Wolfgang. “Sustainable Development and the Crisis of Nature: On the Political Anatomy of an Oxymoron.” In Living with Nature, edited by Frank Fischer and Maarten A. Hajer, 23–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Strathern, Marilyn. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw. “Uncommon Ground: Moral Discourse, Foundationalism and the Environmental Movement.” PhD diss., Lancaster University, 1993. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1992.

CONSUMPTION

AND

TIME USE

Consumption is related to time in multifarious, complex ways. Obviously, consumption takes time, whether it is watching a movie, buying groceries, or driving your new car. However, consumption can also save time, such as when the new car replaces your cheaper but slower bicycle. Consumption and time are also connected because of the time it takes to earn the money required for consumption. Working longer hours and earning more money per hour both allow more consumption. At the same time, longer working hours leave less time for consumption, and a higher salary implies more forgone earning for each hour spent consuming rather than producing. Consumption and production are closely intertwined, and balancing them is just as much a matter of time as it is of money. Changing patterns of time use change are both the cause and the consequence of changing patterns in consumption. Consumption, both cultural and material, has long been known to be strongly based on class. It is argued that a shift occurred in the social functions that consumption fulfills. Where Fordist production yielded standardized goods for the masses, post-Fordist production for affluent buyers became increasingly differentiated. Producers anticipate consumers’ potential desires, allowing consumers to find symbolic significance and self-expression through consumer practices (called “sign value” by Jean Baudrillard). Material and cultural consumption have become more central in people’s lives, to the point that some argue we live in a consumer culture and that the place in the consumption process gains importance as an identity marker next to, or even instead of, the place in the production process. The symbolic significance of consumption shifted emphasis, consumption being interpreted more from a general cultural or psychological perspective than from a class perspective.

Consumption and Time Use

People increasingly aspire to levels of consumption that do not seem to match their financial means. In turn, these desires prompt them to invest more time in acquiring those means. So the freedom to consume comes at a price, which consists of the long hours of work required to be able to do the desired spending. Especially upper-middle-class people were at risk to become dissatisfied with their income levels. Juliet Schor formulated a logic behind the rising aspirations of consumers. An increasing inequality in income and wealth was highlighted by vastly rising levels of affluence among the top 20 percent of the income distribution, visible in ostentatious spending on luxury goods. The social group one compares oneself to and that informs one’s consumer desires, changed from one’s own, often socioeconomically homogeneous, neighborhood to better paid colleagues and enviable media personalities. These vertical rather than horizontal points of reference fueled consumer aspirations. Apart from booming consumer debts, working hours increased to fulfill the increased desires, a logic Schor called “the cycle of work and spend.” Once trapped in the cycle of work and spend, it is difficult to get out. Elaborating the pioneering work by Gary S. Becker, “the acceleration of consumption” was further explained by Staffan B. Linder in terms of the increasing productivity of both work and leisure. People will choose an extra hour of leisure instead of an extra hour of paid work only if the value of the former exceeds the value of the latter. Therefore, an increase in the productivity of work, which also raises hourly wages, calls for an increase in productivity of leisure, to make it more rewarding and to keep the work-leisure balance in equilibrium. Leisure productivity is typically enhanced by investing more money per leisure hour in commodities such as media devices or cars, and in services such as tickets to the theater or a theme park, which allow for efficient and more or less guaranteed “quality time.” As productivity of both work and leisure increases, less time for idling remains, time itself becoming an increasingly scarce resource. So rising affluence has not led to more leisure time, as was believed would be the case half a century ago. Becker, Linder, Schor, and others argue that people’s material needs are most unlikely to remain stable when productivity increases. They point out that consumption becomes more intense, involves higher pecuniary investments, and leaves less consumption

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time per item or activity. This also has consequences for cultural consumption, the increasingly eclectic character of which has given rise to the use of terms such as cultural omnivore or voracious cultural consumer (i.e., people whose cultural consumption is not guided by former distinctions between good and bad taste). Clearly, Thorstein Veblen’s picture of the leisure class, in which the money-rich were also time-rich, spending this time on conspicuous consumption, does not hold for the present leisure class, which needs to put in many hours of work to achieve the desired level of consumption. For them, being money-rich implies being time-poor. This not only affects work and consumption, but also challenges time to spend with family or friends, especially among women, typically burdened by the larger share of child care and household chores.

Data and Analysis Recognizing the importance of time use for understanding consumption brings time use data into the picture. Time use data are not all that different from other survey data. They too are obtained by asking a random sample of a population to cooperate by responding to a survey. The resulting data are to be treated as any other survey data: the possibility of skewed (non)response needs to be taken into account, and generalizations to the population at large are subject to tests of statistical significance. In three respects, however, time use data are different indeed: (1) in the way they are recorded, (2) in the way they relate to the respondent’s daily life, and (3) in the ways they open up for analysis. When inquisitive about people’s consumption—or more generally, about their daily lives—and when set to map that by way of a survey (rather than, e.g., participative observation), roughly two inroads can be taken. One is to ask people questions about their activities, for instance, how often they engage in sports per week or how long they watch television on an average day. Alternatively, and this is the core of time use surveys, one can ask them to keep track of their activities in some sort of diary for some time, be it a day, some days, or a full week. Whether people report in their own words or by naming entries from an accompanying list of activities what results is a data-set that, with more or less precision, mirrors some period of their daily life.

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Those data are believed to have some merits in terms of precision, being a recording that is more than mere estimation, depending less on memory and being less prone to desirability effects. As to the latter: each day holds twenty-four hours for everyone, which reduces the chance that people unconsciously overreport activities they desired to do more than those that they actually did. Of course, such time use data reveal more about everyday activities than about activities undertaken infrequently, such as attending operas or weddings. The resulting data open up a number of possibilities for analysis. The most straightforward one is to calculate the total time spent per activity per day or week. Combing these with information from an accompanying questionnaire allows for observations such as “women are involved in unpaid work much longer than men” or “teenagers these days spend more time behind the computer than in front of the television” (all these exemplary statements are actually true for the Netherlands). In the case that time use data for various years are available, longitudinal observations can be made, such as “people spend more time these days on fun shopping than they did ten years ago.” Once total time per activity is calculated, time use data are in no way different from other types of data. Things can become a bit more complicated, however, when the focus of analysis shifts to the timing rather than the duration of activities. But even then, a bit of logical thinking is more important than highbrow statistics. On the basis of the timing of activities, another set of observations can be made, such as “people these days still largely work in nine-to-five jobs.” By comparing successive days, observations on the routines in daily life can be made, such as “for many people, Monday still largely resembles Tuesday.” Based on additional observations that can—but need not—be part of a time use registration, other fields of research may be addressed too. When location of activities is known, time use data are applicable in mobility studies. When it is known in whose company an activity was undertaken, patterns of social life can be studied. When secondary activities are known in addition to primary activities, the issue of multiple tasking can be addressed. Over time, in many countries, a particular design for conducting time use studies was adopted, each clever of course, but often far from compatible.

Toward the end of the last century, harmonized European time use surveys (HETUS) were developed that, if adopted widely, yield compatible data and enhance comparative analyses, at least within Europe. To date, some fifteen countries have adopted this HETUS design, though with considerable differentiation in the year of measurement. The next section presents some data from the longest time series of time use data in Europe: those in the Netherlands, where such data have been collected every five years since 1975 (Van den Broek and Breedveld 2004). Time use data are not gathered with a focus on any particular research question, but have a broad scope. They are therefore applicable to address a broad spectrum of issues. Typically, when deeply interested in one particular issue, one will find some information in time use data, but at the same time, probably not all the details one might have hoped to find. This also applies to the issue of consumption. Yes, time use data inform about consumption in some respects. But no, not all one might want to know about consumption can be learned from time use data. The following topics were chosen to reflect the potential of time use data in general, as well as in relation to consumption in particular. In the discussion that follows, the merits and shortcomings of time use data for studying consumption are addressed.

Trends: Time Use and Consumption in the Netherlands, 1975 to 2005 The Dutch time use data encompass a full week. That amounts to 168 hours, or, in terms of the data, 672 reports about main activity per quarter-hour. In the course of a week, people engage in numerous and diverse activities. Largely as one wishes, these can be analyzed and presented at various degrees of aggregation or specificity. The most general level of aggregation is the categorization of all those activities into three broad categories: obligations, personal time, and leisure time. This categorization proves to be an informative one, as it shows that the Dutch became more industrious over the 1975 to 2005 period, to the detriment of the volume of their leisure time (Table 1). In spite of earlier predictions about the ascent of a leisure society, these trends are much in line with the theorizing mentioned earlier. Looking into the time use data a bit more specifically, by disaggregating obligations into paid work,

Consumption and Time Use

Table 1

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Trends in Obligations, Personal Time, and Leisure Time in the Netherlands, 1975–2005, Hours per Week, Population Age 12 and Older

Obligations Personal time Leisure time

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

40.7 76.3 47.9

40.8 76.8 47.0

40.7 75.3 49.0

42.0 75.5 47.2

42.6 75.0 47.3

43.9 76.6 44.8

44.3 76.2 44.7

Note: Account does not fully sum up to the weekly 168 hours. Some activities are hard to ascribe to any of the three categories, some time is unreported time, and filling out the time use diary itself is reported too. Together, this amounts to 1.5 to 2 hours per week. Source: Andries van den Broek and Koen Breedveld, eds. 2004, 132.

Table 2

Trends in Paid Work in the Netherlands, by Gender, 1975–2005, Hours per Week and Percentages, Population Aged 20 to 65

Paid work of working, hours Paid work in week, % Paid work in week, %, male Paid work in week, %, female

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

36.2 48 77 17

35.4 47 71 22

35.3 48 68 25

35.3 53 72 32

35.4 56 76 36

34.3 63 80 47

35.6 65 76 53

Source: Andries van den Broek and Koen Breedveld, eds. 2004, 14.

care tasks, and education, and by focusing on the “potential labor force” only (people age 20–64), it becomes clear that the growth of obligations is in fact a growth of the weekly amount of paid work done. Diving into the data a bit deeper, by calculating which proportions of the potential labor force were involved in paid work over that week, one can observe that the rise in paid work is not caused by the lengthening of the average work week of those working, but by a growth of the proportion of the potential labor force that had in fact done paid work in that week. And a further disaggregation by gender reveals that this is completely caused by the growing labor market participation of women (Table 2). As a result, Dutch society, where the bread-winner model was dominant, witnessed the ascent of the dualearner household. Increasingly, both spouses work. As a result, more households than before fare better in terms of discretionary money, but fare less well in terms of discretionary time. Here, already, general time use data start to relate to the issue of consumption, in this case to Schor’s work-and-spend cycle. Superficially, these trends substantiate the existence of such a cycle. Yet, especially

in the Dutch case, there is a competing explanation for these trends. In the Netherlands, women have been discouraged to do paid work. Women were expected to become stay-at-home mothers rather than pursue a professional career. Fifty years ago, women in the civil service were terminated the day they got married. With some delay compared to other countries, by the 1970s, women in the Netherlands voiced the desire for more opportunities to develop and sustain themselves. Picking up on this, government policy started stimulating female labor market participation. Though initially no doubt inspired by the desire to enhance economic independence of women, the increase in their earning and spending capacity nicely fitted the logic of the rise of consumer culture. So what was the effect of the decline in leisure time on the way leisure is spent? Was leisure of all kinds affected in equal measure? Distinguishing eight kinds of leisure activities, the answer clearly is no, apart from a reduction in leisure time, there also was a reprioritization within leisure (Table 3). Despite the cut in leisure time, four kinds of leisure were on the rise: use of electronic media, going

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Table 3

Consumption and Time Use

Ways in Which Leisure Is Spent in the Netherlands, 1975–2005, Hours per Week, Population Age 12 and Older

Reading print media Audio, TV, PC, Internet Social contacts Civil society Going out Sports and exercise Other hobbies Mobility

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

6.1 12.4 12.7 2.0 2.4 1.5 8.2 2.6

5.7 12.1 12.5 2.0 2.2 1.5 8.7 2.3

5.3 13.6 11.5 2.2 2.4 2.1 9.0 2.9

5.1 13.7 11.4 2.1 2.6 1.8 7.7 2.9

4.6 14.2 10.9 2.2 2.6 2.1 7.5 3.2

3.9 14.8 10.1 1.8 2.5 1.8 6.8 3.0

3.8 15.1 9.1 1.8 2.7 2.6 6.1 3.5

Source: Andries van den Broek and Koen Breedveld, eds. 2004, 134.

out, sports, and traveling time for leisure purposes (mobility). With the exception of sports, these all are capital-intensive ways of spending leisure (though extended TV watching and computer use reduce the costs per hour). On the other hand, reading, social contacts, and other hobbies were cut down on more than can be explained by the general decline in leisure alone. Lacking precise details on costs of leisure activities, this nonetheless seems in line with a shift from time-intensive to commodity-intensive ways of spending leisure. Besides, household expenditure figures substantiate the growing capital-intensity of leisure.

Conclusion General time use data as presented in this entry inform about consumption, even without going into the timing of consumption, the extent to which it is a social activity, the ascent of shopping for fun, or the shifts within media use. On the other hand, the general nature of time use data implies they cannot be put to use in answering every detailed question relevant to any given issue, such as, in this case, consumption. There is no known time use survey where the accompanying questionnaire asks about the symbolic meaning of consumption, about things purchased, or about money spent. Then again, nothing inherent to time use studies should stop a design along such lines from being developed. Those interested in studying consumption from the angle of time use might want to scrutinize the possibilities of existing time use data for more detailed analysis as well as think about building additional elements into new time use surveys. Clearly, time use data offer unique

possibilities for the study of consumption, especially the purchase and use of commodities as an integral part of people’s everyday practices, which is where and how most consumption takes place. Among the issues to be researched in the future are questions as to how and whether consumption affects working hours and leisure patterns, how it changes the nature of socializing in leisure time, and perhaps most fundamentally, how consumption, and the related need to earn, affect social cohesion and human happiness. Andries van den Broek and Koen van Eijck See also Comparing Consumer Cultures; Convenience; Harried Leisure Class; Leisure; Linder, Staffan Burenstam; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Time-Use Diaries; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings Becker, Gary S. “A Theory of the Allocation of Time.” The Economic Journal 75, (1965): 493–517. Bittman, Michael, and Judy Wajcman. “The Rush Hour: The Character of Leisure Time and Gender Equity.” Social Forces 79 (2000): 165–189. Bocock, Robert. Consumption. London: Routledge, 1993. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Campbell, Colin. “The Sociology of Consumption.” In Acknowledging Consumption, edited by Daniel Miller, 96–126. London: Routledge, 1995. Linder, Staffan B. The Harried Leisure Class. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Rosa, Hartmut, and William E. Scheuerman. High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008.

Consumption in Postsocialist China Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Schor, Juliet. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Sullivan, Oriel, and Jonathan Gershuny. “Inconspicuous Consumption: Work-Rich, Time-Poor in the Liberal Market Economy.” Journal of Consumer Culture 4 (2004): 79–100. Sullivan, Oriel, and Tally Katz-Gerro. “The Omnivore Thesis Revisited: Voracious Cultural Consumers.” European Sociological Review 23 (2007): 123–137. van den Broek, Andries, and Koen Breedveld, eds. Trends in Time: The Use and Organization of Time in the Netherlands, 1975–2000. The Hague, The Netherlands: Social and Cultural Planning Office, 2004. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Theory of Institutions. New York: Mentor, 1953.

CONSUMPTION IN POSTSOCIALIST CHINA Between the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and China’s entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the Chinese economy shifted decisively from socialist autarky to a globally connected, consumer-oriented political economy. In 1992, the government ended rationing for grains, cloth, and other basic consumer items, and in 1993, the National People’s Congress passed the first Consumer Protection Law. In 1995, the six-day work week disappeared for city workers, and the weekend became a pivot for commercial and social life. In 1993, China had its first public Internet connection, Yahoo! entered the China market in 1999, and by 2008, China had more Internet users than any other country in the world. At the start of the twenty-first century, most of China’s 350 million households had experienced more than two decades of rising disposable incomes and 250 million people had moved out of abject poverty. Agricultural employment peaked in 1995, and by 2007, the majority of the population worked in service and industrial jobs, many producing or distributing consumer goods. A postsocialist consumer revolution had decisively reshaped the material

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culture, social life, and patterns of inequality across the entire nation of more than 1.3 billion people.

Material Culture In 2002, the National People’s Congress designated expansion of consumer demand as the nation’s long-term strategic goal, and in 2004, the Central Economic Work Conference formally endorsed a transition to consumption-driven growth. By 2007, China was the world’s top producer of cement, the top producer of carbon emissions, the top destination for inward foreign direct investment (FDI), and also the leading market for platinum jewelry and cell phones. By 2007, Li Ning, a three-time gold medalist at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles who had created his own line of signature sportswear that included a line of sports shoes endorsed by Shaquille O’Neal, was wealthier than Tiger Woods. An economy that for three decades (1949–1979) had been defined by the ideals of ascetic socialism had become a twenty-first-century pillar of global consumer capitalism. International luxury brands looked to Chinese consumers for future growth, as did such mass retailers such as Proctor & Gamble and Amway. By 2005, there was cell phone service in all but the most remote mountain villages, and 78 percent of rural households owned a cell phone. In the final years of the Mao era (1949–1979), state-owned or collectively owned stores controlled retail sales, and customers were supplicants, often forced to accept shoddy goods and limited choices. Rural households relied almost entirely on family labor, local products, and recycled goods to clothe their families and furnish their homes. Few ever purchased anything beyond the limited items stocked by the commune marketing and supply co-op. By the turn of the twenty-first century, multinational retailers like Carrefour and Walmart had aggressively moved to dominate retail sales in markets far beyond the largest coastal cities, and by 2010, China had four of the largest ten shopping complexes in the world, including the two largest. However, the growth was not only in high-end commerce. Rather, as in the commercial revolution in Shanghai during the 1920s, expansion of the luxury market stimulated retail sales and innovation among low-cost domestic businesses. In coastal metropolises and small county towns, peddlers displaying wares on curbside tarps

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and handcarts crowded sidewalks within a few feet of upscale department stores. Commercial advertising, which had been virtually unknown between 1956 and 1980, not only reemerged with great vitality but quickly migrated beyond print media and television. By the twentyfirst century, facades in many commercial districts incorporated enormous digital screens to broadcast a constant stream of products to pedestrians or anyone in a passing vehicle. In 1997, Jason Jiang developed the idea to place video monitors broadcasting advertising in buses, subways, and the elevators of residential buildings. In 2005, his firm Focus Media went public on the NASDAQ. Postsocialist consumption was driving the economy and the images of this commercial juggernaut were ubiquitous.

Social Life In the years of high socialism (1956–1978), government policy deliberately restricted the social and temporal reach of consumer-driven socializing. The government banned temple fairs and severely punished any who dared host the elaborate funerals and weddings that traditionally had provided the occasion for lavish spending and public feasting. By attacking all local associational activity not directly under the control of the Communist Party, the government not only ended religious pilgrimages and opera troupes, but also eliminated the semiformal groups that drew together neighbors and friends who shared an interest in calligraphy or martial arts. As a result, in villages and in towns, public socializing was restricted to gatherings directly sponsored by local officials or traveling troupes staffed by the People’s Liberation Army. In urban areas, most families lived in enterprise compounds within a short walk of their workplace, and turned to company stores, cafeterias, and recreation halls for most consumer goods and services. As in villages, urban social life similarly revolved around official priorities. Individuals participated because they had no other options. The consumer revolution of postsocialist China dramatically expanded the physical locations for socializing and created a new distance between work time and personal time. After 1985, there was an explosive growth of leisure venues, restaurants, and new forms of entertainment. At the high end were multinational restaurant chains, bowling

alleys, and even golf courses. But numerically, the greatest expansion came at the local level, where individual entrepreneurs set up pool tables on river banks, opened beer gardens on basketball courts, and turned warehouses into dance halls. All but the most destitute could routinely turn to commercial venues for their entertainment, and young adults and adolescents in particular became target customers. As a result, these consumer investments created the material and aspirational parameters of a postsocialist youth culture as decisively as the top-down political mobilizations during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1969) had created the youthful Red Guards and their communal attacks on all things bourgeois. During the high socialist years (1956–1978), the bureaucratic party-state created an intense public social life with no competition from nongovernment or market actors. With the return of private commerce and investment into production of consumer goods and services, forms of socializing became ever-more commercial and diverse. Moreover, within these new spaces of unofficial sociability at dance halls, bowling alleys, temple fairs, Internet bars, and health clubs, participants nurtured ties of friendship and trust beyond the direct control of either employers or officials. The result is a heterogeneous and robust social sphere and public life that is more than the obvious veneer of commercial consumerism.

Inequality and Mass Consumption Between 1985 and 1995, China experienced the most rapid increase in income inequality ever tracked by the World Bank. By 2002, China’s national Gini coefficient that calibrates the degree of income inequality was comparable to that of Mexico or Indonesia. Under the planned socialist economy (1956–1978) there had also been a wide gap in living standards between urban and rural China, and between villagers living in lowlands with irrigated fields and those eking out an existence in dry mountain villages. However, because few rural residents traveled beyond their home town or local community, the differences in standards of living were often invisible to local residents. The impact of increasing income inequality after 1985, however, did not automatically confine lowwage workers and farm families to the positions of envious onlookers in the postsocialist consumer revolution. Between 1978 and 2006, real per capita

Consumption in Postsocialist China

disposable household incomes in both cities and villages increased by a factor of 6.7 and the Engels coefficient that estimates the relative share of food purchases in total household budgets documents a steady increase in discretionary consumer purchases. For example, in 1978, urban families spent 57.5 percent of their income on food, and rural families spent 67.7 percent. By 2000, the Engels ratio had fallen to 39.4 percent in cities and to 49.1 percent in the countryside. By 2007, the percentage had fallen still lower to 35.8 percent for urban households and 43 percent for rural households. Income inequality increased during the 1980s and 1990s, but because the double-digit macrolevel growth significantly raised the purchasing power of 90 percent of households, poverty fell and real incomes substantially increased. Moreover, while the urban-rural income gap continued to increase after 2002, national surveys in 2005 documented declining income gaps among rural residents and relatively stable inequalities among urban residents. One observes real and relative gains in terms of ownership of consumer durables that had once been luxuries even for urban households. For example, in 1985, 48 percent of urban families owned washing machines and only 7 percent a refrigerator; by 2007, 46 percent of rural households owned a washing machine and 26 percent a refrigerator. In 1985, electric fans were prized possessions in cities and towns. By 2000, there were 123 fans per 100 rural households and 168 in urban homes. By 2007, the statistical yearbooks had stopped recording the number of fans and only documented the urban-rural disparity in ownership of air conditioning units: 8.5 for every 100 rural households versus 95 for every 100 urban homes. Of course, not all washing machines and refrigerators are equal in quality or price. However, the routinization of these purchases across income groups clearly documents the centrality of consumer desire and competition for consumers within the Chinese postsocialist economy. Income inequality increased after 1985 not because millions fell into poverty, but because those in well-endowed villages close to cities benefited from market reform far more than those living in the hinterlands, and because international firms competed for highly skilled professionals by paying first-world wages. Over time, the glaring disparities in living standards may fuel attitudes of dispossession and exclusion. When pedicab drivers (and passengers)

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are edged off the street by chauffeur-driven cars, and guards at exclusive housing estates turn back unlicensed service personnel or anyone in shabby dress, comparisons to one’s earlier even greater poverty will not compensate for the knowledge that you and your family will never buy a car or eat in the restaurants you pass every day as you wait for the bus. In the year of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, however, anger at income inequality did not emerge as politically destabilizing. In part, citizens did not mobilize around issues of income inequality because average incomes had risen through 2007 and because the national leadership of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao succeeded in using national revenues to fund inland infrastructure, reduce school fees, eliminate taxes on farmers, and create a national, if meager, rural health insurance plan. In a postsocialist China, the Communist leadership proclaimed consumers and the service economy as drivers of economic growth at the same time as they maintained political monopolies that legitimated and enabled substantial redistribution.

Debates Over Consumerism and Consumer Culture Within China As the postsocialist economy evolved, so did debates about its broader cultural and political significance. Given the conventional hostility of communist ideology to the bourgeoisie and the Marxist emphasis on the primacy of production, Communist Party spokespeople and media not surprisingly attacked the negative side of a consumer-driven economy and associated consumer culture. One strand of this discussion focused on consumerism as the defining element of cultural and moral degradation in the contemporary global era. Articles in People’s Daily (the premier national newspaper and organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party) repeatedly linked consumerism to materialism, hedonism, and worship of money, and took particular interest in the consumer behavior of young adults born after 1980. In academic journals, there was more varied debate. On one hand were those who emphasized the negative dimension, viewing the rise of consumer culture as a fetishistic escape. Jean Baudrillard is a key reference for these intellectual critics, as is George Ritzer’s argument about the disenchantment of consumerism. But there was an equally strong strand

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that identified the consumer as an agent of change. Some celebrated the activism of homeowners who challenged alliances between developers and local governments; others lauded consumer activist Wang Hai, who had gained national fame and subsequently a national hotline and website (http://www.wanghai .net) by pursuing the clause of the 1993 Consumer Rights Law that granted compensation worth twice the initial purchase price to any consumer who could demonstrate the sale of a shoddy product.

and approaching that of Germany. Calibrated in the metric used by the World Bank to capture comparable real standards of living, China’s GDP in 2006 reached 10.21 trillion purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars, thereby placing its economy second in the world after the United States. In 2007, the combined stock market capitalization in China’s two stock exchanges surpassed its GDP. The postsocialist economy is deeply embedded in the flows of global trade and capitalism; postsocialist consumerism has been hard wired into the foundational institutions.

Future Directions The Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) grew tenfold between 1978 and 2007. It doubled first between 1978 and 1987 and again between 1987 and 1996. Thus, one future direction of scholarship is to track and document how macroeconomic gains track onto consumption patterns among households of different income deciles. To track the incomes of more than 1.3 billion people is essential to understanding the historical contours of postsocialist consumption. However, it is not easy. The task is particularly challenging not only because households of similar incomes vary significantly in their purchases, but because the more than 140 million people who migrated from villages to cities between 1985 and 2005 are often omitted from officially released statistics. Only when scholars complete household-level surveys on a national scale that capture and track the changes in consumer behavior and spending can they accurately compare and contrast Chinese consumer behavior with that of other times and places. The second future direction relates to safety of consumer products. In 2008, Chinese consumers learned that for years milk powder had been adulterated with the chemical melamine. In earlier years, cases of tainted cough syrup, poisoned pet food, and toys with lead paint had primarily created unease and fear of Chinese consumer products in overseas markets. The strong reaction within China to the milk powder scandal therefore signaled a new maturity and assertiveness among domestic customers. There is already strong legislation in China; the issue remains how to have effective implementation. Food safety issues precipitated advances in consumer protection in Europe, North America, and Japan. Will China now follow suit? In 2006, China’s nominal GDP exceeded 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars, larger than that of France

Deborah S. Davis See also Comparing Consumer Cultures; Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer Policy (China); Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe; Engel’s Law; Globalization; Mass Production and Consumption

Further Readings Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage, 1998. Bergsten, C. Fred, Bates Gill, Nicholas Lardy, and Derek Mitchell. China: The Balance Sheet. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Croll, Elisabeth. China’s New Consumers. London: Routledge, 2006. Davis, Deborah, ed. The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Davis, Deborah. “Urban Consumer Culture.” The China Quarterly 183 (September 2005): 677–694. Davis, Deborah. “Urban Chinese Homeowners as CitizenConsumers.” In The Ambivalent Consumer, edited by Sheldon Garon and Patricia Maclachlan, 281–299. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Davis, Deborah, and Wang Feng, eds. Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China. Palo Alta, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Donald, Stephanie Hemelrik, and Robert Benewick. The State of China Atlas: Mapping the World’s Fastest Growing Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Garon, Sheldon, and Patricia L. Maclachlan. The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Monograph, 2003. Goodman, David S., ed. The New Rich in China. London: Routledge, 2008.

Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe Hanser, Amy. Service Encounters. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Hockx, Michel, and Julia Straus. Culture in the Contemporary PRC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. National Bureau of Statistics of China. China Statistical Yearbook 2007. Beijing China Statistics Press, 2007. http://stats.gov.cn. Naughton, Barry. The Chinese Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993. Watson, James L. Golden Arches East. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Yan, Yunxiang. The Flow of Gifts. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Yan, Yunxiang. Private Life under Socialism. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Zhang, Li, and Aihwa Ong. Privatizing China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Zheng, Tiantian. Red Lights: The Life of Sex Workers in Urban China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Zheng, Yongnian. Technological Empowerment. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

CONSUMPTION IN POSTSOCIALIST SOCIETIES: EASTERN EUROPE Consumption in postsocialist Eastern European societies comprises specific consumption practices, meanings, and symbols that are characteristic of countries whose social, political, economic, and cultural space has been rapidly transformed from a socialist planned economy to a capitalist market economy. This is often characterized by consumerism and a high prominence of consumption-related lifestyles and from totalitarian political regime to democracy. The beginning of the period of transformation is usually considered to be 1989, although the dismantling process of the socialist bloc started at different times in different countries. This entry covers countries either formerly belonging to the Soviet Union (such as Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia) or its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe (such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland). Postsocialist consumer culture can also refer to various parts of the world that are in transition from socialism, such as China, but this is not covered in this entry. It must be noted that due to the sociocultural and economic variety of the former Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe, no uniform

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description can be given for the whole development of its consumer culture. However, several trends, phenomena, and key processes are common to this area. These can be outlined based on a synthesis of studies on postsocialist consumption conducted in various disciplines—anthropology, ethnology, sociology of consumption, cultural studies—since the beginning of the 1990s. The bulk of these studies use data from the former socialist bloc of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, as well as Russia and Ukraine. The understanding of postsocialist consumer culture primarily focuses on the contrast between consumer culture behind the so-called iron curtain and the West (primarily Western and North—European countries and the United States) as well as developments after the fall of the iron curtain, which are often understood as “re-Westernization,” a term launched in the middle of 1990s by a group of Scandinavian and Baltic researchers led by Marju Lauristin. One of the central notions here is “transition culture”— particularly influentially theorized by Michael Kennedy—as the movement from dictatorship to democracy and from planned economy to market economy. While transition tends to overemphasize the movement from one situation to another, transformation—another important concept in the previously mentioned approaches—focuses more on the complexity and unfinished, ever-changing character of the processes in these societies, which in turn influence how people consume goods and make meaning about them, that is, construct a particular consumer culture.

Socialist Heritage State provision systems and the resulting retail trade in different countries of the Soviet Union (e.g., in the Baltics as opposed to Russia) or the Eastern European countries (e.g., East Germany) were fairly different. Also, times of relative affluence (e.g., late 1960s) were replaced by times of stagnation and a sharpening shortage (early 1980s), thus a very black-and-white contrast between the “then” and “today” can be at times misleading; however, for analytical purposes and general understanding, various common features can be outlined, although countries and times differed. The socialist time was characterized by shortage of goods “dictatorship over needs,” according to Ferenc Feher and colleagues, and a forced homogeneity of lifestyle. Many of today’s portrayals of the consumption of the 1960s to the 1980s show

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it through the prism of desire for freedom and consumer sovereignty, which embodied a mundane form of civic freedom. To find ways of bypassing the inefficient system of provision, various forms of soft, mundane resistance were developed by people under socialism, one of its most vivid forms being what has been called the “second economy” or “informal economy” of mutual, social, capital-based relationships of underhanded deals of provisioning and reciprocal information exchange on the availability of goods. In this, the logics of economic and symbolic exchange sometimes clashed and sometimes existed peacefully side by side. In spite of all its deficiencies, the socialist consumer culture is often represented in the accounts of primarily the elderly as a time of solidarity and a more respectful relationship between consumers and things, subjects and objects. Since there was no market economy–based cycle of fashions and quick obsolescence of things, there was less waste and “colourful cheap trash,” as noted by sociologists of media and consumption Margit Keller and Triin Vihalemm in a study based on young people’s essays comparing consumption in the Soviet Union and in the independent Estonia at the end of 1990s. Thus, people were either consciously or unconsciously “sustainable” in their everyday consumption practices, and today’s consumer culture is, to a certain extent, shaped by sometimes nostalgic recollections of the socialist times.

Stages of Development of the Postsocialist Consumer Culture In each of the countries of the region in focus, the path of development has been different due to different political and economic models applied. No periodization of the change in postsocialist consumer culture can be made that applies equally to all these countries, but since the development has been particularly contrasting in the Baltic countries (from the Soviet system to relatively affluent and fastdeveloping European Union members), its example is primarily used to illustrate the change. In the following list, the periods are presented together with key words that characterize that stage of development: 1. 1988–1991: Breaking away from the old system, first private firms, the first influx of Western goods, the start of foreign travel, and a major inflow of Western tourists

2. 1991–1994: Radical reforms, rapid marketization of the economy, slowly rising living standards, primary satisfaction of the “thirst” for Western goods and lifestyles, proliferation of forgeries of international brands 3. 1995–1998: Economic stabilization, certain “maturation” of the consumer culture, aesthetization, postmaterialization of commercial signs (e.g., advertising) 4. 1999–2004: Preparations for the European Union (EU)—accession and joining of the EU for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland; the growth of living standard and consumption levels; a fast increase of new shopping outlets, especially shopping malls and supermarket chains; rapid development of marketing communications (branding); and the emergence of recreational shopping as a new cultural form 5. 2005–2008: EU postaccession period— economic boom between 2005–2007 resulting in rising levels of consumerism (i.e., consumption oriented to lifestyle and self-expression), real-estate boom, and others 6. 2008– : Economic decline starting from 2008; appearance of new issues on the agenda of consumer culture such as sustainable consumption, intensifying debates on the consumer habits of children and youth influenced by rapidly developing marketing to children and young people; an increasing influence of the global financial crisis in 2008 causes a revision of consumer habits It has been pointed out that with the accession into the EU, which constitutes a symbolic point of re-Westernization or readmission into Europe, for many postsocialist countries the so-called transition is over, which is replaced by a more complex transformation. That involves multilayered and intertwined changes in various fields of life (e.g., politics, economy, cultural sphere), instead of the more linear movement toward a Western standard of life implied by the notion of transition.

Statistical Comparisons Among Countries A statistical portrait of the region’s consumption can be drawn based on some key indicators provided by

Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe

Eurostat for the twenty-seven member states of the EU. For example, the actual individual consumption (AIC) information provided by Eurostat, which is juxtaposed with the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, gives an overview of the statistical picture of consumption and economic situation of the postsocialist bloc (for details, see Svennebye 2008). The average for both indices is 100, which gives a point of comparison: for example, according to the 2006 data, the Czech GDP per capita volume index was 79 and AIC was 70, and the respective Slovenian data were 88 and 80. The Baltic country of Estonia with its 69 and 65, as well as Slovakia and Hungary, were also in the upper half of the average of 100. At the same time, the former socialist bloc’s distance from the most affluent European countries is still large. The respective figures for Luxembourg were 280 and 173, and Norway 186 and 130, respectively. Postsocialist countries such as Serbia (GDP volume index 33 and AIC 36) or Albania (21 and 23) lag furthest behind. Consumption expenditure in 2006 at constant prices compared to 1995 (index value 100) is also revealing. In Latvia and Estonia expenditure grew most, that is, it more than doubled; whereas, for example, in Germany, the corresponding growth was only slightly more than 10 percent. The same trend of rapid increase is also illustrated by the fast motorization rate demonstrated in the Eurostat statistics: in Poland, the number of cars per 1,000 inhabitants grew from 195 to 314 from 1995 to 2004; and in Lithuania, from 198 to 384; whereas by comparison in Denmark the increase was from 321 to 354 only. The New Economics Foundation, an independent think-and-do tank, has composed the Happy Planet Index, which comprises indicators of life satisfaction derived from various European data-sets (e.g., Eurobarometer and European Social Survey), life expectancy and carbon footprint measures that represent planetary resource consumption. In Europe, particularly postsocialist countries, have a low Happy Planet Index; meaning high carbon footprint, low life expectancy, and low life satisfaction. From the bottom 10 of this list of 30 countries, Estonia is the 30th, Bulgaria is 28th, Hungary is 26th, Lithuania is 25th, the Czech Republic is 24th, and Slovakia is the 23rd. Only Slovenia (the 8th) and Latvia (the 10th) are doing considerably better. Thus, a pattern emerges by which many postsocialist consumer cultures can be characterized: climbing consumption

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levels (at least until the economic crisis that became especially severe in late 2008 and 2009); increasingly sophisticated commercial environments in terms of retail space or intensity of advertising and branding coupled with heavy resource consumption, especially by industry; and relatively low quality-of-life indicators. The latter can be at least partly explained by the cultural trauma experienced by the peoples of these countries, in which a relatively sharp and painful adaptation to the norms as well as opportunities of the new, Western-style consumer culture has played a significant role.

Clash Between Generations Various studies on the consumption of the region touch on tensions, as well as coexistence and interweaving of the so-called old and new values and symbols. For example, the well-known Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka has argued that the cultural context of transition is ambivalent: the symbols, values, and identities brought about by new cultural flows exist in parallel with old traditions, narratives, and values. Members of society who are faced with the challenge of coping with the ambivalence of a new situation may refer both to old and new cultural resources. Different social groups may pick up diverse symbols and narratives. In particular, Sztompka emphasizes differences between generations in a transition culture. This applies also in the context of consumer culture where the older generations (people over fifty years of age at the beginning of the twenty-first century) whose youth fell in the socialist years often feel nostalgia for the socialist time. This is contrasted with today’s excessive materialism, show-off mentality based on commodities, and social stratification in which wealth and the ability to consume according to Western standards are key indicators. The elderly are often faced with coping difficulties in which their cultural trauma (i.e., the disappearing relevance of old symbols, resources, and skills) still plays its role. If the shortage of goods during the socialist times was often experienced as a collective failure, the new scarcities and deficiencies of the new Western consumer culture are conceptualized as private failures, that is, lack of money and lower experienced social status. At the same time, the younger generations (especially those born after the collapse of the socialist bloc), express the highest levels of adaptation to the new consumerist lifestyles, as well as the least

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coping difficulties. The so-called children of freedom or postrevolutionary generations have been the most receptive to new cultural flows of self-expressive consumerism and the sign system of commercially produced and branded goods and services, according to a U.S. scholar Juliet Schor, who is known for her critique of the influence of consumer society on children.

Sustainability and Consumerism as Indicators of Lifestyle

Index

A study conducted by Veronika Kalmus and colleagues in Estonia creates a typology of the postsocialist consumer, which cannot be fully generalized to all postsocialist consumer cultures but can serve as an illustration. It may be hypothesized that similar consumer types exist in all the postsocialist Eastern European countries, although proportions and sociodemographic portraits of types differ. The typology is based on a representative survey (n = 1,475), and the data were gathered in 2005. With cluster analysis, four consumer types were created: the saving type, the green consumerist type, the indifferent type, and the lavish type. Indices (i.e., aggregate variables consisting of several single variables) of consumerism (orientation toward higher level of spending and selfexpression through consumption) and sustainable consumption (environmentally conscious consumption practices) were used. Figure 1 reveals that the largest proportion of the Estonian population belongs to either the saving 5.00 4.50 4.00 3.50 3.00 2.50 2.00 1.50 1.00 0.50 0.00

Consumerism Sustainable consumption

Saving 41%

Figure 1

Indifferent Green 28% consumerist 17%

Lavish 14%

Levels of Consumerism and Sustainable Consumption (Index Means) in Consumer Types in Estonia (Data from 2005)

Source: Data from Kalmus et al. 2009, 53–74.

type, for whom consumerism plays an insignificant role and who are also environmentally conscious and thrifty in the financial sense. These people are mostly over forty-five years of age and more often men than women. Another large group is the indifferent type, whose relationship both with the expressive dimensions of consumerism and sustainability is passive. These are mostly elderly people (over sixty-four years of age) and most often males. The green consumerists embody new values of Western consumerism as well as greenness. They are often younger (twenty to forty-four years of age), females, and relatively wealthy. The so-called lavish type, who are consumerist in their orientation but not sustainable, are mostly the youngest people (fifteen to nineteen years of age). Gender distribution in this type is even. While the indifferent and saving types most notably draw on older behavioral patterns and symbols, as well as being not as active participants in today’s consumer culture due to both economic and psychological reasons, the lavish and green consumerist types can be called new. Both value material consumption as a vehicle for self-expression, either combined with greenness or not.

Conclusion In the new member states of the EU, consumption growth rates have been fast, indicating a wish to make up for the lagging behind of the previous decades. At the same time, it can be assumed that in the postsocialist countries, the individual consumer’s behavioral patterns are influenced by the socialist past. Many people, especially the older generations, are sustainable in a pragmatic sense, by inertia and habit, whereas the new conscious environmental attitude of green consumption is still slow to take root both among the young and old. A major future challenge for research on consumption in this region is to conduct comparative quantitative and qualitative studies between the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe and different postsocialist regions of the world. To date, the bulk of studies have focused on a single country. It may be assumed that the socialist past will continue to have its impact on the consumers of this region for generations to come, be it in the memories of the people still living or in stories and maybe even legends and myths about the past. New issues to be focused on by

Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War

scholars of consumption are, for example, marketing targeted at, and the new consumer culture constructed by, youth and children—ranging from their media use to food consumption, which are highly debated and problematic areas; themes related to sustainable consumption by households; as well as issues of political and ethical consumption. Margit Keller See also Americanization; Consumer Culture in the USSR; Consumer Expenditure Surveys; Consumer Sovereignty; Consumption in Postsocialist China; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Socialism and Consumption

Further Readings Åslund, Anders. Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Eurostat. Motorisation Rate. Dataset. 2008. http://epp .eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init= 1&language=en&pcode=tsdpc340&plugin=0. Feher, Ferenc, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus. Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Fehérváry, Krisztina. “American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life in Postsocialist Hungary.” Ethnos 67 (2002): 369–400. Kalmus, Veronika, Margit Keller, and Maie Kiisel. “Emerging Consumer Types in a Transition Culture: Consumption Patterns of Generational and Ethnic Groups in Estonia.” Journal of Baltic Studies 40 (2009): 53–74. Keller, Margit, and Triin Vihalemm. “Coping with Consumer Culture: Elderly Urban Consumers in PostSoviet Estonia.” Trames 9 (2005): 69–91. Kennedy, Michael. Cultural Formations of PostCommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation and War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Lauristin, Marju, and Peeter Vihalemm. “Political Agenda during Different Periods of Estonian Transformation: External and Internal Factors.” Journal of Baltic Studies 1 (2009): 1–28. Lauristin, Marju, Peeter Vihalemm, Karl E. Rosengren, and Lennart Weibull, eds. Return to the Western World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian PostCommunist Transition. Tartu, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 1997. Schor, Juliet. Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. New York: Scribner, 2004.

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Svennebye, Lars. “GDP per Capita, Consumption per Capita and Comparative Price Levels in Europe.” Statistics in Focus: Economy and Finance (March 2008). http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/ KS-SF-08-003/EN/KS-SF-08-003-EN.PDF. Sztompka, Piotr. “The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Postcommunist Societies.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Niel J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 155–195. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Thompson, Sam, Saamah Abdallah, Nic Marks, Andrew Simms, and Victoria Johnson. “The European Happy Planet Index: An Index of Carbon Efficiency and WellBeing in the EU.” New Economics Foundation, July 16, 2007. http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/ european-happy-planet-index. Veenis, Milena. “Consumption in East Germany: The Seduction and Betrayal of Things.” Journal of Material Culture 4 (1999): 79–112. Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

CONSUMPTION IN THE UNITED STATES: COLONIAL TIMES TO THE COLD WAR Twenty-first-century Americans live in a consumer society, wherein people purchase objects and use them to define themselves and redefine relationships. Artifacts such as cars, clothing, and electronics speak to a person’s ideas about self and community, conveying authority, belonging, or rebellion. The artifacts or objects around us—sometimes called material culture—give identity to young and old, male and female, married and single, black and white, telling others who we are and how we want to be treated. Clues about the meaning of objects abound in American popular culture. Slogans like “born to shop” and “shop ’til you drop” speak to Americans’ basic love of material life. Another adage—“the clothes make the man”—suggests that objects belong to a complex nonverbal system allowing people to communicate with each other. People use artifacts to create, manage, and display images. Marketing and merchandising executives at companies that make and sell the goods know that people understand and define themselves through their possessions. They

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acknowledge that shoppers in Walmart differ from the customers in Saks Fifth Avenue, who seek the lowest prices or top quality, respectively. Regardless of where they shop, Americans today enjoy relatively comfortable and lavish lifestyles. The per capita consumption rate in the United States is the highest among industrial economies. The American standard of living often inspires envy around the globe, with many third-world countries striving for equal measure. Yet the activities that define consumer society—purchasing goods and using them to make identity statements—are not a part of an inevitable or natural order. Many cultures barter for necessities, and some societies accumulate very little. American consumerism, with its emphasis on abundance for all, issued from a unique set of circumstances, shaped by multiple forces and actors beginning in colonial times and coming to a head during the cold war.

Periodization Americans were not the first to relish their possessions, and they certainly will not be the last. Earlier agricultural and industrial societies displayed a rudimentary consumerist mentality, going back several hundred years. There had always been a small minority atop society with consumerist tendencies, but these elites spent their money on goods that conveyed prestige, rather than on fashions or fads. The endless creation of novelties and the constant production and promotion of the “new and different” are the marks of a full-blown consumer society. Historians debate the appearance of the first true consumer societies, but the consensus focuses on mideighteenth-century northwestern Europe, including the British colonies in North America. Before then, only the crème de la crème of certain European societies showed consumerist behavior, such as the wealthy banker-princes of Renaissance Florence. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, consumerist impulses emerged in regions with commercial economies and access to international trade, which introduced exotic products such as sugar, coffee, tea, silk, and porcelain. Holland was an important consumer society in the 1600s, but Georgian Britain of the 1700s is often acknowledged as the world’s first true consumer society. Born of industrialism, colonialism, and world commerce, Britain’s prosperous middle class had sufficient discretionary income to build fancy houses, buy Staffordshire china, and wear waistcoats of

embroidered French silk. For the first time in modern Europe, people other than those at the very top of society could indulge their fancies and follow cultural trends that were in fashion. These trends extended to the British American colonies, where consumers living on Southern plantations and in port cities from Boston, Massachusetts, to Alexandria, Virginia, shopped for the “baubles of Britain.” Consumption figured into debates over independence, as patriots lobbied for the right to operate their own factories and engage in international trade free from British constraints. After the American Revolution (1774–1783), the nation turned to new concerns, including suffrage, westward expansion, industrialization, and the abolition of slavery. To establish a national identity, Americans modified manners and traditions inherited from the British to create unique standards of behavior. Whereas the English social traditions limited a person’s upward mobility, Americans learned to define and reinvent themselves, using their possessions to display their affiliation with the middle class. British traditions such as tea drinking continued to be popular customs in the new nation, but the ranked social hierarchy inherited from the parent began to break down. The large number of immigrants, combined with greater opportunities for mobility, gave birth to a distinctly American “new” middle class that began to adopt its own symbols of accomplishment, notably, the single-family home on the urban periphery, the “white-collar” look for men who worked in offices, and fashionable calico dresses in the newest colors for women. The relationship between possessions and middle-class identity became the hallmark of American consumption. After the Civil War (1861–1865), American consumer society and industrial society matured hand in hand. The process of industrialization rendered deep social and cultural changes, creating a new social order. A larger percentage of the population could afford a comfortable lifestyle. Neither rich nor poor, these folks sat on the middle rungs of the social ladder, collectively wielding immense purchasing power and cultural influence. Their beliefs, values, and desires became embedded in a system of production and consumption that still prospers. Americans from all walks of life—whether coal miners or insurance brokers—aimed to belong to the middle class. In the Victorian era (1865–1900), industry and commerce expanded, and new types of retailers

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appeared: department stores, mail-order houses, and five-and-tens. Economic growth enabled some people to shop for a wider selection of factory-made goods. A standard “consumer identity kit” evolved to symbolize middle-class respectability: the singlefamily home, cozy furnishings, and fashionable clothes. Those who could afford it saved up to buy their own homes, and put together fancy parlors filled with knickknacks, overstuffed furniture, and lace curtains. People loved fashion and splurged on the latest Paris and London styles, which were often made in the United States. During the modern era (1900–1945), more and more people were able to become part of consumer society. New cultural concepts, such as “personality” and the “self,” eroded lingering resistance to getting and spending. It was now more socially acceptable to envy and covet. Phrases like “keeping up with the Joneses,” “the standard of living,” “spending power,” and the “American Dream” entered the language, connecting material comfort to upward mobility. Entrepreneurs brought to market products Americans never knew they needed and wanted. Illustrated magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post introduced full-page color advertising. Brands like Quaker Oats, Kodak, Ford, and Marlboro transformed the consumer experience. For the first time, throwaway goods entered the lexicon of American consumption. In the cold war era (1945–1990), mass consumption expanded its boundaries beyond middle-class America to a much broader swath of the population and began fragmenting in the process. In the prosperity that followed World War II, typical middle- and working-class Americans had steady incomes and relatively high earnings, allowing them to enjoy the American Dream. As factory workers entered the middle class, their tastes for two-tone Buicks and Cape Cod cottages had an impact on mainstream design. Synthetic fibers helped create a market for stylish casual clothing. An explosion in consumer electronics (televisions, hi-fi stereos, and computers) led to an even bigger explosion in marketable content (records, cable, and software). New retailing formats, including national chain stores and big-box retailers, took advantage of the relaxed regulations on prices to offer deep discounts on everything from laundry detergent to designer sportswear. Most important as the new century approached, niche marketing to teens, yuppies, urban blacks, Hispanics,

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single people, gays, and other newly affluent groups supplanted the very concept of the “mass market.” Today, most Americans describe themselves as middle class, regardless of ethnicity, income, occupation, race, marital status, sexual orientation, or religion. Many strive for the symbols of respectability: the single-family home, an automobile, nice clothing, favorite music, and leisure time. This product ensemble, or identity kit, has stood at the core of American consumer society since the mid-1800s. Many Americans, including recent immigrants and single people, see the accouterments of a middleclass lifestyle as signs of success. Stores such as Walmart, IKEA, and Macy’s cater to those wants. Debates about the political economy often focus on the “haves” and the “have-nots,” proposing how more Americans might be included in the culture of abundance. Discussions about globalization often consider how international trade, outsourcing, and immigration might erode it.

Object Lesson: The Horse and Buggy The horse-drawn buggy or carriage highlights the functional and culture roles of artifacts in American society, suggesting how different types of objects resonated with consumers during different historical epochs. All categories of artifacts go through a life cycle, enjoying novelty, maturity, and commodity stages. Meaningful objects come and go, carried by cultural tides that ebb and flow. The objects valued by our Victorian ancestors are not necessarily the ones that we covet, and vice versa. Few millennial newlyweds collect 200-piece china dinner services, as did the 1890s bride; and no Victorian consumer had a Motorola television console, or an Apple iPad. The life cycle of the horse-drawn carriage shows how an object’s popularity changed in reaction to social, cultural, and economic forces. New technologies made the horse and carriage obsolete, but they never entirely disappeared. Over time, consumers have given new meanings to the horse and buggy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the carriage was a luxury vehicle and a status symbol for wealthy people. Horse-drawn carriages had long offered mobility and autonomy to people of high economic status. Victorian Americans who could afford personal vehicles—these well-off folks were called the “carriage trade”—did not have to traipse

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through dirty streets or rub shoulders on public trolleys. Victorian carriage owners displayed their wealth by promenading around parks and Main Streets on Sunday afternoons. They hired servants to drive their carriages, and paid neighborhood stables to feed the horses, look after their health, and keep the equipment in repair. As shown by Edith Wharton novels, such as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, the New Yorker who stepped out of a personal carriage impressed those on the sidewalk with his or her importance. People who didn’t own carriages could hire a hackney, or hack, much as we rent taxicabs, or take public conveyances. Horses and carts were often owned by people of lesser means who earned their livelihoods by hauling produce and other goods around, or collecting rags for recycling by the paper mills. The automobile, introduced to America around the turn of the twentieth century, pushed carriages off the streets. This happened gradually over the course of several decades. Wealthy people upgraded to chauffeured cars, while men from the professional classes preferred to drive rather than rent a hack, ride the train, or take the trolley. The father of the American automotive industry, Henry Ford, targeted farmers and factory workers as customers for the world’s first mass-market car, the Model T. Other auto companies followed, disseminating affordable personal transportation to a wider range of income groups. General Motors led the pack, creating “a car for every purse and purpose” and introducing the famous “ladder of consumption,” whereby people were encouraged to trade in and buy up as their incomes and tastes matured. In the 1920s, one out of four households owned cars, and more hoped to buy them. The carriage became a relic of the past; the term horse and buggy, synonymous with old-fashioned. After World War II, consumer preferences shifted again, giving new meanings to cars and carriages. Changes to the landscape, living standards, and credit practices allowed more people to purchase automobiles. By 2000, nine out of ten American households had cars. Near ubiquity changed the automobile’s status and meaning. Some people coveted luxury vehicles such as the Cadillac, the BMW, or the Lexus, but many consumers began to think about the car as a basic necessity, or commodity. Japanese manufacturers had anticipated the shift away from showy to utilitarian vehicles, marketing automobiles for their reliability rather than styling

beginning in the 1970s. All the major manufacturers responded with simpler shapes, plainer colors, and more technological buzz for the buck as the car ceased to be a status symbol and assumed a new role as basic transportation. By this time, the horse-drawn vehicle had entered a new phase in its life cycle, becoming a curiosity and a desirable collectible for wealthy carriage enthusiasts. In the post–World War II years, horse-drawn vehicles were occasionally seen on city streets with the ragman, the country farmer, and the peanut vendor. Today, the horse-and-buggy is a tourist attraction, relegated to romantic drives in Central Park in New York, sightseeing around the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, and carriage parades at county fairs and point-to-point races. Over the past two centuries, the horse-drawn carriage had gone full circle, moving from a status symbol for the upper class to obsolescence in modern times to a collectible antique. This cycle typifies the rise and fall of many consumer products in the American economy. As goods entered the marketplace, consumers tested them out to decide whether they fit into daily routines. Objects survived as long as they had a function, whether practical or symbolic. Replacements better satisfied technical or emotional needs. Technology and aesthetics engaged in an eternal dance, and obsolescence was the final outcome.

Dissonant Voices As Americans shifted some of their attention away from the family, community, politics, and religion to the marketplace, anxious observers worried about the impact of this dramatic change. Critiques of American materialism date back to the colonial era, but those written beginning in the Victorian period tackled the social transformations that accompanied industrialization and urbanization. In 1899, sociologist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, a stinging indictment of American capitalism. Veblen focused on newly wealthy people who liked to show off their social status through their possessions. He criticized their fancy clothes, ornate carriages, and ostentatious mansions. Veblen considered these expenditures of energy and resources as wasteful and described them with the catchy phrase, conspicuous consumption. Good ideas captured in snappy expressions often take on lives of their own. Conspicuous consumption

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was no exception. Dozens of twentieth-century social critics followed Veblen, their eyes fixed on flagrant displays of wealth and their sharp wits ready to attack all sorts of indulgences. Conspicuous consumption worked its way into the American language as shorthand for reckless materialism up and down the social ladder. These discussions circulated through popular culture during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which were key decades for the expansion, contraction, and reinvigoration of consumer culture. Journalist Vance Packard’s 1960 bestseller, The Waste Makers, questioned the American auto industry’s annual model change. Packard suggested that tail fins, chrome trim, and brilliant colors were a misapplication of manpower and materials. Packard contended that outrageous designs and seductive advertising campaigns roped Americans into buying cars, appliances, and other goods that they did not really need. He called this business strategy “planned obsolescence.” In common parlance, it added up to conspicuous consumption by the American middle class. More recently, a new generation of critics has turned their attention to the environmental impact of consumerism. They wonder about the sustainability of consumer culture in the context of global warming and worry about things like pollution and toxic waste. They question America’s throwaway culture and its love affair with gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles (SUVs), McMansions (oversized, pretentious homes), and gourmet kitchens with marble counter tops. Among these jeremiads, journalist Thomas Frank, economist Juliet B. Schor, sociologist Stuart Ewen, and historian Gary S. Cross ask whether endless advertising and high levels of consumption are really necessary. These pundits garner a good deal of attention in college classrooms, raising important questions about ecology, the environment, and sustainability. Not all analysts have believed that consumerism is socially sinister or environmentally unsound. Many thoughtful observers saw consumption as a powerful economic force that could reduce the gap between rich and poor, or satisfy basic human needs for pleasure and community. A pioneer thinker in this regard was the economist Simon N. Patten. In The New Basis of Civilization (1907), Patten argued that industrialization had transformed America into a nation of abundance and that working people should be financially empowered to participate. Consumerism had the potential to diminish the material inequalities

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that had plagued humankind since time immemorial, eradicating poverty, darkness, and discomfort. In our time, libertarian Virginia I. Postrel, who has written for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, is a vocal opponent of anticonsumption jeremiads. Postrel asks Americans to reflect deeply on the pros and cons of consumer culture, emphasizing the importance of style and glamour as cultural forces that give meaning to people’s personal lives. Similarly, sociologist Sharon Zukin believes that consumption is a pleasurable experience that helps people understand themselves and their communities. “We dream of shopping for beauty, truth and perfection,” Zukin writes in Point of Purchase, “and if we do not shop for a perfect society, at least we shop for a perfect self” (2004, 268). While the democratization of consumption was a noble dream, not everyone had easy access to it. People on the fringes of American society found that believing and getting were two different things. Some battled for the ability to be consumers. Social historians like Lizabeth Cohen and Lawrence B. Glickman have shown that generations of factory workers put the living wage and middle-class comforts at the top of their union agendas. Others, born in rural America, were slow to get modern conveniences because of a simple accident of geography or skepticism. When innovations finally reached the hinterlands, many country folk opened their arms. Most farm families enthusiastically adopted new consumer technologies, including the telephone and automobile, which lessened the isolation of country life, but pockets of resistance to electrification retarded the spread of consumer durables like refrigerators. For still others, the market basket remained out of reach until very recently. Racism, ethnic prejudice, and sexism relegated certain groups, including many blacks and poor white women, to the economic margins. Latetwentieth-century gains in civil rights combined with globalization lowered some of the bars, and millions of people living on modest incomes ultimately began shopping at big-box discounters to buy a better life. The role of the intellectual in society is to ask tough, sometimes uncomfortable questions. Ordinary citizens, however, have the right to decide whether or not to listen. Over the past 200 years, many Americans have ignored the critics of consumer society and shopped to their hearts’ content. Like Patten and Postrel, many believed material comfort to be an essential right of every American

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citizen. Politicians and citizens have variably called this idea “the pursuit of happiness,” the “freedom from want,” and the “American Dream.” Social scientists have described it as the basic human need for food, clothing, and shelter. Consumerism has always been seen as a mixed blessing. The majority bought more and better goods, and a few dissented. American enterprise came under fire for encouraging people to buy, but many people welcomed the new products that made life warmer, cleaner, and generally easier. Regina Lee Blaszczyk See also Affluent Society; Cold War; Conspicuous Consumption; Consumer Revolution in EighteenthCentury Britain; Patten, Simon Nelson; Planned Obsolescence; Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

Further Readings Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV. Wheeling, IL: Harlan-Davidson, 2009. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003. Cross, Gary S. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Glickman, Lawrence B. A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Packard, Vance. The Waste Makers. New York: D. McKay, 1960. Patten, Simon N. The New Basis of Civilization. New York: Macmillan, 1907. Postrel, Virginia I. The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Consciousness Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Zukin, Sharon. Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004.

CONSUMPTION PATTERNS AND TRENDS The economic notions of consumption patterns refer to expenditure patterns of income groups across or within categories of products, such as food, clothing, and discretionary items. Sociocultural and political extensions of the consumption pattern idea probe the class, cultural, and symbolic dimensions of organization of consumption. Although there are significant sociohistorical studies of how society organizes consumption—that is, of patterns of consumption (see, e.g., Braudel 1992; Campbell 1987; Slater 1999)—studies of contemporary consumption patterns from sociocultural perspectives are relatively sparse. This is to a great extent because the long perspective of history, often very necessary to understand the patterning of consumption, is unavailable to social and cultural scholars looking at consumption phenomena as they happen. Of course, a whole industry of consultants exists to identify unfolding consumption trends (see, e.g., Naisbitt 1988; Popcorn 1992), but the consulting reports have very instrumental goals and lack analytical and interpretive depth. As a result, contemporaneous consumption patterns receive mostly economic treatments—focusing on immediately measurable factors, such as expenditure patterns. Macrolevel, contemporary analyses of consumption patterns from social, cultural, and political perspectives are, however, important to understand the role of consumption in our lives. Such analyses are particularly valuable for those seeking major transformations in the ways production and consumption activities are organized and controlled.

Economics and Consumption Patterns The term consumption pattern has been used to mean different things across history and disciplines. In economics, it has been mostly used to characterize a household’s allocation of expenditures across different consumption categories, such as food, housing, clothing, and transportation. This definition has also been used in the marketing literature. Allocation of household consumption expenditures has been of interest in economics since Ernst Engel detected that as a household’s income increased, the proportion spent on food decreased.

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This tendency is now known as Engel’s law and it has been well supported by empirical findings. Later, this law has been found to also apply to categories of housing and clothing, both in terms of absolute amounts and in terms of income elasticity—which indicates that the portion of incremental income spent on food, housing, and clothing decreases with each increase in income. The term consumption pattern can also be found being used to define differences in households’ use of products within the same consumption category. For example, when William T. Tucker found that people drank more gin and vodka on the West Coast of the United States, more Scotch on the East Coast, and more bourbon in the southern states, this variation was expressed in terms of differing consumption patterns. According to this usage, consumption of more red meat in certain households in comparison to poultry consumption in others, or preference for sports utility vehicles in some parts of a country versus sedans in other parts would be considered variations in consumption patterns. There are principal differences in these two usages of the term. Whereas the first usage relates to relationships among consumption categories, the second usage refers to differences within a consumption category. The two, however, may well be complementary, as consumption of different products within the consumption categories will probably affect the allocation of household budgets among them. Differences in the cost of habitual products in each consumption category, differences in the usage rates they necessitate, and the like, will impact on the portions of household budgets that go to each category. These two definitions of consumption patterns, therefore, need not be considered as compartmentalized and mutually exclusive.

Brand Choice and Category Choice Furthermore, consumption choices in each category occur at different levels. Differentiated versions of a product under the same brand name constitute one level. One may choose a two-door Chevrolet instead of a four-door version. Brand choice is another level. One may choose a Chevrolet versus a Toyota, for example. Another level of choice is among products in the same category. For example, in the category of housing, one may choose between an independent free-standing house or villa, a townhouse, and an

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apartment unit in a large apartment building; or in transportation, one may choose a motorcycle versus an automobile. Yet another level of choice is among the different modes that respond to needs in the same consumption category. An example is the choice of a public transportation means (e.g., a bus) versus the private mode of transportation (e.g., a private car). These choices across different levels have changed, not only with household income or with other household characteristics or with geography, but also across history and across cultures. What people choose and how they choose to allocate their budgets for household consumption are, thus, influenced by various factors. In the end, these influences reflect on households’ preferences regarding how they wish to live their lives and what type of consumption will support these ways of life. Consumption patterns, therefore, reflect choices that people make for a way of life.

Consumption Patterns and Ways of Life In trying to understand how options for a way of life are reflected in consumption, A. Fuat Fırat and Nikhilesh Dholakia proposed that consumption choices people make mirror preferences along dimensions that represent culturally significant values. They found four dimensions that stood out at the time that modernity matured. These were called the social relationship dimension, the domain of availability dimension, the human involvement dimension, and the level of participation dimension. They suggest that alternatives available in consumption categories (at different levels of consumption choices previously discussed) that represent a particular pattern across these dimensions become preferred because they fit the way of life that is sought at a time in history, in a culture. In their analysis, Fırat and Dholakia observe that the two extremes of the social relationship dimension are individual and collective. The domain of availability dimension ranges from public to private, and the human involvement dimension stretches between active and passive. For the level of participation dimension, the two ends are represented by participatory versus alienated consumption. As the twentieth century neared its end, a pattern of individual, private, alienated, passive consumption had diffused strongly—especially in modern capitalist societies where people had discretionary incomes. Fırat and Dholakia argue that this was an understandable

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consequence of dependence on economic market growth. In a modern industrial economy, individual rather than shared consumption of products that are privately rather than publicly owned will help the market (and therefore the capital of the enterprises that serve the market) to grow as each individual, for example, separately consumes his or her iPod that he or she owns, instead of iPods being shared—this means more iPods would be sold in the market. Similarly, as products are introduced into the market that substitute human activity, for example in washing dishes or clothes, more exchanges are created in the market by having these products (e.g., washing machines) in each household rather than in a common and shared washing facility. Finally, in an industrial economy, mass production capabilities are aided when the products can be standardized through alienation of each consumer from the process of designing the products and the production process. The alienated worker-consumer, quite simply, seeks ways of overcoming alienation in the sphere of consumption.

Transmodern Transformations In the second half of the twentieth century, a period that many now consider as late or high modernity, this particular consumption pattern had diffused widely and globally—in actual buying terms or in aspirational terms (for those whose incomes were constrained)—in all market economies. As a result, products such as the automobile, the refrigerator, the television set, and the dishwasher were the ones that had the highest ownership ratios in households. They all shared in representing the individual-privatepassive-alienated pattern. As modernity has reached its peak and a new cultural epoch may be dawning, however, and with developments in especially communications technologies, this pattern of consumption may also be beginning a transformation. One obvious transformation in the dominant pattern of consumption is increased participation by consumers in the production, assemblage, and, in some cases, designing of the commodities they acquire. New technologies of the web have increased the possibilities for consumers to become interactive with the organizations that offer these commodities. Such technologies of “mass customization,” “cocreation,” and “co-production” seem to grow, with more and more consumers opting to become engaged in the shaping of some of the final products that they

acquire from organizations. Clearly, not every consumer who uses these technologies is interested in using them for all of his or her acquisitions. Thus, for most products that consumers acquire, still largely for individual-private consumption, consumers are still alienated from the designing, production, and assemblage processes. Yet, the trend toward alienation may be waning in contemporary consumption. While the trends toward individual and private consumption are continuing, a trend similar to the one away from alienation is observable in the trend away from passive consumption. Because of interactive technologies and growing health and fitness consciousness, many consumers are becoming less passive in their consumption practices with some products. Both the trends observed during the growth of modernity and trends as a new epoch approaches exhibit strong influences of culture and of the diffusion of ideas regarding the meaning of life. In modern culture, these influences were primarily mediated through the structure of available alternatives in society, which was largely the outcome of necessities and technologies of production to expand the market and grow the capitalist economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the market centeredness of our economy can still be observed. Indeed, the seemingly consumerist orientation of consumer participation and co-creation processes is often nothing more than a new way for capitalist enterprises to appropriate consumers’ labor with minimal or no compensation, as noted by Detlev Zwick, Samuel Bonsu, and Aron Darmody, or a way to “manufacture” digital representations of consumers that are prescreened to be eager and ready consumers of what the enterprise has to offer, as noted by Zwick and Dholakia. However, strong cultural trends that move human desires and interest away from material accumulation and toward seeking richness of experiences and toward the symbolic, as well as cooperative and sharing trends, especially in the technologies of communication, can also be observed. These trends confirm the current significance of the media in the conveyance of influence on consumption patterns and they signal the potential for substantive transformations in the nature of consumption patterns. Nikhilesh Dholakia and A. Fuat Fırat See also Branding; Consumer Demand; Consumer Expenditure Surveys; Engel’s Law; Individualization;

Content Analysis Information Technology; Measuring Standards of Living; Prosumption

Further Readings Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Structure of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Burk, Marguerite. “Ramifications of the Relationship between Income and Food.” Journal of Farm Economics 44 (February 1962): 115–125. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. London: Blackwell, 1987. Eilensteine, Donald, and James P. Cunningham. “Projected Consumption Patterns for a Stationary Population.” Population Studies 26 (July 1972): 223–231. Fırat, A. Fuat, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. “Consumption Patterns and Macromarketing: A Radical Perspective.” European Journal of Marketing 11, no. 4 (1977): 291–298. Fırat, A. Fuat, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. “Consumption Choices at the Macro Level.” Journal of Macromarketing 2 (Fall 1982): 6–15. Fırat, A. Fuat, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. Consuming People: From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption. London: Routledge, 1998. Houthakker, Hendrik S. “An International Comparison of Household Expenditure Patterns, Commemorating the Centenary of Engel’s Law.” Econometrica 25 (October 1957): 81–95. Naisbitt, John. Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1988. Popcorn, Faith. The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. London: Polity, 1999. Tucker, William T. The Social Context of Economic Behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. Webster, Frederick E. Social Aspects of Marketing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974. Zwick, Detlev, Samuel K. Bonsu, and Aron Darmody. “Putting Consumers to Work: ‘Co-Creation’ and New Marketing Govern-Mentality.” Journal of Consumer Culture 8, no. 2 (2008): 163–196. Zwick, Detlev, and Nikhilesh Dholakia. “Strategic Database Marketing: Customer Profiling as New Product Development.” In Marketing Management: A Cultural Perspective, edited by Lisa Peñalosa, Nil Toulouse, Luca Massimiliano Visconti, chapter 27. London: Routledge, 2011.

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CONTENT ANALYSIS Content analysis is a methodologically explicit way of analyzing texts, involving quantitative and qualitative procedures. Klaus Krippendorff defines content analysis as “a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from data to their context” (1980, 21). Ole R. Holsti notes that it typically requires an adherence to explicit selection and coding procedures to ensure reliability and validity. The technique was initially developed as an application of natural science methods to the analysis of an emerging mass media after World War I, specifically in terms of the “accuracy” of messages. German radio broadcasts during World War II were analyzed for the detection of hidden content. Since the 1940s, it has been most commonly used in mass communication research and latterly cultural studies, investigating a broader range of “texts” including photographs, movies, diaries and journals, music, television, film, letters, law cases, manifestos, and advertisements. Also important, both existing print texts and anything that can be converted to printed form are available for content analysis, and this would also include interview data or field notes. It concerns the empirical identification of patterns and relationships in a sample of texts. The technique has been used across disciplines, including sociology, politics, feminist studies, and law, history, and policy studies. In studies of consumer culture, the technique has been used to analyze media representations of consumption and the emergence of discourses of consumer culture. Although it may involve quantitative and qualitative procedures, and combinations of both, the distinctions and applicability of each are subject to some debate. The more common procedure has been quantitative, partly as content analysis has historically restricted its scope to the content of the text as opposed to its wider context or its possible interpretations. It is also conceived in some applications as an “objective” means of identifying previously selected characteristics of texts that are regarded as “manifest.” Manifest content is that that appears obvious or at least unambiguous in its meaning. Qualitative procedures are used when connections between the symbolic characteristics of texts and the cultural context of which they are part are to be drawn. The focus remains on identifying the characteristics in a valid and reliable manner, but may refer more often

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to the “latent” content of the text. Latent content is that which is thought primarily symbolic, or that has underlying meanings in wider context. Content analysis is usually conducted as follows.

Selection Content analysis usually works with large data sets, such as a complete run of a particular magazine or newspaper, a complete set of interview transcripts, and so on. The selection process may be an outcome of a specific research hypothesis or a limit placed on the scale of the data set to be used (e.g., between specific dates). Different sampling methods may then be employed but must be consistently applied in line with the requirement for the reliability of the measures and the validity of the findings. Sampling may be random (using a random number table), stratified (using groupings in the data set), systematic (using intervals in the data), or cluster (using random groups). Whatever the procedure, the sample must be “sufficiently exhaustive to account for each variation of message content” (Berg 2004, 240). In other words, the sample must be large enough to cover all variation of text content, rather than that which simply confirms the hypothesis. Though these approaches vary, there must be systematicness in the established rules for examination before analysis begins.

Codes and Coding Once the selection of texts has been made, a set of categories must be established for coding the texts. In traditionally quantitative procedures, the structure of the categories employed is deemed descriptive and objective in that they are thought to correspond to what is actually in the text. In some qualitative procedures, the categories for coding may be interpretively defined in relation to relevant theoretical issues. Both involve processes of deciding what the unit of analysis is (words, themes, characters, paragraphs, items, concepts, and so on) to which the coding procedures of locating, marking, and tallying will be applied. Coding categories must be exhaustive, exclusive, and have some analytical power in revealing interesting patterns, absences, or perhaps counterintuitive historical trends. Codes may involve looking at whether specific facts, phrases, images, and words are missing from texts as well as what and which are present. Codes must be unambiguous to be replicable by other researchers.

Analysis The selected texts are coded—each text may have many codes attached to it—with the codes subsequently being quantified. Quantities of codes across the sample may be counted using absolute or relative frequency counts (how many times a specific word appears, as a percentage). This may be extended quantitatively using associations, cross-tabulations, and correlations to measure possible relationships between different codes in the sample (between, say, “sustainable” and “consumption”). In a qualitative approach, relationships might be drawn between explicit codes and externally derived themes that relate to theoretical concerns or from the literature base being drawn on by researchers (which might relate to “class,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “sustainability,” etc.). As the quantification of codes provides largely descriptive data, these results are often triangulated with other methods, such as case studies or discourse analysis, in an effort to complement interpretation. Many exemplary applications of content analysis have used such complementary methods. For example, Edward Epstein examined responses to AIDS in the United States using a content analysis of newspaper articles, augmenting this with interviews and discourse analysis. Similarly, where feminist critiques of quantitative content analysis have been skeptical of the objectivity of selection and coding, they have employed content analysis as a complementary interpretive technique that explicitly acknowledges a feminist standpoint. More subtly, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins’s (1993) coding procedures in their book, Reading National Geographic, are shaped by both broader contextual understandings of their selection (600 photographs in National Geographic) and by thematic interpretations of categorical relations.

Consumer Culture Analyses The most suitable application of content analysis for studies of consumer culture concerns historically specific, cross-cultural, and comparative trajectories of advertising, marketing, and related visual and textual materials. For example, Martin Hand and Elizabeth Shove conducted a content analysis using a systematic selection of household magazines over a hundredyear period, coding to identify changes in how

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kitchens are “orchestrated” within the confines of the texts. This was interpreted in relation to shifts in anticipated orientations to consumption practices in the home tied to technological conventions. Similar content analyses of consumer culture have also been used to explore “sex” as a commodity in movie trailers (Oliver and Kalyanaraman 2006), the evolution of comic strips in relation to consumer culture (Gordon 1998), the distinctive “national” promises of consumer culture in print advertisements (Tse, Belk, and Zhou 1998), all of which use explicit codes for tracking valid instances and generating specific accounts of socioeconomic and cultural change as it is represented in textual form. However, it is arguably the case that most applications have been far less formalized or methodologically explicit in this field and the boundaries between content and narrative or discourse analysis are far from clear. This has to do with broader shifts in the social sciences toward contextualized understandings of content, and of how analyses of consumer culture have, on the whole, wanted to elaborate on the “readerley” context of the text as opposed to an exclusively quantitative approach. For example, in an exemplary study of the commodification of childhood, Daniel Thomas Cook conducts an analysis of changes in the representation and constitution of a figure of the “child consumer” through the imagery and terminology of advertising. It is precisely the relationships between these texts and the wider processes of manufacturing and marketization—a set of relations that remains outside of the scope of conventional content analysis—that provides the explanatory power. In other words, the application of content analysis to consumer culture usually involves either semiotics (as in Leiss et al. 1990) or discourse analysis (as in Cook 2004) as a complementary method.

the Child Consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. Hand, Martin, and Elizabeth Shove. “Orchestrating Concepts: Kitchen Dynamics and Regime Change in Good Housekeeping and Ideal Home 1922–2002.” Home Cultures 1, no. 3 (2004): 235–257. Holsti, Ole R. Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969. Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1980. Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, and Jacqueline Bottreill. Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products and Images of Well-Being. New York: Routledge, 1990. Manning, Peter K., and Betsy Cullum-Swan. “Narrative, Content and Semiotic Analysis.” In Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 246–276. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. Neuendorf, Kimberly A. The Content Analysis Guidebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001. Oliver, Mary Beth, and Siriam Kalyanaraman. “Using Sex to Sell Movies: A Content Analysis of Movie Trailers.” In Sex in Consumer Culture: The Erotic Content of Media and Marketing, edited by Tom Reichert and Jacqueline Lambiase,13–30. London: Routledge, 2006. Reinharz, Shulamit. Feminist Methods in Social Research. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Tse, David K., Russell W. Belk, and Nan Zhou. “Becoming a Consumer Society: A Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Content Analysis of Print Ads from Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan.” The Journal of Consumer Research 15, no. 4 (1989): 457–472.

Martin Hand

The term convenience denotes an idea that increasingly suffuses contemporary consciousness. In January 1998, there were 280,337 different webpages that mentioned convenience, by November 2010; this figure has reached 62.7 million. The rising significance of convenience reflects three key processes in the development of contemporary consumer cultures: the further embedding of individualized orientations toward everyday life; the growing importance of time pressure; and the acceleration of rationalization, calculation, and commodification in personal life.

See also Advertising; Childhood; Comics; Discourse Analysis; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Semiotics; Sex

Further Readings Berg, Bruce L. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences. 5th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2004. Cook, Dan. The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of

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The term convenience is not a new one, it has been used in English since the fifteenth century, though the early usages are now obsolete and current applications of the term have their origins no earlier than the seventeenth century. Three meanings derive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first refers to something that is suitable or well adapted to the performance of an action or attainment of some satisfaction. This continues to be an important sense referring to utensils. A second meaning concerns the avoidance of personal trouble in particular practices, and also to material advantage and personal comfort deriving there from. From this emanate phrases such as “marriage of convenience” and “at one’s convenience.” A third sense refers to an opportune occasion or an opportunity, as in the phrase “at your earliest convenience.” All three meanings continue to operate in contemporary discourse. The Oxford English Dictionary records no significant new applications of the term convenience between the early nineteenth century and the 1960s, when another usage emerged in the United States. The terms “convenience food” and “convenience store” indicated that arrangements or commodities might be “designed for convenience or used when convenient.” In 1968, the British newspaper the Guardian (December 6, 1968) reported, “No one would deny the drudgery, the time-wasting, the monotony, that has been removed by convenience foods.” As Warde (1999) notes, this more recent twentieth-century addition to the meaning of the term relates to notions of saving, or more properly reordering, time. Increasingly, convenience acts as a reason for purchasing a plethora of goods and services and for decisions about the organization of everyday life. There has been a perceptible change in emphasis during the twentieth century on different attributes of convenience. Houses and hotels used to be advertised as having “all mod cons,” meaning all modern conveniences (electricity, running hot and cold water, and an indoor lavatory). Such conveniences were oriented toward comfort—keeping warm, not having to go outside in the cold to find coal—but also toward saving labor. A whole set of convenience devices has emerged in this form. Washing machines involve less physical labor, prevent chapped hands, require less than constant attention (the operator can do something else while clothes get clean), and take less time overall than handwashing or using a

tub and washboard. Other labor-saving devices are convenient because they require less cleaning: especially the electric fire, the self-cleaning oven, ceramic cooktops, and so forth. As Shove (2003) notes, such convenience devices, sensu stricto, reduce labor input and reduce labor time attached to a given activity, but they do not necessarily save time. Since the 1960s variant emerged, convenience has increasingly come to take on an additional form: an appeal to a new way of conceptualizing the manipulation and use of time. First identified by Elizabeth Shove and Dale Southerton in 2000 in their analysis of the domestic freezer, the contemporary application of convenience refers to the capacity of goods and services to reorder the temporal sequences of everyday practices. The contemporary value of the freezer, for example, not only rests in its food storage functions. Its capacity to preserve, to literally freeze in time, pre-prepared foods allows for the reordering of the practices of food procurement, preparation, and consumption such that one activity no longer needs to follow, sequentially, the other. In a similar case, Roger Silverstone shows the widespread diffusion of the television video recorder had the effect of changing the temporal rhythms of households, which had previously been ordered around the scheduling of television programs. The video recorder permitted the storing of programs that could be watched at times that suit individual household members, reordering household temporal rhythms in the process. Other time reordering goods and services include e-mail, telephone answering/messaging services, automatic functions on devices (such as media recording or ovens), and e-commerce. The first implication of convenience for understanding contemporary consumer cultures is that it points to the further individualization and privatization of everyday problems. Convenience usually refers to the practical purposes of private individuals. It implies consideration of technical and service-based alternatives for the conduct of everyday practices that refer less to economies of money and more to economizing of time and toil. Convenience is a concept referring to the practical purposive activities of private individuals vis-à-vis their material reproduction and fulfillment of social commitments. As Southerton (2003) demonstrates, the appeal of such alternatives can be found within contemporary concerns about harriedness. Associated with Schor’s (1992) work-spend cycles and with fears of missing

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out on consumer experiences through the inefficient organization of personal time, convenience goods and services promise solutions to time pressure by providing the capacity to control and order one’s personal schedule. The irony is that the consumption of more goods and services is presented as the solution to a problem that is widely understood to result from increasing levels of consumption. Further irony is found by considering the second implication of convenience: individualized solutions to personal schedules only act to create senses of time pressure in the first place. According to Southerton’s (2003) research in England, harriedness was not entirely a consequence of working and consuming more. Rather, time pressure emerged from the challenge of coordinating practices and people within one’s personal schedule. In a society where convenience permits the temporal reordering of practices and more individualized personal schedules, coordinating time to spend together with those that matter most becomes increasingly difficult. Like the American working mothers that Craig Thompson (1996) discussed, who struggled through daily life juggling domestic tasks, child care, and work, Southerton’s respondents went to great lengths to coordinate their personal schedules with others. This involved the scheduling of “hot spots” (periods of intense work and domestic activities) so as to create temporal space for “cold spots” of quality time—which, like “convenience,” is a phrase that has taken on particular meaning and significance since the 1960s. Through their capacity to create individualized personal schedules, convenience goods and services exacerbate the problem they seek to solve: time pressure emanates from the lack of collective alignment between schedules. This theory comes into sharp focus when the collective temporal rhythms of daily life in interwar Britain are compared with the individualized schedules of the contemporary period. Southerton’s sociohistorical research (2009) showed that in 1937, personal schedules were collectively aligned: work times, meal times, and times of leisure (such as listening to the radio or going to the pub) were conducted at the same time by the vast majority of people. As a result, coordinating practices and moments of togetherness were not as problematic. Southerton concludes by arguing that contemporary feelings of harriedness are a consequence of the erosion of the collective temporal schedules that once coordinated everyday lives.

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The third implication of convenience is that it indicates the acceleration of rationalization, calculation, and commodification in personal lives. In her influential book The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (1997), Arlie Russell Hochschild argued that as hours of paid work increase (what she calls the first shift), time for domestic matters (the second shift) are squeezed, and time devoted to emotional and interpersonal relationships become experienced as a “third shift.” Convenience goods and services, which break down practices into their component parts and re-sequence those components to maximize temporal efficiency, take on particular significance. Washing clothes, for example, is collapsed into components of washing, drying, and ironing, each component being separate from the others. Even time spent with family and friends comes to be experienced as a “third shift,” subject to planning and calculation. For Hochschild, this rationalization and calculation of personal life corrodes the quality of time that people spend together. Convenience is a much-vaunted value. Its prominence is indicative of a major consideration within the organization of everyday life as a means to express personal autonomy and pursue personal objectives. Greater rationalization of the life world and commercialization of daily life occurs as people deploy new mechanical devices and commercial services to achieve a reduction in labor time devoted to the tasks of reproduction, and new planning devices to develop greater control over the sequencing of activities. At least part of the sense of being harried is the promise that personal fulfillment will be achieved by cramming ever more activities into a day, a year, or a lifetime. Reducing the volume of time devoted to heteronomous personal tasks and achieving greater control over the sequencing of activities lie at the heart of the appeal to contemporary convenience. The associated frame of mind is one that suggests that there are always more and more important things to be done and that it is a duty to fill time as variously and creatively as possible. This attitude has proved a primary conduit for the further commodification of everyday life as these aspirations have found a response from commercial manufacturing and service industries. While rationalization and commodification are critical considerations, the concept of convenience has become increasingly important for investigating the relationship between time, temporalities, and consumer cultures. It has opened a range of enquiries

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into the temporal rhythms and organization of daily life, with implications for shedding new light on understandings of patterns of mobility, personal relationships, and environmental sustainability. Dale Southerton See also Commodification; Consumption and Time Use; Domestic Technologies; Harried Leisure Class; Individualization; Rationalization; Time-Use Diaries; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Shove, Elizabeth. “Everyday Practice and the Consumption and Production of Time.” In Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk, 17–34.Oxford: Berg, 2009. Shove, Elizabeth, and Dale Southerton. “Defrosting the Freezer: From Novelty to Convenience: A Story of Normalization.” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 3 (2000): 301–319. Silverstone, Roger. “Time, Information and Communication Technologies and the Household.” Time and Society 2, no. 3 (1993): 283–311. Southerton, Dale. “‘Squeezing Time’: Allocating Practices, Co-ordinating Networks and Scheduling Society.” Time and Society 12, no. 1 (2003): 5–25. Southerton, Dale. “Analysing the Temporal Organisation of Daily Life: Social Constraints, Practices and Their Allocation.” Sociology 40, no. 3 (2006): 435–454. Southerton, Dale. “Temporal Rhythms: Comparing Daily Lives of 1937 with Those of 2000 in the UK.” In Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk, 49–63. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Thompson, Craig. “Caring Consumers: Gendered Consumption Meanings and the Juggling Lifestyle.” Journal of Consumer Research 22 (1996): 388–407. Warde, Alan. “Convenience Food: Space and Timing.” British Food Journal 101, no. 7 (1999): 518–527.

CONVENTION THEORY French convention theory focuses on the quality characteristics of information and the need for common

understandings and not just rules and norms as the basis of social action. It defends the plurality of publicly justifiable actions based on a limited number of coherent systems of values that are culturally specific. French convention theory is both an economic and a sociological theory. In economics, it emerged in dialogue with the North American game theory approach to conventions (David K. Lewis: Convention: A Philosophical Study, 1969) and the “new microeconomic” theories of information, uncertainty and bounded rationality (George A. Akerlof: “The Market for Lemons,” 1970). In sociology, it marked a shift away from the classical concepts of social groups and classes and a turn to the way action is understood and justified in concrete situations, aligning itself with the pragmatist tradition. Differently from earlier French schools of thought associated with one particular leading figure, convention theory is itself plural with a collegiate of leading proponents—Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, André Orléan, Olivier Favereau, François Eymard-Duvernay, Robert Salais—each developing a specific approach to the way conventions are to be understood.

Key Elements The key elements of convention theory were established in the 1980s on the basis of research into the special features of the wage-labor relation. The uncertainties surrounding the implementation of labor agreements were analyzed through the notion of the “incomplete contract,” where features of the world relevant for the implementation of the contract are not available at the time the agreement is signed (for an overview, see Jean Tirole: “Incomplete Contracts: Where Do We Stand?” 1999, 741–781). A specific contribution of convention theory was to argue that the notion of incomplete contracts applies equally to the exchange of products in situations where key information on the characteristics of the product is not transmitted by the price mechanism or evident in the product itself. Where convention theory takes its distance from the new microeconomics is in its insistence on the qualitative nature of information. In addition, therefore, to problems related to uncertainty and unequal access to information, convention theory argues that the same information can be subject to very different evaluations. Rather than focusing on quality as an attribute of the product, convention

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theory sees quality as the result of a process of qualification involving the negotiation of an agreement on the criteria that define the product’s quality. These criteria are embodied in specific practices and procedures that create objective references for this process of qualification and prevent the notion of quality from being reduced to an abstract idea or a subjective attribution. Here convention theory converges with the actor-network tradition of analysis in French (Michel Callon and Bruno Latour) and Anglo-Saxon (United States, England, and the Scandinavian countries, and specifically John Law) social science where objects—regulations, technologies, production practices, and standards—become the organizing principles of collective action in the form of sociotechnical networks.

Founding Documents Two publications have established themselves as the founding documents of French convention theory. The first was a collective endeavor resulting in the publication of a special issue (volume 40, number 2) of the Revue Économique in 1989 titled the “Economy of Conventions” edited by Orléan. The second took the form of a book written by Boltanski and Thévenot first published by Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) in 1987 as Les Économies de la Grandeur (Economies of Worth) and then again by Gallimard in 1991 with the title De la Justification (On Justification) by which their work has become known. The special issue of the Revue Économique also became published as a book in 1994 with the title Analyse Économique des Conventions (PUF) and has been subsequently republished. The special issue of the Revue Économique reveals the very close relationship between convention theory and French regulation theory, which also has the wage-labor relation as its central concern, seen in this case as the key to interpreting macrosocietal dynamics. Two of regulation theory’s leading proponents, Robert Boyer and Michel Aglietta, who contributed to the special issue, draw particular attention to the factors influencing persistence and change in conventions. One such factor, presented by Mark Granovetter, are social networks; and Granovetter’s social network critique of transaction cost approaches to economic organizations and institutions has been subsequently adopted in tandem with convention theory for the analysis of quality markets.

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The special issue explores the conditions for ensuring collective action in economic activity, with a central focus on the firm and interfirm relations in which different patterns of coordination can be identified whereby the market cedes to client and partnership relations. In this way, EymardDuvernay develops a typology of firms and coordination based on the different qualities of the products in question. Subsequently, Robert Salais and Michael Storper, in their book Les Mondes de la Production (1993), which was later published in English as The Worlds of Production (1997), present a systematic analysis of four radically distinct production dynamics based on the different qualities of inputs/means of production and final products. The result is a typology contrasting the industrial, market, innovation, and interpersonal worlds. This work was influential in presenting the French convention perspective to the Anglo-Saxon social science community. Within these approaches, consumption, however, remains little explored and maintains a shadowy presence as an effect of these different market dynamics. Boltanski and Thévenot’s book mentioned previously, De la Justification, has a similar focus on the different logics governing firm behavior. Its concern, however, is not with the implications of the different qualities of products for economic coordination but rather with the way in which different styles of social action have been historically sanctioned. Within Western culture, and particularly within the realm of political philosophy, the authors identify the consolidation of six value systems, which, following Augustine, they call “cities.” By this they mean coherent patterns of social behavior that, although quite distinct and potentially in conflict, have all established their legitimacy in Western society. David Starke, whose work “For a Sociology of Worth” has also been important in introducing French convention theory into the Anglo-Saxon world, calls these cities “orders of worth.” All have as their baseline a respect for common humanity but are organized in terms of very different values implying different forms of recognition and recompense. An industrial order of worth gives pride of place to technical competence and efficiency, whereas a market order looks first to price and consumer satisfaction. Reputation and opinion can provide the basis for attributing values and establishing hierarchies, but creativity and inspiration resting on inner convictions have

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equally their place. A domestic order of worth values practices and competences acquired and passed on through experience. A civic order, for its part, insists on the centrality of defending public goods and citizen rights. Within the Western tradition, therefore, justifiable forms of collective action are plural but at the same time limited in number. Subsequent to the publication of De la Justification, a green order, based on ecological values, was proposed both by Bruno Latour and Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot. Boltanski, in a later work with Eve Chiapello (Le Nouvel Ésprit du Capitalisme 1999), argues for the emergence of a network order of worth as economic activity is increasingly organized around collective action oriented to the accomplishment of short-term projects requiring a wide range of heterogeneous competences. The second part of De la Justification is dedicated to an analysis of the way each of these orders of worth can be identified in the practices of modern firms and, as in the case of the special issue, there is little explicit discussion of consumption. Nevertheless, the relevance of De la Justification for a discussion of contemporary dynamics in consumption is quite different from that of the contributions to the special issue, and each represents a specific way in which consumption has been considered within the convention tradition.

Consumption and the Convention Tradition On the one hand, research programs along the lines of Eymard-Duvernay, Salais, and Storper have emerged that consider how the different qualities of the product imply different organizations of the market and consumption practices. Callon and colleagues, and Frank Cochoy have paid particular attention to the ways quality markets require a whole social technology for the appropriate positioning of the consumer. A recent contribution by Lucien Karpik, L´Économie des Singularités (2007), who, while close to, marks his distance from convention theory, develops a systematic account of the way in which a range of special quality markets—wines, films, literature, music—develop systems of judgment that organize the consumer’s relation to the different markets. Consumption, in this approach, is analyzed from the perspective of the particular qualities of the products. The implications of the analysis developed in De la Justification and later in Le Nouvel Ésprit

du Capitalisme are quite different. Here, the different values seen to organize economic activity in the firm are first and foremost historically embedded values of social action that have established their legitimacy in Western society. The economic is not cordoned off from the social, and consumption is not an effect of the characteristics of the product and the organization of production. This is particularly important to the extent that the legitimate orders of worth are not reduced to the two dominant sets of values governing economic life—the industrial and the market orders—or the emerging network order. The construction of reputation and the consolidation of opinion also constitute a legitimate basis of evaluation. Orders of worth include both a respect for tradition/craft and for the inspired activity that often places this in question. More important, they include civic values, which reject the immunity of economic from social values, and the emerging green order, which questions the economy in the name of nature. The significance of this distinction (and complementarity) between the approaches of the special issue and De la Justification became more evident in the analysis developed in Le Nouvel Ésprit du Capitalisme. Here, the conflict provoked by the emergence of new social and aesthetic movements in the second half of the twentieth century is seen to lead to a shifting of the boundaries between the firm and society, with the former increasingly internalizing elements of the social and aesthetic critique. Patterns of consumption, therefore, must be situated within this dual process by which societal values invade and/or become co-opted in business practices. A key moment in the diffusion of French convention theory was the collaborative work developed with researchers from INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, on new quality agricultural markets, particularly organics, and craft products based on geographical indications. This collaboration led to the publication of La Grande Transformation de l’Agriculture (1995). Here, a whole range of markets (organics, geographical indications) and their systems of certification were analyzed, drawing on the insights of the different orders of worth, with particular importance given to the domestic and civic justifications of these markets. Of central concern here was the way consumption practices increasingly depend on the elaboration of new mechanisms for generating trust and transmitting information and guarantees appropriate to notions

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of quality associated as much with the conditions of production as with the product itself. From the second half of the 1990s, convention theory was increasingly adopted in Anglo-Saxon social science for the analysis of quality markets, particularly agrofood markets. Often in tandem with social network and/or actor-network theory, convention theory has been drawn on to explore the negotiations that justify contesting proposals for the institutionalization and regulation of new quality markets. It has also been employed in the exploration of new producer-consumer relations, particularly in the case of short circuit markets. Here, the dynamic of the domestic order of worth is conflated with the interpersonal world, elaborated by Salais and Storper as a component of their “worlds of production” typology. Of particular importance has been the use of convention theory in discussions of the convergence between the role of consumer and that of citizen. In this context, alternative networks and social movements embracing production and consumption for the promotion of fair trade, organics, and social and environmental justice have been analyzed through the lens of domestic and civil, in conflict with industrial, orders of worth. More broadly, the current dynamics of consumption have been analyzed as a confrontation between two emerging conventions. One of these, production oriented, focuses on the increasing capacity to break down products into their component parts, which is justified in terms of the benefits of more precise and efficient targeting. The other has emerged from the various consumer and civic movements and can be characterized as having a logic of identity legitimated in terms of an appeal to naturalness, proximity, authenticity. It is argued that traditional conventions governing consumption have been eroded by the shift to a service economy where consumption is separated both from production and from the home and is increasingly confronted with credence goods whose qualities escape direct confirmation. The result is a more volatile consumer environment in which confidence is strongly influenced by the predominance of a reputation or opinion order of worth where values are filtered through mass communication media.

Future Directions Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the leading contributors to convention theory have had their works translated or have published in the

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Anglo-Saxon press, which has greatly increased the accessibility of their ideas to an English-speaking public and academic community. A major international seminar in 2003 in Paris, whose papers were subsequently published, was also a key moment of dialogue with theoretical approaches outside of France, particularly in the domain of economic sociology. A more recent development has been the introduction of convention theory to Germany. At the invitation of Hans Joas, the German pragmatist philosopher Boltanski presented a series of lectures that were published as De la Critique (2009), and Rainer DiazBone has been responsible for a series of publications on convention theory. These developments converge with the current concerns of German economic sociology with the moral order of markets, as evident in the recent work of Jens Beckert. It can be expected, therefore, that convention theory will continue to make an important contribution to understanding consumption as issues of quality become increasingly central to economic organization. Two distinct but complementary contributions of convention theory have been highlighted. The first, which can be identified with the line of analysis developed in the special issue of Revue Économique, focuses on the new forms of coordination necessary for the functioning of quality markets. In terms of consumption, the central contributions here have been on the new institutionality needed to underpin quality consumer markets and the plurality of legitimate criteria of consumer evaluation. The second implies a questioning of the boundaries between markets and society and the distinctions between consumer and citizen. Qualities are understood as values, implying a generalized moralization of economy activity. In this context, convention theory, particularly in Le Nouvel Ésprit du Capitalisme, connects with discussions of consumer dynamics in terms of social movements. John Wilkinson See also Actor-Network Theory; Economic Sociology; Economics; Social Network Analysis; Social Networks; Sociology; Sociotechnical Systems

Further Readings Allaire, Gilles. “Quality in Economics: A Cognitive Perspective.” In Qualities of Food, edited by Mark Harvey, Andrew McMeekin, and Alan Warde, 61–93. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004.

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Barham, Elizabeth. “Towards a Theory of Values-Based Labeling.” Agriculture and Human Values 19 (2002): 349–360. Beckert, Jens. Beyond the Market: The Social Foundations of Economic Efficiency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Busch, Larry. “The Moral Economy of Grades and Standards.” Journal of Rural Studies 16 (2000): 273–283. Callon, Michel, Cécile Meadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. “L’Économie des Qualités” [The economy of qualities]. Economy and Society 31, no. 2 (2000): 194–217. Cochoy, Frank. Une Sociologie de Packaging ou l’âne de Buridan face au Marché [A sociology of packaging, or Buridan's ass in the face of the market]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Lafaye, Claudette, and Laurent Thévenot. “Une Justification Écologique? Conflits dans l’Aménagement de la Nature” [An ecological justification? Conflicts in the development of nature]. Revue Française de Sociologie 34, no. 4 (1993): 495–524. Latour, Bruno. “To Modernize or to Ecologize? That Is the Question.” In Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium, edited by Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, 221–242. London: Routledge, 1998. Morgan, Kevin, Terry Marsden, and John Murdoch. The Worlds of Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Raynolds, Laura, T. “Re-embedding Global Agriculture: The International Organic and Fair Trade Movements.” Agriculture and Human Values 17, no. 3 (2000): 297–309. Renard, Marie-Christine. “The Interstices of Globalization: The Example of Fair Coffee.” Sociologia Ruralis 39, no. 40 (2002): 484–499. Sylvander, Bertil. “Le role de la certification dans les changements de regime de coordination: l’agriculture biologique, de réseau a l’industrie” [The role of certification in the changes of coordination regime: Organic farming, the network industry]. Revue d’Économie Industrielle 80 (1997): 47–66. Wilkinson, John. “A New Paradigm for Economic Analysis.” Economy and Society 26, no. 3 (1997): 335–339.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS Conversation analysis (CA) is a sociological approach used to investigate the culturally methodic character of “talk-in-interaction,” which has had cross-disciplinary influence in linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Harvey Sacks, together with his colleagues Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, developed CA in a series of lectures in

the 1960s (now collected in Sacks 1992). His aim was to develop a thoroughly naturalistic, empirical social science, that is, one that dealt with social events as they actually occurred—and not as captured in or portrayed by sociologically staged interviews, surveys, questionnaires, or documents (the traditional ways in which social science gets access to the social world). The development of CA was, at least initially, strongly influenced by Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, the sociological study of the practical methods that members of society have to accomplish their everyday activities. Ethnomethodology drew on the work of Alfred Schutz who remarked that the social world that the sociologist encounters and tries to describe has already been described and interpreted by society’s members. For ethnomethodology, the central question therefore was not: what are the best sociological methods to find out about the social world? But rather: how do members of society themselves find out about their world (in a practical, ordinary manner as part of their conduct of the society’s everyday affairs)? One of the challenges in the development of ethnomethodology was to access these “seen but unnoticed,” taken-for-granted “ethno-methods.” Sacks’s way of dealing with this issue was to rely on (audio) recordings of talk-in-interaction. This allowed for the capture of verbal activities as they occur in real time, and, through repeated listenings, the possibility of studying the gathered materials in ever-closer detail—a feature that has been likened to the slowmotion instant replay of sports events. In that sense, CA is perhaps one of the few examples in social science where technological developments (the availability of cheap and portable tape recorders) led to methodological innovations. CA researchers typically produce detailed transcripts of the materials that they are investigating. The transcription conventions of CA have been developed by Sacks’s collaborator Gail Jefferson and are designed to strike a balance between capturing the way that participants actually talk (highlighting prolonged sounds, stressed syllables, or overlap between speakers) and overburdening the transcript with so much detail that it becomes unreadable. The purpose of transcribing is twofold. First, during the analysis, the very process of transcribing forces the researcher to pay detailed attention to the materials. Second, after the analysis has been written

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down, the inclusion of transcripts in reports allows readers to check whether what the researcher is saying about the materials is actually the case, thereby inviting readers to launch and document their own, alternative analysis. Technological developments (in particular, digitization of audio and visual materials) have lead to an increasing availability of sound, or even video, samples themselves. Although CA started with a focus on conversation, this was simply a result of the fact that talk could be easily recorded, replayed repeatedly, transcribed, and made available to other researchers. In this sense, the name “conversation analysis” was misleading for Sacks’s project since the interest was not in conversation per se, but rather in the culturally methodic character of social action and interaction, with conversation being only a convenient, but highly productive, case. The name “conversation analysis” was not then meant to designate a new sociological technique (to study conversation), but rather to point to a topic: the study of the conversational analyses employed by conversationalists themselves (i.e., their real-time understandings of “why that now?”). Early work in CA focused on the ways in which conversationalists accomplish the fact that typically “one person talks at a time.” The result was the landmark publication “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking in Conversation” (Sacks et al. 1974), in which a formal system was laid out through which participants collaboratively locate transition points and determine who speaks next. The most important methodological innovation lay in the fact that Sacks and colleagues not only demonstrated that the system could be used to describe the turn-taking of conversation, but that the system is locally and interactionally managed by participants themselves, who, for example, notice, interpret, and correct violations of it. To demonstrate this, Sacks and colleagues took advantage of the “interactional” character of conversation: what participants do or say next depends crucially on their understanding of what another participant has said previously—and furthermore displays how those prior utterances have been interpreted. The fact that participants analyze each other’s conduct—and display their analysis of previous turns—was used as a proof procedure for the sociological analysis. Although the original focus was on ordinary conversation, or talk-in-interaction, CA has since

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developed in two rather different directions. On the one hand, there has been an interest in the institutional character of talk, that is, the ways in which participants’ turns of talk enact institutional affairs (Heritage 2005). Researchers have, for example, investigated how lawyers structure legal interrogation, how doctors deliver good and bad news, or how journalists aggressively question politicians while simultaneously displaying their political neutrality. On the other hand, researchers have tried to extend CA to analyze nonverbal (visual, multimodal) aspects of interaction (Hindmarsh and Heath 2007), for example, the organization of gaze in relation to turns of talk, the timing of gestures in relation to the verbal utterances to which they are tied, or the various ways in which technology can structure work practices. There seem to be two ways in which CA could fruitfully be used to study consumption or consumer culture, namely, through investigating talk about consumption and through researching the various acts of consumption. First, one could argue that consumer culture is, to a large part, realized through talk, since people do not just “do” consumption, but also talk “about” consumption. Such talk has not been the explicit focus of CA, but one can find examples in various studies in which conversationalists display and use their knowledge of consumer goods. A good example is Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s 2006 study of conversation among adolescent girls, in which one can find instances of girls talking about shopping, going to a restaurant, or playing tennis— and how such talk (about what kinds of things you have bought or places you have been to) can be used to accomplish status differentiation. Second, CA can be used to study the sequential organization of various consumer activities. An obvious case is the buying and selling of various goods. Christian Heath and Paul Luff investigate how auctioneers seek to encourage competitive bidding by establishing two bidders and no more than two bidders at any one time (a “run”), while Clark and colleagues study how salesmen work verbally at beginning a rapport with their customers. Other studies have looked at the selling strategies of market pitchers (Pinch and Clark 1986), the categorization work in calls to a travel agency (Mazeland, Huisman, and Schasfoort 1995), or the work of telenegotiated mediation in business-to-business encounters (Firth 1995).

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In sum, by paying detailed attention to the sequential organization of talk and embodied conduct, CA provides detailed access to the interactional accomplishment of various activities, including various aspects of consumption and consumer culture. Christian Greiffenhagen See also Content Analysis; Discourse; Discourse Analysis; Ethnography; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

Further Readings Clark, Colin, Paul Drew, and Trevor Pinch. “Managing Prospect Affiliation and Rapport in Real-life Sales Encounters.” Discourse Studies 5, no. 1 (2003): 5–31. Firth, Alan. “Telenegotiation and Sense-Making in the ‘Virtual Marketplace.’” In The Discourse of Business Negotiation, edited by Konrad Ehlich and Johannes Wagner, 127–149. Berlin: Mouton, 1995. Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stances, Status, and Exclusion. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff. “Ordering Competition: The Interactional Accomplishment of the Sale of Art and Antiques at Auction.” British Journal of Sociology 58, no. 1 (2007): 63–85. Heritage, John. “Conversation Analysis and Institutional Talk.” In Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, edited by Kristine L. Fitch and Robert E. Sanders, 103–147. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Hindmarsh, Jon, and Christian Heath. “Video-Based Studies of Work Practice.” Sociology Compass 1, no. 1 (2007): 156–173. Mazeland, Harrie, Marian Huisman, and Marca Schasfoort. “Negotiating Categories in Travel Agency Calls.” In The Discourse of Negotiation: Studies of Language in the Workplace, edited by Alan Firth, 271–291. Oxford: Pergamon, 1995. Pinch, Trevor, and Colin Clark. “The Hard Sell: ‘Patter Merchanting’ and the Strategic (Re)production and Local Management of Economic Reasoning in the Routines of Market Pitchers.” Sociology 20, no. 2 (1986): 169–191. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turntaking in Conversation.” Language 50, no. 4 (1974): 696–735.

COOL HUNTERS Cool-hunting is the practice of surveying advanced and innovative consumer groups for ideas about upcoming trends. Cool-hunting originates in the fashion industry where, already in the early 1970s, a number of fashion houses (most famously perhaps Fiorucci) set up research offices that were charged with the task of surveying a rapidly developing street culture and translating its stylistic and lifestyle innovations into products that could be commercialized. Employees at the Fiorucci style office were paid to keep abreast of popular culture, and enjoyed yearly paid vacations to exotic places on condition that they brought home research reports. Such isolated examples of trend research offices developed into trend research firms during the second half of the 1970s. These firms supplied books and style sheets, listing the colors and patterns that were set to dominate next season’s collections. During the 1980s, trend research or cool-hunting spread outside of the domain of the fashion industry. This was in part a response to the perceived inadequacy of traditional methods of qualitative and mainly quantitative market research. It was also a reaction to the perceived increase in the mobility and complexity of consumer demand, resulting from the continuous mediatization of consumption and the pluralization of lifestyles. Cool-hunting was perceived as necessary outside of fashion—in particular for technology and home electronics—because consumers of these goods began, in a certain sense, to behave like fashion consumers. Cool-hunting firms provide a number of services that are based on a continuous surveillance of the social. Their focus is mainly, but not exclusively, on the youth market (considered the vanguard of the consumer market as a whole), and the services that they provide include information on macro (general) and micro (market or product specific) trends; “brand trackers” that evaluate the standing of brands with respect to consumer awareness and “cool factor” trend analysis and lifestyle investigations. They also perform market research on particular brands and services and offer their services as consultants in product development, brand renewal, public relations, or corporate brainstorming sessions. Their major clients are media companies, cosmetics and fashion companies, publishers, communications and electronics,

Cool Hunters

advertising agencies, and big brands. While some coolhunting firms also use traditional forms of market research, such as focus groups and ethnographic studies, the main source of the information they provide is a network of trendsetters and “cool” consumers. Who are these cool consumers? What distinguishes the (mostly) young people employed by cool hunters is that they make up a group of expert consumers. They are the people who impersonate a trend before it materializes and actively take charge of producing new consumer trends by, for example, combining existing garments in a creative fashion or even making their own clothes. Unlike the economic and social elites who have traditionally been understood as the leaders of consumer taste, the people approached by cool hunters have a particular expertise in the field of consumption that need not be connected to a more general elite status or even to high standing or competence in other fields. Cool hunters are interested in the people who possess an expertise in predicting or even anticipating fads and fashions, who have a motivation to constantly stay at the top of the field. These may be extraordinary creative and gifted individuals, but their edge consists mainly in their ability (and motivation) to interpret the position of others. Cool consumers are what they are because they are the first to articulate and materialize what everybody subsequently recognizes as general knowledge. They thus provide a way of appropriating the socialized productivity of the particular field in its entirety. But what is it cool consumers produce? What is “coolness”? The significance of the term cool probably goes back to the Yoruba concept of Itutu, combining, in Dick Pountain and David Robins’s definition, “meanings of conciliation and gentleness of character, the ability to diffuse fights and disputes, of generosity and grace” (2000, 36). It has been preserved in the culture of American plantation slaves where it has come to signify a certain challenge or defiance. Indeed, the genealogy of cool includes such antecedents as the British aristocratic reserve, and the spezzatura of Italian courtiers, as well as the antiestablishment attitude of the twentieth-century avant-garde and counterculture. Overall, cool should be translated as a kind of achieved defiance. It is an attitude of opposition that one produces and assembles in front of a challenge. In this sense, coolness refers to the capacity on the part of consumers in their collective production of meaning, in their mass

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intellectuality, to produce private forms of resistance or evasion in relation to the power of marketing and other institutions of consumer culture. As in the case of the appropriation of style, capturing cool is a matter of incorporating and profiting from the resistance that consumers spontaneously produce. (Indeed, the antithesis of cool is understood to be commodification: One ceases to be cool at the moment in which one’s style becomes appropriated as part of the mainstream. Conversely, continued coolness builds on a continuous capacity for stylistic resistance.) Cool-hunting is one of the institutional mechanisms by means of which consumer resistance becomes a form of market-sanctioned cultural experimentation through which the market rejuvenates itself. If in the early twentieth century, innovation in consumer tastes and trends was the business of the bourgeoisie and their children, today it is the business of the consumer proletariat in its natural state of alienation and defiance. It is the fact that some consumers do not identify with the prevailing norms of consumer culture that makes their agency valuable as labor power. There are mainly two present trends within the cool-hunting industry. First, the phenomenon of coolhunting is becoming increasingly generalized. While cool-hunting traditionally concentrated on vanguard groups, such as young people or members of the counterculture or urban creative scenes, increased market pressure and the consequent need to find more precise niches for products has spurred a growing interest in the productive and innovative practices of ordinary consumers, and important subgroups such as the elderly. In response to this need, many cool-hunting agencies now practice what is known as “business anthropology,” in which traditional anthropological methods are put to work in understanding the deep meanings of goods in the everyday life of ordinary consumers. The value added of such business anthropology firms consists mainly in their ability to appropriate ordinary, everyday knowledge and package it in formats that can be managed by the complex organizations of large multinationals. Second, the diffusion of networked information and communication technologies has added new possibilities for cool-hunting. Data mining and mathematical text analysis provide an alternative (or complement) to ethnographic methods and networks of informers. These methods provide cheap, fast, and reliable information on what the recent trends are in people’s online habits. In addition,

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new platforms that integrate consumers more strongly with a particular brand, such as user-led innovation initiatives or corporate-initiated brand communities, provide ways to harvest consumer opinions and innovations directly online, without having to resort to informer networks. Adam Arvidsson See also Cultural Intermediaries; Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Fashion; Fashion Forecasters; Lifestyle; Methods of Market Research; Prosumption; Style

Further Readings Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge, 2006. Frontline. The Merchants of Cool: A Report on the Creators and Marketers of Popular Culture for Teenagers. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ shows/cool. Pountain, Dick, and David Robins. Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

COSMETIC SURGERY Cosmetic surgery, also called plastic surgery or aesthetic surgery, refers to surgical operations changing, transforming, reconstructing, and shaping the physical human body, and adding or removing body parts for aesthetic purposes. Cosmetic surgery includes operations on the face (such as face-lift and rhinoplasty) and operations on other parts of the body (such as breast augmentation or reduction, liposuction, and abdominoplasty), all conducted under anesthesia. The most common procedures include rhinoplasty, which is usually known as a nose job, as well as breast augmentation or reduction. A subgroup of aesthetic medical procedures, called minimally invasive procedures (such as injection of botulinum toxin or injecting filler materials around lips), are also widely employed. From a medical perspective, what we know today as cosmetic surgery dates to antiquity. The Sushruta Samhita, written approximately 600 BCE, has the oldest known account of nose reconstruction performed in India and Egypt. Procedures have been improved by the introduction of anesthesia and antiseptic techniques in the latter part of the nineteenth century. After World War II, the branch of aesthetic and reconstructive surgery has begun to

specialize and organize. At the same time, public demand has increased as surgical techniques became more refined and advanced. Today, technology for cosmetic surgery is highly sophisticated. Along with the expertise of the surgeon, critical points for consideration with regard to cosmetic surgery include the professional liability of the doctor, appropriate “patient selection” criteria, and informed consent of patients. Patient selection becomes especially important as patients might be overly concerned with “magical” results of the surgery and expect that the surgery itself will change the problems in their lives, such as a marriage problem or problems at work. Also, some patients are obsessive about how they look, called body dysmorphic disorder, which affects the way they perceive their bodies and surgical results. Some patients are never satisfied, because they always perceive some flaws on their bodies. Looking at cosmetic surgery as a method of making physical appearance more attractive makes it a method of beautification, which itself is a very old concept. History is full of stories and examples of ancient people who were highly interested in beauty and changed their physical appearances in different ways. Some examples include molding of skulls among Mayan society, making girls’ and women’s feet very small through painful processes in China, or wearing rings on the neck to make it look longer in Thailand. More decorative and less demanding tools include makeup, hair styling, as well as dieting and exercising, but they are considered less significant since permanent decorative forms are associated with more enduring constructs, such as gender, group affiliations, and cultural norms. Cosmetic surgery, in its current form, is a concept applicable to modern societies. When cosmetic surgery is considered as a method of beautification, the distinction between reconstructive and aesthetic surgery becomes more problematic. Reconstructive surgery can be used following traumas, injuries, infections, tumors, birth defects, or developmental problems. Aesthetic surgery, on the other hand, can be perceived as elective; and aesthetic surgery patients can be perceived as not really sick. Accordingly, one of the labels for cosmetic surgery in modern societies is that it is unnecessary, nonmedical, and that it is a sign of vanity. The goal in cosmetic surgery is mostly perceived as making the patient’s appearance closer to the current ideal.

Cosmetics

This notion also makes the line between medicine and beautification less distinct. Michel Foucault has described the interplay between the “medical gaze” and the material it examined and fabricated. According to this account, new medical insights have contributed to the creation of a body in close interaction with social patterns, making cosmetic surgery a practice of constructing an identity, that is, a technology of self. There can be a variety of motivations of cosmetic surgery patients, such as a perceived “need” to look better or approximate a “normal” appearance, easing the transition from different stages in life, as well as a passage from one group or social class to another. Some patients are considered more rebellious, as their basic motivation is individual expression in the form of “positive liberty” (Gilman 1999) through freely customizing the body. Faced with a greater number of different images in more entertaining and effective ways in the global world and as the image of an ideal body has been presented in consumer culture as desirable in modern societies, consumers may now compare their bodies and use cosmetic surgery to approximate the “ideal” in a reflexive identity project, making it the individual’s responsibility to carefully observe his or her own body and go to the doctor if there is a “problem.” Berna Tarı See also Adornment; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Cosmetics; Cyborgs; Gender; Hair Care/Hairdressing; Health Care; Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings Askegaard, Søren, Martine Cartel Gertsen, and Roy Langer. “The Body Consumed: Reflexivity and Cosmetic Surgery.” Psychology and Marketing 19, no. 10 (2002): 793–812. Featherstone, Mike. “The Body in Consumer Culture.” Theory, Culture, and Society 1 (1982): 18–33. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, 16–49. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Gilman, Sander L. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Howson, Alexandra. The Body in Society: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Rees, Thomas D. “Introduction: Concepts of Beauty.” In Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, edited by Thomas D. Rees and Gregory S. LaTrenta, 1–2. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1994.

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Sanders, Clinton R. “Marks of Mischief: Becoming and Being Tattooed.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 16, no. 4 (1988): 395–431. Sayre, Shay. “Facelift Forensics: A Personal Narrative of Aesthetic Cosmetic Surgery.” Advances in Consumer Research 24 (1999): 178–183. Schouten, John W. “Selves in Transition: Symbolic Consumption in Personal Rites of Passage and Identity Construction.” Journal of Consumer Research 17 (1991): 412–425. Sullivan, Deborah A. Cosmetic Surgery: The Cutting Edge of Commercial Medicine in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Tarı, Berna. “Exploring Local and Global Ideals of Beauty in Turkey: Discourses and Practices of Plastic Surgery Patients and Physicians.” PhD diss., Ankara, Turkey, Bilkent University, 2008. Thompson, Craig J., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman. “Understanding the Socialized Body: A Poststructuralist Analysis of Consumers’ Self-Conceptions, Body Images, and Self-Care Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research 22 (September 1995): 139–153.

COSMETICS Cosmetics are products used to temporarily modify the body surface for decorative or transformative purposes, normally in determined social situations or by members of specific groups. In contemporary consumer societies, cosmetics are mass-produced and mass-distributed goods applied especially by women to embellish their body and enhance their attractiveness. They include skin-care creams, lotions, perfumes, hair colors, deodorants, and makeup items such as powders, blush, lipsticks, eye shadow, mascara, eye liners, nail polish, and concealers. The temporary beautifying of the body through dyes, ornaments, or perfumes, and permanent modifications through piercing, tattooing, or scarification are practices performed in all cultures. More particularly, cosmetic modification has been known since the distant past: archaeological evidence is found from prehistoric times, in ancient Egypt, Greek, and Roman societies, where men and women used elaborate moisturizing creams and oils to counteract the dryness and aging of the skin, pigments for adorning their eyes, but also cosmetics containing poisonous mercury and lead-based makeup to lighten their faces. In Western as well as in non-Western stratified

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societies, makeup has been used to distinguish classes and occupations, like other body appearance modifications. In medieval Europe, for example, the use of cosmetics was restricted to the upper classes, and for centuries, Japanese geishas have used white powder to lighten their skin. Throughout its long history, cosmetics and particularly face painting have stood up to strong opposition. From the early fathers of the church, such as Tertullian, to Elizabethan Puritans, and intellectuals such as Thomas More and Arthur Schopenhauer, adversaries of cosmetics lined up a battery of arguments rooted in the idea that they were women’s disgraceful affectation. Some arguments were theoretical, and viewed cosmetics as the trappings of the art of dissimulation considered as “typically feminine,” or the incentives for a luxurious lifestyle. Other arguments were more practical, pointing out that spending hours in front of a mirror subtracted time from the household or distracted women from pleasing their husbands. During the nineteenth century, the use of makeup was practiced primarily by actors and prostitutes, and moralists or political authorities publicly declared it improper and vulgar. Thus, for an American or English woman at that time, being a lady meant forswearing visible cosmetics, since the painted face was a sign of deception, of an inauthentic or immoral self. In the nascent consumer culture, the cult of sentimentality and sincerity still advocated moral cosmetics, like soaps, exercise, and temperance, and idealized the natural face. Underlying this discourse there was often an effort to confirm the fixity and naturalness of social hierarchies by assuring that external manifestations corresponded to the inner self. New relationships between cosmetics and female identity were established by the beginning of twentieth century. The middle classes were busily engaged in purchasing goods, sustained by the growing belief that individuality was a purchasable style. In the increasingly consumer context, the use of cosmetics, like of other commodities, gradually became the salient marker of new social identities. A commercial culture of “you-tooism” democratized beauty, suggesting that it could be achieved by all women, if only they used the correct products. At first, face powders were the most popular; then rouge, lipstick, and eyebrow pencils were added to the list of acceptable beauty products. The proliferation of cosmetics in the consumer market coincided with women’s new relationship with the

public sphere: their expanding but contested participation in economic, political, and social activities that were previously conceived as masculine. Workplace or leisure activities were presented as occasions where young women could perform their femininity through manufactured beauty and succeed. Cosmetics achieved respectability and modernity, enabling them to embody emergent social categories, such as saleswomen, secretaries, entertainers, or consumers. The social organization of sexual relationships and dating equally reinforced the importance of social mobility through the aware management of physical appearance. Moreover, the beauty business has represented a new arena for success and competition for a number of female entrepreneurs, who founded salons, beauty schools, correspondence courses, and mail-order companies using the patterns of women’s social life: visiting, conversation, and their presence in shops, clubs, and theaters. Some of them became multinational corporations that currently dominate the multimillion dollar market of cosmetics, such as Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, and Estée Lauder. By the interwar period, using makeup became a bourgeois way as middle- and working-class women confirmed or embraced commercialized femininity in their everyday lives. The effect has since then been to represent womanhood as a kind of merchandise, to symbolically emphasize women’s lack of entitlement to be in the public sphere without a mask, to feel discomfort if their faces are unpainted in a wide range of social situations, and to transmit white ideals to non-white women—outcomes that are still contested by feminists. Nevertheless, the emerging commercialized beauty culture also led to the renegotiation of traditional hierarchies among women, opening the path to economic opportunities and new social definitions. In an effort to look like the attractive divas they saw in the magazines and in the movies, for example, American and European wage-earning women of the 1930s increasingly began to differentiate their lifestyles from those of younger schoolgirls and of their mothers. Cosmetics became the battleground of intergenerational conflicts, since they were perceived by parents as the signal that their daughters wanted to be treated as socially and sexually mature and by girls as a means to emancipate from the family. Nonetheless, cosmetics succeeded in combining attractiveness and respectability in a new ideal of femininity. It is emblematic that the image of Rosie the Riveter, created by U.S. propaganda to recruit

Cosmopolitanism

women into the workplace during World War II as men were mobilized for the war, is a woman dressed in a factory uniform, flexing her bicep, but wearing mascara, lipstick, and nail polish. Since the second postwar period, the cosmetics industry has flourished and its growth is still unrelenting. The imaginary mobilized by manufacturers has changed, from the ultrasophistication of the 1950s to the sexual innuendo of the 1960s, from the ostentation of the 1980s to the experimentation of the 1990s. Beauty culturists and cosmetics manufacturers have been promising personal and social transformation, and have evolved a language that presents makeup as an integral component of womanhood. Advertisers suggest that cosmetics are a crucial aspect of feminine self-realization, which induces an anxiety in the relationship between appearance and identity. The beauty ideal sold together with skin-lighteners, creams, and colored powders often reinforce traditional class, age, and race hierarchies, but cosmetic manufacturers, in contrast, depict this makeover as the first step toward expressing oneself, achieving upward mobility, and gaining personal popularity. The use of makeup has continued to be contested from a variety of sources, including authors and public interest groups. Animal rights activists, for example, pressure cosmetic companies to stop testing on animals and campaign vigorously, even recommending boycotts. This advocacy has been effective, as many manufacturers committed themselves to stop testing their products on animals and some countries banned the sale of animal-tested cosmetics. But the main criticism of the use of cosmetics in everyday life is put forward by feminists and focuses on the very heart of the modern legitimizing discourse about cosmetics: making-up is a highly stylized activity that leaves little room for self-expression. As Sandra Lee Bartky wrote, “painting the face is not like painting a picture; at best, it might be described as painting the same picture over and over again with minor variations” (1990, 71). The most dangerous message underlying this disciplining practice is, according to some feminists and social theorists, that a woman’s face, if unpainted, is defective, thus reinforcing women’s lack of self-confidence. Rossella Ghigi See also Adornment; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Cosmetic Surgery; Femininity; Gender; Hair Care/Hairdressing; Self-Reflexivity

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Further Readings Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination. New York: Routledge, 1990. Corson, Richard. Fashions in Makeup. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2004. Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998. Scranton Philip, ed. Beauty and Business. New York: Routledge, 2001. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990.

COSMOPOLITANISM Cosmopolitanism, which is becoming an important notion for the understanding of taste and the circulation of commodities, has according to most social theorists its origins in Greek philosophy. The concept refers to ways of knowing the world and the forms of belonging this knowledge generates. The term is comprised of kòsmos (our socially constructed world) and polìtis (the citizen of a pòlis or ancient Greek city-state, the civic organization that exerted influence on European politics). The term resonates with Aristotle’s conception of the human as zõon politikòn, a being that exists in relation to others in a polity. It has been suggested that Aristotelian texts are in fact Arab readings of Aristotle subsequently reimported in the West to revive its intellectual traditions. The Stoic teachings, according to which both the polis and the cosmopolis preserve the common good, acted as stepping-stones to early Christian understandings of the cosmopolitan as the “citizen” of God’s Kingdom. Christian exclusivism is evident in Augustine’s Neoplatonic cosmopolitanism that presupposes the love of God, in contrast to the love of the self that nonbelievers maintain. In short, Christian teachings erased non-European (non-Christian) contributions to European civilization at large. Modern European theorizations of cosmopolitanism are attributed to Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who produced the first abstraction of the cosmopolitan subject. But Kant’s kosmopolìtis missed the exclusivist Hellenistic understandings of citizenship and polity. The “world citizen” of the Hellenic orator Socrates, to whom the concept is often attributed, was supposed to speak Greek, think Greek, and act as a Greek (Panegyricus, par. 50) in the context of the Alexandrian empire. Those

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who did not conform to Socratian expectations were nonhumans (barbarians). Feminist theorists critiqued Kant’s cosmopolitan subject as a predominately male political (and sociocultural) actor in Europe and beyond. Mindful of the Christian legacy, critical political perspectives used the term to debate the role of the nation-state (the particular) in global geopolitics, emphasizing the significance of a cosmopolitan outlook for the future of global citizenship, justice, and democracy. In more recent years, the concept’s relation to the institutional structures of the nation-state began to wane. Cultural theorists examine how our learning habits and practices shape our multiple identities as consumers and producers or how pedagogical experience is used to situate citizens in the world at large and vis-à-vis other viewing (including non-European) positions. The post-Kantian philosophical trajectory of the concept suggests that any “cosmopolitan” respect for human diversity that promotes solidarity on a global scale cannot be achieved solely through formalized agreement (as in Kant’s interstate legal agreement to maintain global peace, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “social contract” to achieve social togetherness), because it also demands the development of moral sensitivity for specific cultural contexts. The coexistence of the specific (culture, nation, tribe, etc.) with the universal highlights both the inescapable tensions within cosmopolitanism as a condition of being, and its creative-productive nature as a state of becoming part of a human whole. Particular readings of Kantian philosophy render the concept relevant to the sociology of globalization, production, and consumption. Literal meanings of kòsmos (from kosmõ, meaning “to make beautiful”) introduce an aesthetic-cultural dimension to the concept. Pedagogy, aesthetics, and politics converge to suggest a method of knowing through visual enactment and bodily performance. This model of cosmopolitan aesthetics, which finds application in creative industries (e.g., film industries such as Bollywood and Hollywood, mega-events such as the Olympic Games and expos), selectively borrows from the Kantian sensus communis, the moral universe of human solidarity, and the literal meaning of kosmopolítis as the subject that inhabits the space of the aesthetic. Theorists, such as Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, and John Urry, talk about “aesthetic reflexivity” as constitutive of contemporary knowledge economies to refer to a contemplative

form of learning that transforms human beings into agents who monitor the social world rather than accepting a predetermined place in it. Formalized aesthetics (from aésthesis or sense) is the philosophical principles of art, but its banal understanding refers to ideas of beauty that we acquire through sensory experience. While this banal form of cosmopolitanism forms a response to a progressive geographical decontextualization of the concept, it is linked to everyday practices: it refers to clashes, dialogues, and fusions of ideas that occur every time people (e.g., diasporic families), objects (e.g., consumer products), and ideas (e.g., broadcast narratives) are on the move. The technological history of mobilities (e.g., the history of the train, the car, the telephone, the mobile phone) serves as an essential link between material cultures and universalized human experience (e.g., travel or migrations). It proffers a way to examine, for example, the commodification of travel as a leisure activity or travel’s role in the global capitalist arena (e.g., business travel). It may also be used as a heuristic tool to examine how capitalist networks exploit the interplay of virtual (cinematic, Internet) with terrestrial forms of travel. Mediations of travel through the Internet (advertising of tourist destinations, marketing vacation packages) or even the electronic enactment of leisure routines (e.g., computer games, interactive sites, and blogospheres sustained by global communities of travel or movie fans) are concrete examples of such cosmopolitan belonging too. Air travel also captures this mode, as it affords to travelers a god’s eye view, a view of the earth from above. This detached form of knowledge renders viewers (travelers) an omniscient gaze (e.g., looking at countries, towns, villages) while separating them from what they see. Other examples of technocultural links are traced in the cosmopolitanization of music styles that “belonged” to particular cultural geographies before becoming part of global cultures: thus, when we visit music stores we find salsa or belly-dancing CDs in the “world music” section. These genres have been moved out of their context (of assigned gender roles, racial politics) to form part of a subculture that crosses state boundaries. Alternatively, music or dance fusions (e.g., hip-hop or rap) may eventually become appropriated by specific ethnic subcultures (e.g., Afro-Caribbean groups). Although in these examples the particular and the universal maintain bilateral communications, they all remain part of

Counterfeited Goods

creative industries that operate as transnational or global agents. For cultural theorists, tangible and intangible artifacts that borrow from different cultures also serve as manifestations of cosmopolitan belonging. The Louvre’s Pyramid, I. M. Pei’s architectural invention, fused the classicist style of the Second Empire (rooted in French imperialism) with Eastern structures to produce a postmodern complex. This served as a statement of France’s overcoming of its colonial past. Such attempts are viewed with skepticism among theorists that advocate a political and moral understanding of cosmopolitanism, highlighting that the argument conflates material fusions with political planning and international economic inequalities. Thus, Pei’s Pyramid has been a controversial project since its announcement in 1985 as one of President Francois Mitterrand’s most ambitious grand projets that countered France’s colonial legacy the very moment national politics worked toward sustaining the racist structures on which the modern state was created (e.g., policies targeting labor migrants from former colonies). Such criticisms bring the mechanics of global labor markets to the fore, tying cosmopolitanism to the legacy of racism, slavery, and colonialism. The history of the concept, replete with paradoxes of exclusion—of other cultures and polities, of phenomenologically established (based on gender, race, disability) “difference”—in a supposedly inclusive agenda, continues to affect its application. A more conciliatory approach acknowledges both arguments as complementary rather than competitive trends. In this intermediary approach, global interconnectedness is not manifest only across institutions and cultures but also within them. This informs, for example, Arjun Appadurai’s conception of global cultural flows or “scapes” (of images, ideas, products, etc.) or Beck’s replacement of abstract cosmopolitanism with a processual cosmopolitanization that advocates the communication of the local or regional with the global. Such hybrid theory can facilitate research into migration and consumption or global risks such as terrorism or pollution, generating more effective links between them. If we accept that the politics of cosmopolitanism are part of the history of globalization and its auxiliary oppressive agendas (colonialism, racism, sexism), we may also discern in the sociology of cosmopolitanism and its diverse history (flows of ideas from East to West, South to North, rurality to

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metropolis) the seeds of an emancipatory agenda that can forge inclusive policies. Rodanthi Tzanelli See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Cultural Flows; Cultural Studies; Enlightenment; Globalization; Information Society; Migration; National Cultures

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 1–24. Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies.” Theory, Culture and Society 19, no. 1 (2002): 17–44. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins. Cosmopolitics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Hebdige, Dick. “Fax to the Future.” Marxism Today 34, no. 1 (1990): 18–23. Held, David. Democracy and the Global Order. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage, 1994. Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and John Urry. “Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar.” British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 1 (2006): 113–131. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995.

COUNTERFEITED GOODS Historically, counterfeit goods—goods that are made to imitate designer or high-end goods—have been used to artificially raise one’s social standing. To be seen, by others, to be in possession of a Gucci handbag, a Warhol silkscreen, or an Armani Collezioni jacket (three areas in which counterfeit goods are currently rife) is understood to evidence wealth and good taste and an informed appreciation of quality, artistry, tradition, and craftsmanship. Thus, when the goods are understood to have been counterfeited, and so bought “on the cheap,” the owners’ taste is revealed to be only deceptively intimated, as is their wealth, and with an appreciation of tradition and craftsmanship revealed to be little more than a sham. The ready availability of such “knock off” goods, via Internet sites or from the vendors in street markets (so that buying a fake Louis Vuitton belt for a few dollars or

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euros while on vacation is almost de rigueur) means that the designer look, if not the authentic designer item itself, is attainable for all. Thus, the goods are no longer the exclusive preserve of those with the social cachet and finance to gain entry to the inner sanctums of the most upscale shops. However, any social faux pas that arises from the use of counterfeited goods has come to be undermined by the nature and origins of the authentic goods: when the “real thing” itself is seen to be of a problematic status, the denigration of the fake version would seem to be made in bad faith. In her 2008 book Deluxe, Dana Thomas argued that the quality and craftsmanship of luxurious goods has waned as newly wealthy middle classes began to seek out an array of affordable, designer-branded status symbols for their domestic spheres. In their full capitalization on this newly emergent market, manufacturers moved further toward mass production, even to the point of many designer items assembled in sweat shops of developing worlds—indeed in the very same areas, possibly by the very same hands, where their counterfeit versions also originate. This capitalization arose through an acceptance of a new market regime for designer brands: a paradigm of straight supply and demand over exclusivity and limited editions, with the typical suppression of manufacturing costs, and with the brand name, and upholding the status of the brand name, as now secondary to generating profit. Two problems have arisen with respect to this market-driven democratization. First, the imperatives of lowered overheads via cheaper labor overwhelmed traditional, old-world craftsmanship: hand-tooled gave way to the factory line, and ethical questions of child labor (see Pilger’s investigation into such developing world assembly lines, for example, in The New Rulers of the World) undid ideas of taste and quality. Second, following Jean Baudrillard’s account of simulacrum, where the brand name itself is understood to have supplanted the product descriptors and, as discussed by Naomi Klein, where it is understood that it is the brand rather than the item that is sold, the dissolution of designer brand name exclusivity has proven to have been near fatal. The designer brand had been understood to denote an authenticity: that the name manufacturer’s quality control has always trumped the expediencies of mass production, so that the particular designer’s

vision has remained untainted and is manifest in this bought item. This is not so much a matter of highquality materials and assembly but of the authenticity of high quality—predicated on an acceptance or blind faith in questionable attributes. The craftsmanship and the artistry of design are visible, but the notion of the tradition in which the product can be placed is obscure, or open to dispute.

Counterfeited Goods and Question of Authenticity Authenticity, if understood in the sense of aura, as described by Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (where the item is possessed of the touch of inspiration—traditionally divine but, for the secular age, via the artisan hands that impart a uniqueness to the item), has always been endangered during an age of mass reproduction. Why pay extra for the aura that, as a metaphysical attribute, remains akin to the Emperor’s New Clothes—or where the lack of such aura, authenticity, and uniqueness is only apparent to those in the know or on closer inspection? That is, the idea of wearing the deceiving imitations of a designer-branded product, even where the imitations are evidently without the official imprint of the assumed maker, now barely represents a cause of embarrassment. In addition, on the crest of the wave of the market democratization of designer goods, a preference for certain brands (such as Burberry), certain goods (such as cognac), and a tasteless overuse of designer jewelry (“bling” or, in the American vernacular, “pimping”—to achieve the look of classless ostentation, as if a cash-rich pimp) by those understood not to be in the select circles of the wealthy classes, along with the use of celebrities of questionable provenance in advertising campaigns, has seemingly damaged the exclusivity and aura of the designer brand. Early intimations of trouble for designer-branded goods were apparent in Versace and Dolce & Gabbana collections by the mid-1990s, and the attempts to strike a balance between exclusive and “street”— a rearguard action to accommodate this shift. The balance, however, was not achieved. The increasing criminalization of counterfeit goods can be understood in this context too, and as a last resort in the battle to preserve authenticity. One could add that the activity of counterfeiting

Counterfeited Goods

has also lost a glamour that once arose from the interplay of playboys, experts, and criminals; with globalization, counterfeiting becomes a matter of the work desperately eked out by the precariat— immigrants without documents, whose trading in counterfeit goods is entirely at the behest of a hungry family—or teenagers with little idea and care for the ethical underpinnings of copyright law, illegally downloading entertainment media for free from the Internet.

Counterfeited Goods in the Digital Era This latter concern represents the newest front in the battle over counterfeited goods. The replacement of analogue technology by digital technology—one of the motors of globalization in the sense of the creation of a global village, a borderless information society with the Internet, termed the information superhighway in the mid to late 1990s—has given rise to new forms of counterfeiting. In terms of illegal downloads and software piracy, the counterfeit copy is identical to, and as functional as, the original. Indeed, the very materiality of the original item is rendered irrelevant; whether the song contained on an iPod has been legally downloaded or illegally “ripped” makes no difference to the user. With the high-profile legal battles set in motion by such ungoverned communal use, often as test cases toward establishing institutional possession of goods-as-pure-data (as with Pirate Bay in 2009), a number of new market paradigms have arisen, remaining often—as yet—un-subsumed or unresolved. First, the downloaders or duplicators may not be profiting in cash terms from their actions, only taking something they have not paid for (and possibly of negligible financial value) entirely for their own use, and without denying the product to its original purchaser. In the case of music, this action may lead to substantial payments to the owner or creator of the song if the downloaders then feel sufficiently inspired to purchase a whole album, or albums—and then to attend live concerts, buy further related goods, and so forth. Record companies are wary of stunting this process, which underlies their very existence. Second, although the industry has a record of using disinformation and scare tactics in respect to the front against counterfeiting, recent attempts at a solution focus on quality. For example, recent

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industry responses to the increased circulation of counterfeited films have pointed out the superior image and sound quality of bought originals. Third, the copyrighted information may not belong to the company that exerts intellectual property rights over it in the first place; as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note, indigenous knowledge developed across generations (concerning, for their example, the medical uses of plants) is not something that can be said to belong to any one person or institution. Fourth, those who exert copyright often remain in breach of antitrust laws through the attempted monopolization of the market (as is the case with the protracted legal battles between the European Commission and Microsoft in the 2000s) and have historically overpriced underperforming or errorridden goods. In these instances, it is the gravitational pull and discernment of the counterfeiters that has exerted full market pressures to the betterment of the sold product. In the final analysis, counterfeiting seems to be a function of the market and for the market: a survival of the fittest in the marketplace itself, for which old modes of distribution are recalibrated toward new forms of consumption of immaterial goods for the global age. Counterfeiting restores functionality as the role of goods and, with a postmodern twist, it begins to cast the original as the inferior to the reworked item. Benjamin Halligan See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Authenticity; Branding; Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Electronic Video Gaming; Informal Economy; Simulacrum; Smuggling and Black Markets

Further Readings Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–242. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. First published 1935. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2001. Pilger, John. The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso, 2003. Thomas, Dana. Deluxe: How Fashion Lost Its Lustre. London: Penguin, 2008.

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CRAFT CONSUMER Craft consumer refers to a person who obtains objects made by skilled artisans. Until the nineteenth century, crafts were ordinarily made for practical or ceremonial use by part-time or full-time specialists. Although some crafts were traded or sold in markets, most were either exchanged through kin networks or appropriated by the state. In the past two centuries, crafts have increasingly been made explicitly for sale. Many commercial crafts are more or less identical to those produced for use in daily life. Most, however, have been altered substantially to attract potential buyers. Some “tourist crafts” created solely for market purposes may be only tangentially related to local cultural traditions. Nonetheless, the search for “authenticity” that motivates many purchases of crafts is an important aspect of consumer culture. The distinction between “crafts” and “arts” is not entirely straightforward. Artists are sometimes said to emphasize concepts, while craft workers place more importance on physical materials and the skill and execution through which a vision is made concrete. Because the potential financial rewards for objects considered to be art are much higher than for those considered to be crafts, classification in one category or the other by tastemakers has significant material consequences. Naive observers may not be able to easily distinguish between craft and art objects. The difference may only become evident by noting the venues in which particular objects are exhibited and sold. Objects labeled as crafts at one time can later be regarded as art; the reverse also happens. Despite these definitional issues, certain types of objects are typically thought of as art (e.g., paintings, sculpture), while other types are usually regarded as crafts (e.g., jewelry, furniture). The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s led to the development of a significant market for crafts. Prior to that time, almost all objects used in daily life were made slowly by skilled artisans. The Industrial Revolution allowed the rapid mass production of identical, machine-made objects. Social elites in Europe and the United States came to value individually fashioned, technically proficient objects that were the product of many hours of work. Because of the time and skill required to make such crafts, these objects were usually more expensive than comparable machine-made pieces. Furthermore, craft

objects could often be readily identified as the work of particular famous artisans. Members of the upper class could demonstrate their wealth and sophistication by purchasing finely made crafts esteemed by tastemakers who were their social peers. The market for crafts in recent years has increasingly included objects made in places far from the homes of buyers. The artisans making such crafts may be quite different culturally from the crafts’ eventual owners. Consumers in industrial countries buying “ethnic” crafts from distant places are usually motivated in part by their admiration for the skill and aesthetic sensibility of their makers. Many also have a romantic desire to connect emotionally with artisans who work with their hands and seem close to nature. By buying an ethnic craft, consumers can show a certain amount of alienation from the machine-made objects of the Industrial Age. The display of ethnic crafts in a consumer’s house suggests (perhaps incorrectly) that trips abroad have been taken, with the implied socioeconomic status associated with international travel. Such displays of crafts also indicate their owners’ sophisticated taste for exotic objects. The market for crafts comprises countless niches. Pieces vary, for example, in their type, price, place of origin, color, and style. The extent of such variation makes it impossible to provide broad generalizations about the motivations for craft purchases. There are different reasons why a consumer might be attracted to a locally made wooden desk in an antique store, a cheap handmade bracelet in a flea market, a Guatemalan blouse found on a trip to a Mayan village, and an expensive set of Italian dishes in a department store. Nonetheless, the prestige associated with owning a scarce, wonderfully crafted object is clearly an important motivation for the purchase of expensive crafts. Buyers of cheaper, less spectacular crafts are more likely to be influenced by their preferences for home decor and their desire to own something different from their neighbors. Customers for crafts usually have inchoate ideas about authenticity. Many scholars disdain authenticity as a criterion for evaluating craft objects. They regard authenticity as a folk category that people in particular times and places use to judge cultural productions. Nevertheless, perceived authenticity is a key criterion that many buyers of crafts use when considering purchases. Characteristics that sellers of crafts use in their attempts to convey authenticity include conformity with traditional designs,

Craft Consumer

handcrafting, and specificity about the makers of particular pieces. Writers have often observed that “traditions” change and that customs and objects said to be of longstanding cultural significance may actually be recent inventions. Only a small number of consumers know much about these studies detailing changes in the forms of allegedly traditional crafts over time. Most merely want to be sure that objects they buy are “real” in some ill-defined sense. Consumers’ concerns about authenticity pose problems for sellers of the many crafts that have been either significantly altered over time or recently invented. The molas made by the San Blas Cuna of Panama illustrate how crafts can be transformed. These rectangular panels of reverse appliqué are worn by Cuna women on the front and back of locally made blouses. The imported cloth is commercially manufactured. Long blouses painted with abstract designs similar to those found in indigenous body painting first appeared among the Cuna in the early nineteenth century. The designs found on molas have changed markedly over the years. At first geometric patterns predominated; later designs included (in approximate order of development) fantastic representations, realistic depictions of plants and animals, human figures, and utensils. Now, all of these designs and others are produced for sale to tourists. Many molas are also made for local use in both everyday life and ceremonial occasions. Wood carvings from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, in contrast, are an invented craft of the twentieth century. Although artisans in the area have long made wooden masks and toys, the origins of the current craft can be traced to activities of Manuel Jiménez (1919–2005) and American and Mexican merchants in the city of Oaxaca. Jiménez began to carve wooden figures as a boy to pass time while tending animals. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, owners of craft shops in Oaxaca bought some of his carvings and sold them to prominent folk art collectors. Tourists and collectors started to visit Jiménez’s workshop in the 1970s. By 1990, most families in Jiménez’s community and another Oaxacan village were making brightly painted carvings for sale to tourists and international wholesalers. At the outset of the wood carving trade, most pieces were clearly related to aspects of rural Oaxacan culture, depicting, for example, farmers, ox teams, devils, angels, and Day of the Dead skeletons. By the peak of a wood carving boom in the mid-1990s, an astonishing

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variety of high-end and low-end pieces were sold to casual tourists, dealers, and collectors. Animal carvings dominated the trade. The most commonly made pieces were cats, frogs, armadillos, and dogs. The commercial success of objects such as Cuna molas and Oaxacan wood carvings might seem to contradict the desire for authenticity that is said to motivate buyers of crafts. Merchants use diverse strategies in their efforts to convince potential customers that such pieces fit in with local culture and are in some sense authentic. They emphasize the simplicity of tool kits and the remoteness of the areas where artisans live. Attempts are sometimes made to relate crafts to religious ceremonies and mystical beliefs. Even when such discourse fails to convince particular consumers that crafts are authentic, it can be effective in appealing to their romantic, antimodernistic sentiments. Writers about buyers of crafts sometimes classify customers into two categories. “Product-oriented” shoppers want to learn how particular crafts are made and place a high value on technical proficiency and aesthetics. “Process-oriented” shoppers want to know the cultural and historical significance of a craft and enjoy learning about the lives of particular artisans. Because sellers try to appeal to both product-oriented and process-oriented shoppers, their advertisements must stress diverse aspects of crafts and their creators. In recent years, some researchers have attempted to describe the sociological and psychological characteristics of buyers of particular kinds of crafts. Several scholars, for example, use the phrase cultural creatives to describe people attracted to ethnic and tourist crafts. Cultural creatives are said to be open to world cultures and attentive to global issues. In the United States, this group supposedly comprises a quarter of the adults in the United States. Cultural creatives are reported to be 60 percent female and mostly college-educated. Although such findings seem plausible, they must be regarded as only the most preliminary explorations of a complex topic. The market for crafts in the contemporary world can be understood with respect to consumers’ reaction to industrial mass production. By seeking out handmade, labor-intensive objects, some consumers are showing their appreciation of an individuality and artisanry that is often absent from machinemade products. Their craft purchases in many cases also allow them to acquire prestige by demonstrating

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that they have the money and taste to buy expensive, finely made objects. Michael Chibnik See also Authenticity; Counterfeited Goods; Craft Production; Globalization; Inventing Tradition; Material Culture; Prosumption

Further Readings Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Chibnik, Michael. Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. García Canclini, Néstor. Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Phillips, Ruth, and Christopher Steiner, eds. Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Ray, Paul, and Sherry Anderson. The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. New York: Harmony Books, 2000. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Tice, Karin. Kuna Crafts, Gender, and the Global Economy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

CRAFT PRODUCTION The concept of craft production refers to work processes resulting in products where the design and manufacture are conducted by the same person more or less concurrently. The arts and crafts movement in the United Kingdom in the mid- and latenineteenth century appears as the first explicit use of the notion of crafts and craftsmanship as a social critique. These notions served John Ruskin and William Morris in their critique of industrial production. Scholars such as C. Wright Mills and recently Richard Sennett have refined this critique of the authority of the machine in commanding human actors and addressed the appreciation of skills, engagement with work, and commitment to good

quality as general phenomena of human activity. Sennett views crafts as a merger of design and making and ultimately as a critique of duality of the mind and the body, according to which creative thinking is abstract and takes place without interference or active contribution of our physical being. The human actor that Sennett’s analysis purports is an integrated body-mind engaged with materials in acts of making. The concept of craft production is informed by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and manifest in the so-called practice turn (Schatzki et al. 2001). Crafts theorizing also resonates with the work of Nigel Thrift on performance and precognitive, tacit intelligence of the body-mind. Thrift’s idea of performance indicates an emergent form of production that counters the idea of separate mind and body by suggesting that our ways of being in the physical space are always iterative and responsive. In his argument, precognitive bodily responses lay beyond, or before, management and control. Hence, they also constitute an alternative form of production. In organization and management studies, the scholars of organizational aesthetics such as Antonio Strati have made use of the notions of tacit and bodily knowledge and drawn on and further developed the idea of craftsmanship. Craft production can also be understood as a particular set of products and production processes. In a narrow sense, craft production makes use of nonfabricated, “natural” materials such as clay, wood, and natural fibers. In a similar way, the acts of blacksmithing, weaving, and pottery making are central to the notion of crafts. Hence, craft products are frequently considered as traditional, authentic, and local, as opposed to industrial production. This selection of natural materials has also contributed to an understanding of crafts as being environmentally sustainable, in addition to a socially preferable form of organizing work. Contemporary accounts tend to emphasize that craft production is sacred. Engagements with crafts are thought to provide authenticity, orientation, and order in a chaotic modern world. Craft production is thus also a ritual to be attended as a practitioner or admired and consumed as part of an audience. In the same vein, handicrafts are spectacular objects to be gazed at and seized in exotic destinations. To uncoil these notions one can first note that because of their claimed authenticity, crafts form an important part of the tourist industry. Craft products are materializations of culture, and thus

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handicraft souvenirs enable cultural sampling. Craft items participate in a commerce of tourist arts that is important both for local producers as well as the tourist industry (Grabourn 1984). Given the importance of handicrafts in tourism, developers of new resorts and destinations are involved in establishing a craft “industry” (e.g., Moreno and Littrell 2001). Tourism thus constitutes processes in which the role and understanding of local, traditional crafts changes through both commodification and the establishment of new meanings. Paradoxically, however, handicraft products are also increasingly traded in the anonymizing international market. The objects of this international trade are curiously faceless and anonymous commodities that nevertheless bear marks of craftsmanship. Apart from consuming the crafts of exotic cultures, displays of tradition and heritage are also performed locally. Heritage can be convincingly remade by emphasizing the continuum of used materials and methods. The replicas of historic seagoing vessels serve a prime example (Laurier 1998). Though they are not original as physical objects, these projections make use of old designs, aim to evoke feelings of authenticity, and enable traveling through time. Such objects and performances of craftsmanship thus become part of commercial activities not as souvenirs but rather as stages of various role games. Craft hobbies and household production constitute a rather different and more active engagement with craft production. Many acts of nonmarket time, such as cooking and various forms of maintenance are craftlike pursuits, as they require both a broad range of skills, manual labor, and problem solving. On the other hand, craft hobbies exemplify a more explicit pursuit of doing crafts and finding a different orientation to that of work life. Gardening, knitting, and do-it-yourself activities stand for a creative craft work in leisure. Equally, the various courses on craft skills that underlie these hobbies are significant modes and elements of craft production. Crafts can be understood as a contingent part of the art world. As a form of artistic production, craft items are considered both useful and expressive. Craft production and consumption are thus subject to processes that have been found to structure the art world. Following the prominent figure of Pierre Bourdieu in art sociology, one can ask the question, what counts as crafts? How do craft items function in society? How are taste and class displayed

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in public through craft products, and how are craft products used at home? In his article “Arts and Crafts,” Howard S. Becker considers explicitly the interplay between arts and crafts. While both artists and craftspeople, or artisans, seek to master particular techniques of making, Becker suggests that artists stand apart from craftspeople because of their expressive pursuits and concerns. Hence, while a craftsperson may take pride in controlling a technique to be able to repeat the minute details of consecutive products, artists reject simple mastering of skill and virtuoso for the sake of repetition. Uniqueness, and the singularity of objects, is understood differently in arts and in crafts. Equally, although usefulness is a self-evident starting point for crafts, apparent uselessness is a means to twist the same techniques and materials to support artistic and expressive pursuits. Yet, as Becker also notes, distinctions between craft and art are contingent. Ceramists, textile artists, and more lately carpenters are examples of the blurring between art and everyday objects. A more conceptual statement of the intertwining of arts and crafts is the design dictum “form follows function,” which has informed much of modern design since the arts and crafts movement. Craft items as embodiments of culture and vessels of artistic expression are understood as singular and unique as opposed to standardized and uniform industrial products. This singularity of crafts can be conceived in different ways. Most obviously, these handmade products bear the signatures of their makers and the marks of skill. However, craft products are also thought to reflect the personality of their makers and carry traces of preconscious and prerepresentational tacit forms of intelligence. To quote the website of the World Craft Council, “crafts are produced from the heart and mind of an artisan, whose hands personify it, exalt it, as a work of art. Touch it, feel it, turn it in your hand and you can feel the pulse of an Artisan who made it” (Obeyesekere 1996). Furthermore, following Sennett, one can argue that crafts are never flawless and perfect in a standardized sense, but rather irregular and thus contain the idea of their human maker as an active learner. What are the contemporary academic uses of the notion of craft production? Sennett attempts to place the romantic and nostalgic sentiment associated with craftsmanship to serve the analysis of work life and addresses, for example, the craft of open source software development. In his work, the concept is

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relevant for, first, understanding human relations with technology; and second, for understanding the puzzle of excelling skills with repetition and yet maintaining a curious problem-solving mind. On the other hand, craft production is a concept that opens up new avenues to understand consumption and everyday life. Much of consumption can be viewed as skilled activity and analyzed with the notion of craft production. Finally, craft production constitutes new ideas about the singularization of objects and value-creation in global economy. Mikko Jalas See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Authenticity; Craft Consumer; Decommodification; Leisure; Material Culture; Prosumption; Souvenirs; Theories of Practice

Further Readings Becker, Howard S. “Arts and Crafts.” The American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 4 (1978): 862–889. Grabourn, Nelson. “The Evolution of Tourist Art.” Annals of Tourism Research 11 (1984): 393–419. Laurier, Eric. “Replication and Restoration: Ways of Making Maritime History.” Journal of Material Culture 3, no. 1 (1998): 21–50. Mills, C. Wright. The American White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. Moreno, Josephine, and Mary Ann Littrell. “Negotiating Tradition: Tourism Retailers in Guatemala.” Annals of Tourism Research 28, no. 3 (2001): 658–685. Obeyesekere, Siva. World Craft Council. 1996. http://www .worldcraftscouncil.org/history.html. Schatzki, Theodore, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 2001. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Strati, Antonio. Organization and Aesthetics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999. Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory. London: Routledge, 2008.

CREDIT Borrowing and lending are as widespread and old as human societies, but credit is a phenomenon of the modern world. In early European economies, a unique form of credit took shape, initially drafted

for the powerful: the church used credit to fund the Crusades, state politicians amassed public debt to fund wars as well as imperial and domestic projects, and merchant and industrial classes embraced credit to expand their business empires. These early credit networks layered onto the many financial innovations of the early modern period, such as the accounting procedures and checks popularized by Italian merchants in the thirteenth century, banking and stock relations devised in fifteenth-century Holland, and British financial networks woven by mercantile expansion in the sixteenth century. Yet, most important for consumer culture was how twentieth-century retailers popularized, built on, and transformed these early credit systems to service the mass consumer market.

Modern Credit Expansion Changed attitudes toward lending accompanied modern credit expansion, signaled by the replacement of the morally tainted term usury, Latin for the charging of interest on a loan, with credit. Modern writers, such as merchant Daniel Defoe, shaped the meaning of credit, embracing it, albeit ambivalently, and insisting interest was an acceptable and necessary agent of economic growth. Debtor’s prison for Defoe, who spent time there, was overly harsh treatment for honest businessmen experiencing a streak of bad investment luck. Building on this positive redefinition of credit, legal reformer Jeremy Bentham crafted arguments that abolished antiusury canonical law in 1694, establishing the free, rational individual’s right to draft credit contracts. Credit emerged in a context of intensive capital exchange—more a phenomenon of affluence than poverty—advanced legal, technological, and institutional networks. Modern notions of money marketing, secularism, and individualism also empowered credit networks. Although corner shop accounts, the traveling salesperson, and visiting the pawn shop had long saved families from ruin, twentieth-century credit networks drew consumers and producers into fateful institutionalized union. The corporate model dominated credit networks that had once been diversely organized by cooperatives, workers’ collectives, and credit unions. Automobile manufacturers were some of the first to understand that by smoothing consumers’ purchasing patterns, credit extended, regularized,

Credit

and heightened the speed of mass-production cycles. Western Europe became a branch plant for U.S. cars, and U.S. style credit, which expanded as domestic businesses replicated the credit practices and governments promoted credit believing it might stimulate national economies. In the 1960s, U.S. financial institutions, such as Visa, built powerful revolving credit monopolies that linked banks, retailers, and consumers. In 1983, two-thirds of Visa cards circulated domestically, yet, a decade later, U.S. consumers accounted for less than half of the total number of Visa cards in circulation. By 2000, Visa cards circulated throughout Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East. The extension of credit to previously untapped markets fueled the phenomenal growth and profit of the credit sector since the late-twentieth century. New lending formulas and management of financial risks by charging higher rates contributed to credit expansion at the same time as it systematically ensured that the poor and young pay more for credit than the wealthy and established. As credit networks became ubiquitous, those who paid in cash were disadvantaged, because retailers bury in the price of goods the 2 to 3 percent levy credit networks demanded on each credit transaction. In the 1980s and 1990s, several governments’ liberalization of financial markets and relaxation of credit restrictions, along with significant sums of capital looking for investment opportunities, increased the sums available for household lending. Between 2000 and 2008, U.S. household lending increased from US$7.1 trillion to US$15.3 trillion; the United Kingdom from US$1 trillion to US$3 trillion; Germany from US$1.4 trillion to US$2.1 trillion; and France from US$486 billion to US$1.3 trillion (Economists Intelligence Unit 2009). The combined U.S. and European consumer debt load reached $4.4 trillion. From Turkey to India to China, consumer credit and consumer debt increased globally (Worthington, Stewart, and Lu 2007). Still, it is impossible to adequately explain consumer credit as simply a by-product of Americanization or modernization, because ample evidence demonstrates how unique historical circumstances, laws, and customs shape distinctive contexts of credit use. For example, some sectors of Islamic faith communities denounce credit, leading to its limited use in Pakistan and Egypt, as well as the formation of Islamic credit alternatives by major U.K. and U.S.

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banks to service their Muslim customers. Patriarchal laws and custom prevented British women from engaging in some forms of credit until 1935. Credit is frequently restricted in families, as many parents refuse to charge interest on loans to their children. Further, despite growth, levels of credit use and consumer debt remain limited in France and Germany, explained partially by high levels of state subsidies, countervailing beliefs to the marketplace, as well as an enduring cultural pride, particularly in the middle class, toward the values of prudence, thrift, and saving. Credit use is more prevalent in market-friendly countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Mortgages, a key form of consumer credit, are highly popular because these instruments have allowed some of those of limited means to get out from under the dictates of a landlord, generate wealth, and, through property inheritance, provide future generations a leg up. In this sense, U.S. consumer debt plays a role in the American Dream. Campaigns supporting the democratization of credit and social movements acting against its selective restriction are justified by the belief that it is a consumer’s right to invest in his or her future and immediately enjoy the fruits of the market. Credit discrimination is tackled in regulation, appeals to human rights, and the formation of smaller, controlled lending circles, like women’s collectives in Africa. Some assert that modern credit contracts changed the character of modern cultures by fostering abstract, individualized, and impersonal ways of relating that distorted people’s sense of value and supported their alienation from one another. Authors distinguished credit from the more personal, communal, and morally laden obligations of traditional lending circles. Still others reject the idea that credit networks are universally impersonalizing, or inherently alienating, arguing instead that credit can be put to many ends, including social integration. For example, cultures distinguish different types of money and lending situations: loan sharking, blood money, and pocket money.

Problems Associated With Consumer Credit A variety of economic, social, and personal problems accompanied consumer credit expansion. Credit facilitated new types of criminal activity. Credit card records are a powerful map of consumers’ activities, thus credit fraud, identity theft, and concerns

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about privacy remain ongoing concerns. Mistrust in lending circles—brought on by such issues as fear that borrowers will not pay back their debts, the overvaluing or depreciation of goods purchased on credit, and increased interest rates and demands for repayment—is associated with a menagerie of problems. Imprudent lending and trading of risky mortgage bonds around the globe brought high and low finance together as never before, producing a decade of capital expansion and, in 2007, an international recession. Credit retraction resulted in job loss, asset stripping, and economic stagnation. In the United States and the United Kingdom, bankruptcy laws, originally devised to forgive farmers at the mercy of nature of their debts, by the twenty-first century forgave the bad loans of banks and financial houses to prevent economies from failing. Yet, in advanced consumer cultures, where up to 70 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) is attributable to retail and service consumption, and where politicians encourage people to view spending as their patriotic duty, bankruptcy laws show less forgiveness to many individuals who sought relief from their unmanageable debts. High personal debt is correlated with variety of physical and mental illnesses, as well as addictions (Dittmar 2007). Debt also plays a role in the breakdown of social and family relations (Price, Price, and McKenry 2010). The human cost of debt stimulates criticism against predatory lending, and much contemporary research has set out to expose the aggressive sales practices, deceptive marketing claims, poor credit checks, and deceptive advertisements that prey on consumer’s desires instead of offering financial information. Others focus on credit’s contribution to consumerism. Some point to a broad scale shift in cultural values, consumer attitudes, and elevated aspirations. The twentieth century is recognized as a moment when traditional fears of debt and the value of thrift were bypassed by appeals to hedonistic lifestyle that embraced a have-it-all, have-it-now attitude. Popular culture discourses shamed the indebted consumer by constructing a contemporary folk devil, the out-of-control shopaholic, typically women, who, with a fist full of credit cards, drive themselves and their families to ruin. Credit is also thought to encourage impatient and unsatisfied individuals, who are unable to wait to acquire goods, which is exactly what a consumer culture predicated on the high turnover of goods requires.

Credit from this perspective feeds elevated aspirations and stokes individual pleasure seeking and the pursuit of novelty over functionality, long-term maintenance, and thoughtful use and meaningful interaction with objects. Along with criticism, campaigns for more financial education in schools, counseling services, and financial advice seek to address credit problems and consumerism. Some call for the medical interventions for treating debt-ridden shopaholics. Still others insist that treating individual consumers neglects the systemic problems associated with credit systems and consumer culture. Despite growing personal debt loads, the vast majority of consumers continue to show a remarkable capacity to pay back their debts, despite great hardship. In a consumer economy where consumption is the central engine of growth, people appear to dutifully work hard and consume hard into the future by taking on credit. Jacqueline Botterill See also Affluent Society; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Consumer Society; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Debt; Islam; Money; Network Society; Thrift

Further Readings Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Black, Donald W. “Compulsive Buying: A Review.” The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 57, no. 8 (1996): 50–54. Botterill, Jaqueline. Consumer Culture and Personal Finance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Calder, Lendol. Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Davies, Glyn. A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day. 3rd. ed. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2002. Dittmar, Helga. Consumer Culture, Identity and Well-Being. London: Routledge, 2007. Economists Intelligence Unit. “Plastic Implosion.” Country Monitor 17, no. 28 (2009): 5. Finn, Margot. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The New Industrial State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Kaynak, Erdener, and Talha Harcar. “Consumers’ Attitudes and Intentions towards Credit Card Usage in an Advanced Developing Country.” Journal of Financial Services Marketing 6, no. 1 (2001): 24–39.

Cultural Capital Manning, Robert. Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. O’Connell, Sean. Credit and Community: Working-Class Debt in the UK since 1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Olney, Martha. Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Price, Sharon, Christine A. Price, and Patrick C. McKenry. Families and Change: Coping with Stressful Events and Transitions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010. Ritzer, George. Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1995. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. Sullivan, Ceri. The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Tucker, David. The Decline of Thrift in America: Our Cultural Shift from Saving to Spending. New York: Praeger, 1990. Worthington, Steve, David Stewart, and Xiongwen Lu. “The Adoption and Usage of Credit Cards by UrbanAffluent Consumers in China.” International Journal of Bank Marketing 25, no. 4 (2007): 238–252. Zelizer, Viviana A. The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

CULTURAL CAPITAL The analysis of consumer culture is premised on both the top-down understanding of the emergence and effects of large-scale systems for the production and market-mediated dissemination of cultural objects, performances, and experiences and the bottom-up theorizing of the process through which people select and appropriate particular offerings (while, by implication, excluding others) as part of their own active attempt to build a “lifestyle.” The concept of cultural capital has recently come to acquire a central place in our understanding of lifestyle choices in consumer societies (Holt 1998) by allowing us to, on the one hand, better conceptualize the usually hard-to-appreciate systematicity to be found in otherwise seemingly arbitrary choices across putatively disconnected

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consumption domains and, on the other hand, allowing us to link these choice styles to the consumer’s socialization history and current social position. The term cultural capital was introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron to better understand patterns of inequality—such as educational inheritance, or the differential ability of the sons and daughters of educated parents to be judged as better students by their teachers—in educational outcomes in French schools. Bourdieu and Passeron suggested that educational institutions are “imprinted” with the styles of thought and classification as well as habitual orientations toward institutionally validated cultural goods and experiences of the status groups that exercises control over them (e.g., higher-education professionals). Cultural capital differences among pupils thus partly explained differential educational trajectories for students originating from different class fractions. In their original statement, the acquisition of a set of tacit competences in culturally privileged households lead to an unconscious, undirected, but ultimately systematic development of an organized set of expectations, styles of appreciation, and systems of practical action in recurrent status-marked situations that Bourdieu (1984) later came to refer to as the class habitus. This class habitus is an enduring (but dynamic) cognitive structure that produces thoughts, reactions (aesthetic, cognitive, and moral), and choices (e.g., what to buy, what to major in, who to marry) that are in tune with and attempts (within constraints) to re-create the environment during which it developed. The habitus does this by making “choices” that are consonant with its conditions of development, because it is essentially a set of practical dispositions that unconsciously construe and expect the future to be similar in shape and pattern to the past, unless subject to a process of radical disconfirmation (for instance, by way of systematic exposure to a series of countervailing experiences). The thought styles and habitual cultural practices that are rewarded in formal school settings, according to Bourdieu and Passeron, are similar to those that are more likely to be promoted and imparted in middle-class households and are qualitatively distinct from those that are implicitly transmitted in workingclass households. Bourdieu’s mature formulation of this process came to differ from other arguments as to the impact of socialization on educational outcomes (e.g., those provided by Basil Bernstein) in construing parental socialization as less driven

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by an unintentional process of “code” transmission mediated by linguistic forms and more by an implicit, embodied, unconscious immersion in an entire social, symbolic, and material environment (mainly composed of parental practices, but also material objects, built environments, as well as specific sensory and cultural experiences). Empirical studies of the effects of cultural capital on educational outcomes that have followed Bourdieu’s lead have usually operationalized cultural capital using parent’s and children’s rates of engagement in legitimate cultural practices (e.g., reading of “serious” literature, going to a museum). These studies have shown that indeed seemingly extrainstitutional (vis-à-vis formal schooling) patterns of cultural practice in the realm of symbolic goods consumption impact intra-institutional outcomes in the educational system. These range from better grades for children who engage in legitimate arts consumption (DiMaggio 1982) to better chances of making a given educational transition for children of culturally privileged parents (Aschaffenburg and Maas 1997).

Conceptualizing Cultural Capital The concept of cultural capital has enjoyed a much more flexible and generalized applicability beyond the study of educational outcomes in contemporary sociological theory and empirical research. This has been mainly due to the impact of Bourdieu’s classic study Distinction, where the notion of cultural capital was extended to explain differential rates of engagement in the (institutionally legitimated) arts. Released from its functional linkage to a narrow set of outcomes in the early work coauthored with Passeron, cultural capital now came to denote a generalized, transposable disposition to apply the artistic “scheme” (e.g., the Kantian notion that aesthetic form should be privileged over content) to cultural products hailing from symbol-producing art worlds of different degrees of institutional legitimation (Bourdieu 1984, 3). This is what Bourdieu referred to as the “aesthetic disposition.” The key argument in Distinction is that the aesthetic disposition functions as cultural capital in latemodern societies, because it is the most institutionally legitimated (e.g., through its reinforcement by educational institutions) form of appropriation of aesthetic goods, although it is not the only existing mode of reception. Bourdieu concluded that it was this

differential capacity to apply aestheticizing cognitive schemes to the different symbolic goods produced by the symbol-production fields of the more legitimate (and sometimes the popular) arts that served as the primary differentiating factor among art-consuming audiences in late-modern societies. This was also the key to understanding the cultural advantage of the more educated segments of the dominant class. Those portions of the population who have the most habitual command of the practical schemes of aesthetic appreciation that yield cultural capital would therefore be more likely to be knowledgeable about and be heavily engaged in the arts. This is precisely what Bourdieu finds in his empirical analysis and what has been confirmed by scores of studies that have followed in its wake.

The Three Modes of Existence of Cultural Capital In an influential essay, Bourdieu (1986) argued that cultural capital can exist in three analytically distinct states: in its embodied state, cultural capital consists of an implicit set of cognitive-emotive schemes of perception, appreciation, and action relevant to the manner in which institutionally legitimated cultural objects and aesthetic experiences are experienced, appropriated, and thus “consumed.” A more explicit aspect of embodied cultural capital may be manifested in the capacity to verbally express the aesthetic qualities of a given cultural object. Bourdieu was clear, nevertheless, in underscoring the fact that the relative ability to “redescribe” implicit aesthetic experiences into explicit verbal statements differed according to the mode of acquisition of cultural capital. Those who have acquired the bulk of their cultural capital in the informal family environment (in contrast to those whose main source of cultural capital is the formal educational system) are predicted to be relatively less likely to explicitly verbalize and schematize their aesthetic experiences, while at the same time being more likely to make the “right’ aesthetic choices. Cultural capital may also exist in what Bourdieu referred to as an institutionalized state, which refers to the possession on the part of the bearer of concrete (and institutionally defined and legitimated) markers of cultural distinction and status rank (such as educational qualifications in contemporary societies). More specific forms of institutionalized

Cultural Capital

cultural capital appear in the form of the occupancy of objectified posts of cultural authority that assign the bearer the symbolic power to make “distinctions that make a difference” within fields of symbolic production (e.g., curator, critic). Naturally, due to the reinforcing and socializing effects of educational institutions, we should empirically expect to observe a rough match between indicators of institutionalized cultural capital and the implicit aptitudes constitutive of its embodied form. Finally, Bourdieu suggests that cultural capital may also appear in an objectified state, in the form of the “direct” possession or appropriation (e.g., ownership through market mechanisms) of institutionally defined art objects. For Bourdieu, while the direct appropriation of cultural goods can be a potential signal of cultural capital, in late-modern societies, sole direct ownership of objectified cultural capital in the absence of a demonstrable ability to indirectly appropriate those products (through the application of the contextually defined “correct” schemes of perception and appreciation) had come to be devalued (e.g., conspicuous displays of objectified cultural wealth). In fact, for Bourdieu, the two different fractions of the dominant class are partitioned mainly according to this division between indirect (embodied, associated with patronage of nonprofit arts dissemination institutions) and direct (objectified, associated with involvement in a literal market for symbolic goods associated with the monetary purchase of prestigious art objects). These constituted two opposing principles of engagement with cultural works (possibly reconciled in the figure of newly mobile professionals endowed with both embodied cultural capital and the ability to purchase art objects). In spite of the importance of this tripartite distinction between the different forms of cultural capital, most empirical research that has attempted to put Bourdieu’s framework to the test usually relies on relatively incomplete measures of cultural capital that seldom attempt to disentangle the relative impact of these different forms of cultural capital on the outcomes of interest.

Cultural Capital: Proficiency Versus Boundary Definitions A key interest on the part of sociologists in the notion of cultural capital is the fact that various strands of theory predict that it should be systematically linked

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with a host of outcomes, especially those having some impact on a person’s ability to reproduce his or her position in the system of status and stratification. However, the way in which we conceive the effects of cultural capital are clearly dependent on the way in which we define the concept in the first place. In the Anglo-American literature, there are two primary definitions of cultural capital that inform contemporary theory and research. One, partially based on Bourdieu’s (1986) influential formulation, defines cultural capital as an aptitude or a skill acquired in the combined realms of the upper-middle-class family and the school system. For instance, Paul DiMaggio conceives of cultural capital as “proficiency in the consumption of and discourse about generally prestigious—that is institutionally screened and validated—cultural goods” (1991, 134). From this point of view, and following Bourdieu’s (1984) rejection of Thorstein Veblen’s (1899) account of emulation through conspicuous consumption in his book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, theories of consciously guided “distinction,” whatever benefits accrue to the individual as a consequence of possessing cultural capital appear as an unintended consequence produced by cross-institutional linkages in society-wide cultural definitions of value and worth (i.e., between symbol-producing art worlds, higher education institutions, and high-status professional fields). It follows that with transformations in institutional conceptions of what constitutes aesthetic value, certain forms of cultural capital may lose their legitimacy and be replaced by others (Peterson and Kern 1996). The other major conceptualization of cultural capital in current theory and research on the subject is concerned with addressing what are perceived to be ambiguities in the Bourdieu-inspired definition of cultural capital as skill or proficiency. Instead, from the boundaries point of view (Lamont and Lareau 1988, 164) cultural capital is defined as “the institutionalized repertoire of high status signals” useful for purposes of marking and drawing symbolic boundaries in a given social context. This definition of social capital attempts to recover what is perceived to be its origin in a theory by Max Weber of status group closure. From this perspective, whatever counts as cultural capital are those symbolic resources that are actively mobilized by members of groups or class fractions to establish their difference from other

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groups and thus to devalue the cultural resources and symbolic practices of outsiders. Omar Lizardo See also Aesthetics; Conspicuous Consumption; Habitus; Lifestyle; Social Class; Social Distinction; Status; Symbolic Capital; Taste

Further Readings Aschaffenburg, Karen, and Ineke Maas. “Cultural and Educational Careers: The Dynamics of Social Reproduction.” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 573–587. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977. DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Capital and School Success: The Impact of Status Culture Participation on the Grades of U.S. High School Students.” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189–201. DiMaggio, Paul. “Social Structure Institutions and Cultural Goods: The Case of the United States.” In Social Theory for a Changing Society, edited by Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, 133–155. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Holt, D. B. “Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?” Journal of Consumer Research 25 (1998): 1–25. Lamont, Michèle, and Annette Lareau. “Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments.” Sociological Theory 6 (1988): 153–168. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907.

CULTURAL FLOWS Cultural flows refer to multidirectional movements and reallocations of human beings, artifacts, and ideas within the ill-defined sphere of “culture” in its global, national, and regional dimensions. The term was widely applied in consumer culture, especially

in relation to production/consumption processes and products. Mobilized by transformationalist globalization theorists, the concept suggests that migrations and mobilities generate ever-changing cultural formations, erasing imagined boundaries and territorial borders through which nation-states legitimate their power. Transformationalists express suspicion toward traditional identifications of globalization with cultural standardization (e.g., one-dimensional “Americanization” of world cultures), arguing instead that cultural flows diffuse identities, generating new possibilities for intercultural dialogues. Unlike other branches of globalization theory (e.g., world systems theory), transformationalism does not establish culture as a single system of collective values and practices. Instead, it highlights the multiplicity of cultural trajectories through time and space, and the power individuals and collectivities have to create, destroy, and reinvent cultures. Cultural flows facilitate human creativity both in organized or institutionalized (in nation-states, factories, cultural industries) and nonorganized forms (through travel, migration, and consumption). Producing and consuming culturally specific goods and ideas become interconnected: consumers assign new meanings to them, a process that transforms them into symbolic producers and grants them with some agency and belonging to a consumer community. Most world societies have always been in (peaceful or violent) contact with each other. The twentiethcentury revolution in communications and transport has only intensified this phenomenon, according to David Held. However, cultural flows remain unevenly distributed across the world: urban areas are more benefited by flows of goods than rural peripheries, as they tend to be the destinations of business or labor migrants or production centers for commodities. The developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere (e.g., Britain, the United States) and Asia (e.g., China, India) possess more military and technological power to control whole regions of the world, as opposed to impoverished countries (e.g., on the African continent), which are cast as political satellites or subaltern cultural formations. The concept of cultural flows is associated with anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Appadurai suggests that we reconsider the binary oppositions colonial history bequeathed us: global

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versus local, South versus North, or metropolitan versus rural. Instead, we should try to understand how “flows” or “scapes” sweep through the globe, carrying capital, images, people, information, technologies, and ideas. As these flows travel through national boundaries, they form different combinations and interdependencies, mutate, and split cultural imaginations into nation and state. Institutional barriers collapse, and people join imagined communities that live beyond the place they were born and raised (e.g., communities of interest, such as those that maintain Internet blogs or diasporic groups that live outside their homeland). Refuting the canon of push-and-pull factors of traditional migration theory (e.g., lack of jobs in one country and abundance in another are solely responsible for migrations), Appadurai develops a thesis with an eye to Scott Lash and John Urry’s disorganized capitalism hypothesis, that is, to split global cultural flows into ethnoscapes (human migrations), technoscapes (configurations of technology), financescapes (global business networks), ideoscapes (concatenations of images), and mediascapes (cultural industry networks). He claims that global flows occur through and in the growing disjunctures between scapes. For example, the Olympic Games organize financescapes (global, regional, and international business networks flock to invest in the host city), mediascapes (the games have opening and closing ceremonies that showcase national cultures), but also ideoscapes (images of the host city and nation, their history and customs circulate globally to attract tourists), and ethnoscapes (human migrations of business networks and localities that are removed from parts of the city to make space for Olympic venues). Financescapes are at war (in disjunction) with ethnoscapes: global social movement networks often protest against the violation of human rights that take place during the games (housing problems, migration management); in turn, ideoscapes clash with ethnoscapes, as city brands and narratives are tarnished by demonstrations and negative press reporting. Cultural flows result in hybridity that regulates fusions of tangible or intangible categories initially considered separate entities. The concept invites us to shed light on the symbolic process through which goods are produced in local, national, and transnational markets. Like scapes, it refers to fusions, different understandings and material reproductions

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of national cultures by different groups (producers and consumers). For example, Olympic legacies are read through the host city and nation’s history. The Athens 2004 ceremonies claimed the Olympic Games as part of Greek-European national heritage, whereas their Beijing 2008 counterpart stressed how Chinese civilization with its groundbreaking inventions (calligraphy, paper, the compass) preceded the European-Hellenic civilization. Their global audiences and consumers of their paraphernalia (e.g., mascots), however, developed their own understanding of the ceremonies and their products. Similar to the cultural flows debate is the idea of “traveling cultures,” a term coined by James Clifford to communicate an understanding of the practice of “doing anthropology.” For Clifford, the anthropological field is not a neatly framed area but an open one that observers (outsiders) and the observed (insiders) create together. Culture is a grand travel: people leave home and return, enacting interconnected cosmopolitanisms through encounters with others. Other sociologists adapted Clifford’s thesis to explore ideas of (embodied, actual, and virtual) travel and tourism. For example, it has been suggested that tourism involves flaneurism, a cosmopolitan outlook that enables travelers to consume the world from afar (an aircraft or the Internet) or from the standpoint of physical proximity (e.g., buying souvenirs or photographing monuments). Just like anthropologists, tourists and travelers may remain outside native cultures, but their very presence or banal interactions with locals introduce social change. Their traveling is a form of mobility that sustains ties between the global and the local, producing what sociologist Ronald Robertson has termed glocalization. Glocalization is also actualized by production companies that manufacture consumer goods for global markets: these products travel and flow through the globe. Consider, for example, the geographical and cultural journey of the Barbie doll as an idea (intangible) and a marketable (tangible) product: inspired by a German toy doll in the mid-1950s, it was produced in the United States, became a globally traded brand, was appropriated in various national contexts (today, eBay sells “Sumatra Barbie dolls” in ethnic outfits), but is manufactured in China. The predecessor of Barbie, Bild Lilli, was based on a popular German character implicitly connected with the femme fatale cinematic genre: Lilli was a working girl that knew

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what she wanted and was not above using men to get it. The sociopolitical connection with the film noir tradition that emerged in the turbulent interwar years when a number of economic changes threatened the social structure (especially ideals about the family and gender roles) provides a distinctive European context that was lost during Lilli’s relocation to the United States as the “blonde” girl (connotations between blondness and stupidity were prominent in Hollywood cinema). The production and distribution process transcended state boundaries, whereas the idea itself is a cultural synthesis in constant flux. In the 2000s, the much cheaper version of Fulla replaced the legendary American toy in the Arab world, regranting it with its original sociohistorical context. Distributed by the Emirates-based NewBoy Design Studio, Fulla clashes with the blonde, skinny archetype (it is both dark-skinned and veiled, to appeal to the upper-class Muslim consumers). This happened just as Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, often called the religious police, had banned “the Jewish doll,” whose “revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories, and tools were a symbol of decadence to the perverted West.” A hybrid toy thus became the battleground of both anti-Western cultural values and nationalist rivalries, simultaneously uncovering the postcolonial (both anti-Western and anti-Semitic) context in which these values are played out. Likewise, salsa music, a genre inextricably linked with one of the last surviving communist regimes, was originally invented by Cuban immigrants in Miami in the 1920s through fusions of African and Latin American genres. However, as a contemporary subcultural (musical and dance) trend, it is divested of its political background. Cultural flows enable the enrichment of culturally specific ideas and goods. This process does not entail a monocultural synthesis akin to the thesis that foretells the Americanization of the globe and the subsequent erasure of cultural particularity. Rather, it facilitates fusions of ideas by both the producers of goods and their consumers. As cultural flows enable the mobility, interaction, and clashes of diverse scapes, they are a manifestation of globalization dynamics. Rodanthi Tzanelli See also Americanization; Cosmopolitanism; Diaspora; Disorganized Capitalism; Flaneur/euse; Globalization; Information Society; Migration

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 1–24. Clifford, James. “Travelling Cultures.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 96–116. New York: Routledge, 1992. Held, David, ed. A Globalizing World? London: Routledge, 2000. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. The End of Organised Capitalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Pieterse, Nederveen Jan. “Globalization as Hybridization.” In Global Modernities, edited by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Ronald Robertson, 45–68. London: Sage, 1997. Pieterse, Nederveen Jan. Globalization and Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Robertson, Ronald. Globalization. London: Sage, 1992.

CULTURAL FRAGMENTATION The concept of cultural fragmentation implies the disintegration of “singular” cultures and the formation of numerous diverse cultures, be they associated with particular ethnicities, religions, concepts of nationhood or people groups, or those associated with particular forms of lifestyle, values, or commodification. The notion of cultural fragmentation has been linked with processes of globalization and is particularly associated with the ascendency of postmodernism as a condition of society. The connection between globalization and postmodernism and its relationship to cultural fragmentation is a complex one because of processes of globalization that create both homogeneity and heterogeneity. Some commentators argue globalization has produced increasing homogeneity (the serial repetition of processes and places, such as shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, retail chains, global consumer and pop cultures, Internet socialities) and that this threatens diverse cultural practices. Others argue the postmodern period has been associated with increased fragmentation and diversity with regard to social life, lifestyles, and identity choices. Cultural fragmentation is also strongly linked to globalization through processes of commodification. The commodification of everyday life in a globalizing world has meant that more and more goods and services become subject to market relations of exchange. This has resulted in increased visibility and access to

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commodities for many people. The marketing and portrayal of the symbolic and representative qualities and images of things, services, and lifestyle practices conjures up particular imaginative visions of people and places, visions that construct differences between “self” and other. Regardless of whether people are able to possess such commodities, greater exposure to a range of both commercial and noncommercial images of people, places, and things presents individuals with increased possibilities for different lifestyle orientations and for constructions of identity. The rise of post-Fordist or flexible regimes of accumulation are also seen as important, enabling firms to produce short runs or batches of commodities that can be marketed to niche consumers. Niche products further encourage the development of fragmentation as new consumer cultures emerge around particular commodities and orientations (such as green consumerist movements, food cultures, brand followers and “tribes,” music and film genres). Processes of cultural fragmentation have not only been facilitated by an increase in the scale and diversity of commodities, which can be used to shape individual and collective identities in the form of consumer cultures. Of particular significance in facilitating processes of cultural fragmentation has also been the role of new technologies, especially in media and communications. These have resulted in the creation of information-rich societies and increased exposure for individuals and groups to images of alternative ways of living and being. Exposure to media images and information, both in traditional print and visual media, has been extended through the use of new forms of billboard and advertising technologies, the rise of the Internet, and mobile phones and mobile computing technologies (including the development of web 2.0 tools, allowing new and varied forms of social networking). Music, television, and film industries had also expanded over the course of the twentieth century, broadening the range of experiences and tastes an individual may be exposed to in his or her lifetime. These industries may, in turn, facilitate the development of their own forms of consumer culture and preferences (e.g., through fan clubs, fashion, and merchandising). New social networks and practices may be associated with these diverse consumer cultures, further fragmenting collective identities. Internet and social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, and Blogger, also allow individuals to personalize their interests, limiting their exposure to

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ideas, information, and relationships that specifically interest them and reducing the spaces in which they may encounter the views and perspectives of others. Although such personalization may be seen as a form of cultural fragmentation, it may actually enable the formation and aggregation of communities of interest across distant spaces that previously may have been formed in physical proximity. The fragmentation of cultures associated with globalization is believed by some to have brought about an overall decline in civic responsibility and behavior (civil fragmentation), particularly in Western countries. With globalization, economic differences are said to become starker, further contributing to the widening of cultural differences between rich and poor. The exacerbation of economic and material differences may be expressed politically, with the wealthy remaining politically engaged and vociferous, and the economically disadvantaged feeling insecure and alienated from the political process. Cultural fragmentation has also been connected with the rise in alternative political identifications, such as those based on indigeneity, regional location, diaspora, and immigrant status, with greater mobility of people, and an ability to construct political affiliations across new spaces. Migration and mobility have also resulted in a more diverse range of communities within the boundaries of nation states. A consequence of numerous people groups and identifications within nation-states may be a lack of shared visions of sovereignty and nationhood and potentially also competing and multiple claims for rights and entitlements that may extend beyond state boundaries. Thus, groups may embrace and exert their own values much more strongly, with a result that cultural distinctions (such as those based on political persuasion, religion, particularly social practices) become more rather than less politicized. Consequently, there is a concern that globalization in combination with processes of cultural fragmentation have implications for the capacity of states to govern with a rupturing of the relationships between sovereignty, territory, and state power. Some caution is, however, needed in considering the application of the notion of cultural fragmentation. The concept should be critiqued because it implicitly relies on assumptions of earlier periods in which cultures were more sedentary, fixed, and relatively unchanging. While the speed and direction of cultural change may have increased dramatically over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first

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centuries, it would be incorrect to suggest that forms of fragmentation did not exist in earlier periods. Cultures have always been formed in contexts in which individual and collective identities are diverse and subject to change. Likewise, the belief that cultural fragmentation is a consequence of global economic and cultural homogenizing forces denies the ways in which the local and global are shaped relationally, with each scale an important part of the production of the other. As the previous discussion has illustrated, processes of cultural fragmentation (such as the development of multiple niche markets and consumer cultures) can actually result in formation of new cultures and new communities of interest and practice across dispersed spaces. Consequently, while globalization may produce difference, diversity, and new exclusions, it may simultaneously result in the development of new socialities and spatialities of inclusion, integration, and interconnection. Nevertheless, the global diffusion and creation of different lifestyle and consumer choices and the increasingly complex networks of association that shape identities in a postmodern globalizing world provide challenges to the notions of cultural connection and cultural change based on collective standpoints. Much of the concern arising over issues of cultural fragmentation is based on the belief that increased diversity and distinctiveness are removing “common ground,” a concept that enables the meaningful exchange of information. There is also a concern that as individual identity choices and cultural interests proliferate, there will be a decline in shared visions, vocabulary, experiences, and common reference points. Under conditions of cultural fragmentation, it becomes more difficult for individuals and organizations to communicate and connect with broad populations. However, it also means that the individual or groups may potentially ignore, filter, or suppress ideas, topics, and information that do not align to their particular worldview or orientation. Cultural fragmentation also poses challenges for the ways in which private and public (common) spaces are constituted and potential possibilities for social action as people are able to filter out views that may not be aligned to their own and can choose to engage with a much smaller social network than may previously have been the case, reducing the possibility for wide engagement in the public sphere. More in-depth studies are necessary to unpack the ways in which fragmentation and integration are culturally

and economically co-constituted in a globalizing world and the consequences of this for specific people and place relationships. Juliana Mansvelt See also Cosmopolitanism; Cultural Flows; Diaspora; Geography; Globalization; Neo-Tribes; Post-Fordism; Social Networks

Further Readings Cornwell, T. Bettina, and Judy Drennan. “Cross-Cultural Consumer/Consumption Research: Dealing with Issues Emerging from Globalization and Fragmentation.” Journal of Macromarketing 24 (2004): 108–121. Elliot, Richard. “Addictive Consumption: Function and Fragmentation in Postmodernity.” Journal of Consumer Policy 17 (1994): 159–179. Fırat, A. Fuat. “Globalization of Fragmentation: A Framework for Understanding Contemporary Global Markets.” Journal of International Marketing 5, no. 2 (1997): 77–86. Friedman, Jonathan. Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage, 1994. Friedman, Jonathan. “Globalizing Languages: Ideologies and Realities of the Contemporary Global System.” American Anthropologist 105, no. 4 (2003): 744–752. Grove, D. John. “Global Cultural Fragmentation: A Bourdieuan Perspective.” Globalizations 4, no. 2 (2007): 157–169. Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Janmaat, Jan Germen. “Socio-Economic Inequality and Cultural Fragmentation in Western Societies.” Comparative Sociology 7 (2008): 179–214. Martinelli, Alberto. “Global Order or Divided World? Introduction.” Current Sociology 51, no. 2 (2003): 95–100.

CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES The notion of cultural intermediary has been of use to recent research and thinking on consumer culture because it has enabled explorations of how the emergence and reproduction of the latter is hard-wired to broader sets of sociocultural transformations, including transformations to the class structure and to largescale shifts in the relationship between consumption and production. Mobilized initially by French

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contemporary social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of cultural intermediary refers to those sets of occupations and workers involved in the production and circulation of symbolic goods and services in the context of an expanding cultural economy in postwar Western societies. Bourdieu included in this category the “producers of cultural programmes on TV and radio or the critics of ‘quality’ newspapers and magazines and all the writer-journalists and journalist-writers” (Bourdieu 1984, 325) as well as those working in design, marketing, public relations, advertising, packaging, and sales promotion (Nixon and du Gay 2002). Crucially, however, the notion of cultural intermediary was mobilized not simply to capture a quantitative growth in the number of symbolic occupations and workers; it was also operationalized to capture the sociological significance of this expansion in terms of transformations to the class structure. Specifically, cultural intermediary was a term mobilized by Bourdieu to capture how the growth in symbolic occupations and working activities related to the emergence of a service class or new middle class, a class fraction whose tastes, classificatory schemes, dispositions, lifestyles, and working practices often clashed with those of the established middle class. The positions of power and control in the mass media occupied by members of this group moreover allowed the assembly and circulation of cultural products (advertising, television, film) that embodied such tastes and values. Bourdieu characterized the latter as involving the creation of a whole range of “half-way genres” (1984, 326) that sat somewhere in between “legitimate” and mass culture, genres that divulged aspects of “legitimate” culture to those who had been historically excluded from its consumption. The emergence of cultural intermediaries therefore marked not just an expansion of the culture industries and a major and enduring transformation of the class structure but also the emergence of what has been termed postmodern culture, a culture in which established taste and value hierarchies were challenged by halfway hybrid genres produced in the main by a new culturally “mediating” class fraction. Moreover, according to Scott Lash, through the production of this culture, this new class fraction not only shaped tastes and challenged the authority of established taste makers but also pursued its own legitimacy and power. While Bourdieu’s comments on cultural intermediaries were brief and not particularly well elaborated

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either empirically or theoretically, nonetheless they are of substantial significance, not least because they captured simultaneously economic and cultural change, or changes in both the spheres of production and consumption. This is of importance because social scientific accounts of social life tended toward and often still tend toward a radical separation of economy and culture. Hence, accounts of production tend to bracket questions and issues of culture and vice versa. Bourdieu’s account of cultural intermediaries (and his corpus more generally) challenges this separation and is widely acknowledged to have provided a pivotal account of the interlinkages and interrelationships between cultural and economic practices. Hence, as well as providing key theoretical resources for the elaboration of the characteristics of postmodern consumer culture (especially the class dynamics of the latter), Bourdieu’s understanding of cultural intermediaries has helped to pave the way for the recent resurgence of interest in cultural economy. Yet while this is true, there have also been recent calls for refinements to the notion of cultural intermediary. For example, Sean Nixon and Paul du Gay have claimed that Bourdieu’s understanding is far too broad-ranging and all-inclusive in regard to occupational groups, cultures, and forms of expertise. Thus in Bourdieu’s formulation, differences between the social composition of cultural intermediary occupations (e.g., between broadcasters, journalists, advertising executives, and designers) tend to be collapsed into one another when a far more differentiated account of these occupations is required. Nixon and du Gay claim that to achieve the latter, careful empirical investigation is required, research that will not only be able to establish the place and role of intermediaries in the occupational structure, but also the role such groups play in social and cultural life, particularly in processes of social change. In addition to more empirical qualification, it has also been suggested that Bourdieu’s notion of cultural intermediary also requires greater historical specificity. Liz McFall, for example, has questioned the “newness” of cultural intermediary positions. Drawing on a historical-sociological analysis documenting the practices of early advertising producers, McFall claims that many of the roles and functions attributed to contemporary cultural intermediaries (especially in terms of lifestyles, connections, and competencies) can also be observed for “older” occupational groups. Immersion in a

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specific taste culture was, for example, characteristic of early advertising producers and, in the early nineteenth century, “there were clear occupational links between those involved in the production of advertising and literary, newspaper and publishing circles” (McFall 2002, 546), links that shaped advertising styles and forms. McFall claims that such historical parallels between early creative practitioners and late-twentieth-century creative staff mean that we should approach the idea that the cultural intermediary is a relatively new structural position with some caution. Further points of refinement to the cultural intermediary concept have been called for by Keith Negus, who has questioned the extent that it can bridge the gap between production and consumption in a context of what he sees as an enduring distance between these two spheres. Negus concedes that in some instances, production and consumption may be linked by sets of mediating workers and activities, but more often this is not the case. Fashion designers and advertisers are, for example, far removed from and have little involvement in or knowledge of the production and manufacturing activities at issue in the production of clothes. Indeed, Negus points out that such gaps between production and consumption (particularly in regard to knowledge) are ironically often the very result of the symbolic worlds that cultural intermediaries are involved in producing and circulating since such symbolic goods (e.g., advertisements) conceal the laboring activities, divisions of labor, and exploitative practices at stake in the production of many consumer goods. At the level of ideology therefore, rather than transcend the production-consumption or economy-culture divide, the activities of cultural intermediaries shore up their enduring separation. Negus also questions the extent to which the activities and lifestyles of cultural intermediaries pose a challenge to traditional elites and dominant classes. Indeed, far from being avant-garde, the tastes and cultural habits of the workers occupying cultural intermediary positions concern the “judgements of a small, relatively elite educated, middle class, white male fraction” (Negus 2002, 512; see also Moor 2008). While the practices of this fraction may, to some extent, defy conventional divisions (e.g., between work and leisure), nonetheless Negus maintains that these workers have used their access to the cultural industries to maintain a series of rather more

traditional and enduring divisions and social boundaries, particularly in regard to class, class distinction, and gender. Despite these important critiques and calls for empirical and theoretical qualification, recent research suggests that the notion of the cultural intermediary should by no means be abandoned, particularly in a context where the activities of certain intermediary groups appear to involve not simply practices that make links between the spheres of production and consumption, but active shaping of the material processes and practices of production. Liz Moor’s 2008 research on branding consultancies and agencies, for example, demonstrates that this intermediary group plays a decisive role in shaping the physical spaces and materials of consumer culture, as well as the range of goods and services that large companies produce. Such research therefore suggests not only that certain intermediary groups are increasingly powerful but also that tracking and substantively elaborating the activities of these groups is now vital for understanding the dynamics of production. Lisa Adkins See also Cool Hunters; Cultural Capital; Cultural Studies; Culture Industries; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; Production of Culture; Taste

Further Readings Adkins, Lisa. “Community and Economy: A Retraditionalisation of Gender?” Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 119–141. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Cultural Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1984. Featherstone, Mike. Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. London: Sage, 1991. Featherstone, Mike. “Postmodernism and the Aestheticization of Everyday Life.” In Modernity and Identity, edited by Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, 265–290. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Lash, Scott. Sociology of Post Modernism. London: Routledge, 1990. Lury, Celia. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge, 2004. McFall, Liz. “What about the Old Cultural Intermediaries? An Historical Review of Advertising Producers.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 532–552. McRobbie, Angela. “Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 516–531.

Cultural Omnivores Moor, Liz. “Branding Consultants as Cultural Intermediaries.” The Sociological Review 56, no. 3 (2008): 408–428. Negus, Keith. “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance between Production and Consumption.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 501–515. Nixon, Sean, and Paul du Gay. “Who Needs Cultural Intermediaries?” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 495–500. Wright, David. “Mediating Production and Consumption: Cultural Capital and ‘Cultural Workers.’” The British Journal of Sociology 56, no. 1 (2005): 105–121.

CULTURAL OMNIVORES The notion of cultural omnivore (and cultural omnivorousness) has been introduced in current sociological debate on the relationship between social stratification and cultural consumption (the latter more than lifestyles in general, as in the case of Pierre Bourdieu) by the late U.S. sociologist Richard A. Peterson, in a series of articles published since the early 1990s. The broad hypothesis advanced in these writings—always moving from empirical research’s findings related to the U.S. situation—is that in contemporary societies, the homology argument set forth by Bourdieu in Distinction (1984) appears to have lost its validity, not because cultural consumption is becoming ever more individualized and therefore detached from social stratification’s conditioning (as argued by postmodern social theorists), but because a new kind of relationship between social structure and consumption is emerging. Rather than cultural stratification mapping immediately onto social stratification, the cultural consumption of individuals in higher social strata differs from that of individuals in lower strata as it is greater and much wider in its range—comprising not only more high-brow culture but also more middle-brow and more lowbrow culture as well. Thus, the crucial contrast, says Peterson and colleagues, is not the traditional one of “snob versus slob” but the previously unknown and recently emerged contrast of cultural omnivore versus cultural univore. What has been received as the omnivore thesis contends that there is a sector of the population of Western countries—located somewhere at the top of the social hierarchy—who appreciate and participate

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in a greater variety of forms of culture than previously, and that this broad engagement undermines snobbery while reflecting, very probably, emerging values of tolerance and cosmopolitanism. This argument has been tested so many times since its earlier expositions—with data from, for example, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, the Netherlands, and China, among others (see Peterson 2005 for an overview)—and debated so much, both speculatively and on empirical grounds, that it can now be considered a crucial component within the ever-growing “industry” of sociological research on cultural consumption and social taste. This was an area that, only a few years ago, was left either to purely philosophical speculation or to the abstract empiricism of purely statistical descriptions. Of course, Bourdieu in his book Distinction had drawn attention to the theoretical dimensions and the analytical potentials of the topic. But with his insights, Peterson has contributed a great deal to the revitalization of the field, first by offering what looks like a truly sociological alternative hypothesis to Bourdieu’s theory of the social (i.e., class) determinants of cultural taste, and second, by showing that much sociological work could still be done in this area, with the aid of both a large mass of official data (updated since Bourdieu’s work in this area) and of the whole range of research methods. The notion of the omnivore has also fostered new conceptual imagery, as evident in the notion of the voracious consumer set forth by Oriel Sullivan and Tally Katz-Gerro. As for every argument, its novelty is not absolute. It was partly anticipated by empirical research findings on leisure in the 1960s, and it holds similarities with Paul DiMaggio’s influential rereadings of the changing links between art and social classification. Peterson (2000) himself has acknowledged that his research on cultural consumption is a sort of expansion of his earlier work on cultural production, involving a movement into the territory of what he has called autoproduction. He has thus stressed an important issue also focused on by British cultural studies scholars, namely the view that every act of consumption is also an act of meaning creation and therefore of symbolic production. Besides the focus on the formal production of culture, which is at the center of the original approach, Peterson added a focus on the world of informal cultural production in everyday life contexts, opening up the older

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perspective to new and broader research horizons. Indeed, if one works in a truly genealogical fashion, anthropology appears to be the original source of inspiration for Peterson’s insights on cultural consumption. From the work of Ruth Benedict and thus from Franz Boas—he first took the idea of “pattern of culture,” which then gave way to the notion of “patterns of cultural choice” (Peterson 1983), this conception was then further developed—through the analysis of rich empirical materials gathered by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, for whom he was acting as a consultant—into a rereading and a critique of the homology model of cultural stratification theorized by Bourdieu. As a sort of middle ground between the previously advanced homology and individualization arguments, the omnivore hypothesis has capitalized on both their impact and increasingly noted gaps or faults to impose itself as a kind of must-reference argument in recent debates on the topic. This success is partly due also to a certain ambivalence, constitutive of the argument, which makes it appealing to more audiences. As Tak Wing Chan and John H. Goldthorpe note on the one hand, omnivores may look like essentially tolerant individuals who show an openness to cultural styles other than that into which they were initially socialized. This would be a variation of the individualization argument. On the other hand, according to Jordi López Sintas and Ercilia García Álvarez, omnivores may be expressing a truly new aesthetic that, even if more inclusive and cosmopolitan than that of earlier cultural elites, is anyway still “distinctive” when set against the more limited cultural tastes of the univores. In this case, then, the omnivore-versus-univore argument looks like a slight revision of the homology argument. The mapping of cultural onto social stratification is understood in a more sophisticated way, but cultural consumption is still seen as crucial in drawing symbolic boundaries and in fostering and reproducing status competition. Indeed, a strong methodological critique of the general hypothesis has been advanced by French sociologist Bernard Lahire in his book La Culture des Individus (The Culture of Individuals, 2004) who sees in it not only a not-so-substantial revision of Bourdieu’s argument, which leaves intact the notion of a social determination of tastes, but also the effect of an unnoticed confusion between two different analytic levels, namely, the group level and the individual

level. In short, for Lahire, Peterson takes variations at the level of collectives as variations at the level of individuals without really investigating inside the individual and his or her (intraindividual and situational) variations. It is apparent from these critiques and faithful to Peterson’s work style that his proposal was just an initial insight, puzzling enough to inspire fresh research, and to solicit refinement, especially from an interpretative perspective, to better distinguish among different types of cultural “openness” and to elaborate on the many different meanings attributed to cultural consumption by situated and practicing agents. Marco Santoro See also Cosmopolitanism; Cultural Studies; Individualization; Lifestyle; Production of Culture; Social Class; Social Distinction; Taste

Further Readings Chan, Tak Wing, and John H. Goldthorpe. “Social Stratification and Cultural Consumption: Music in England.” European Sociological Review 23, no. 1 (2007): 1–19. DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440–455. Ollivier, Michele. “Modes of Openness to Cultural Diversity: Humanist, Populist, Practical, and Indifferent.” Poetics 36, nos. 2–3 (2008): 120–147. Peterson, Richard A. “Patterns of Cultural Choice: A Prolegomenon.” American Behavioral Scientist 26, no. 4 (1983): 422–438. Peterson, Richard A. “Two Ways Culture Is Produced.” Poetics 28, nos. 2/3 (2000): 225–233. Peterson, Richard A. “Problems in Comparative Research: The Example of Omnivorousness.” Poetics 33, nos. 5/6 (2005): 257–282. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907. Sintas, Jordi López, and Ercilia García Álvarez. “Omnivores Show Up Again: The Segmentation of Cultural Consumers in Spanish Social Space.” European Sociological Review 18 (2002): 353–368. Sullivan, Oriel, and Tally Katz-Gerro. “The Omnivore Thesis Revisited: Voracious Cultural Consumers.” European Sociological Review 23, no. 2 (2007): 123–137. Warde, Alan, David Wright, and Modesto Gayo-Cal. “Understanding Cultural Omnivorousness: Or, the Myth of the Omnivore.” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 143–164.

Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES Cultural studies can be roughly identified as a transdisciplinary intellectual field focused on the relationships between culture, society, and identity. “Culture” here is conceived of in a very broad way, including the arts (both high and popular ones) as well as beliefs, discourses, and communicative practices. Media entertainment and popular culture are possibly the most common and most typical foci of interest of cultural studies practitioners, especially because of their relative exclusion from traditional curricula, but it is the whole field of cultural practices that appeals to cultural studies followers. Literary and film criticism, sociology, history, anthropology, communication research, geography, and even political theory are the main disciplinary venues from which its practitioners usually come, and from which they draw their tools, mixing them in often-innovative ways. What makes this instable mix still identifiable as a field, albeit one with blurred and ever-changing boundaries, is a focus on the linkages between culture and power or politics. Indeed, cultural studies can be defined as a project that explicitly tries to bridge gaps between traditional disciplines to get a better, more encompassing understanding, its theorizing and critiquing of culture intended as a crucial terrain of political and ideological contestation. The political dimension of cultural production and consumption is the main object of cultural studies as an intellectual endeavor, where the commitment to emancipation and democracy has been a driving assumption in the field from its inception in postwar Britain. From this perspective, cultural studies is best understood not just as an academic discipline or a special approach to the study of culture, but as a political-intellectual project with a final objective to construct a better (i.e., more equal and democratic) society moving from an engaged analysis of the cultural dimensions of social life. What cultural studies practitioners usually do is take an element of culture and explore, analyze, and interpret the varied ways in which it is received, internalized, interpreted, re-created, or represented by different social groupings, variously qualified and identified in terms of class, age, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and so on. One of the typical stakes in this intellectual strategy is to show how any of these cultural representations could be interpreted and used in ways that may be counter to the original producer’s

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or creator’s intent, usually well-positioned in the social and political structure. This “cultural populism” inscribed in the original project of cultural studies has been one of its strengths, but also, at the same time, one of its weakness, especially when stretched to the point of making any use or consumption of a cultural item into a potentially subversive act of micropolitics. The political implications of the approach, as well as their potential ambivalence, are indeed apparent: although it can be read as a subversive endeavor from the perspective of dominant agencies as it helps to deconstruct their wished representations by revealing their power intentions, at the same time it could be a powerful tool in the hands of an agency wishing to construct its product (be it a commodity, an image, or an agenda) so that it is received and therefore consumed by the proper population segments. As a critical approach, cultural studies owes much to debates in and around Marxism, and especially in the New Left, which has been the original matrix of the political-intellectual movement from which the field emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the United Kingdom. As a transnational and transdisciplinary field since its inception period and increasingly over the years, cultural studies has drawn on different and only rarely interweaving intellectual traditions, both from the humanities and the social sciences. European Marxism and the Frankfurt school’s critical theory, French semiotics, structuralism, and post-structuralism, and the Chicago school of American sociology, among others, have all provided conceptual and methodological insights for cultural studies theorists and practitioners to investigate the connections between culture and society and problematize preexistent ideas on a variety of issues: from ideology to identity, from the mass culture industry to subcultures, from deviance to media, from sports to the organization and uses of space, from body to consumption, from sexuality to the public sphere. It is from the original blending of these various legacies that cultural studies developed in the 1970s, to expand during the 1980s and 1990s into a truly global one, as a patchwork of traditions and stories whose linkages—when they are still apparent—are intellectual, personal, and institutional.

The British Tradition In their work, cultural studies scholars have generally and explicitly striven to strike a balance between

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empirical research and theoretical reflection. In this regard, the history of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and its directors’ and scholars’ research careers are paradigmatic. Founded in 1964 at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, CCCS has long been and still probably is the main reference for scholars working in the cultural studies tradition. Cultural studies’ intellectual genealogies conventionally start with three British authors: Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson, the former two literary critics, the latter a historian, united in challenging the received wisdom in the humanities as they were cultivated and taught in postwar England. Among their points, the claim that high culture, as evaluated and transmitted in formal education, was just one expression of culture, which should be taken in the more anthropological sense of a way of life—“culture is ordinary,” as Williams titled one of his seminal early essays—and understood as embedded in a broader social, political, and institutional context. For example, in The Uses of Literacy (1957), subsequently recognized as one of the founding texts of cultural studies, Hoggart tried to make sense of the changing culture of the working class through a close reading of pubs and family life, as well as popular songs and literature, capitalizing on both his critical skills as a literary critic and his personal experience of that culture as a child. While not so personally grounded, both Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) addressed problems of historical change in cultural life, approaching them from the point of view of literary consciousness in the first case, and of the same ordinary people’s reflexive awareness and creativity in the second one. In their work, Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson acted as critical analysts of cultural experiences taken in their lived form, moving from the humanities in which they had been educated into an appreciation of cultural and social reality. Even if the early beginnings of cultural studies could be identified in debates occurring in a few journals and clubs of the New Left already in the 1950s, its institutionalization as an intellectual project began at the University of Birmingham in 1964, where Hoggart founded the CCCS as a graduate research institute under his direction and with the collaboration as secretary of a young scholar, Stuart Hall. CCCS scholars produced a number of classics in the

field, including Resistance through Rituals (Jefferson and Hall 1976), Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978), Women Take Issue (CCCS 1979), and The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS 1982). To appreciate the kind of work done at the CCCS, it is helpful to understand that social life experienced a formidable change in the postwar decades, with implications for both social structure and lifestyles. In particular, the rise of youth as a new social category and market target gave popular expressions of culture an unknown power as source of both profit for cultural industries and pleasures for people. New cultural forms and media technologies—such as television, rock and roll, and later, MTV, the shopping mall, music videos, and theme parks—were being produced and consumed in ever more social circles. These changes asked for new ways of thinking and analyzing culture that could better link the new genres and technologies to their audience’s lives as well as to society and politics at large, especially with respect to their impact on democratic practices and on social inequalities. Intellectual work at CCCS was therefore mainly devoted to exploring new ways to deal with contemporary culture intended at large, therefore not only as books or art works but also as films, songs, TV shows, soap operas, magazines, and even clothes and cultural commodities in general. To accomplish the task, students and teachers turned from traditional humanistic practices like the close reading of texts and critical assessment of artistic value to methods and concepts taken from the social sciences—including ethnography, interviews, and labeling theory— and from the newly formed discipline of semiotics, and to various strands of European Marxist theory, especially Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci— ideas that are subject to intense debate and various appropriation inside CCCS as well as in its intellectual surroundings. From both Althusser and Gramsci cultural studies, practitioners drew instruments to deal with the political dimensions of cultural life: in the first case, through the theory of the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and the notion of interpellation, and in the second case through the seminal concepts of hegemony and resistance. As a whole, it is possible to identify (at least) four major streams in Hall’s work—possibly the most influential of the thinkers associated with the CCCS. Moving from a critical autoreflection on Marxist materialism informed by semiotics, structuralism,

Cultural Studies

and post-structuralism, Hall’s work has provided (1) specific textual analyses of the ideological messages of media contents, with a particular focus on the visual dimension; (2) wider interpretation of the potentially active role and symbolic resistance expressed through the practices of media audiences and minority or so-called deviant social groups, articulated within conceptually organic models of the processes of production, circulation, and consumption of cultural objects; (3) insightfully deconstructive analyses of race, ethnicity, and gender subjectivities and identities, often aimed at the organizations of wider political efforts around them; (4) broader accounts of the political developments related to the rise of the new conservatism in the United Kingdom, theorized as symbolic struggles for cultural hegemony on the definition of “popular” cultures/classes and, consequentially, of social hierarchies of power. Hall and the CCCS scholars criticized the work of the Frankfurt school, highlighting the intrinsic limits of their conceptualization of the merely passive role of the audience and their exclusive analytical focus on production rather than consumption processes. Most important, the exponents of the Frankfurt school a priori negatively judged the popular culture and its role on the everyday life of laypeople. To overcome these constraints, CCCS scholars took on the Marxist work developed by Althusser in France and, most notably, Gramsci in Italy. Althusser has offered a partial reformulation of Karl Marx’s traditional and rigid opposition between the (determinant) material-economic base and the (determined) cultural-ideological superstructure through the concepts of “relative autonomy” (of other social domains besides the economic one) and of “ideology as practice” (rather than as mere reflection), embedded in a number of ideological state apparatuses (such religious, scholastic, familiar, journalistic, and so on, interpreted as sites of domain in society). But it was Gramsci’s study of the culture of the popular classes in Italy and his elaboration of the concept of cultural hegemony that proved most fertile for CCCS scholars’ construction of a new Marxist-oriented conceptual and methodological tool-kit. Gramsci’s cultural hegemony referred to the struggle for class domination: according to his view, the dominant class had power not only because of its economic force but also through its ability to acquire consensus over the subaltern classes expressed by its moral and intellectual—that is, cultural—leadership.

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While the “discovery” and reinterpretation of the works of Althusser and, above all, Gramsci (which brought Hall [1980] to state in an influential essay the existence of “two paradigms” of cultural studies) allowed British cultural studies to overcome the limits of the Frankfurt school’s critical theory, it was semiotics that let them take distance from the evaluative approach of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, in order not to judge the value of texts but rather to understand the processes through which the meaning of texts are dynamically and often conflictually constructed and differently interpreted. Since, as an intellectual and political project, cultural studies aimed (and aims) at interpreting and eventually intervening in the dynamics through which texts, discourses, and cultural objects and practices are produced, diffused, displayed, and consumed in the everyday life of social groups as well as in different social institutions, the contribution of the semiotic analysis of those texts, discourses, cultural objects, and practices was crucial. A renowned example of the relevance of the semiotic investigation of the process of signification (or meaning-making) is the work on photography by Roland Barthes, particularly the analytical distinctions drawn between the denotative and connotative dimensions of the photographic messages—which has been later taken on by Hall, particularly in his work on photojournalism and on visual culture and in his critical reflections on the concept of representation—as well as the suggestion of the existence of a dimension of pleasure in the reading of texts, the so-called pleasure of the text— later empirically applied and theoretically refined in particular by John Fiske and on the basis of the more psychoanalytically oriented and very influential critical visual analysis developed by Laura Mulvey. On the basis of these different conceptual insights and intellectual traditions, over the years, cultural studies has proved particularly powerful in the analysis of both media and subcultures. These works usually aimed at unveiling the ideological stances inscribed in the verbal and visual texts and in the institutional discourses diffused by the media and culture industry, as well as at highlighting the potential power of media audiences and subcultural social groups to eventually react, resist, and rearticulate the meaning of different texts through their own contextual practices of reading, viewing, and consumption. In this context, Hall developed a conceptual model that has become extremely influential over

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the years, especially but not exclusively in the field of media studies. The encoding/decoding model conceived the communicative process of transmission of the media message inscribed in a specific text as a dynamic relationship between the producer(s) and the consumer(s), which give the latter three possible forms of reading of and reaction to that specific text. The first position is called “dominant-hegemonic,” since the viewer is operating inside the so-called dominant code: he or she decodes the message in the exact terms of the reference code in which it was encoded by the producer; it is hegemonic because it conveys an idea of legitimacy of this viewpoint, which appears to reflect the “natural” social order. The second position, which is called “negotiated,” contains a mixture of dominant and oppositional elements: it generally recognizes the legitimacy of the hegemonic code and of the dominant definitions but at the same time, it elaborates its own positions at the more specific, situated, local level. Finally, the third position, which is called “oppositional,” implies the receiver perfectly understands the message and recognizes its hegemonic code but decodes it in a completely contrary way within an alternative frame of reference. It is quite evident how much this influential theoretical tripartition is influenced by Gramsci and Barthes but also, more implicitly, by particular research streams within the American sociology of media, most notably the theories on the uses and gratifications of the media audience developed by the founders and heirs of the so-called Columbia school, particularly by Elihu Katz between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. In this context, another wider and well-known intellectual tradition of critical thought that had an explicitly crucial influence on the empirical research and theoretical analysis of British cultural studies was post-structuralism. As the name suggests, this intellectual movement aimed to take distance from structuralism, at the same time maintaining and critically rearticulating a number of its basic assumptions. On the basis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics and Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, since the 1950s, structuralism had radically marked European (particularly French and Italian) philosophy, especially through, most significantly, Barthes’ semiotics, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and Althusser’s political theory. On the basis of a crucial focus on language and an explicit antihumanistic intellectual posture, structuralists developed explanatory models

of the organization of language and the construction of meaning founded on conceptually rigid (and static) binary oppositions. Post-structuralists, such as Jacques Derrida and, less explicitly, Michel Foucault, instead, underlined the dynamicity and instability of the linguistic systems and the social order. While structuralism aims to constructively unveil and identify the hidden structures of the social and cultural order, post-structuralism, especially through Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, aims to underline the potentially available different readings and interpretations of the same linguistic concept by showing that a variety of basic linguistic oppositions (such as good/evil, friend/enemy, man/ woman) do not constitute universal linguistic structures, but have instead variable meanings and therefore represent a crucial field of political struggle, since any attempts to naturalize the linguistic categories and the moral hierarchies of the social order can hide a strategy of control and a will to power. Contrary to the basic assumptions of structuralism, for example, Foucault did not claim that the meaning of semantic elements and structures is determined a priori to (therefore, quite independently by) their articulation. On this basis, a number of theoretical insights articulated by Foucault have proved relevant for the project of British cultural studies: in particular, Foucault’s conception of discourse as a constructive mediation between linguistic text and practice and of discoursive formation as a complex of linguistic events that bring to light and give meaning to a specific object (such as, in his renowned analysis, the official declarations, laws, conflictual definitions, and social practices that, in a given society and historical period, define what is and how to deal with madness). Besides the analyses of media contents and institutional discourses, CCCS scholars adopted post-structuralist elements and, most evidently, Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and resistance in their analyses of popular cultural forms and subcultural practices. Youth subcultures became a particularly interesting object of study in the 1970s because their members collectively and often explicitly constructed countercultural or oppositional social and cultural identities on the basis of new styles elaborated through a rearticulation of the meanings and uses of cultural commodities. By empirically researching British subcultures and at the same time critically and creatively drawing

Cultural Studies

on Gramsci and Althusser, CCCS scholars focused their attention on the conjunctural nature of ideological formations and their relative autonomy from class determinism. Contrary to the assumptions of the Frankfurt school, according to this perspective, people are not merely conceived as passive receivers who are controlled and manipulated by dominant discoursive formations, but as potentially active actors who strive to more or less creatively assert themselves in the face of power by overcoming the determinations that could constrain them and benefiting from and amplifying the available spaces of opportunities, often by strategies of productive consumption through which a given cultural object (such as a TV show, a guitar, a safety pin, but also, for example, the spaces within a shopping mall) is attributed a different use and a new meaning. The classic subcultural theories developed by the CCCS in the 1970s on the basis of empirical research on material conditions and cultures of British postwar working-class youth (such as teddy boys, mods, skinheads, hippies, bikers) represent a crucial point of reference in the literature on popular culture, youth deviance, and music subcultures. In this context, the most important work published by the CCCS was Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post War Britain (Hall and Jefferson 1976). Many of the scholars of the CCCS within this book later produced some of the most widely quoted authorial works on youth subcultures, such as Profane Culture by Paul Willis (1978), Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige (1979), and Feminism and Youth Culture by Angela McRobbie (1990). As a whole, CCCS’s viewpoint conceived the cultural universes of the new British working-class youth as collective and symbolic forms of resistance against the material and social subordination of their class—in this way, implicitly and critically resonating also with the research carried out in the same period in France by Pierre Bourdieu in his book Distinction, as Sarah Thornton, in particular, has later highlighted. British cultural studies, however, was marked by a crucial difference from the mainstream sociological research on the relationships between social classes and aesthetic tastes: CCCS scholars conceived popular culture as a relatively autonomous sphere of action, keeping it distinct from elite culture and mass culture. In fact, this kind of research took seriously the potential active role (that is, in sociological

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terms, the question of the agency) of media audiences and marginal social groups by investigating the practices of and the possibilities for resistance, symbolic struggle, political position, and even social-historical change. Subcultures allowed them to set themselves free, at least symbolically, from the hegemony of the dominant culture. In this regard, this influential stream of research within cultural studies at CCCS was explicitly inspired by some elements of American sociology, especially of the so-called Chicago school tradition of symbolic interactionism, which helped give the work of the scholars at the CCCS a recognizably (micro) sociological gaze, not only by focusing on marginal social groups and by developing social studies of music and arts—drawing in particular on the work of Chicagoan sociologist Howard Becker—but also by often adopting and developing ethnographic methods of participant observation on the field of research. On the basis of the empirical research and theoretical reflections on youth subcultures, a few scholars working within the CCCS at Birmingham in the 1970s and 1980s later focused their attention in greater detail on the politically connoted processes of construction of race and gender and their multiple interweaving aspects. The arguably most-widely quoted and influential authors originally associated with the CCCS in these fields are Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie. Gilroy wrote the preface to the collective book, The Empire Strikes Back (1982), the first one to introduce the issue of race among the research themes of the CCCS group, and later developed his analysis of black contemporary cultures in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987) and in the internationally acclaimed The Black Atlantic (1993), by showing the empirical fruitfulness of the materialistic conception of culture developed by the British cultural studies scholars. Gilroy (1987) investigates the U.K. cultural politics of both racism and nationalism, conceived not as distinct ideologies but as complementary articulations of the same culturalpolitical structure. Following the traditional research issues of the CCCS, Gilroy has paid particular attention to the role of intellectual and artistic movements and cultural forms of production and consumption in the construction of (political) identities. Black music cultures, conceived as (post)modern expressions of the culture of slavery (particularly in the cases of reggae and hip-hop), are attributed a potentially

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political role in the diffusion of critical visions of global capitalism by black diasporic communities. Gilroy (1993) articulates in greater depth the concept of black diasporic cultures: the idea of the existence of a historically transnational cultural-political formation called Black Atlantic is conceptualized as an alternative to the idea of the nation-state, and it constitutes the basis of the production and circulation of contemporary black cultures. Similarly, on a different but complementary level of analysis, McRobbie’s influential work on gender began during her postgraduate studies at the CCCS. With her chapter within the collective book Resistance through Rituals, she first criticized her colleagues’ work on subcultures for a lack of attention to the issues of gender, and she underlined the urgency to explore the distinctive articulation of young women’s cultural practices of production and consumption as they were expressed through such cultural objects as romances, popular music, and above all teenage magazines. Both Gilroy’s and McRobbie’s works—especially their emphasis on the critical relevance of taking race and gender into careful account in the politically oriented research of their colleagues and successors—over the years had a significant impact in the field of cultural studies at the international level.

Cultural Studies as a Global Project As indicated, cultural studies scholars were, since the early 1970s, sensitive to intellectual stimuli coming from other countries, and especially from France, where a structuralist semiotician such as Roland Barthes was already investigating in the 1950s how apparently minor cultural forms, such as wrestling or magazines’ images, encoded structures of power and worked like veritable popular “mythologies.” Even if a truly French tradition of cultural studies has really never coalesced, post-structuralist thinking has, in a certain way, both fostered cultural studies elsewhere and offered a sort of local surrogate, especially thanks to exceptionally original scholars such as philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, an early student of consumer society and of virtual reality; philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, possibly the most influential thinker of the link between knowledge and power; and sociologist Bourdieu, who has been drawing on both anthropology and sociology to analyze how culture, and legitimate high culture in particular, impact on both social

stratification and socialization (which Bourdieu theorizes as habitus formation). In France and Italy, a veritable tradition of cultural studies has emerged only slowly and with some resistance, but the seeds that produced cultural studies in Britain were well represented through not only the Gramsci heritage (even stronger in Italy in the political sphere than in the academy) but also through the influential work on cultural and media criticism by the semiotician Umberto Eco and a local tradition of radical thought developed in the 1970s that is well represented by internationally reputed scholars such as Paolo Virno and Toni Negri (the latter a coauthor of the influential Empire, with Michael Hardt, 2000), and by media theorists and activists such as Franco Berardi (aka Bifo). While CCCS was forming as a “school” in Britain, in Germany, philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas was drawing on the Frankfurt tradition of critical social theory to make sense of what he famously called the “public sphere”—conceiving it as a third domain between the marketplace and the state, not reducible to family and the private life. With his insistence that communication is an aspect of social reality irreducible to economic interests, Habermas was developing a cultural interpretation of political life destined to much fortune in the Anglo-American world, especially in the United States, where Habermas’s highly theoretical work has inspired more empirical, usually historical, analysis of the effects of newspapers and other media on civil society (see e.g., Calhoun 1992). The impact of cultural studies on the U.S. academic field has been massive since the early 1990s, also thanks to a few successful public initiatives, as huge international conferences soon transformed into books (Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 1992). If the field of communication research has been the first to be impacted, the influence of cultural studies has been rising since the 1990s in anthropology, American studies, literary criticism, and sociology, and also through the mediation of postmodernism and post-structuralist criticism. However, in the United States, more than in the United Kingdom and possibly Europe, cultural studies has found its institutional home more in the humanities departments rather than in social sciences circles, making for a still perceptible difference in methods and styles between the two streams of work. A similar story can be noted for Australia, where cultural studies entered early in the 1980s mainly through communication

Cultural Studies

scholars (also coming from Britain), variously influenced sociology and even anthropology (including the study of native cultures), and institutionalized itself in humanities departments as a blend of communication research and political theory. What has made cultural studies a successful intellectual movement since the 1990s is, however, its expansion and diffusion and progressive institutionalization in places other than the Western culture. An important spring in this direction was the publication, in 1978, of the book Orientalism by the PalestinianAmerican literary critic Edward Said, which has been recognized as the founding text of the newly emerging field of postcolonial studies, a special branch or declination of the cultural studies project aimed at reading and unmasking the hidden political meanings of texts (mainly literary but also scientific) and practices devoted to the representation of non-Western cultures, typically with a colonial past. Postcolonial studies are possibly the most influential offspring of the original British cultural studies and one of the most effervescent and exciting research fields in contemporary humanities—while it has yet to have an impact on the social sciences (with the exception of anthropology). One of the effects of the rise of postcolonial studies has been the discovering, or the revival, of scholars coming from peripheral countries, usually not white, or even of not-white scholars from metropolitan countries. This is the case of W. E. B. Du Bois, a mulatto historian and social scientist who, in the early twentieth century, became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States, and whose The Souls of Black Folks (1901) is considered a masterpiece and a founding text of African American cultural studies. Latin America cultural studies was, at least in part, foreshadowed by autochthonous intellectual programs strongly linked to local circumstances, such as those of José Carlos Mariátegui in Peru. It found its pioneers in the early work on media and on popular culture by scholars such as Armand Mattelart in Chile, and Néstor García Canclini in Argentina and then Mexico. However, the most influential experience occurred in India, where a whole tradition of Gramscian historical studies devoted to the analysis of colonialism and popular politics coalesced in the 1980s around Ranajit Guha, forming what is currently known worldwide as subaltern studies. What these and other experiences (for an overview on others, see Miller 2006) show is the strong

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appeal an intellectual movement born in apparently very local circumstances, as were those of the postwar Britain, could still have in other, very distant shores in times marked by the emergence of a new geopolitical order and grounded on increasing rates of mobility, an increasing blurring of borders, and new constellations of technology and capital. Notwithstanding the unquestionable intellectual innovations produced by cultural studies and the fertile internal variety of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological streams of research developed over the years (such as black cultural studies, feminist cultural studies, visual cultural studies, and the already mentioned postcolonial studies), nowadays the future of cultural studies looks fragmented and uncertain. It is possible to briefly identify two main domains of critical debate on the contemporary status of cultural studies as a transnational intellectual field. On the one hand, the fundamental and original commitment to interdisciplinarity turns out to imply that the research and profiles of cultural studies scholars cannot always easily and comfortably fit within the structured disciplinary walls of traditional academic institutions that continue to strongly organize intellectual practices. On the other hand, the often explicitly declared aim to produce a better understanding of the cultural dynamics of power of a given society and to eventually open up possibilities for social change can risk making cultural studies scholars appear (sometimes arguably too) highly politically committed, with the danger of mixing or even interchanging scholarly research and political engagement, to the detriment of both. Marco Santoro and Marco Solaroli See also Communication Studies; Discourse; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Post-Structuralism; Production of Culture; Semiotics; Subculture; Youth Culture

Further Readings Baldwin, Elaine, Brian Longhurst, Scott McCracken, Miles Ogborn, and Greg Smith. Introducing Cultural Studies. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Paladin, 1972. Becker, Howard S. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press, 1963. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

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Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin & Hyman, 1989. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hall, Stuart. “The Determination of News Photographs.” In The Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass Media, edited by Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, 226–243. London: Constable, 1973. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media Culture and Society 2, no. 1 (1980): 57–72. Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997. Hall, Stuart, and Jessica Evans, eds. Visual Culture: The Reader. London: Sage, 1999. Miller, Toby, ed. A Companion to Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. Ryan, Michael. Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010. Stratton, Jon, and Ien Ang. “On the Impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies: ‘British’ Cultural Studies in an ‘International’ Frame.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 361–391. London: Routledge, 1996. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. London: Polity, 1995.

CULTURAL TURN The phrase cultural turn is commonly evoked in academic discourse to refer to a series of interrelated developments in the humanities and the social sciences that have occurred since the 1960s that have more or less radically changed the shape, aims, and practice, and possibly even audiences, of the humanities and social sciences. Most noted among these developments have been the emergence and global spread of a new intellectual formation called cultural studies,

the impact of philosophical debates as (post)structuralism and postmodernism on both the humanities and the social sciences, and the constitution of new specialties inside traditional disciplines, or even new ways of conceiving of them, such as cultural history, cultural geography, the sociology of culture, or cultural sociology. As an intellectual movement, a few key authors can be identified as crucial in producing and fostering the cultural turn. Among them are the French: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu; the British: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson; and the American: Hayden White, Marshall Sahlins, Frederic Jameson, and especially Clifford Geertz—whose Interpretation of Cultures (1973) has been a foundational reference for many practitioners and followers of the cultural turn in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, history, and communication. A shift from production to consumption issues—or from creation to reception—has been pivotal in many, albeit not all, of these various developments. This is especially true for cultural studies and cultural history, as well as literary criticism, less for sociology, where the cultural turn occurred originally, at least in the United States, through a focus precisely on cultural production. According to David Chaney, among others, the expression cultural turn puns indeed on the “linguistic turn”—a movement in the philosophy of the human sciences that started at the beginning of the twentieth century and reached maturity around the 1960s. The general thrust of this earlier turn is that words and vocabularies play a constitutive part in the production of objects and not simply in its description and reporting. Far from being in the objects, as their intimate essences, the meanings of the objects (i.e., what the objects are) are contingent on the vocabularies we use to define and identify them. In short, objects, even facts, are not independent of our descriptions of them. The consequences of this linguistic turn for the practices of the human and social sciences are clearly major. However, even if there are important links between language and culture that account for some convergence or at least familiarity between the two “turns,” there are also important distinctions that make the cultural turn something different from a growth of interest and significance in the study of language and its epistemological implications, and something other than an extension to both social and human sciences of development in linguistics

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(e.g., Ferdinand de Saussure, V. N. Volosinov) and in linguistically grounded philosophical investigations (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Austin). First, even if a crucial ingredient of culture, language is not coterminous with it. Second, it is the same notion of language to be “problematized” (a favorite word and activity in this whole field) by proponents and followers of the turn—for example, by reconceptualizing it as text or discourse. More than language or linguistic games, but also more than discourse or text, it is “culture” at the heart of the cultural turn, and the complexity of the word—one of the two or three more complex of the English vocabulary according to Raymond Williams—that accounts for the variety of meanings and aims attributed to the phrase cultural turn in various disciplines and by different authors. Nowadays, a cultural turn is claimed to have occurred or to be occurring across such diversified fields of inquiry as historiography and anthropology, sociology, international relations and development studies, economics and management studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, demography, psychology, and even humanistic disciplines like literary criticism, musicology, and art history—where the study of “culture” is apparently constitutive and already granted. This turn to culture has also been prominent in the expanding field of globalization and cosmopolitan studies and in contemporary political studies, including those on the state, citizenship, and national identity. It is not difficult to imagine how different the implications could be, as well as the objectives and even the meanings of this supposedly unique “turn to culture” when we discover it occurred in disciplines as diverse and as differently implicated with the cultural world as those just noted. However, these peculiarities apart, it is still possible to identify commonalities that make the cultural turn something more than a useful label or banner. Although the term culture is notoriously vague and complex, some definition is indeed both requested and possible: this is one of the same stakes of the cultural turn, according to whose proponents we might define culture as more than the traditional reference to intellectual or aesthetic pursuit and even language (i.e., as the whole social process whereby people communicate meanings, make sense of their world, construct their identities, and define, interpret, and transmit their beliefs and values). Far broader than the arts or education—traditional referents of

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the humanistic conception of culture as spiritual perfection—culture is now coterminous with the entire field and processes of symbolic interaction, communication, and expression through which (both professional and common) people define and present, or perform, themselves. As this definition suggests, the cultural turn has been and still is more than simply asserting that “culture matters” or that culture should be brought “back in”—though certainly it entailed both of them, and in certain cases, it has been identified with these more limited claims. Indeed, more than simply a return to culture as a useful conceptual category or a belief in its analytic and maybe historical relevance, the notion of cultural turn more aptly identifies an intellectual movement constructed around a series of recurrent authors, texts, conceptual tenets, and epistemological principles. Generally speaking, the expression cultural turn therefore describes a move toward meanings and symbols as constitutive forces against the primacy previously granted to supposedly “harder” factors, such as social structure, demography, politics, or economics intended as spheres of raw power and practical or material interest. This move occurred over a prolonged time and with different timelines and intensities according to disciplines and fields of inquiry since at least the 1960s, becoming massive along the 1980s and 1990s. This general move apart, the shift toward culture occurred in somewhat different ways in different places and times, sometimes configuring a truly paradigmatic shift, sometimes a narrower change in topics and foci, making the trope of a unified cultural turn something like a simplification and reification of a plurality of historically grounded cognitive and intellectual processes with different timings, reasons, actors, and even outcomes. Indeed, we can say that the insiders’ reactions to these simplification and reification are part and parcel of the same “turn,” fostering it while contributing to its clarification and better identification. In part, the cultural turn has been an effect and an accompanying movement in the realm of thinking of a few transformations occurring in the spheres of economics and politics since the 1970s, with the growing (also from an economic point of view) importance of leisure activities, cultural goods, and cultural industries; the rise of creative labor, advertisements and branding as strategic features of the economy (the so-called aestheticization of

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production); the growing personalization and spectacularization of democratic politics; the rise of identity politics and identity movements in civil society; the spectacular rise of electronic media including the Internet. The idea that symbols and images have now expanded their role and influence in economic life and that they have become relatively autonomous is often associated with the claim that the economy itself and the (material) commodities that flow through it are now largely constituted through and by symbolic processes. Some followers of the cultural turn envision an implosion of the economic and the cultural spheres, suggesting that any clear distinction between the two is no longer meaningful. One central implication of this assumed implosion has been, as anticipated, the increasing attention devoted to consumption processes, conceived of as spaces and practices where individual members of contemporary societies actively and reflexively build and shape ever more differentiated, fluid, fragmented, and hybrid identities. This same mechanism also highlights the increasing role of signification in political life. The implied consequences include a dissolving of the relatively fixed identities (on nation and class bases) that characterized earlier modernity. However, it would be naive to reduce the cultural turn, as an epistemological or paradigmatic shift, to a simple reflex of these mundane changes. Indeed, the turn has been in many ways a re-turn, as culture figures prominently in the work of the classics of the social thought, such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, George Simmel, and Max Weber, as well as of pioneers of cultural studies, such as Antonio Gramsci. More than this, the cultural turn exceeds in its reasons and implications the task of accounting for these contemporary changes in the fields of economic and politics, implying a reconfiguration of the whole project of the social sciences, and a rethinking of their central categories, from culture to economics, from society to the same “social” (Friedland and Mohr 2004). Last but not least, the intellectual side of the cultural turn doesn’t merely reflect a supposedly more real side in the sphere of economy and politics but contributes to its constitution as well as its management. Marco Santoro See also Cultural Studies; Culture Industries; Identity; Postmodernism; Post-Structuralism; Production of Culture; Semiotics; Sociology

Further Readings Bonnell, Victoria, and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Chaney, David. The Cultural Turn: Scene-Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History. London: Routledge, 1994. Friedland, Roger, and John Mohr, eds. Culture Matters: Cultural Sociology in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998. London: Verso, 1998. Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Ray, Larry, and Andrew Sayer, eds. Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn. London: Sage, 1999. Rorty, Richard, ed. The Linguistic Turn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Steinmetz, George, ed. State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

CULTURE INDUSTRIES Broadly defined, the notion of culture industries refers to the production, circulation, distribution, and promotion of cultural texts, including those by the music, film, publishing, television, Internet, advertising, and marketing industries. Such industries necessarily assemble a range of agents, including creative artists, producers, journalists, animators, designers, printers, editors, archivists, engineers, technicians, promoters, managers, audiences, fans, consumers, and users. For contemporary capitalist economies, the activities of such agents are understood to be increasingly significant, particularly because it has been widely observed that in economic life there is an expanded role for culture and creative industries (that the capitalist economy is becoming a cultural economy) and because culture has emerged as a significant site of capitalist innovation and value creation. Yet while the role of the culture and creative industries in contemporary capitalism has been much debated, particularly for the role they might play in economic as

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well as urban renewal in advanced neoliberal economies, nonetheless, to understand the significance of the concept of the culture industries, including what is at stake in its mobilization and mutations in its usage, we must turn first to the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, and in particular to the writings of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory Based on their observations in the United States in the 1940s, and published in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), Adorno and Horkheimer laid out a radical critique of the rapidly emerging mass entertainment industry, a critique that linked together the production of standardized cultural goods, the development of mass culture, and a particular form of social domination. In this critique, Adorno and Horkheimer posited that at stake in the development of the mass entertainment industry was a bringing together of previously differentiated art and commercial worlds, a dedifferentiation in which, rather than functioning as an autonomous sphere, culture is produced much like any other commodity, according to the principles of industrial production. As Adorno and Horkheimer saw it, this merging of cultural and commercial worlds—or the emergence of the culture industry—had a number of deleterious effects. First, instead of being unique and elevated, culture becomes debased and impoverished by its commodification and commercialization, not least because in this process, it becomes standardized and reproducible. Put differently, in this process, culture loses its aura or singularity. Hollywood movies, for example, follow a particular script even when plots, characters, and actors are different. Similarly, popular songs follow a standard set of musical and lyrical conventions even as they may appear novel. Second, and as this suggests, the commercialization of culture creates a mass culture that is an undifferentiated and standardized culture, in which basic competence rather than connoisseurship is demanded from audiences for the consumption of cultural goods. In such a culture, pleasure rather than self-improvement is the consumption rationale. Third, this undemanding culture gives rise to and creates a passive mass audience, an audience whose passivity enables their subsumption into the capitalist machine. More particularly, the passive

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and acquiescent audience that mass culture fosters uncritically accepts the status quo of capitalist society and the conditions of their own existence. For Adorno and Horkheimer, therefore, the culture industry not only produced an impoverished culture stripped of singularity, originality, and authenticity, but also worked to deceive the masses and obstruct emancipation from capitalist processes. As Adorno succinctly put it, the culture industry “impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves” (Adorno 1991, 92; Oswell 2006, 83).

Contestations to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Theory The cultural pessimism and disdain of mass culture exhibited by Adorno and Horkheimer has, however, has been widely contested. It is well rehearsed, for example, that their critique of the culture industry resonates with a Kantian understanding of culture, one in which creative practice is understood to be singular and irreducible and associated with both freedom and critique. As Adorno and Horkheimer see it, the commodification and commercialization of culture strips creative practices of such potentialities, hence their opposition to the culture industry. Yet, in wanting to keep the idea of the specialness of creative practice in place, Adorno and Horkheimer fail to recognize how such a stance is bound up in taste distinctions and, in particular, with the making of the distinction between high and low culture, a distinction central to the dynamics of class formation, as noted by Pierre Bourdieu. Thus, in their objection to the commercialization and massification of culture and their disdain of the popular, Adorno and Horkheimer not only reveal a nostalgia for preindustrial forms of culture production but also enact a cultural elitism in which they assume that autonomous art is both more valuable and meaningful than commercial popular culture. Significantly, however, the very changes in culture production described by Adorno and Horkheimer make such a distinction and hence elitist stance increasingly difficult to maintain. Consider, for example, Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the very same processes at issue in Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique. Like his contemporaries, Benjamin observed that a range of technologies was enabling the reproduction of culture on a mass scale. Yet while Adorno and Horkheimer

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lament that this process destroyed the specialness and authenticity of creative works, Benjamin understood the de-auratization of art as more complex and contradictory. Specifically, rather than bemoan the detachment of the work of art from tradition, Benjamin saw that this process opened up exciting new possibilities. Film, for example, not only liquidated “the traditional value of cultural heritage” (Benjamin 1968, 221) but also shifted the organization of human sense perception. Thus, with apparently superhuman vision and a disregard for scale, the camera provides close-ups of any object, an innovation that reordered human perceptions of space and distance. In short, Benjamin elaborated how the technological changes at issue in the mass reproduction of culture involved innovative interventions into human nature. But as well as this, and in his elaboration of the de-auratization of art and particularly his refusal to demonize mass culture, Benjamin’s analysis hinted at crucial shifts in taste hierarchies. Specifically, in his discussion of the detachment of aura from cultural works, Benjamin’s analysis underscores how the developments he describes involve a challenge to the distinction between high and low culture, not least because in an era of reproducibility, claims toward authenticity are increasingly stripped of meaning and efficacy. Although writers such as Bourdieu have maintained the distinction between high and low culture is very much in place and remains central to class distinction, others have insisted that its destabilization and dedifferentiation relates to the emergence of new taste hierarchies and class formations. Scott Lash (1990), for example, has argued that the audience for cultural goods that challenge distinctions between the authentic and the popular is a new postindustrial middle class, a class fraction whose tastes, habits, and classificatory schemes are distinct from more established bourgeois groups. Specifically, while the latter embrace and celebrate the elitism and hierarchy of the modernist distinction between high culture and popular culture, the new middle classes reject this split and instead celebrate dedifferentiation—especially the dedifferentiation of the authentic and inauthentic—and seek to consume goods that perform this dedifferentiation. Indeed, this classificatory scheme is at the center of the new middle class’s struggle with older elite groups, a struggle that Lash suggests not only involves an attempt to distinguish the new elite groups from the old, but also involves an attempt to

impose the (postmodern) cultural tastes of the new middle classes as hegemonic for the whole of society. In short, Lash understands contemporary postmodern culture as providing the signs, symbols, and resources for the development of a specific class habitus for the making of both the identity of a new elite group and for the making of distinctions between this new bourgeoisie and other groups. Lash’s analysis is significant not only because it shows how the consumption of cultural goods continues to be linked to class formation, but also that it exists even in a context of dynamic change. It also gives a sense of the complexity of the issues at stake in culture production, a complexity that tends to be flattened out in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of the culture industry, particularly as this pertains to issues of consumption.

Culture Industry Versus Culture Industries The demand for appreciation of the complexity of the issues inhering in the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural goods is also found in the call that the singular and universalizing notion of the culture industry be abandoned in favor of the plural notion of culture industries. David Hesmondhalgh, for example, makes a strong case for the latter on a number of grounds. First, the notion of culture industries enables a recognition that culture production is by no means a unified field and does not follow a singular logic. The broadcasting industry, for example, is organized very differently from the press industry, and so on. Second, and following Benjamin, the notion of culture industries allows recognition of the ambivalence attached to the process of the commercialization of culture, including a recognition that the process of commodification involves innovation as well as a logic of standardization. Finally, the notion of culture industries connotes that far from a smooth, seamless process, the extension of capitalist relations into the realm of culture is often messy, uneven, and contested. One only has to reflect briefly on controversies and struggles regarding new media, and especially the use of web 2.0 applications and the harvesting of data generated by the use of such applications to confirm this to be the case. The social networking site Facebook, for example, caused controversy in 2007 when it began to raise revenue by developing advertising informed by user activities and preferences. As Nicholas Gane and David Beer make clear,

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at issue in the disquiet over this practice was an objection to the commodification of information, a process of some significance if we concede that cultural practice is increasingly informational. Thus, in the contemporary information-based culture industries, we readily witness the types of contestation and struggle in regard to the extraction of economic value from cultural practice that Hesmondhalgh posits as paradigmatic of cultural production. While Hesmondhalgh wishes us to understand that complexity, ambivalence, and contestation are at the heart of the culture industries, in a study of what they term the “global culture industry,” Scott Lash and Celia Lury have added further to specifying the dynamics of contemporary culture production. Engaging directly with Adorno and Horkheimer, Lash and Lury suggest that the global culture industry differs from the culture industry observed by these writers in that “globalization has given culture industry a fundamentally different mode of operation” (Lash and Lury 2007, 3). More specifically, in the culture industry of Adorno and Horkheimer (and we might also add in the postmodern culture industry), culture was superstructural, that is, operated as (and domination and resistance took place through) representation and symbols. In the contemporary period, however, culture is no longer superstructural. Cultural entities are everywhere, “as information, as communications, as branded products, as financial services, as media products, as transport and leisure services” (Lash and Lury 2007, 4). As a consequence of this ubiquity, culture comes to dominate the economy and the everyday and no longer functions as a superstructure, that is, as ideology or as representation. Instead of representation, Lash and Lury maintain that in the emergent global culture industry, culture is a thing. In this context of the collapse of the superstructure, “goods become informational, work becomes affective, property becomes intellectual and the economy more generally becomes cultural” (2007, 7). In short, in the emergent global culture, industry culture materializes. Brands, for example, become brand environments, as witnessed in the case of Apple Stores or in British Airways’ Terminal Five at London’s Heathrow airport. Thus, while in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account, culture industry operated in the space of the symbolic, the global culture industry operates in the space of the real. The significance of this theorization of the transformation of the culture industry is legion, not only because it

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revitalizes the culture industry concept for the present, but also because it demands that we think of culture and power in radically new ways. Specifically, it demands that for the contemporary culture industry, power should be understood to operate in a posthegemonic mode. Equally significant, however, is that the historicization of the culture industry laid out in this entry allows us to see that far from being simply wrong or misplaced, Adorno and Horkheimer’s understanding of the culture industry was both relevant for a particular time and is generative of continuing debate. Lisa Adkins See also Commercialization; Cultural Studies; Cultural Turn; Lifestyle; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; Production of Culture; Social Distinction

Further Readings Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 1991. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane, 1979. Banks, Mark. The Politics of Cultural Work. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007. Banks, Mark, and Justin O’Connor. “After the Creative Industries.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 4 (2009): 365–373. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–242. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. First published 1955. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Gane, Nicholas, and David Beer. New Media. Oxford: Berg, 2008. Hartley, John, ed. Creative Industries. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. London: Sage, 2007. Lash, Scott. Sociology of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1990. Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002. Lash, Scott, and Celia Lury. Global Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Miege, Bernard. “The Logics at Work in the New Cultural Industries.” Media, Culture and Society 9 (1987): 273–289. Oswell, David. Culture and Society: An Introduction to Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2006. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Culture Jamming

CULTURE JAMMING Culture jamming is a form of consumer activism, undertaken by individuals or groups, that attempts to contest the ostensible predominance of commercially oriented, consumerist culture by exposing its contradictions and shortcomings. Culture jamming is conceptually inspired by the technique of electronically interfering with (i.e., “jamming”) radio or television broadcast signals for military or political purposes, and it comprises a variety of strategies and tactics. These include altering corporate or other institutional messages, products, and/or identities; parodying or satirizing corporate or other institutional communications, artifacts, and images; and otherwise appropriating or mimicking corporate or other institutional references or frames, usually in critique. Credit for coining the term is generally given to the San Francisco–based performance/activist group Negativland, who first used it in a 1984 live radio broadcast later issued in recorded form. Other early practitioners include filmmakers Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, whose 1989 protest of a Canadian pro-logging industry public relations campaign led to the founding of Adbusters magazine, an influential journal for reporting culture jamming activity. Culture jamming is also known as “semiological” or “meme,” the latter in reference to the definition of meme as a unit of information (an image, an idea, an object, etc.) that serves to reproduce culture in the same way a gene serves to reproduce an organism. Interrupting and redirecting the system of cultural reproduction is one of culture jamming’s main objectives. A primary method for accomplishing this is détournement (turning around, rerouting, or hijacking), an artistic technique of appropriating, deconstructing, and re-presenting images and texts that was initially used by the postwar French avant-garde movement known as the Situationist International. Culture jamming is often directed against major brands, trademarked products, and advertisements as perceived symbols of increasing corporate control over all aspects of contemporary life, confronting the ideological and material apparatus of the “society of the spectacle” against which the Situationists also arrayed themselves (Debord 1967/1995). Other terms used to describe these tactics are subvertising (a blend of the words subvert and

advertising) and hacktivism (a blend of hack and activism). The former refers to spoofs or parodies of logos, trademarks, advertisements, consumer products, and such made by either altering existing materials or by creating new ones. The latter refers to the more general practice of using digital tools (as in computer hacking) for subversion or to pursue political ends. These methods have been greatly aided by the availability of desktop publishing software and other creative capabilities made possible by the proliferation of personal computers at relatively modest prices when compared to traditional, more capitalintensive forms of media production, such as print or broadcast media. It is perhaps predictable, then, that culture jamming, properly called, first emerged in proximity to the high-tech enclaves of Silicon Valley in California and the corporate headquarters of Microsoft in the Pacific Northwest. Examples of culture jamming can now be found around the world. Image-intensive online social networking sites, such as YouTube and Flickr, have also greatly expanded the reach of culture jamming practice. The activist group Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) is one of the best-known examples of subvertising. Based in San Francisco, BLF has intervened in corporate marketing communications campaigns since 1977. Its first project was to alter the billboard message of a cigarette brand from “I’m realistic. I smoke Fact” to “I’m real sick. I smoke Fact.” BLF produced new letters in a type font, character size, and color to mimic the original text and glued them over existing printed copy, making it virtually impossible to perceive that the message was not the one intended by the advertiser. The intervention meant to point out that no tobacco cigarette is healthy, not even those marketed as “low tar” or “low nicotine.” Another well-known example is the hacktivism of Jonah Peretti. Responding to an online promotion from Nike in early 2001 offering to customize its products with a personalized message, Peretti ordered a pair of shoes with the word sweatshop on them. The goal was to use the company’s own product to protest the unfair labor practices of its suppliers. A series of e-mail exchanges ensued when the company declined to supply the product as ordered. These communications circulated broadly on the Internet and ultimately found their way into the mainstream media, arguably drawing far more attention to the intervention and the issue of Nike’s labor

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policies than would have been possible if Peretti had simply worn the shoes in public. As a social phenomenon, culture jamming is related to and very often an adjunct of new social movements, such as animal rights, ecological sustainability, anti-sweatshop/fair trade, global justice, DIY (do-it-yourself), and voluntary simplicity/downshifting. Like those groups, culture jamming is an outgrowth of so-called postwar counterculture. And also like those groups, culture jamming embodies certain disaffection with earlier countercultural social movements, such as those advocating antiwar, civil rights, and feminist positions, in part due to their perceived lack of success in realizing long-term social change. Culture jamming, according to Adbusters’ founder Kalle Lasn, is politically “neither left nor right, but straight ahead” (cited in Bordwell 2002, 251). Culture jamming is not necessarily against capitalism per se, but the consumer excessiveness it is believed to foster and for not taking into account economic externalities, such as environmental despoliation and global social inequality. As it relates to overconsumption, culture jamming can be situated into a broad tradition of antimaterialism in Western culture, which extends from early Christian asceticism, is sifted through mid-eighteenth-century Romanticism, and persists today in anxiety over contemporary definitions of the “good life.” In helping to further the causes of various new social movements, culture jamming has been an effective method for raising awareness and fostering critical deliberation on issues of common concern. It has played and will likely continue to play an active role in the development of what has come to be termed transnational civil society, the sphere of social action that lies between the purely private domain of economics and the more public arena of politics. Culture jamming is one of the preferred media strategies of the global justice movement, and in particular pro-environment and anti-sweatshop constituencies regularly use détournements of transnational corporate and other supra-state institutional identities in their campaigns to ameliorate the perceived inequities of globalization as it has unfolded under neoliberalism. It has direct relevance for deconstructing what Leslie Sklair terms the culture-ideology of consumerism, which many hold as a primary site for reproducing the asymmetrical relations of power within the global system. Some advocates see culture jamming as an end in itself, an avenue of escape from consumer society in

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general, essentially extending countercultural narratives of personal liberation. Yet so-called countercultural liberation has been shown to often create new avenues for consumption, redirecting consumer resistance into new niche marketing opportunities. In providing an incentive for producers to respond to socially responsible demands of consumers, culture jamming may serve to correct certain market failures of currently existing consumer society rather than open the door to a new paradigm. Even this more modest goal suggests that culture jamming will remain a dynamic social and cultural force for the foreseeable future. Vince Carducci See also Advertising; Commercialization; Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism; Consumer Protest: Environment; Cultural Turn; Culture-Ideology of Consumerism

Further Readings Bordwell, M. “Jamming Culture: Adbusters’ Hip Media Campaign against Consumerism.” In Confronting Consumption, edited by Thomas Princen, Michael F. Maniotes, and Ken Conca, 237–253. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Carducci, Vince. “Culture Jamming: A Sociological Perspective.” Journal of Consumer Culture 6, no. 1 (2006): 116–138. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1995. First published 1967. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador-USA, 2000. Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New York: Eagle Brook, 1999. Sklair, Leslie. Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002

CULTURE-IDEOLOGY CONSUMERISM

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The culture-ideology of consumerism is a central concept in the theory of capitalist globalization proposed by Leslie Sklair. It refers to the transformation of above-subsistence consumption from a sectional preference of the rich to a globalizing phenomenon. Its emergence can be explained in terms of two central factors, factors that are historically unprecedented.

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First, capitalism entered a qualitatively new globalizing phase in the 1950s. As the electronic revolution got under way, significant changes began to occur in the productivity of capitalist factories, systems of extraction and processing of raw materials, product design, marketing, and distribution of goods and services. This golden age of capitalism, driven largely by new types of globally integrated transnational corporations and organized politically by an embryonic transnational capitalist class, took root in the United States, but soon spread to Japan and Western Europe and other parts of the first world, to the newly industrializing countries, and to some cities and enclaves in the third world. Second, the technical and social relations that structured the mass media all over the world made it very easy for new consumerist lifestyles to become the dominant motif for these media, which became in time extraordinarily efficient vehicles for the broadcasting of the culture-ideology of consumerism globally. In the second half of the twentieth century, and for the first time in human history, the dominant economic system, an increasingly globalizing capitalism, was sufficiently productive to provide a basic package of material possessions and services to almost everyone in the first world and to privileged groups elsewhere. Capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal phase from the 1980s, promised that eventually everyone else in the world would get rich as long as they followed the precepts of the so-called free market. The rapidly globalizing system of mass media was also geared up to tell everyone what was available and, crucially, to persuade people that this culture-ideology of consumerism was what a happy and satisfying life was all about. In a powerful empirical study of the increasing hours and more intensive nature of work in the United States since the 1950s, Juliet Schor demonstrated how capitalist consumerism led North Americans (and other groups elsewhere) into a Faustian bargain whereby those who can find relatively well-paying employment work longer and longer hours so that they can afford to buy more and more consumer goods and services or, at least, qualify for loans to do so. The culture-ideology of consumerism would not have been possible without two great twentiethcentury inventions, namely the shopping mall and the credit card. Malls in the first world have attracted substantial research attention, less so elsewhere. Third-world malls until quite recently catered mainly

to the needs and wants of the expatriate well-to-do, but now the success of the culture-ideology of consumerism can be observed all over the world in these malls, where increasing numbers of those in relatively well-paid work and their families flock to buy, usually with credit cards, thus locking themselves into the financial system of capitalist globalization. The ideas of Americanization and cultural and media imperialism are important elements in any discussion of the culture-ideology of consumerism. Through Hollywood and the globalization of the movies, via Madison Avenue, from where captains of consciousness created the modern advertising and marketing industry (see Ewen 1976), to the more geographically diffuse but ideologically monolithic television networks, and the mainstream of the Internet, the consumerist elites of the corporate world have assumed leadership of the culture-ideology of consumerism in the interests of capitalist globalization. The universal availability of the mass media has been rapidly achieved through relatively cheap hardware (first radios, then TVs, and now computers with online facilities) that now totally penetrates the first world, almost totally penetrate cities elsewhere, and is beginning to penetrate deeply into the countryside, even in the poorest places. Thus, the potential of global exposure to global communication, the dream of every merchant in history, has arrived. The socialization process by which people learn what to want, which used to occur mainly in the home and the school, is increasingly taking place through what the theorists of the Frankfurt school had so acutely termed the culture industry. The financial crisis that broke in 2008 was widely believed to have been triggered by the bursting of the bubble of rising house prices, exacerbated by what was labeled a subprime mortgage collapse. Home ownership, particularly in the United States, but increasingly all over the world, is a central aspect of the culture-ideology of consumerism, involving not only the debt incurred in buying a home but the further debt involved in furnishing, servicing, and improving it. The centrality of the culture-ideology of consumerism and the contradiction it holds for capitalist globalization are both tellingly expressed in the “solution” that governments of the so-called Group of Eight (G8) have offered for the financial crisis, namely lending taxpayers’ money to the banks so that people can borrow more and thus get further into debt. The transnational capitalist class is thus locked into an ongoing crisis of overproduction, the only response

Cyborgs

to which is an increasingly shrill and self-defeating culture-ideology of consumerism. The net effect of the culture-ideology of consumerism appears to be the creation of twin crises of capitalist globalization—namely class polarization and ecological unsustainability—that threaten to destabilize the global capitalist system as a whole. These crises feed off each other, and they are both unintended and extremely unwelcome consequences of the culture-ideology of consumerism as it has colonized the world under conditions of capitalist globalization. In its Human Development Report that heralded the new millennium, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) pointed out: “Economic growth cannot be accelerated enough to overcome the handicap of too much income directed to the rich. Income does not trickle down; it only circulates among elite groups” (UNDP 2000, 43). In these stark words, a central myth of capitalist globalization is destroyed: not prosperity for all, but increasing class polarization. In their analysis of the ecological consequences of such a system, Robin Leichenko and Karen O’Brien develop the concept of double exposures, as some regions, sectors, ecosystems, and social groups are exposed simultaneously to adverse impacts from climate change and economic globalization. This fruitfully combines the analysis of the crises of class polarization and ecological unsustainability (though they do not use these terms). The implications of an unrestrained culture-ideology of consumerism for the ecological future of the planet are plain for all to see, and it appears increasingly unlikely that this dilemma can be resolved while the conditions of capitalist globalization prevail. Leslie Sklair See also Advertising; Consumer Sovereignty; Credit; Globalization; Hollywood; Internet; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Spaces of Shopping; Transnational Capitalism

Further Readings Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Leichenko, Robin, and Karen O’Brien. Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Schor, Juliet. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

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Sklair, Leslie. Sociology of the Global System. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Sklair, Leslie. Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report. New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2000.

CYBORGS A cyborg is an organism that is part flesh, part artificial, and a popular character of science fiction. Well-known examples are Arnold Schwarzenegger’s flesh-covered robot Terminator, the Frankenstein creature, and the androids of Blade Runner. The cyborg has often been used as a metaphor to point to potential risks involved in letting machines take over human functions. They have visually embodied the unknown future and have been used to symbolize transformations of different kinds. Intrigued by such transformatory characteristics, cultural theorists have turned to the symbolic values of the cyborg figure. The uncertainties surrounding this figure have been used to question concepts of human and nonhuman. The cyborg—caught in between culture and nature— doesn’t necessarily have to deal with the social orders of our time and carries a potential to reconceptualize social relations and identities, it has been argued. Neither completely technological nor completely organic, cyborgs disrupt distinctions between natural and technologically enhanced bodies. In consumer culture theory, the cyborg has been used both as an abstract concept for questioning identity and difference and in more applied ways. The body’s interplay with information technologies and machines, such as in online games, the appearance of virtual bodies, or use of cell phones have been theorized as prostheses or formations of new kinds of human bodies. Cyborg theory can also be used to theoretically understand consumers’ physical relationship with consumer goods, such as fashion and food, and offer new ways of approaching processes such as branding and digital forms of marketing. Used as a critical concept, cyborg is generally associated with Donna Haraway and her 1991 text “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway’s text was in part written as response to strands of feminism where technology was problematized as building on masculine and patriarchal values. Even though she, too,

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recognized such value constructions, she wanted to give an alternative view. The development of information technology has made us all into cyborgs, she argues, we are all human, and not natural, creations. All identity categories such as gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity or race, are too, in Haraway’s view, human and not natural creations. As a concept, cyborg points to the shifting power relations that are involved in identity constructions and has become a metaphor for feminists who question distinctions between nature and culture, sex and gender, and male and female. Above all, the concept has been used to illustrate the ways in which advanced technological developments have blurred the boundaries between “natural” human bodies and “artificial,” “manufactured,” or “machinelike” human bodies. Cyborgs are, according to Haraway, hybrid entities with no natural origin or identity The human body is, in this view, a material entity as well as a discursive process. Also associated with the concept cyborg is N. Katherine Hayles, who in her book How We Became Post Human provides a critical account of the ways in which science has made human subjectivity synonymous with a disembodied mind. In the age of DNA, computers, and artificial intelligence, the body is seen as excess “meat,” she argues. Information is becoming disembodied as the “bodies” that once carried it vanish into virtuality. Consciousness has become separated from the body, a condition she calls posthuman. Hayles investigates the cultural processes that have made a posthuman condition possible and questions the separation of matter and information. Similar to Haraway, Hayles also shows how becoming posthuman can be liberating. Haraway’s use of the cyborg has been criticized for being too optimistic. Anne Balsamo has, for instance, pointed out that even if it may be possible to refashion gender within cyberculture, technology is ideologically shaped by gender interests, and conventional gendered patterns of power and authority are generally reinforced. Even if artificial materials offer possibilities to re-create gender, this doesn’t necessarily happen. Although some dualisms and differences may be disrupted through new technologies, others may simultaneously be reinforced. New forms of consumer culture that appear on the Internet have been studied as versions of cyborg formations. In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, cyberspace, which is given a broad definition, is analyzed as a

cultural phenomenon. The ways in which humans interact with and within emerging cybercultural formations are discussed, and the topics range from car crashes, cyberpunk, science fiction, human interaction with computers, cybertechnologies, viruses, cybersex, cyberbodies, and post-cyberbodies. Other ways of theorizing consumption are offered by Magnus Mörck, who has shown how paper cut-out dolls have gotten renewed interest over the Internet. The dolls work as transgressive objects in themselves; similar to cyborgs, they don’t follow doll conventions regarding gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. They also rely on and interconnect with information technology to come into being. Also in the fields of branding, marketing, and consumer behavior, the cyborg has been used as metaphor for the ways consumers behave online, as well as how brands market themselves on the Internet and the interplay between technology, brands, and consumers. Consumers interact with high-technological products, networks commodities, and to the economic priorities of the market. Cyborgs have been used to theorize visual representations of the technological body, the future body, and body parts in market communications. A concept similar to cyborg, and that has been used in studies of consumption of social media, is Bruno Latour’s “hybrids.”

Cyborg Fashion Anne Farren and Andrew Hutchinson have discussed technical aspects and challenges with nanotechnology and smart textiles in clothing and how future fabric can be made of living tissue that gets activated by the body’s own processes or nanomechanical technologies with garments that “think.” They make a distinction between “garment cyborgs,” which characterizes the relationship people today have with garments or cell phones, and “flesh cyborgs,” where technology is actually inside the body and united with flesh. For example, the space suit can be understood as a cyborg construction. The mutual fascination of fashion and technology with each other has also been discussed. From a slightly different angle, the relationship between experiencing nature and high-tech boots with GPS has been discussed by Mike Michael. It has been pointed out how the cyborg has become an aesthetic category that has influenced fashion and popular culture. Marie O’Mahoney argues that we must be

Cycles of Production and Consumption

very careful not to confuse the practical problems presented to and by a cyborg as a real, living thing, on one hand, and the stylistic, symbolic value it has as a kind of totem on the other hand. Jennifer Craik has discussed how borders between body and technology are constantly challenged in the development of the full body “fast skin” swimsuit, made of high-tech fabric that can enhance the body’s physical performances. Technological innovations have the potential to challenge and transform ideas of body, dress, and gender. Fabric, flesh, and skin are brought together in new constellations, blurring borders between what’s natural and what’s technologically recrafted. Approaching clothes worn on bodies as cyborg technologies can give new light on how garments constitute our understandings of nature, gender, and bodies. The projection of the body’s function onto garments blurs distinctions between nature and culture.

Cyborgs and Food Another area of consumer culture where the human body’s interaction with other substances has been theorized is within food culture. Eating is an important bodily practice. Similar to fashion and information technology, food can also be approached for its ways of creating hybrid entities or interconnecting with humans or questioning the nature-culture divide. In the book Consuming Geographies by David Bell and Gill Valentine, food consumption is explored, as well as the ways in which eating contributes to the construction of identity and bodies. Rick Dophijn has, in the book Foodscapes, examined how food moves in structures, how it changes them, and how it is changed by them. He examines how food is produced by these structures and how these structures are produced by food. Further, Elspeth Probyn has discussed food anxieties in ways that resemble cyborg thinking. In Carnal Appetites, she studies food through a perspective where the body and the material are in focus: how we eat is turned into culture, identity, and ourselves. Probyn uses what she calls the materiality of eating, sex, and bodies to rethink the ethics of bodies. She discusses how definitions of food or nonfood, human or nonhuman, material or symbolic, and public or private are constructed through social practices and power relations, and how ambivalence and uncertainty about such boundaries are a common cause of anxiety. Magdalena Petersson McIntyre

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See also Adornment; Body, The; Cosmetic Surgery; Embodiment; Gender; Information Technology; Mobile Phones; Postmodernism

Further Readings Balsamo, Ann. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Bell, David, and Barbara Kennedy. The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. London: Routledge, 1997. Craik, Jennifer. Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Dophijn, Rick. Foodscapes: Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption. Delft, The Netherlands: Eburon, 2004. Farren, Anne, and Andrew Hutchison. “Cyborgs, New Technology, and the Body: The Changing Nature of Garments.” Fashion Theory 8, no. 4 (2004): 461–476. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Michael, Mike. Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity. London: Routledge, 2000. Mörck, Magnus. “Modeling Small Scale Utopias.” In Little Monsters: (De)coupling Assemblages of Consumption, edited by Helen Brembeck, Karin M. Ekström, and Magnus Mörck, 29–50. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007. O’Mahoney, Marie. Sportstech. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food, Sex, Identities. London: Routledge, 2000.

CYCLES OF PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION Systems of production and consumption are often analyzed in a static way, the interactions and dynamics of the two often being overlooked. The way humans produce goods and services tends to be analyzed separately from the way they consume the same goods and services, except for some relatively simple interactions premised on the basis of consumer demand. More recent accounts have shown that such production and consumption systems can better be described as dynamic equilibriums, in which gradual developments or sudden shocks can lead to tipping points changing the practices of consumption and production (Tukker et al. 2008). Commuting,

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for example, has for a long time depended on cars, buses, and rail-based transport, but deregulation and the advent of low-cost aviation carriers has transformed a transport mode only accessible to the jet set until the 1980s into an option available to all layers of Western societies. Against this background, this entry shows various ways to look at such “cycles” of production and consumption. The first, and simplest, is the traditional static view of a cycle of economic production and consumption, describing the physical flows of products and monetary flows in a system of production and consumption. The second view is more oriented toward overall trends in cycles of production and consumption—how do consumption and production gradually change in character? How is there a shift in value creation? The third view again takes a different approach and uses the word cycle to express literally cyclical changes in patterns of production and consumption in time. This can be done mainly from consumption (changing consumer behavior), business (changes within or across industrial sectors), and economic (macroeconomic changes) perspectives.

The Traditional Economic Cycle of Production and Consumption The first way of describing cycles of production and consumption can be found in traditional macroeconomic descriptions of society and is often referred to as the “circular flow of income” (see, e.g., Mankiw and Taylor 2006). In its most simple form, society can be described as a two-sector model of firms (producers) and households (consumers). Figure 1 provides a visual representation of this approach. Firms produce goods and services that are delivered and paid for by households, causing a monetary flow that is a reverse of the physical flow. In turn, households provide labor and capital (so-called factors of production) to firms, for which they are paid in the form of wages, rent, and dividends. The monetary flows have to be in balance and the value of the factors of production used per unit of time in principle has to meet the value of the products and services produced per unit of time. Somewhat more sophisticated representations include three other main sectors: the finance sector, the government sector, and a “rest of world” sector. The finance sector borrows savings (from households) and lends it to parties investing capital (firms).

This money hence “leaks” from the primary cycle, since it is not used anymore to purchase consumer products and services. Yet, the finance sector again puts this money back in the loop in the form of loans, which then are used for the purchase of other (capital) goods and services. The government sector levies taxes on households and firms and hence creates another leakage, but at the same time shuttles this money back in the form of government expenditure (wages for government workers, payment for public services and public infrastructure). Finally, a rest-ofworld sector can be introduced (i.e., other countries from which goods and services are imported and to which domestically produced goods and services are exported). The imports need to be paid for and form a leakage in the monetary flow, whereas exports form a leakage in the physical flow of products and services (but add to the monetary flow). Figure 1 also gives a stylized representation of the five-sector model. The five-sector model is in (monetary) equilibrium when savings (S) plus taxes (T) plus imports (M) equals investment (I) plus government spending (G) and exports (X), or, in formula: S + T + M = I + G + X.

Societal Megatrends and Shifts in the Mode of Value Creation Societal megatrends influence the cycles in the production-consumption system depicted in the former section: what products and services are put on the market, how they are consumed, and what creates the highest added value. For instance, one could argue that the (mega)trends of globalization, informatization, move toward a network economy, lean and just-in-time production, concentration on core businesses, the shift to dual-income families, more single-person households, time pressure on citizens, and individualization inherently will lead to a greater demand for product-services rather than products. Customers simply do not have the time, the skills, or do not want to devote resources to integrate all kinds of products and services from individual suppliers to an integrated solution for their needs. They will prefer suppliers that can provide an integrated fulfillment of needs (Tukker and Tischner 2006). This message is probably most eloquently given in The Experience Economy (1999), written by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. Pine and Gilmore argue that over time, the characteristics of

Cycles of Production and Consumption

413

Two-Sector Model Income (Y) Resources Households

Firms Output (O)

Expenditure (E) Five-Sector Model Income (Y)

Resources Households

Firms

Expenditure (E)

Saving (S)

Taxation (T)

Imports (M)

Government Sector

Overseas Sector

Government Spending (G)

Exports (X)

Output

Income

Consumption

1

2000

2000

2000

0

2

2000

2000

1800

200

3

1800

1800

1800

180

Period

Figure 1

Investment (I)

Financial Sector

Injections

Leakages

Output (O)

Saving

A Two- and Five-Sector Model of the Production-Consumption System

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Ari89.

economic supplies have shifted from commodities or materials to products and further to services and finally to experiences. As depicted in Table 1, each of these economies leads to its own basis for competition. The key message of Pine and Gilmore is that society is shifting to an experience economy.

In an affluent (Western) society, consumers generally can take basic Maslowian needs such as food, shelter, and safety for granted, and will be more geared toward the realization of higher needs, such as affiliation, love, esteem, and self-realization. The trick then becomes to satisfy needs on these higher

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Table 1

Shifts in Dominant Types of Economic Offerings

Type of Economic Offering

Commodities

Goods

Services

Experiences

Economy Economic function Nature of offering Key characteristics Delivery

Agrarian Extract Fungible Natural Bulk

Manufacturing Make Tangible Standardized Per piece

Service Deliver Intangible Customized Made on demand

Seller Buyer Factors influencing demand

Trader Market Characteristics

Manufacturer User Features

Provider Client Benefits

Experience Stage Memorable Personal Shown during a specific period Stager Guest Sensations

Source: Adapted from B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore 1999, 6.

levels in conjunction to the offer of a material artifact: “turning ordinary products into extraordinary experiences.” By creating such intangible added value, the provider makes the client willing to pay more than would be justified on the basis of “rational” calculation.

The Consumer Hype Cycle Gartner, a U.S. marketing firm based in Stamford, Connecticut, has developed a so-called consumer hype cycle to predict the attitude of consumers vis-à-vis particularly new electrical and electronic goods. The generic form of the hype cycle (Fenn, Raskino, and Gammage 2009) is depicted in Figure 2. The figure basically plots the visibility of a new technology or product over time and argues, in essence, that consumer attitude goes through five distinct phases, each with different options for business to react on it. The timing of such phases may depend on the product or technology at stake. 1. The first phase is the so-called Technology Trigger. A new technology or product is announced, gradually gets more and more attention, and generates significant press or interest. People start to develop expectations of what the product could mean and do, leading to the next phase in the hype cycle. 2. The second phase is the Peak of Inflated Expectations. The expectations and media attention has resulted in a frenzy of publicity. The enthusiasm

and expectations around the new product or technology are inflated to fully unrealistic proportions. Sure, there will be successful applications and uses, but typically the product or technology ends up being a (sometimes bitter) failure, certainly against the high expectations initially raised. 3. The third phase is the Trough of Disillusionment. The discrepancy between the early expectations and actual performance has become so high that consumers start to reject the new technology in full. They now swing to the other end of the spectrum and end up with a fully negative assessment. Where the press and other communication means first helped to create the hype, they now abandon the topic, or only show negative messages about it. 4. The fourth phase is the Slope of Enlightenment. Where most consumers still have a negative attitude toward the topic, and media attention has reached a low, some people start to understand the practical value and benefits of the subject. Slowly and steadily, a growing group of consumers gets a more realistic idea of what the product or topic truly can mean for them, and gradually the product or issue gains more ground. 5. Finally, the fifth phase is the Plateau of Productivity. The benefits of the technology now become widely applied and realistic performance characteristics become widely known. As a consequence, it becomes widely accepted. The technology usually also matures, and certain initial disappointing

Cycles of Production and Consumption

415

Visibility Legal File Sharing/Legitimate P2P Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld Mobile TV Broadcasting HD Optical Disc Players PC-Based Media Center

Fixed-Mobile Converged Voice Service Ultramobile Devices Network DVR Portable Personality Terrestrial Digital Radio (HD Radio) OLED TVs Microprojectors

IPTV Mobile TV Streaming Online Game Consoles

Digital TV (Cable and Satellite) Household Wi-Fi Bluetooth in Automobiles Residential VolP Consumer Telematics Mobile Video on Demand HDTV Displays Digital Video Recorders Interactive TV Video Chat Over IP As of July 2007

Widgets

Media Distribution via Game Consoles

Technology Trigger

Video on Demand Digital Terrestrial TV Wireline Home Networking (Dedicated Ethernet Wiring) Portable Media Players

Wireline Home Networking (Coaxial and Power Line) Broadband Video on Demand Next-Generation Satellite

Peak of Trough of Inflated Disillusionment Expectations Time

Slope of Enlightenment

Plateau of Productivity

Years to mainstream adoption: less than 2 years

Figure 2

2 to 5 years

5 to 10 years

more than 10 years

obsolute before plateau

Technology Hype Cycle

Source: Wikimedia Commons/[email protected]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg.

drawbacks are mitigated. Whether the visibility of the technology or product again becomes as high as in the second hype stage depends on its applicability (niche or mainstream market).

speak of a full disillusionment in that case, a mild form of the hype cycle seems to be applicable there as well.

Business or Industry Life Cycles Note that while Gartner’s hype cycle was mainly developed for electronic products, other authors suggest it has a more generic value. A hype cycle may not only be triggered by technical innovations, but it can also activate a new product launch, a shift in consumer interest, or any other event that generates significant press, interest, hopes, and expectations. Also those issues or events can go through trigger, inflated expectations, disillusionment, enlightenment, and plateau phases. Indeed, one could even argue that the election of a new charismatic president, such as Barack Obama in the United States, goes through these phases, losing some of his popularity after being around six months in office. Though we certainly cannot

A dynamic parameter often used to describe phases in the development of business systems (and hence what brings competitive advantage) is the industry life cycle. This life cycle is generally assumed to comprise four phases: introduction/emergence, growth, maturity, and decline. Each of these phases has its own characteristics when it comes to type of markets, size of markets, and emphasis of the innovation effort. Figure 3 gives the level of sales and Figure 4 gives the emphasis in innovation processes for each stage in the life cycle (see e.g., Grant 2002): 1. Introduction/emergence. In this stage, the market is small and penetration is low. The products produced by the industry are just doing their job,

Industry or Product Sales

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product rises. The shift from stage 1 to 2 also marks a shift from radical to more incremental innovation of products.

Introduction

Growth

Maturity

Decline

Time

Figure 3

The Industry Life Cycle

Rate of Innovation

Product Innovation

Strategic Innovation

4. Finally, the industry enters the decline stage once it cannot keep up with challenges posed by new industries that produce substitutes with superior functionality, performance, and price.

Process Innovation

Time

Figure 4

3. In the maturity stage, market saturation slows sales growth to a virtual standstill—the sales volume in the market peaks. New demand becomes a replacement demand and companies start to compete on costs rather than functionality or quality. This usually shifts the emphasis from product innovation to large-scale manufacturing and process innovation. Another tactic of companies is to bet on brand differentiation and feature differentiation to beat competition. The overall profit margins on the product decline since companies have only two main choices to deal with competition: cost leadership or (more costly) brand and feature differentiation.

Innovation per Industry Life Cycle Stage

quality is low, and prices are high. This, in relation to the newness of the product type, leads to a slow growth rate. Design and technology can be heterogeneous. The effort of the industry is mainly focused on improving product quality and improving its functionality—which in this stage is a main source of competitive advantage. Sometimes there is even little competition; potentially competitive manufacturers “wait and see” if the first mover is able to create a market and then try to catch up, hoping to avoid the trial and error that the first mover had to do. 2. In the growth stage, market penetration accelerates and the product technology becomes more standardized. In relation, prices are becoming lower and the product type enters the mass markets. Profitability starts to rise, but this usually draws more competitors in to try their luck on this market too, which eventually puts more pressure on prices. Public awareness and confidence in the

So, industry life cycles usually start with an emphasis on product innovation, and later on shift toward process innovation. In the stages between 3 and 4, however, when both product and process innovations no longer give an advantage, the only viable alternative seems to be what has been termed strategic innovation. This involves activities such as redefining markets and market segments, embracing new customer groups, adding products and services that perform new but related functions, reconfiguration of the sequence of activities in a new format, and so on. Reconciling multiple (opposing) performance goals is often the key to strategic innovation. Charles Baden-Fuller and John M. Stopford have done extensive research into this issue. They concluded that maturity is more a state of mind than an industry characteristic that binds a firm; that an entrepreneurial, learning, and experimental culture is key; that strategic innovation needs to be endorsed by top management and needs the creation of suitable boundary conditions; and, as with all creativity, one has to be selective in choosing its new territory. A rejuvenating strategic innovation approach requires entrepreneurship and out-of-the box thinking. These are capabilities that might have been neglected and even become extinct in stage 3, when all focus had to be on cost reduction by up-scaling, volume

Cycles of Production and Consumption

growth, detailed planning, forgoing costly (since production-disrupting) experimentation, and so on. The length of business cycles depends very much on the type of product and business. The car has been around over a century, and despite all the problems in the automotive industry, congestion, fuel consumption, and so on, it is likely that carlike transport means will still be around for a considerable time to come. Many industries in the consumer electronics sphere, however, show a much higher dynamism. Companies such as Philips and Sony have existed for a long time, but the products they sell now, the way they produce these products, and the business models applied are, in many cases, incomparable to those of just twenty or thirty years ago. Examples include turntables and tape decks being replaced by compact disk players in the 1980s and 1990s and then by MP3-players, and video recorders making way for DVD followed by hard disk recorders.

Kondratieff Cycles Nikolai D. Kondratieff, a Russian economist, was the first to suggest that the economy in the (capitalist) world shows cycles of about forty to sixty years in length, in which periods between high and relatively slow growth would alternate. Joseph Schumpeter, when developing his theory of creative destruction, proposed to call these long cycles Kondratieff waves, compared to the shorter cycles, such as Kuznets waves. Explanations of why such cycles exist use innovations, capital investment processes, war, and capitalist crises as the main explanatory variables. The explanation based on innovations suggests that each cycle starts with fundamental innovations, which allow fundamental technical and business revolutions, creating new sources of wealth and destructing old sources of wealth. The result is a cycle of four stages: 1. The first stage is one of expansion and growth (the “Spring” stage). The novel innovations and the following technical and business revolutions create a major social shift in wealth and wealth accumulation. Upheavals and displacements in society are the consequence, and work and the role of participants in society are redefined. 2. The second stage is one of stagflation (the “Summer” stage). Society is used to the affluence of the previous growth stage, changing the attitude toward work in society. The result is inefficiencies.

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3. The third stage is one of deflationary growth (the “Fall” stage). Growth comes to a standstill and a plateau is reached. The popular mood changes too. It changes toward stability, normalcy, and isolationism. 4. Finally, the fourth depression stage kicks in (the “Winter” stage). This stage includes the integration of social shifts and changes into the social fabric of society. It is supported by the shifts in innovation and technology. The theory of Kondratieff cycles is not unanimously accepted. Critics point to the fact that different scholars tend to suggest different start and end dates for the cycles. The theory can hardly be “proven” with the mass of economic statistics available, and that seem to allow for different explanations for upturns and downturns in the economy. It is also suggested that many of the downturns in the cycles are related to human error and could have been avoided. Overall, the theory seems much less accepted by traditional economic scholars than by innovationbased and evolutionary economic scholars, the latter forming the most important “alternative” scientific paradigm in economic sciences. Having said this, most scholars studying economic cycles tend to agree that, since the Industrial Revolution, about five waves can be recognized, as depicted in Figure 5: First Industrial Revolution—1771. This period saw the breakthrough of cotton-based technologies, such as spinning and weaving. Second Industrial Revolution—1829. In this period, steam power was widely introduced for both industrial production and for transport, in the form of railways. Third Industrial Revolution—1875. In this period, steel and electricity became important new innovations in production. The period from 1908. Here, the automotive sector took off, mass production was introduced, and oil became the basis of energy supply and the chemical industry. The period from 1971. In this period, information and communication technology took off, with a tremendous impact on many other sectors and business practices in general.

To some extent, there are parallels between the Kondratieff cycles and the shifts in mode of value

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steam engine cotton

P

R

railway steel

D

electrical engineering chemistry

petrochemicals automobiles

information technology

E

1. Kondratieff

2. Kondratieff

3. Kondratieff

4. Kondratieff

5. Kondratieff

1800

1850

1900

1950

1990

P: prosperity R: recession D: depression E: improvement

Figure 5

Kondratieff Waves

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Rursus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kondratieff_Wave.svg.

creation proposed by Pine and Gilmore (see earlier). Pine and Gilmore are, however, mainly interested in how societal megatrends and technical breakthroughs influence the type of products and services that create the most value on the market, where Kondratieff used the phenomenon of breakthroughs of clusters of new technologies to explain alternating periods of economic growth and downturn.

Conclusion The static and dynamic aspects of production and consumption can be analyzed via various perspectives that differ according to emphasis on the type, the extent of the dynamics, the time horizon applied, and the emphasis on production or consumption (see Table 2). The traditional economic view looks at the interaction between consumption and production in a single year. Macrotheories looking at the shift in value creation span centuries, and by their focus on value creation, they inherently look at production as well as consumption. Consumer hype cycle studies inherently put the consumer side central, taking rather short time spans into account. Business cycle analyses typically emphasize the production side, where the rise and fall of industries typically takes decades. Finally, the approach of Kondratieff cycles has much in common with theories looking at shifts

in value creation, but emphasizes the factors driving change (technology) rather than the implication (what is the basis for value creation). There are many synergies between approaches. Consumer hype cycles and business cycles can best be understood in the context of the long-term dynamism reflected by the theories on Kondratieff cycles (big technical innovations creating societal change) and the related shifts in basis of value creation. And the apparently static nature of the economic “bookkeeping” approach of the economic productionconsumption cycle becomes much more dynamic if one starts to gather and analyze the time series of economic data on production and consumption. Indeed, it is such economic data that show which consumer hypes arise and die out, or that show that the source of added value in production shifted gradually from industrial production to services, and that by now in many Western cities, the so-called creative industries form important creators of wealth. This all fits perfectly with the analyses of Pine and Gilmore on shifts in value creation and the Kondratieff waves. Future developments in this field are likely to see conceptual integration between theory and perspectives. It also seems likely that economic data provided by the first approach in Table 2 will be more and more used to underpin and interrogate the other approaches. Quantitative insights,

Cycles of Production and Consumption

Table 2

1 2 3 4 5

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Characteristics per View on Production and Consumption Cycles Focus on Product or Consumption

Type

Static or Dynamic

Time Horizon

Economic productionconsumption cycle Shifts in value creation Consumer hype cycle Business cycle Kondratieff cycles

(Largely) static

Usually a single year Integrated

Dynamic Dynamic Dynamic Dynamic

Decades to centuries Years Decades Decades (to centuries)

particularly in scenario assessments and econometric modeling, to further explore the dynamics identified in theories 2 through 5 in Table 2 are already being developed. Arnold Tukker See also Air and Rail Travel; Automobiles; Economic Sociology; Globalization; Information Society; Innovation Studies; Maslow, Abraham; Post-Fordism; Price and Price Mechanisms

Further Readings Baden-Fuller, Charles, and John M. Stopford. Rejuvenating the Mature Business: The Competitive Challenge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Fenn, Jackie, Mark Raskino, and Brian Gammage. Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009. Stamford, CT: Gartner, 2009. http://www.gartner.com/ DisplayDocument?id=1108412.

Integrated Consumption Production Integrated

Grant, Robert M. Contemporary Strategy Analysis: Concepts, Techniques, Applications. 4th ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Mankiw, N. Gregory, and Mark P. Taylor. Economics. London: Thomson Learning, 2006. Pine, B. Joseph, II, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999. Schumpeter, Joseph A. Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. Abridged and introduction by Rendigs Fels. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. First published 1939. Tukker, Arnold, Martin Charter, Maj Munch Andersen, Eivind Sto, and Carlo Vezzoli. System Innovation for Sustainability I: Radical Changes to Sustainable Consumption and Production. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf, 2008. Tukker, Arnold, and Ursula Tischner. New Business for Old Europe: Product Service Development, Competitiveness and Sustainability. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf, 2006.

D keen cultivation of the “aristocratic art of giving offence,” he caused every gentlemen of his time to turn to him for the answers to what he made to seem, in his milieu, the important questions of conduct— questions of taste, fashion, and propriety. (Smith 1974, 727)

DANDYISM Dandyism is the act of presenting oneself as a member of high society, especially through one’s attire. In an 1863 essay, Charles Baudelaire identified the passion that drove the dandy to perfection with the “burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties.” The “eyes of a dandy” are “in love with distinction” (499). Classical dandies had an exceptionally developed sense for distinctions, which they eagerly displayed in public, in regular meeting places for the urban high society such as the afternoon promenades on the city boulevards and parks, the literary saloons, the clubs and balls, the opera and theater, and so on. The dandy was the ultimate trendsetter in all matters of taste and etiquette, above all in his personal attire. To Baudelaire, and many others, George “Beau” Brummell was the prototype of a dandy, admired and copied by many young men. Brummell did not come from high nobility but from its upper servant class. The milieu in which he grew up, however, was rich, leisured, and exclusive enough. His career as a dandy in English high society during the Regency period (1811–1820) was quite remarkable and well known all over Europe. In his sociological study, Thomas Spence Smith characterized Beau Brummell as follows:

The dandy is the extreme representative of cultural refinement. A dandy runs the risk of crossing the narrow border that separates him from a fop, a man who makes a fool of himself by being overconcerned with his appearance and clothes. A dandy, however, makes his whole life a highly styled object of art. As Baudelaire observed, dandies lived in a time when the society of estates, with its strict social hierarchies, gradually gave way to greater social mobility and equality: “Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fail” (Baudelaire 1964, 28). Brummell lived concretely in times of social turmoil during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. A gentleman born in the outskirts of the noble society but particularly keen to the issues of social, cultural, and economic change, as well as the new possibilities they opened up, could establish a kind of new aristocracy of taste as a final gesture of decadence and great heroism. The social esteem a dandy enjoyed in high society was based on a presumption of his having substantial economic resources and a life of leisure. However, his lifestyle determined his social position, primarily through the wide attention it garnered, and not vice

By a deliberate display of unproductiveness and waste; by a life of idle worldliness, methodical refinement, and luxurious consumption; and by the 421

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versa. Just as the position of a courtier at Versailles was defined by his ability to distinguish himself from his peers and emulate the taste and style of the king, so, too, could a dandy distinguish himself above his peers by the skilful manipulation of the signs of excellence. According to the values of the ancient regime, the dandy was a pretender, his taste and lifestyle more refined than his social origins actually entitled him to. Through his refined style, he, in fact, defended the aristocratic privilege of leisure against the new bourgeois standards of achievement through work. He was a symbol of the real distinction between classes. The dandy was thus the last defender of the aristocratic pathos of distance against the general leveling out of social distinctions. According to Pierre Bourdieu, the surest sign of the legitimacy of taste is self-assurance. The social “bluff” of pretending to be something finer than one in fact is succeeds if it is done with enough confidence. In the dandy’s case, the self-assurance was connected to an “aristocratic” offensiveness that, often with great wit, turned down all challenging gestures and remarks. Together with its opposite figure, the Bohemian of the artistic vanguard circles of mid-nineteenthcentury Europe, the dandy is a great cultural hero of early modernity. The dandy’s entire appearance differed drastically from the Bohemian, but the targets of their critical gestures were basically similar. Brummell and other famous dandies, like Lord Byron, have had many followers among young men of culture. The young aspiring Russian poets Sergey Yesenin and Anatolii Mariengolf walked the streets of Moscow in the middle of the civil war dressed in the classical outfit of a dandy: cylinder hat and the tail coat. These, as well as many similar later dandies often closely associated with artistic and intellectual circles of their times, are examples, in Baudelaire’s understanding, of the “metaphysical phase” of dandyism. The dandy’s mere existence challenged the responsible and down-to-the-earth petit bourgeoisie and the members of the middle class by elevating aesthetics to a living religion. The classical dandies were men. Dandyism is often associated with the male gender, whose general sartorial appearance during the nineteenth century, under the demands set by the new urban professions and increasing bureaucratization of the state apparatus, became more uniform-like; the dandy’s exaggerated “aristocratic” refinement and distinctiveness effectively contrasted

with this trend. In this context, a dandy could even give a slightly feminine impression. Female dandies are, however, not totally unknown. They were sometimes referred to as dandysettes. Nevertheless, a male is definitely the dominating cultural model of dandyism. With the disappearance of the social conditions and opportunities that emerged at the crossing point of old and new regimes, the later generations of dandies often give the impression of a historical anachronism or present a poor mimicry of their historical originals. If, as many claim, the traditional cultural signs of excellence have in modernity started to live a life of their own, at least partly disconnected from their social origins, this could open up a possibility for the great majority of people to style their own lives according to their individual tastes, not to become cultural heroes like Brummell but perhaps “little dandies,” presuming that their aspirations could find some positive response among their social milieus. A dandy’s general attitude to his surrounding social world was open indifference or even a slight hostility to others. Such a predominately intellectual attitude was, according to Georg Simmel, typical of modern life in the metropolis in general. Brummell lived totally at the attention of his audience. His image was a public possession. His self-image was absorbed in his public image. Like the flaneur, he was a figure whose existence depended on the new public urban milieu and audience. As the audience changed or the scene shifted, a dandy’s identity became unsettled because he was completely “outer directed” (Smith 1974, 732). In the opinion of some modern cultural critics, such a situation could easily face not only exceptional individuals living in exceptional times but also, increasingly, the members of the great middle class in modern society. Jukka Gronow See also Conspicuous Consumption; Cool Hunters; Fashion; Flaneur/euse; Neo-Tribes; Social Distinction; Style; Taste; Urban Cultures

Further Readings Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée. The Anatomy of Dandyism. Translated by D. B. Wyndham Lewis. London: Peter Davis, 1928. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. New York: Da Capo Press, 1964.

Databases and Consumers Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Gronow, Captain Rees. The Reminiscences and Recollections of Captain Gronow, Being Anecdotes of the Camp, Clubs, and Society 1810–1860. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated and edited by K. Wolf, 409–424. Chicago: Free Press, 1950. Smith, Thomas Spence. “Aestheticism and Social Structure: Style and Social Network in the Dandy Life.” American Review of Sociology 39 (1974): 725–743.

DATABASES

AND

CONSUMERS

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, datadriven marketing is ubiquitous and shaping business practice in a growing number of markets. The decreasing cost of information technology, datastorage systems, and data analytical services permits seamless and systematic consumer surveillance as well as increasingly sophisticated production of consumer representations. By capturing consumer activities in a ubiquitous fashion and in minute detail, databases become repositories of complex consumer lives by turning behavior into abstract aggregates of individualized and individualizing data points. Once consumption has been dematerialized and made available as coded, standardized, and manipulable data, there are no more limits to the construction of difference, to classification, and to social sorting, notes David Lyon. The electronic customer list allows visualizing of consumption, or rather consumer life phenomena, at the microscopic level. Customer databases reorganize the gaze of marketers and the way marketing practice configures and controls spaces of operation, production, and economic valorization.

Inscribing Consumption: The Foucauldian Perspective For marketers, databases are central agents in the expansion and refinement of strategies of marketing control based on the observation of consumer populations. With 360-degree surveillance, customer databases operate like a market super-Panopticon, according to Mark Poster. Poster approaches

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databases and profiling machines from a poststructuralist perspective, calling attention to the discursive effects of databases in a Foucauldian sense. Foucault’s understanding of discourse and language is of special relevance to a study of customer databases because of the relation Foucault draws between language and the constitution of the subject. Mainly drawing from his genealogical work, Foucault develops a theory of the human being as a subject that is configured, and given cultural significance, in the first instance through language. From this perspective, a new language introduces a new way of constituting cultural objects (such as human beings and customers) and social relationships (such as markets). As Poster argues, computerized databases constitute such a new language, altering the way individuals are constituted as subjects and mobilized as identities. Importantly, a new language changes not only how the consumer subject is constituted but also how this subject can be known. From a Foucauldian perspective, the creation of knowledge is the creation of cultural objects, and both are functions of linguistic power. In other words, a new system of representation—be it writing, statistics, or digital information flows—articulates newly ordered spaces of knowledge in which the object of representation (e.g., the consumer) becomes observable, measurable, quantifiable, in short known. The customer subject emerges as a known and knowable object on which the marketer can now act strategically.

Modulating Consumption: The Deleuzian Perspective Although the recoding of consumer behavior into discrete and virtual “data doubles” and the inscription of digital identities is intrinsic to databases, there is more to the panoptic power of the customer database. Extending Poster’s Foucauldian focus on the linguistic fabrication and multiplication of data subjects, Greg Elmer observed that the panopticism imposed onto consumers by information machines is much more concerned with “the collection of personal information to discriminate individuals into previously categorized consumer lifestyle groups or ‘profiles’” (2004, 41). Hence Elmer puts the spotlight of contemporary market-surveillance strategies squarely on the reproductive (or cybernetic) aspect of electronic panopticism. Because data subjects

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are “always already discriminated and profiled” (41), the contemporary mode of data collection and analysis must be understood as a dynamic process where—with each new interaction between the system and consumers—existing surveillance and profiling systems and personal information continuously inform each other. This mutability of both the surveillance apparatus and the data subject requires a departure from Foucault’s architectural and optical conception of disciplinary power focused on enclosures, molds, and fixed castings, according to Gilles Deleuze. Elmer proposes instead to draw on Deleuze’s notion of modulation to more successfully conceptualize how control and power operate in and through technological surveillance networks of contemporary information economies. This retheorization of disciplinary forms of control as modular represents more than a semantic change: modulation stresses simulation, movement, and flexibility rather than surveillance, enclosure, and documentation. To be sure, simulation relies on surveillance but only as far as documentation, expression, and spatial organization of collective life mapped within the electronic Panopticon provide the foundation for circular, recursive, and self-reproducing strategies of power aimed at forecasting future positions “in an increasingly dispersed and automated infoscape” (44). Theorizing electronic surveillance and database technologies with Deleuze in terms of cybernetic feedback loops contrasts fruitfully with Foucauldian analyses because it recognizes the need for database marketers to actively solicit consumers for information, hence conceptualizing the building, mining, updating, and distributing of the customer database as a systematic modulation of the consumer population. In other words, the customer database’s simulational gaze is focused on the reflexive generation and projection onto consumers of a digital code through the continuous reconfiguration of relationships and associations between always changing data points. By recognizing the feedback loop between data collection and analysis, a Deleuzian modulation of information theory is superior to the Foucauldian approach in explaining how panoptic profiling machines operate to control and homogenize everyday consumption behavior in advanced capitalist societies. Despite accentuating the crucial interaction between consumers (qua response to solicitation) and technologies of surveillance (qua continuous soliciting and modular simulation), however, the

cybernetic aspect of Elmer’s theoretical position still maintains the conceptual separation between the sphere of consumption and production. In his detailed case studies, for example, Elmer links the solicitation, storage, and retrieval of personal consumer information to the planning and implementation of standard marketing tactics, mainly targeted advertising and event marketing, through which companies hope to improve consumer responses to their product offerings.

Manufacturing Consumption: The Flexible Production Perspective Recent investigations of the role of customer databases in the shaping of contemporary consumer capitalism build on the foundational work of Poster, Elmer, and others but shift the focus of analysis from the technology’s panoptic operations to their productive function within post-Fordist regimes of flexible accumulation. Drawing on recent retheorizations of Marx and typically placed under the headings of information capitalism, postindustrial capitalism, and post-Fordism, conceptualizations of the database as a technology of production foregrounds the expanded economic significance and strategic possibilities of market panopticism in the age of information. Instead of a homogenization of consumption, this approach suggests that the economic strength of panoptic surveillance rests with its ability to detect, valorize, and monetize consumer heterogeneity. In particular, the database’s capacity to spot creative, nonconforming, and unexpected forms of consumer life has not been lost to marketing executives. Indeed, given the need of growth-dependent, contemporary capitalism to reproduce at an ever-increasing pace to meet new consumer needs, too much consumer homogeneity would constitute a serious challenge for contemporary strategies of accumulation. Analyses of customer databases from a Deleuzian and a Foucauldian perspective are united in their failure to notice that with progressing automation of data collection, analysis, and organization, surveillancebased simulation no longer represents merely a means to discipline or control consumption but to manufacture consumers. In other words, the modular simulation of the consumer population becomes the site for direct economic value creation, while the ambition to control consumers, still important to modern marketers, is increasingly giving way to the possibility

de Certeau, Michel

of manufacturing customers as valuable information commodities themselves in need of marketing. Theorizing “profiling technologies” such as the customer database in terms of production requires a reassessment of how technologies derive their unique power. In particular, while the dominant focus in the current literature on surveillance and simulation technologies has been on spatial politics of consumption “that attempts to locate and map the circulation of information, data, power and control” (Elmer 2004, 46), a production of customers’ perspective proposes that the importance of the database for the exploitation of markets and the creation of economic value is derived less from its panoptic capacity than from its ability to produce modular (flexible and reflexive) consumer simulations in rapid or, better even, real time. The recent gains in speed and flexibility of production processes, premised on the unfolding of increasingly powerful data-mining techniques, is hence central for an understanding of how the customer database leads to a reversal of Fordist organizations of production and consumption. It is important to recall that databases are made up of symbols in data fields. They embody a specific mode of representing the world. As Poster puts it, “One does not eat them, handle them, or kick them, at least one hopes not. Databases are configurations of language; the theoretical stance that engages them must take at least this ontological fact into account” (1995, 278). Poster, of course, has in mind a poststructuralist analysis when he points to the database as a repository for linguistic power. Yet theories approaching information and communication technologies via an analysis of the informatization of production also benefit from this insight because it speaks directly to some of the fundamental features of a post-Fordist economic system: the nature of the technological base, the nature of commodities, and time–space compression.

Conclusion Under a post-Fordist regime of capitalist accumulation, the flexible production of information has come to dominate value creation and surplus-extraction strategies. The ability of the customer database to capture what Adam Arvidsson calls “the communicative action of life in all its walks” (2004, 467) effectively turns increasingly complex and mutable consumer practices into value. In other words,

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ubiquitous information gathering transforms the mobile, creative, and unpredictable consumer—from the fickle object to be controlled by marketers—into a productive and economically important force working for marketers. Hence, we need to conceive of customer databases as the factories of the twenty-first century because they seamlessly fuse communication and production into a highly flexible manufacturing system that is perfectly adapted to the rules of postFordist regimes of accumulation and control. Nikhilesh Dholakia and Detlev Zwick See also Communications Studies; Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS); Governmentality; Lifestyle Typologies; Markets and Marketing; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Post-Structuralism

Further Readings Arvidsson, Adam. “On the ‘Pre-History of the Panoptic Sort’: Mobility in Market Research.” Surveillance & Society 1, no. 4 (2004): 456–474. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. Elmer, Greg. Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Vintage, 1982. Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 605–622. Lyon, David. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2001. Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Poster, Mark. “Databases as Discourse, or Electronic Interpellations.” In Detraditionalization, edited by Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris, 277–293. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Zwick, Detlev, and Janice Denegri Knott. “Manufacturing Customers: The Database as New Means of Production.” Journal of Consumer Culture 9, no. 2 (2009): 221–247.

DE

CERTEAU, MICHEL

(1925–1986) Michel de Certeau was born in Chambéry in France in 1925 and lived until 1986. At university he studied classics and philosophy but later trained as, and

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became, a Jesuit priest. He continued his academic interests, mainly in theology, but after the political unrest of 1968, de Certeau shifted his interests more toward issues of society. De Certeau went on to teach at several universities, including Geneva and San Diego, and published on a wide variety of subjects, such as history, religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, but it is his work on everyday life that has been fundamental in establishing his academic legacy. De Certeau suggests that individuals have little control over many aspects of their lives; however, everyday life is extremely complex and multifaceted and allows some room for maneuver and individuality. For example, de Certeau suggests that when an individual reads a text, though the words on a page are set (in black and white), the reader frequently provides his or her own meanings and interpretations. He is not suggesting that texts are open to any number of endless readings but rather that texts are like a city, which, though they provide only certain avenues (a “map”), individuals can find their own paths (or “tours”) through. This is an example of how individuals “make do” (faire-avec) with the resources that society gives them. De Certeau’s idea of “making do” is a theme that has frequently been used by many other writers as an example of social resistance. It is possible to see some overt examples of social resistance in the work of de Certeau. For instance, a much-cited example is that of la perruque (or “the wig”), which is “the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer” (1984, 25). This is the way in which workers can use time and facilities at work to their own advantage, such as producing objects for themselves. And it is evident that these kinds of social resistance have informed the work of authors such as John Fiske and Henry Jenkins in their application of de Certeau to contemporary forms of consumption and the opportunities for resistance that they suggest these can afford. This has often led to the work of de Certeau being dismissed as excessively optimistic. However, de Certeau is “not nearly so frivolous as some of his followers” (Buchanan 2000, 87), and this dismissal also somewhat misses de Certeau’s key point. Focus on obvious and visible forms of resistance overlooks the importance of more common and mundane practices, which are more prominent and significant in the work of de Certeau, according to Ben Highmore— for example, a worker at a machine whose body

sometimes involuntarily convulses, unintentionally indicating that he is not himself part of the machine, but rather human, and individual still. By no means an act of overt resistance, but a clear sign that the person is different to, and not, a machine. In theorizing everyday practices, de Certeau employs the concepts of strategies and tactics. Strategies for de Certeau are similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of habitus; hence, these are linked to places and the appropriate manners specific to that particular location. However, in contrast to Bourdieu, de Certeau sees no “single logic,” as there will always be room for multiple actions and practices (Gardiner 2000, 170). These multiple actions de Certeau refers to as tactics, which involve the disguises, deceptions, bluffs, stubbornness, and personalization of experiences that take place within everyday life. However, de Certeau is not suggesting that tactics exist in opposition to or outside of strategies but rather are a constituent part of these. Though de Certeau may frequently employ the language of binaries, such as strategies and tactics, he does so to illustrate the nonbinary nature of these concepts and the futility of drawing clear distinctions between them. For instance, de Certeau illustrates how the supposed oppositions of consumption and production collapse in on each other, as consumption itself can be seen as involving processes of cultural production. Garry Crawford See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Habitus; Resistance; Theories of Practice

Further Readings Buchanan, Ian. Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist. London: Sage, 2000. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol. The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 2, Living and Cooking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Gardiner, Michael E. Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2000. Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers. London: Routledge, 1992.

Debt

DEBT Debt is something that is owed. Commonly, debt relates to assets owed, but the term might also refer to obligations, goods, services, and other commitments not requiring or involving money (financial) transactions. Likewise, a debtor is someone who owes something to another. Debt and indebtedness are the natural consequences of credit, such as loans, mortgages, or credit cards. A basic loan is the simplest form of debt. It consists of an agreement to lend a principal amount for a determined period of time, to be repaid by a certain date. In general, the creditor in return receives interest from the debtor. When accounting debt as a matter affecting the national economy, one distinguishes between household debt (i.e., debt held by households), national or public debt (i.e., the debt held by governmental institutions), and business debt (i.e., debt held by the business). Financial debt is the debt held by the finance sector. The total national debt equals the sum of all those kinds of debt, excluding financial debt. These different kinds of debt can be enumerated into debt/gross domestic product ratios. Such ratios help assess and evaluate the dispatch of fluctuations in indebtedness and the amount of debt due. Valuable instruments for evaluating the growth and decline of economy in any country, such ratios also constitute an important tool when making comparisons among different countries.

Etymology and Historical Origins The word debt originates from the French word dette, which in turn is derived from the Latin word debitum. From the perspective of Western history of law, the earliest accounts of debt can be traced to Mesopotamia as early as 1600 BC. According to Niall Ferguson, archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Sippar revealed a clay tablet with inscriptions in cuneiform writing, indicating that the owner of the clay tablet was in possession of a recognizance of debt, in terms of a ratified amount of grain due at the time of the next harvest. However, the earliest surviving piece of wordings of an Act on debt originates from the so-called Twelve Tables, constituting the first code of law by the Romans in 450 BC. The statutes of debt, which were captured by inscriptions on Table III, declare that a debt that is not repaid in due time after the announcement of

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a court order gives the creditor the right to arrest the debtor. After sixty days in custody, the case is returned to court, and if the debt is not then paid, the debtor can be sold abroad as a slave or simply killed. Whereas Roman law, at its first stage, exerted extreme penalties for payment default to the debtor (subsequent reformulations of the Roman law improved the situation of debtor, though), the Middle Ages brought about a radically different perspective in Europe. According to the Catholic Church, moneylending and income from interest were considered manifestations of greed and usury, therefore appertaining to the seven deadly sins, and as such were seriously condemned. For example, if a moneylender (i.e., banker), before his own ultimate death, did not refund all the interest he had charged his debtors, he could not expect to be buried in consecrated ground. Interestingly, Islam forbids lending with interest even today.

Indebtedness and Overindebtedness in Modern Market Economies Today, in most market economy–orientated countries, the credit market has been deregulated, which likely has contributed to dynamics and vitality of the global economy at large. Deregulation of the credit market also implies that credit is offered to, and easily accessible to, most citizens. From a consumer perspective, this in turn has led to the majority of citizens in such countries being more or less indebted. Nearly all liberalized market economies also seem to produce a certain amount of debt-and-payment problems due to the continuous fluctuations and ruptures characterizing such systems. As shown by David Caplowitz, modern households are then at great risk for debt-payment problems by their broad exposure to market forces. In the aftermath of market deregulation, there has been a massive growth in the number of households worldwide that have ended up unable to handle their financial obligations—recently labeled overindebtedness. This means that the available income, for an extended period of time, is not sufficient to cover the costs of household credits and expenses. For example, in the European Union, 20 million people are estimated to be overindebted. It is well substantiated in international research that debt-and-payment problems have severe consequences for individuals and their families as well as

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for society. On the individual level, effects like loss of property, reduced living standards, severe stress, and health problems are among the most prominent ones. According to Christian Poppe, the main causes of overindebtedness are income fluctuations, which reduces one’s ability to handle bills; growing expenditures such as inflation, fluctuating interest rates, or overconsumption; system-level changes such as taxsystem revisions or adjustment of framework conditions for entrepreneurs and small businesses; the development of new credit products such as credit cards or Internet- or cell phone–based credit; the effect of life events such as divorce, illness, or accidents; and financial illiteracy, that is, poor economic knowledge and lack of financial skills. Dieter Korczak states that overindebtedness can lead to five different ways of exclusion: access exclusion where a bank account is refused; price exclusion where people only gain access to financial products at prices they cannot afford; condition exclusion where the conditions attached to the financial products make them inappropriate to the need of people with debts; self exclusion where people withdraw from social and financial life because of fear, shame, disappointment, or resignation; and social exclusion where people are excluded from social life by creditor’s sanctions. For example, in many countries, overindebted individuals cannot have any kind of credit, subscribe to a telephone or Internet contract, sign up for life insurance, or rent a car. More seriously, though, is that overindebted individuals are rarely accepted as tenants and are frequently turned down when applying for a job. One of the most fateful consequences in terms of hardship incurred to the debtor are the effects of debt collection and law enforcement. These measures easily bring a gradual degradation of human dignity and loss of control over one’s own life. Since this degradation process usually unfolds itself in a predetermined, stepwise procedure regulated by law, it was named “the debtor’s career” by British scholar Paul Rock. As the scope and distribution of debt-and-payment problems has increased in the United States and most European countries during the last decades, governments in many countries have established different regimes of debt-relief programs or debt-settlement procedures. In the United States, the Fresh Start Doctrine of the American consumer bankruptcy legislation allows honest but unfortunate debtors to be

discharged of their debt burdens quite rapidly, while in most European countries there is an emphasis on a lifelong responsibility for debts. Richard Ahlström See also Credit; Economics; Income; Money; Moral Economy; New Right; Seduced and Repressed; Store Loyalty Cards

Further Readings Ahlström, Richard. “Overindebtedness Affects Health: What Are the Costs to Society?” Money Matters, the Consumer Debt Net Newsletter 3 (1998): 18–22. Caplovitz, David. Consumers in Trouble: A Study of Debtors in Default. New York: Free Press, 1974. Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Korczak, Dieter. “The Money Advice and Budgeting Service Ireland. A Service to Help People with Financial Problems and to Tackle Over-Indebtedness. Synthesis Report.” Peer Review and Assessment in Social Inclusion Programme (2004). http://www.peer-reviewsocial-inclusion.eu/peer-reviews/2004/money-advice-andbudgeting-service/04_IE_synth_en_050225.pdf. Le Goff, Jacques. Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Niemi-Kiesiläinen, Johanna, Iain Ramsay, and William C. Whitford, eds. Consumer Bankruptcy in Global Perspective. Oxford: Hart, 2003. Poppe, Christian. Into the Debt Quagmire: How Defaulters Cope with Severe Debt Problems. PhD diss., Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo, 2008. Rock, Paul. Making People Pay. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.

DECOMMODIFICATION In current theories of consumption, consumer practices are often described as processes of decommodification or decommoditization. The notion of decommodification indicates the active work—symbolic and practical—that people as consumers do on goods to make them effective, meaningful, and usable in everyday relations, thus partially removing them from the cash nexus. It denotes the fact that consumer practices amount to a relatively autonomous sphere of action and cannot be directly reduced to production or exchange relations.

Decommodification

In late capitalist societies, consumption is seen as related to the purchase, use, and disposal of commodities. Commodities are goods that are sold on the market at a price; they have often been produced for sale, but they may exit the circuits of monetary exchange, for example, through gift-giving relations. Commodities are thus goods that undergo what in Marxist terms is a commodification process. In turn, the word commodification denotes a particular social construction of things: it is the social process through which things are produced, used, and exchanged as commodities. Whatever its connotations in both scientific and ordinary language, the commodification process is often described as enlarging, with more and more aspects of life being produced and exchanged as commodities—from natural resources such as water, which is increasingly consumed in small, pricy bottles, to leisure time increasingly channeled through market relations such as in theme parks and tourist villages. Indeed, ordinary consumer practices entail some form of commodity appropriation that, partly, removes objects from their original economic meanings and relations to insert them in the circuits of daily life. As Igor Kopytoff has emphasized, even while being reducible to a single scale of value on the market (i.e., price), once acquired, commodities enter different social spheres and take on other values. Considered from the point of view of consumption, and thus from their symbolically rich contexts of use, commodities are irreducible to the logic of production and monetary exchange. They “represent very complex social forms and distributions of knowledge” of at least two sorts: “the knowledge (technical, social, aesthetic, and so forth) that goes into the production of the commodity; and the knowledge that goes into appropriately consuming the commodity” (Appadurai 1986, 41). Corresponding with the inexhaustible commodification of goods and services, each of us relentlessly tries to preserve personal identities and relations from the logic of the market and price, and we often end up adjusting the second to the first. This adumbrates a dialectical configuration. According to Mary Douglas, even in consumer capitalist societies, the consumption of goods is predicated on a variety of logics related to context and personal relations, partly removed from the cash nexus. Douglas Holt notes that the production of goods for its part addresses consumption, with the phenomenon of branding adumbrating the power of personal(ized)

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attachments in the mass market and being predicated on the attempt to orient consumers in their practices of decommodification. Thus, Roberta Sassatelli suggests that one of the key paradoxes of our society is that we actually depend on commodities to complete our daily lives, yet we find it necessary to decommoditize—that is, personalize, finish with meaning, and translate in daily practices that are only loosely related to market relations—objects and services if we want our activities to have meaning for us as human beings. If the consumer society is that in which daily needs are satisfied in a capitalist way through the acquisition of commodities, it is also that in which each consumer has to constantly engage in reevaluating these objects beyond their price to stabilize meanings and social relations. A similar notion of decommodification is rooted in the work of a number of authors such as Michel de Certeau, Paul Willis, and Daniel Miller. Miller stresses that material culture cannot be intended as a collection of objects to be judged as good and authentic or bad and false, as the Frankfurt school would have it. Material culture is instead a process that implies a “dual” movement: objects are not quite culture until they have been both produced and consumed, both placed outside subjects by production and internalized by subjects in their use and consumption. Miller thus maintains that consumption can be considered a form of sublation or assimilation—that is, “the movement by which society re-appropriates its own external form” and the way in which a subject “assimilates its own culture and uses it to develop itself as a social subject” (1987, 17). Conceived as “reappropriation,” consumption contains the potential to realize the human being whom Marx attributed solely to work. The term reappropriation implies the capacity to make an object properly for and of oneself. Goods that, like commodities, are anonymous, identical, or fungible at the moment of purchase can be recontextualized in numerous different ways by consumers, so that practices of consumption tend to generate diversity rather than homogenization. Still, reappropriation also implies feedback effects on identity: by absorbing or appropriating, the subject expands and modifies himself or herself. It is in this process of renegotiation of one’s identity that a space opens up in which the advertising industry intervenes, trying to manage and modify our needs. This view resonated with de Certeau’s portrayal of consumers as bricoleurs: they

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operate in the gaps and the contradictions of dominant, mass-produced consumer culture. Consumers indeed “assimilate” goods, not necessarily in the sense that they become similar to that which they consume, rather that they make goods similar to themselves, they appropriate and reappropriate goods, and to do so they often use “tactics,” and it is these “ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong [which] thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices” (1984, xvii). Concentrating on subcultural and everyday cultures of consumption, Willis has taken seriously the aesthetic qualities of popular and mass culture, exploring the symbolic as an ordinary practice of consumption accomplished by common people rather than a system of signs predetermined by capitalist relations. While the latter determine the conditions of the process of commodification, the meanings of commodities are in many ways reconstructed by people qua consumers in everyday life. Although the commodity form may have alienating effects on consumption, commodities can be taken out of context, claimed in a particular way, developed and repossessed to express something deeply, and thereby to change somewhat the very feelings which are their product. And all this can happen under the very nose of the dominant class—and with their products. (1978, 6)

Still, as suggested by Jean Baudrillard, capitalism is fueled by its very critique, which it internalizes and transforms through the market logic. Yet, as Willis proposes, “messages are not so much ‘sent’ or ‘received’ as ‘made’ in reception”—and a “grounded aesthetics” testifies to subversive, undisciplined renderings of commercial culture. Once removed from the market, especially insofar as consumed by marginal or subcultural groups, commodities are arranged as part of a “profane creativity” that may be the only “way to radical cultural change” (1990, 135). These approaches are motivated by the need to take what consumers do seriously, stressing their active role in the cultural process. They show that consumption should not be dismissed as merely the end point of the process of capitalist production, or as its logical consequence, but should be seen as a meaningful sphere of action with subversive as well as integrative potential. Still, they can be read as running the risk of placing a disproportionate emphasis on ordinary, symbolically rich cultural practices as

opposed to structural economic realities, opening the way to heroic visions of consumption. According to Sassatelli, to capture the kind of practical and symbolic work that occurs with decommodification while keeping an eye on the broader frame of commoditization that sustains it, we may conceive decommodification as a practice of reframing that displaces goods and meanings, places them in new contexts, translates their properties, and filters some of them while transforming others. Decommodification thus adds layers or laminates the original practical and symbolic values of a good. It happens in contexts of consumption that are themselves more or less commercialized (from the home to the fitness gym) and that offer conventions by which a commodity is partially removed from its commercial imagery and value, and transformed into something patterned on and against the original commercial imagery but experienced to be something else. As a geometrical translation, decommodification does not substitute the original framework, without which reframing would indeed be meaningless, but it blocks its relevance and systematically transforms it so that participants in the activity produce new meanings by engaging with old ones. Decommodification is thus provided by different contexts, spatially and temporally defined, within which people, as individuals and members of small groups defined by their idiocultures or subcultures, transform commodities but do not overturn the commoditization process as such. Contexts of consumption indeed exist as relatively separated fields of practice against the background of commoditization. These contexts are made through rituals and practices of embodiment, marking, sharing, sacralization, and so forth, that personalize commodities, code them through lived experiences, socialize them via social gatherings of various kinds, restrict their possibility of being exchanged on the market, attach them to specific settings, and so forth. Different contexts of consumption may add different layers or laminations to the commodity or the practice, and going back to commoditization may always occur. What is more, they may be more or less conducive to reflexive and resistant practice. Precisely because they are relatively separated from production and exchange, these contexts may not, even when marshalling resistant, reflexive practices, produce the desired macroeffects on the structure of the market and commercialization. Practices of

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decommodification may actually be subsumed and appropriated again by the commercial system, which may put them to work in directions divergent from the intention of their initiators. Roberta Sassatelli See also Appropriation; Bricolage; Commodification; Identity; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Material Culture; Self-Reflexivity; Subculture

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage, 1998. First published 1970. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. First published 1979. Douglas, Mary. “Wants.” In Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, 149–154. London: Routledge, 1992. Holt, Douglas B. “Why Do Brands Cause Troubles? A Dialectical Theory of Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research 29, no. 1 (2002): 70–96. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory, Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Willis, Paul. Profane Culture. London: Routledge, 1978. Willis, Paul. Common Culture. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1990.

DELOCALIZATION Delocalization is the belief that there is an ongoing process whereby the process of making things local is being reversed. For example, it is the view that the goods and services associated with consumption are becoming less local and are increasingly externally sourced. The delocalization process, however, can refer to economic, financial, cultural, or political matters. In recent decades, globalization as a term

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has perhaps begun to replace the concept of delocalization. However, the scaling up of economic, financial, cultural, or political processes from the local is not always to the global level. Delocalization, therefore, is a wider concept than globalization, and this captures how delocalization might also involve regionalization, at both the intranational and global regional levels. In recent decades, the thesis of delocalization has received widespread support. With the recent and rapid intensification of interregional and international trade and investment (economic delocalization) and the emergence of hypermobile and homeless capital (financial delocalization), a seamless and borderless world is asserted to be coming to fruition in which there is a diminution of the sovereignty of local, regional, and national states and their ability to regulate either national or international capital (political delocalization). The outcome is a loss of local cultures (cultural delocalization) due to the advent of a homogenous global culture founded on “Westernized” or “Americanized” cultural values. However, this rhetoric of economic, financial, political, and cultural delocalization has perhaps run ahead of the lived practice.

Economic Delocalization It is often assumed that the rapid and recent intensification of trade and investment and the advent of global corporations have led to a delocalization of economies. Whether this is occurring to the extent often supposed, however, is open to question. Not only do the vast majority of businesses conduct most of their trade locally rather than interregionally or internationally, but even among the world’s one hundred largest transnational corporations, few have abandoned their country of origin and are now transnational, placeless, and boundaryless organizations operating in a worldwide space freed from the old national hurdles and restrictions. Most, according to Peter Dicken, retain the overwhelming majority of their assets and employment, as well as control, within their home country. The extent of economic delocalization, in consequence, is perhaps greatly exaggerated.

Financial Delocalization The near-total delocalization of finance is widely believed. With an ever-greater share of the equity

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market in funds managed by large financial institutions such as pension funds, life insurance, hedge funds, and open- and closed-ended mutual funds, fund-manager capitalism is widely viewed as having led to a near-total delocalization of finance with hypermobile and homeless capital circulating a borderless globe in search of investment. However, even if some funds operate globally and there is greater rapid-fire trading, faster fund switching, and the disembedding of capital ownership from place and individuals, fund-manager capitalism is not operating in a seamless world with hypermobile and homeless capital. Most funds are geographically ring-fenced, assets are not and cannot be speedily moved around the world, and this money concretely belongs to specific individuals living in particular places. There is thus little evidence that the apogee of financial delocalization—a seamless world of hypermobile and homeless capital—has been achieved. Cultures resistant to financial delocalization, moreover, are spreading and expressed in moves to relocalize money, ranging from community-development finance initiatives such as credit unions to experiments with local currency systems such as local exchange and trading schemes, time banks, and hours systems.

Political Delocalization Political delocalization refers to the process whereby what was previously locally determined is now determined at the regional, national, or international level. The result is a reconfiguration in the power, jurisdiction, authority, and legitimacy of local states. Political delocalization, however, is perhaps more a prescription than description of the situation, and one that if adopted limits political possibilities. Although there may have been some “hollowing out” of the local state, the local, regional, and national state remains a significant force which remains capable of intervening in, and shaping, economic, political, and cultural life.

Cultural Delocalization Cultural delocalization refers to the notion that we live in a world where local cultures are disappearing as standardized global products created by global corporations take hold. Much of what now passes for this global culture—Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Levi’s, Disney, MTV, or Hollywood—emanates from the United States. There is, of course, little doubt that in a bid to construct a global capitalist culture, there has been a colonizing of hearts and

minds, and the export of cultural traits and products from advanced economies and their worldwide adoption (“Westernization,” “Americanization,” “McDonaldization,” “modernization”); in other words, in such modernization theory, Western culture is globalized alongside Western capitalism. This does not mean, however, that people are becoming increasingly similar across the world in terms of consumption, lifestyle, behavior, and aspirations. Many cultural forms remain deeply national, regional, and even local. Indeed, instead of imagining global culture as replacing local and national cultures, Mike Featherstone views global culture as a “third culture” developing alongside local and national cultures. Cultural delocalization, therefore, in the form of a hollowing out of local cultures and their replacement by a uniform global commodity culture, is far from the lived practice.

Future Issues The discourses of economic, financial, political, and cultural delocalization are arguably seeking not just to reflect, but also to shape, lived practice. In recent years, therefore, counternarratives have begun to emerge that tell different stories about the processes currently underway (e.g., Cameron and Palan 2003). Indeed, a discourse celebrating the virtues of localization has emerged with campaigns to “buy local,” encourage local ownership, pursue import substitution, and encourage local production and consumption. Given the concerns about climate change, this localization discourse seems likely to become more influential in future years. As Colin Hines explains, localization “is not trying to put the clock back. . . . It is not against trade, it just wants trade where possible to be local. The shorter the gap between producer and consumer, the better the chance for the latter to control the former”(2000, x). This counternarrative is valuable, therefore, because it opens up the future to alternative possibilities beyond delocalization and globalization. Colin C. Williams See also Capitalism; Coca-Cola; Globalization; McDonaldization; Modernization Theory; Spaces and Places; Transnational Capitalism; World-Systems Analysis

Further Readings Cameron, Angus, and Ronan Palan. The Imagined Economies of Globalization. London: Sage, 2003.

Dematerialization Dicken, Peter. Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century. 4th ed. London: Sage, 2003. Featherstone, Mike. Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity. London: Sage, 1995. Hines, Colin. Localization: A Global Manifesto. London: Earthscan, 2000.

DEMATERIALIZATION Dematerialization can be taken variously as meaning less materials used in objects, a less materialistic outlook on consumption, or the virtualization of communication and interaction. Designer and technology advocate R. Buckminster Fuller began using the term ephemeralization in the early 1930s to mean getting more out of less, or as he once put it, “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing” (1938, 252). In Fuller’s view, technological progress could over time achieve a higher standard of living for people while reducing the amount of resources consumed per person. His geodesic dome buildings, for example, used much less materials than equivalent-sized traditional structures did. Yet Fuller’s advocacy of technological solutions neglected the ways that techniques are embedded in human purposes that are not determined by efficiency, so that a higher standard of living, for example, may reflect cultural and psychological desires and purposes unrelated to needs or efficient social functioning. A higher standard of living could mean everyone driving fuel-efficient autos, where individual use of oil per vehicle is reduced, while net societal use of oil is increased and other means of efficient transport ignored. The concept of dematerialization in the sense of whether societies are undergoing changes toward physically lighter materials in the end products of industrial production was proposed in 1989 by Robert Herman, Siamak A. Ardekani, and Jesse H. Ausubel. One could point to lighter automobiles, radios, or any number of other artifacts as examples. A study of dematerialization in 1996 by Iddo K. Wernick and colleagues concluded that although ratios of primary materials to products did appear to be declining, and also possibly waste materials, such efficiency was offset by consumption demands. In the authors’ words, “As consumers, we profess one thing (that less is more) and often do another (buy, accrete, and expand). We see no significant signs of

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net dematerialization at the level of the consumer or saturation of individual material wants.” Hence, the question of dematerialization as a consumption issue goes to the heart of modern consumption materialism as a system of wants and desires: something basically mental rather than material. Considering material culture and technoculture in this light raises questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well, where smaller is not necessarily simpler, and where smaller may not even be less. Consumption is clearly a driving force on the globe today, powering economies, promising identities, and providing a cornucopia of commodities. Technoculture is at its center, both in ever-proliferating material devices and in the ideas they communicate about how what one has affects what one is and can be. Though Ralph Waldo Emerson said more than a century and a half ago that “things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” the ride has only galloped ever quicker. Material technoculture is riding today with something like the speed of Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore’s well-known law that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. Since he pointed out the trend in 1965, it not only has continued but also manifests today in virtually all of the capabilities of electronic devices, such as speed, memory, decreasing size of device, or increasing pixels in digital cameras. Dematerialization in this sense involves not only smaller or lighter physical properties, or even increased information in similar or smaller formats, but also the whole development of forms of virtualized electronic interaction, of what Vilém Flusser called “the non-thing” (1999, 85). E-mail is dematerialized correspondence in relation to postal or “snail mail,” not requiring paper, postage, or physical movement of a physical letter. Computer and related screens make possible electronic encodings of a range of written and other media. They can contain a book or images, obviating the need for paper, or sound, potentially reducing the need for separate music players. They can provide multimedia tours, maps, and games, compressing multiple information devices into one. Ironically, however, the early dream of a paperless office has not happened: dematerialization can result in net proliferation. Hence dematerialization is not necessarily the opposite of materialism but may be a facet of it. Virtual space also raises important questions for dematerialized human interaction. Clearly, there are

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advantages to being able to communicate instantly, globally, and at little or no cost. But what are the disadvantages? Do the benefits of electronic devices and the information they provide also contribute systemically to forms of alienation, promising to pour information in while simultaneously devitalizing experience? Do they function as “soft propaganda,” not simply in the content of communications they make possible but in the forms of communication they enable or disable? Consider as dematerialized interaction the everincreasing enscreening of experience, especially for young children, who face not only increased quantity of enscreened experience but also increased enscreened quality of experience. How do these emerging conditions relate to the requirements and capabilities of the live interpreting human creature and its interactions? What is the value of face-to-face communication and immediate circumstance in everyday life, both in early socialization and in adult interaction? From the traditional view of face-to-face interaction, dematerialized interaction can be seen as the loss of face, as well as the loss of place. Consider the irony of the popularity of such websites as Facebook and MySpace, which are faceless and placeless electronic images. Eugene Halton has characterized the tendency to displace primary face-to-face relations, and secondary personto-person role relations, by person-machine mediated virtual interaction as tertiary relations. Global financial transactions exemplify the possibilities of electronic communication to dematerialize interaction, so that various markets, once literal places for trading, such as Wall Street, became increasingly delocalized. Spot currency traders conduct computer transactions involving enormous amounts of money in time frames of around two seconds. Karin Knorr Cetina has viewed global financial markets as “scopic systems,” which she has characterized as synthetic situations, in contrast to traditional interactionist assumptions of a situation as an actual face-to-face encounter. But as the crash of financial markets in 2008 exhibited, evermore abstracted virtual interactions and exchanges, combined with virtualized financial instruments such as derivatives, illustrate not only how dematerialized interactions can exemplify capitalist materialism but also how they can lead to a dematerialization in a more literal sense of one’s mortgage-defaulted house, shrunken retirement funds, loss of job, and even viable shopping malls.

Lewis Mumford used the term dematerialization in 1970 to characterize what Arnold Toynbee had earlier called etherialization, namely, the progressive simplification and efficient organization of something. Mumford then proposed a broader meaning of etherealization: For that part of the process which Toynbee indicates I prefer to use the term “de-materialization.” Following the mode of etherealization, the tangible visible world is translated progressively into symbols and reorganized in the mind; . . . so here I purpose only to describe how a once fully embodied culture becomes de-materialized, and thus opens the way for a new constellation of formative ideas, which themselves come into existence partly by reaction against the dominant culture. (1970, 427)

Mumford depicted culture as involving an active dialectic of materialization and etherialization. If etherialization is a dematerializing of a once fully embodied culture, opening the potential emergence of new ideas, materialization goes the reverse route, bodying forth from subjective feelings and intuitions toward realized manifestations. In this sense, both dematerialization and materialization mean something more than technology or materialism for Mumford; they are ways he attempted to show the active human presence as formative to human culture, and human culture as not reducible to technical determinism or materialism. In this sense, his ideas resonate with those of other proponents of dematerialized alternatives to consumption. E. F. Schumacher, in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, argued for appropriate and sustainable consumption, against the idea of unlimited growth, whether of individual consumption or gross domestic product. He wrote, The keynote of Buddhist economics is simplicity and non-violence. . . . For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human wellbeing, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.

Department Stores

Duane Elgin developed the implications of Schumacher’s ideas in his 1981 book Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, and launched a movement to reduce materialistic, consumption-oriented lifestyles. Voluntary simplicity involves limiting one’s consumption, but it also can include limiting the kind and quantity of work one does. “Downshifters” are those who work less hours or change to a job that pays less but is more rewarding, as ways of orienting to the nonmaterial aspects of life. Eugene Halton See also Commodities; Consumer Socialization; Downshifting; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Information Technology; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Needs and Wants; Reuse/Recycling

Further Readings Elgin, Duane. Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. New York: William Morrow, 1981. Flusser, Vilém. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. Translated by Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion Books, 1999. Fuller, R. Buckminster. Nine Chains to the Moon. New York: Anchor Books, 1971. First published 1938. Halton, Eugene. The Great Brain Suck: And Other American Epiphanies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 Herman, Robert, Siamak A. Ardekani, and Jesse H. Ausubel. “Dematerialization.” In Technology and Environment, edited by Jesse H. Ausubel and Hedy E. Sladovich, 50–69. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1989. http://phe.rockefeller.edu/dematerialization (accessed March 23, 2009). Knorr Cetina, Karin. “The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World.” Symbolic Interaction 32, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 61–87. Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine. Vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970. Schumacher, E. F. “Buddhist Economics.” In Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/ buddhist_economics/english.html (accessed June 3, 2009). Wernick, Iddo K., Robert Herman, Shekhar Govind, and Jesse H. Ausubel. “Materialization and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends.” Daedalus

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125 (Summer 1996): 171–198. http://phe.rockefeller .edu/Daedalus/Demat/#end2 (accessed March 23, 2009).

DEPARTMENT STORES Department stores can be characterized as innovative forms of retailing established in the nineteenth century. The basic business idea was to sell a broad range of goods with low profit margins and high turnover in purposely built multistory buildings. Goods were displayed and sold for fixed and ticketed prices, as opposed to the traditional practice of bargaining and selling from behind the counter. Whereas, in older shops, entry implied an obligation of purchase, department stores invited the public to look around regardless of the intention of buying. The classic department stores of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been extensively studied beyond the field of business history and became a kind of historical laboratory for the analysis of the early consumer society. The stores came to symbolize the beginnings of modern consumer culture with its ethos of self-indulgence, dreamlike aesthetics, and elaborate commodity displays, changing gender relations and blurring class hierarchies. Moreover, the monumental architecture of these stores illustrated the rapid transformation of urban environments. Historians describe the Parisian grands magasins of the mid-nineteenth century, especially the Bon Marché and the Magasin du Louvre, as the first department stores. Both were founded in the 1850s and expanded in earnest from the late 1860s. Other stores and other cities followed, and by 1900, monumental buildings were raised in the largest cities of Europe, the United States, Japan, and Australia. While dry goods, accessories, and clothes, both ready-to-wear and couture, often dominated in the European stores, the American department stores, such as Wanamaker’s, Marshall Field, or Macy’s, offered a complete range of goods including food, furniture, vehicles, and even pets. Also, customer service developed considerably in the United States. Returns, refunds, professionally administrated credit, and store cards were introduced. In 1909, American businessman Gordon Selfridge launched the concept of the “American department store” in Europe by building his store in London. By this time, the largest stores both in Europe and

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in the United States had grown into huge enterprises occupying entire blocks in the city centers and providing work for up to ten thousand employees. The uniformed sales staff was educated in sales techniques and represented the cultivated image of the store. Although every store has its own history, the developments of department stores around the world were similar to each other as transnational contacts between the companies frequently occurred.

New Spaces of Shopping: Dreams and Rationality Department stores have famously been called the “cathedrals of commerce” by Émile Zola and “cathedrals of consumption” by Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain. Department stores often provided various events (e.g., concerts, exhibitions, fashion shows) and public conveniences (e.g., luxurious reading rooms) and thus are attributed with introducing a new way to shop. The stores were designed to attract customers to enter and to stay as long as possible. Walking around in the stores was meant to be entertainment in itself. The stores combined modern technology and new commercial aesthetics to create an enchanted environment of dreams and desires. The windows were made of large plate glass with high transparency—a technical innovation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Displays often consisted of a scene or a decorative installation of colors and shapes, not a crowded selection of merchandise, as was usual before. Inside, the displays could be even more spectacular. The typical rotunda, the glass-roofed court in the center of the store, offered a magnificent scene for seasonal transformation of the interior. Thus, the department store introduced the practice of selling by association. The excessive use of electric lights, modern ventilation systems, telephones, and pneumatic tubes for communication created a rationally managed and comfortable environment for both the public and employees. Technological novelties, such as escalators, not only facilitated mobility within the store but also functioned to stun the public as a kind of enchantment of modernity and rationality. Shopping was redefined as entertainment based on a desiring mood. At the same time, the department store offered new possibilities for rational consumer

choices: finding everything at the same place could save time, prices were moderate, and comparisons could be made easily. The purpose of the commodity displays was to entice the public into losing self-control and buying on impulse; quite understandably, this attracted shoplifters as well. In fact, the emergence of shoplifting is often associated with department stores. The middle-class lady stands out as the typical shoplifter of the nineteenth century, superseded by the figure of the youngster in the twentieth. During the early days of department stores, gendered explanations about kleptomania and the female psyche flourished, while contemporary interpretations point out women’s lack of financial autonomy and the subversive tactics of the weak in capitalist society. Department stores sought to limit shoplifting by means of glass showcases, detectives, strategic placement of mirrors, and strict instructions to the employees regarding how to observe customers. Contemporary techniques are more advanced, but the problem remains: how to control the consumer’s behavior and give the impression of freedom at the same time.

Sociability and Class Department stores established a transformed mode of sociability and a new experience of the public realm, claims sociologist Richard Sennett. Free entrance, fixed-price systems, and commodity displays made impersonal encounters, passivity, and anonymity into norms. By browsing and shopping, the consumer had no reason to engage in longer interactions with the salespeople. The latter were instructed not to intrude. These changes, however, also opened the way for a new kind of personal and active experience of shopping. Consumers were free and also enticed to invest in objects with personal meanings. Social class did not determine where and what to buy as much as it had before—although there were still economical limits. The main public of the department store was the broadly defined middle class. An extensive range of goods was offered for prices accessible to a large public, and historians therefore often talk about the “democratization of luxury,” to use the words of nineteenth-century French author Émile Zola. The fact that department stores also offered a range of services, entertainment, and facilities that could be enjoyed by anyone for free supports this

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interpretation. On the other hand, new means of differentiation were introduced. Different departments were often hierarchically situated within the stores, with a bargain department, or bargain basement, on the lowest level. The more expensive the goods, the higher they were placed in the building. In addition, middle-class style and manner was not only shaped and sold by the stores but also expected from the customers.

Gender Was the department store an emancipating or segregating environment for women, and in what way? The research field is divided. The history of department stores provides empirical support for both interpretations. On the one hand, department stores opened the way for women into modernity by offering new public places, and new opportunities for pleasures and for unsupervised social encounters. Child-care facilities for shoppers were set up in most department stores. Restaurants, tearooms, and reading rooms at the stores were frequented by women for private, professional, and political meetings. As opposed to other public meeting places around 1900, male company was not required. Some stores established a fruitful cooperation with the women’s movement in the early years of the twentieth century by allowing the suffragettes to use the premises for meetings and propaganda, while advertisements and reports from the stores were strategically placed in feminist periodicals. On the other hand, some historians and cultural scientists claim that the department store reinforced male dominance as well as a sexualized and objectifying model of womanhood, and cemented the construct of separate spheres. Women were depicted as frivolous and irrational shoppers in sales literature, for example. The layout and decorations of most stores were strongly gendered. The furnishing of the ladies’ departments was similar to that of a bourgeois home. Ladies’ and gentlemen’s departments—and not only those that sold garments and accessories—were manifestly separated. The placement of the different departments was permeated by the idea that women would give into the temptation of spending money and time, whereas men were more instrumental in their purchases. That, despite the fact that the stores otherwise made use of and recognized women’s expertise in consumer issues, for example, by hiring

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women as buyers, departmental heads, or expert shoppers. Department stores were revolutionary in creating a new culture of retailing as well as in exploring the economic value of culture. Events like arts-and-crafts exhibitions and more mundane festivities contributed to turning the stores into tourist attractions and cultural institutions not unlike museums. By the 1930s, however, the charm and novelty of department stores started to decline. Other innovations in retail attracted attention, such as chain stores, selfservice, and, later on, superstores, shopping malls, and concept stores. Today’s department stores are often monuments of the past as much as the early stores were monuments of modernity. Orsi Husz See also Credit; Desire; Gender; History; Mass Production and Consumption; Public Sphere; Spaces of Shopping

Further Readings Crossick, Geoffrey, and Serge Jaumain, eds. Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999. Husz, Orsi. Drömmars värde. Varuhus och lotteri i svensk konsumtionskultur 1897–1939 [The value of dreams: Department store and lotteries in Swedish consumer culture]. Hedemora, Sweden: Gidlunds, 2004. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869–1920. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Rappaport, Erika Diane. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Reekie, Gail. Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1993. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf, 1977. Zola, Émile. Au bonheur des dames [The ladies’ delight]. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. First published 1883.

DESIGN Design is the process of giving form, style, and visual appeal to the many objects used by consumers

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in their daily lives. All types of mechanical and electronic devices, from Airbus planes and Toyota automobiles to GE appliances, Apple iPhones, and Sony HDTVs, bear the mark of design professionals, such as engineers, industrial designers, and corporate colorists. Branded goods, from the General Mills cornflakes stocked by the supermarket to the Clairol hair dye sold by the discount store, come in paper containers designed by packaging experts and graphic artists. Whether it is purchased on Main Street or at the suburban mall, clothing is also a designed product, created by specialists in fashion design and merchandising. Design is as old as civilization itself, and the ability to design objects that are both useful and beautiful distinguishes humans from other animals. When ancient artisans made and decorated the first knives from iron and the first glass vessels from melted sand, they were exerting the human skill in design. In the ensuing centuries, craftsmen refined those skills as they made goods for local and regional consumption, from woolen fabrics for clothing to wooden utensils for food. In the small craft workshops of the medieval era, the fabricator and designer were often the same person. The guild system evolved as a gatekeeper, overseeing entry into the various crafts and monitoring quality control. Design elements, such as the quality and quantity of decoration, distinguished one workshop from another, giving birth to competition. As global trade expanded during the Renaissance, artisanal workshops grew in size, job specialization was introduced, and design emerged as a job that was distinct from fabrication. Fittingly, the word design entered the English language in 1588, just as Europe inched toward the industrial era. The Oxford English Dictionary defines design as a plan or scheme devised by a person for something that is to be made, including objects in the “applied” or “industrial arts.” Design blossomed as an occupation during the British Industrial Revolution of the mid-1700s, the golden era of applied arts. The heightened demand for fashion goods like belt buckles and colorful teapots led English entrepreneurs to build the world’s first factories. They introduced the assembly line and separated design from production. Talented workers who combined practical knowledge of manufacturing with an artistic eye became among the most highly revered and best-paid employees. Factories in Europe and North America relied on these artistic

workers to keep tabs on consumer tastes and to add value to the product. These factory designers often combined on-the-job experience with formal training in drawing and color theory at design schools in England, France, Germany, and the United States that were created to train designers for the industrial arts. Most designers were men, although women were sometimes employed as designers for textiles, pottery, and clothing. The terms designer, decorator, or artist referred to a design department employee who worked under the guidance of the factory’s chief designer or art director. The factory designer flourished during the Victorian era, when falling prices and the rise of the new middle class created a market for highly embellished household goods and personal fashion accessories. In the United States, consumers benefitted from the deflationary economy, as those with discretionary income could buy more for their dollars. A burgeoning consumer culture, fostered by masscirculation magazines, advice books, and downtown shopping streets lined with retail stores, encouraged the acquisition of durable goods that hallmarked middle-class status. New industries and industrial districts dedicated to furniture, ready-to-wear, jewelry, and crockery sprung up across the Midwest and Northeast, from Philadelphia and St. Louis. Every factory needed staff designers to copy high-style goods imported from Paris, Vienna, or London in ways that suited American tastes and pocketbooks. The term industrial design came into common parlance in the United States during the interwar years, particularly during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It referred to a new profession—the consultant designer—whose members defined themselves as counterpoints to designers in the applied arts tradition. Pointing to the economic crisis, a coterie of ambitious young designers blamed in-house designers for the slump, pointing to the proliferation of oldfashioned products that wouldn’t sell. Their mantra was “streamlining,” an aerodynamic style based on the engineering principle of efficiency and, in some instances, from eugenic thought. Taking cues from architects, engineers, and advertising agencies, industrial designers like Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, and Raymond Loewy all opened consulting businesses in major cities and secured major clients like the Pennsylvania Railroad; Sears, Roebuck and Company; and General Motors Corporation. Streamlining enjoyed its heyday at the 1939

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New York World’s Fair, where GM’s “Highways and Horizons” building, featuring the “Futurama” by consultant designer Norma Belle Geddes, depicted the imagined City of 1960, replete with sanitized skyscrapers, spaghetti-strand superhighways, and plenty of room for all the cars. After World War II, the design profession contributed to the burgeoning consumer culture, particularly in North America. Major U.S. companies like GM continued to employ prominent in-house designers like Harley Earl, hiring consultants for additional input or for special projects. As the industrial-arts tradition waned, the label “industrial designer” came to describe both in-house designers and consultants. Practitioners coalesced around professional associations, such as the American Society of Industrial Designers and the Industrial Designers Society of America, to share concerns and advance common interests. In the post–World War II era, design came under the scrutiny of cultural critics concerned with profligate consumption, economic waste, and human health and safety. In his 1960 best seller, The Waste Makers, journalist Vance Packard lashed out against Detroit’s emphasis on stylistic extravagance—cars with large tailfins, dripping chrome, and bright colors—at the expense of improvements to engineering. Five years later, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed exposed the design flaws of GM’s Chevrolet Corvair, a sporty roadster with a rear engine that was deadly in accidents. Once celebrated as the harbinger of a new order, design in Detroit became the whipping post for postwar consumer culture and its highprofile enabler, product design. The history of design has drawn considerable attention from practitioners, historians, and museum curators. In the public mind, “design” is often associated with the sleek style associated with Germany’s famous Bauhaus movement of the 1920s, or the Scandinavian minimalism embodied in IKEA’s products. This type of design is collectively known as modernism, referring to its early twentieth-century genesis. Concerned to improve the living conditions of the common man, many of the leading proponents of modernism were also driven by the moral imperative to improve the tastes of the masses. Major figures in this strand of design included Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and William Morris and Charles Locke Eastlake, two nineteenth-century British design reformers. Due to its groundbreaking aesthetics and admirable social goals, design in the

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modern style is often the subject of museum exhibitions. However, many different styles remain popular with the consuming public, whose preferences depend on factors such as income, social status, peer group, race, ethnicity, neighborhood, and life cycle. One of the major sociological questions about design is about the locus of power. Do designers dictate what consumers will buy, or is there more give-and-take? The design process often takes place at the sites of production, but the best designers necessarily reach out into the larger society and culture to “imagine the consumer.” Successful design occurs when designers mesh manufacturing, marketing, and merchandising capabilities with the needs of the marketplace. In the Victorian era, designers learned about tastes by watching people at the point of purchase, while the new industrial designers of the modern period learned to collaborate with department store buyers, merchandise managers, and market researchers, who had their fingers on the pulse of demand. Design failures occurred when there was a lack of communication between producers and consumers or a general inattentiveness to trends in the marketplace. Sometimes there was a misfire in the design process, and producers simply missed the mark in trying to anticipate changing demand. Another resurgent issue in design revolves around human ecology and the environment. Mid-twentiethcentury activists like Buckminster Fuller raised important questions about the sustainability of consumer culture in relation to the built environment. More recent concerns about global climate change have revived an interest in sustainable design. Regina Lee Blaszczyk See also Craft Production; Dematerialization; Department Stores; Fashion Forecasters; Fashion Industry; Material Culture; Style

Further Readings Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Cogdell, Christina. Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgwood to IBM. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Heskett, John. Industrial Design. London: Thames & Hudson, 1985.

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Meikle, Jeffrey L. Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–1939. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. Meikle, Jeffrey L. Design in the USA. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Sparke, Penny. Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004. Woodham, Jonathan M. Twentieth-Century Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

DESIRE Desire refers to the experience of a lack. The concept of desire is one of the best with which to begin an inquiry into the complexity of conceptualizing human behavior. The persistence and the evolution of treatises regarding what desire refers to is enlightening for consumption research and provides a good example of how and why conceptual rigor matters for the field. Indeed, the way that anyone, including academic researchers, understand and interpret desires reflects, at least in part, the desires of that person—for example, whether that relates to viewing desires as a shallow reflection of capitalist-driven consumer cultures or as the freedom of individuals to express themselves through their consumption. Many an economist or manager would like for sociologists or psychologists not only to define the concept clearly but also to identify exactly what it should refer to—a problem they often believe they could deal with better, provided they were given a precise and clear foundation. Such a wish emanates from their desire, and the lack of recognition of this fact reveals a clear misunderstanding of the specificity of human behavior. With this misunderstanding, humans are treated almost as if they were plants: identify the seed and you will know what is most likely to occur and how to deal with it. Such an approach to social behavior flourished within economic development theory when economists and sociologists dreamed they could identify the seed that needed irrigation or the engine that needed fuel. However, the complexity of social existence is irreducible to such simplicity and, as we shall see, even when pointing to a core concept—as Georg Friedrich Hegel pointed to the rule of desire in our world— theorists of social behavior end up stirring a wide range of factors.

It has been evident for ages that human beings differ radically not only from plants but also from other animals. For instance, Plato in The Republic (380 BC) indicated that humans can desire contradictory objects (e.g., one can be thirsty and not want to drink). In his Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind (1755), Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked that “a pigeon would be starved to death by the side of a dish of the choicest meats, and a cat on a heap of fruit or grain.” Thus, it is not the satisfaction of needs that should be of interest for consumer research. For humans, there is not a single need that is not subject to a whole series of questions. Water quenches thirsts, but there are many ways humans deal with thirst, hunger, and the like. Most often, human beings are caught in dilemmas of the following kind: I wish to eat this cake and want to stay fit; I would love to buy this but I also want that and cannot afford both; I would love to do this but I don’t want to upset my spouse; I wish I just could do this but I can’t help wondering why. Consequently, what matters is not so much the expression of the need but its interpretation, that is to say, how need translates through a whole system of symbolic representations and social relations that humans use to make sense of whatever they do in various ways. There is not at single need that remains untouched by sensemaking. Humans never experience a need in a pure (or natural) form but always in a symbolic and cultural context. This is why and how desire comes about. It can be said that desire originates from the fact that humans are compelled to relate to what drives them to do this or that. Contrary to other animals, humans just cannot help thinking about it, and they do so at the intrinsically linked individual and collective levels. Desire, then, is the form that needs take once the symbolic order is established. Whereas needs link us to the order of things, desire binds us with the rest of humanity. Thus, any endeavor to reduce desire into something more natural and simple is bound to miss the whole point. This is indeed a core issue for consumer science: we should not seek the power of nature but the nature of power. We should try to look beyond needs and wants and study desire in process and context.

Desire in Western Philosophy According to Baruch Spinoza, desire is the essence of man and the expression of an infinite overflow

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of power that nothing can put an end to (Ethica in Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, 1663). Desire has no means or end but only God. Spinoza considers, therefore, that consumption and things are only distractions. Though his interpretation and solution thus remain within the scope of religion, Spinoza has made a forceful difference in intellectual (modern) thought by claiming that there is no a priori determination of the Good and that no object can be said to be good in itself. Until his time, most of the debates concerning how to deal with desire had to do with control. Plato had inaugurated the great philosophical debate about the conflict between reason and passion, considering desire a kind of blind force with no aim that needs to be guided by reason. From Empedocles (490–430 BC) to Saint Augustine (354–430), desire was considered the expression of the power that unites mankind with the metaphysical, but that was naturally unbounded and polymorphic and therefore needed to be moderated and tamed. Still, the diversity and multiplicity of its forms of expression and its obvious tendency toward excess were then considered to be neither deviant nor wrong but had to be understood from within the cosmic order of things. Desire was ontologically valued. According to Aristotle—who also saw desire as the expression of a processing power and the sign of the divine in man—desire can be sublimated in the search for reason and beauty (Nicomachean Ethics, 350 BC). Ranking the possible uses of desire toward sublimation, he ends up proposing a code of ethics. Thus, Aristotle not only introduced an understanding of the specificity of mankind as a being of desire long before Spinoza but also opened the door for a condemnation of all nonsublimated expressions of desire. Yet, it was Christianity that turned desire into the expression of evil. Many words in Greek had expressed the variety of aspects of the phenomenon; now desire clearly meant diversion from God—in Latin, desiderium etymologically refers to a fall from the sky and the stars, to a disaster. For the Greeks, desire had to do with mankind’s relation to pleasures and the Good; with Christianity, desire is what recalls man to his imperfection, and the best thing about it is that it reveals the strong bond between man and evil. Admittedly, following Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Christianity maintains that there is a bond of love between God and humanity understood as

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the noble form of desire—the desire of the divine. However, the earthly forms of desire are related to sin and to the expression of the Fall, of a lack. Reason is no longer of any help. On the contrary, in the Christian myth, the Fall originates from man daring to doubt. So, only faith can help, and to trust in God means submission, not reflection. Nevertheless, the idea that from this lack man can rise and get strong has centuries later translated into other theories, such as that of Hegel considering the strength of the negative as the prime mover of consciousness and history, or that of Jean-Paul Sartre pointing out nothingness as the force of being. This dilemma is still present in the cultural debate and the individual minds of our time: should we give in to or restrain our urge to consume? This is even truer when what is consumed is perceived and presented as luxurious, as identity seeking, as sublimation. Between the time of the emergence of the Christian ideology of the lack and the time of the postmodern ethos of letting go, Western society went through radical changes. The growth of modern society corresponded with new answers given to the question regarding how desire should be dealt with within society, and coping with the organization of earthly powers clearly infected by some of the most problematic aspects of multifaceted desire. As long as politics belonged indisputably to a hereditary class and the economy relied mainly on landed property, desire could still be presented to people as being related to sin. Yet, the intellectual and political edifice of Christianity fell as a result of the assaults of experimental science and the successful application of methodologies of technical and political reasoning to any question. The Renaissance revived the notion of man as a creative entity, and the Enlightenment promoted merit against lineage. Desire could then be seen as a potential for social development. After all, human desires had also resulted in architectural and technical wonders, some of them not only in praise of God. Following the development of political principles, which in themselves became a political force, the emergence of political economy introduced a radically new vision of desire as a logic of passions and interests that could be liberated for the benefit of all in society. Two thinkers can be said to have synthesized the evolution from the ethics of theology to the philosophy of politics and then to political economy: with Machiavelli (The Prince, 1513),

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politics no longer belongs to ethics—it no longer is in spite of men’s passions but because of them that one has to think of proper ways to rule society—and with Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776), the desires of the many give life to the market, which is the institution that is supposed to turn all passions and interests into social harmony.

Relation of Consumption to Desire Consumption related to desire was still confined to the higher order of society. Nevertheless, the changes were significant. Courts during the Renaissance in Italy turned the court into a sort of competitive parade scene using luxury as a means of government (Braudel 1973, 307). Likewise, Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century used expenditure as a systematic policy, manipulating the desires of her subjects who held high status, forcing the nobility to spend conspicuously in order to centralize power and tame the elite. Thus, in Elizabethan England, noblemen began to spend extravagantly, with great enthusiasm and on a new scale, undertaking the additional expense of a London residence, spending time and money away from the community where each was the highest-ranking member, entertaining one another in London close to the queen, and soon enslaving themselves to a new order of centralized competitive consumption, thus provoking radical changes in their localities where envy and awe often ended up being replaced by confusion and contempt (McCracken 1988,10–16). In France, a century later, Pierre de Boisguilbert developed the theoretical foundation of laissezfaire, studied the behavior of economic agents, and served the interest of the French king, Louis XIV. He advised the king to free the movement of goods in order to promote a greater selfishness that would strengthen his central power (Faccarello 1999). This illustrates the different ways desires of varying groups in society are captured with a new societal dynamic. The drive of hunger is not at all what motivated the developments. This dynamic of consumption was induced by a plurality of intertwined logics of action, including not only the social competition among Elizabethan nobility, or the ambition of the Sun King, but also technical progress, the growth of world trade, and more. At the beginning of this new dynamic, common men experienced only the death of local hospitality and the exclusion

from trickle-down consumption. Their everyday lot was still to work hard and consume little. The issue of letting desire loose was not a concern for them. Even among those who could more freely dedicate their activities to market growth, many members of the bourgeoisie adopted an attitude of asceticism reducing their role to facilitation of accumulation (Weber 1920). Nevertheless, a reversal had taken place. For a growing part of the population, desires were turned loose as they escaped the confines of tradition to enter other settings. Soon economic growth would require the effort of everyman not only to produce but also to consume, and a uniform logic of consumption animated by desire would trickle down to almost all groups within society at the global level. Again, this was not the result of a single logic. Industrialization resulted in the movement of large groups of the population, and traditional bonds were severed. This constituted the overture to a reorganization of work and free-time relations where the division of labor, urbanization, and newgroup membership meant an increasing difference in the definition of roles and a greater anonymity in daily life. Workers were uprooted from local traditions that lost in importance as the market gained influence. Rise in economic growth, productivity, and workers’ demands made it possible for many to dedicate longer periods of time to something other than production. A greater part of life had to revolve around consumption. The dream of consumption captured a growing part of people’s daily existence, and commodities acquired greater and greater social value. Of course, tastes changed, but a more radical change occurred when actions and thoughts increasingly became related to the exchange of goods and to consumption. Now, desire could be expressed in new ways, and it is not so much the spreading of luxury within the population that is significant here but that of hedonism. Whereas, formally, priests had told their flock to restrain their desires, advertisers would soon do their utmost to kindle every single desire. As the new pattern of consumption unfolded, many a mind became concerned more than ever with consumption as a channel of desire rather than as a mean of quenching anything, be it a need or a desire. In relation to this overwhelming importance and complexity of consumption within society and for every human being, it became even more evident that desires can never be quenched, as one cannot take

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a desire to an end state. It became obvious that it is desire that takes you for a ride. For a long time, most consumption researchers attached to the marketing field tried to identify the motivation for consumption and the forms of need satisfaction and were fundamentally unable to take the role of desire into consideration. Their conceptual frameworks did not permit it. They could make distinctions between needs, wants, and demands. They were mainly interested in “preferences” and “customer satisfaction,” and they mostly expected to serve marketing purposes. It was with the initial awareness that entered the new field, provided by studies in philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, when the insatiable and social nature of desire was truly perceived and revealed within the various forms of modern consumption. It became evident that desire flows in all forms of consumption.

Modern Debate In the modern debate about desire, Jacques Lacan and René Girard made significant contributions with major implications for consumer science. They provided explanations and models. Girard clarified how desire relies on mimetic social relations, and Lacan established why it is inaccessible to consciousness and impossible to appease. Works by both of these scholars further develop Hegel’s work, which emphasized the role of desire in the struggle for recognition. Lacan also builds further on Sigmund Freud’s work. His focus is mostly on the first phase of the struggle where the newborn establishes communication with its surroundings. Lacan pointed out that, from the beginning of its existence, whatever an infant needs has to be expressed through the symbolic order and is dependent on the relation to a parent. Demand has to be expressed through a language and a cultural code. The symbolic order, which can be defined as what makes the wording of a demand possible and necessary, rends the original need relationship. The symbolic order presses itself almost as a hatchet, creating a gap that has to be filled: desire emerges. “Thus desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomena of their splitting (Spaltung)” (Lacan 2001, 318). Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need: this margin

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being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regard to the Other, under the form of the possible defect, which need may introduce into it, of having no universal satisfaction (what is called “anxiety”). (344)

In other words, it is from the distance between the need and the human subject’s relationship to his needs that desire emerges, and this relationship has to be expressed in a cultural code, not a natural one. In this relationship the other (i.e., those who are not oneself) play a significant role. Desires operate through the other, through the promises and rewards of society, through culture. It is not to be “satisfied,” it is just to be “moved” or “agitated.” Two other prominent theoreticians of the theory of desire, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, express it in this way: “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression” (1983, 26). Girard built further not only on Hegel’s emphasizing the role of desire in the struggle for recognition but also on Hegel’s underlining of the fact that all people rely on the mirror image that the other can provide for him or her. As Sartre expressed it, “The inspired intuition of Hegel is . . . to have me depend on the other in my own being. I am, he says, a being by itself that is by itself only through someone else” (1943, 293). Adding to this, Girard builds on Alexis de Tocqueville’s classical analysis of the advance of individualism. He explains that desire should not be considered something linked to an individual as it is always mimetic. We can only desire something that others desire. No person, no object has in oneself the qualities that are required to be desirable. Those qualities are developed in the relation. The relation is always somewhat triangular. Girard calls the model a person imitates the mediator. It operates between the subject and the object and plays a much more important role than either. It does not have to be a positive model; still, the model/rival has to be surpassed. It has always been so in all kinds of societies. However, in democracies, anyone is entitled to seek anything for himself, whereas in aristocratic societies or caste societies, the mediator was so highly placed over the masses that it remained unrivaled. In contrast, the number of mediators is so large today that mimetic desire becomes more competitive, conflicting,

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obsessive, and exhausting. In such a perspective, desire is not so much liberated as knocked around in a never-ending headlong flight. Part of this endless flight drives along a cultural project where consumption—and desire—plays a significant role. Mary Douglas explains that the consumer has a cultural project: “Everything he chooses to do or to buy is part of a project to choose other people to be with who will help him make the kind of society he thinks he will like the best” (1996, 113). Thus, it seems absurd to reduce desire to wants and needs. It cannot be reached or met; it is just in the air. It is always in flood, but it has neither a source nor a mouth. Desire has more in common with sound, of which melodies are bound to make use, than with seeds that must grow and need to be watered. It can never be fulfilled. It is insatiable. Desires are always related to other desires and thus always socially expressed. They rely much more on the condition of the social bond than on the evolution of supply and demand. Even when consumers do express a cultural project, it is not the expression of their will but the result of many interactions, most of which are unconscious. Asking consumers about their desire does not seem to make sense, as desires are not accessible through individual questionnaires or introspection. When asked about their desires, people might answer about their wishes, needs, wants, or aspirations but never about what drives them, as it is the desire of others. Furthermore, people have very different cultural and intellectual backgrounds to relate to when they are asked about their desires. The question translates in various ways into many different but always superficial understandings. Working scientifically with desire in consumption research therefore requires an interdisciplinary and interpretative approach, an approach that has more in common with the works of the great pioneers of sociology, such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber. It is not so much the fanning out of desire that matters (the way it spreads out in different consumption styles for instance). It is the funneling of desire into consumption and identity management that makes the concept of desire relevant for today’s consumer research. As desire relates to a fundamental anthropological aspect of humanity, it is most likely to remain a driving force. Still, the way it participates in the social bond clearly evolves, and the consumption researchers who have been studying

its evolution in history are now interested in further developments. For some decades now, in societies where consumption has long been considered the driving force of the economy, the mastery of nature and the mastery of social development have no longer been perceived as necessarily linked to each other. This might have consequences for the way humanity relates to the force of desire. There may well come a day when the funneling of desire to productive consumption will be brought into question, no longer with reference to the dogma of religions but to the quality of the relation mankind has with its environment. Dominique Bouchet See also Christianity; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Society; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Happiness; Hedonism; Needs and Wants; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800. Translated by Miriam Kochan. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrénia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Douglas, Mary. Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste. London: Sage, 1996. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Faccarello, Gilbert. The Foundations of Laissez-faire: The Economics of Pierre de Boisguilbert. London: Routledge, 1999. Girard, René. The René Girard Reader. Edited by James G. Williams. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. A Selection. Translated by Ala Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1977. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Être et le Néant. Essai d’Ontologie Phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Simmel, Georg. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1997. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons with an introduction by Anthony Giddens. London: Routledge, 1992. German original 1920.

De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling

DE-SKILLING, RE-SKILLING, AND UP-SKILLING Skill is a property, the capability to accomplish something, which requires practical knowledge and ability and is acquired with practice. De-skilling, re-skilling, and up-skilling are each processes through which the skill demanded of practitioners by specific activities, tasks, or situations is changed or redistributed. A process of de-skilling involves something demanding less skill of the people accomplishing it. For example, the replacement of handlooms with mechanized looms in the early nineteenth-century British textile industry demanded less-skilled human labor to accomplish the production of woven cloths. Re-skilling generally refers to processes through which someone develops new skills. Its dominant use has been to describe processes through which workers made redundant from one skilled trade, such as in manufacturing, are re-skilled to be competent practitioners of a new trade, such as working in a service sector occupation. Up-skilling is the equipping of someone with the capability to take on something that can be seen as more demanding than what he or she currently accomplishes. It has most visibly been applied to grand plans for up-skilling a workforce, or a nations’ youth, or a class of workers to face the challenges and opportunities of a new technological age or of a dawning knowledge-based economy, and so on. It is immediately clear from these examples of dominant usage and meaning that ideas of de-skilling, re-skilling, and up-skilling have been forged and applied in relation to production and labor processes. However, with recognition over recent decades that skill resides in the activities, tasks, and situations of consumption as well as those of production, these terms take on analytical relevance to directly understanding the dynamics of consumption. In what follows, this entry first considers the roots of these terms in debates over labor, capital, and technology, which stretch back to the nineteenth century, before finally turning to applications of the terms to understanding processes of contemporary consumer culture. While the processes described by the three different terms of the title can be retrospectively identified over centuries, of the three terms, de-skilling has the longest history of use and meaning. In academic debate, its origins are particularly identified with Harry Braverman’s de-skilling thesis. Braverman contested

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accounts of labor process theory that saw twentiethcentury processes of deindustrialization and the rise of the service economy as a process of the elevation of work away from routinized manual labor toward white-collar occupations. Drawing on Karl Marx’s understandings of the appropriation of surplus labor and the alienation that ensues under capitalism, Braverman argued that the twentieth century saw the continued degradation of both manual and whitecollar work. By reducing the need for skilled craftspeople, reducing individual responsibility and scope for action within labor processes, twentieth-century capitalism functioned to extend into new realms of economic activity the processes of proletarianization identified by Marx in the nineteenth century. Threads of Braverman’s arguments continue into contemporary debates over the managerial imperative of both capital and state. For example, George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis contends that the rational management control, standardization, and efficiency characteristic of the archetypal fast-food outlet was increasingly characteristic of a broadening range of social phenomena. The effects of contemporary “audit culture” in both private and public work situations can similarly be criticized as deprofessionalizing and de-skilling occupations like teaching or social work, as knowledge, skills, judgment, and creativity are separated from practitioners into generic codes of practice in ways which facilitate managerial monitoring and control in the interests of maintaining particular models of quality or value. Through such processes, de-skilling can be argued to be part of the continued degradation of work into the twenty-first century. As de-skilling has been part of the history of relations between labor, technology, and capital, it has been inseparable from processes taking place in realms of consumption. The temporal and spatial separation of work from home and of production from consumption that characterized the emergence of industrial society entailed innumerable processes through which domestic activities were de-skilled. In preindustrial societies, many products and services consumed in a home are the product of the skilled work of people in the home or neighborhood. In progressively separating out production from the home into factories, workshops, and offices, industrialization removed skilled labor from people in their homes and invested it in specialized workers and machines to produce products and services to

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be sold to workers. This narrative is well established in relation to craft production, with methods that involved one person undertaking all of the stages of production from raw materials to finished commodity displaced by the specialization and centralization of industry. It is also true, however, for the processes that went on in the home where skilled labor resulted not in finished products for sale but things and services consumed by the same household that produced them. These processes, and the role of de-skilling within them, are inseparable from processes of re-skilling and up-skilling. On the one hand, as workers, people paid to produce goods and services can be said to be upskilled in relation to the relevant specialized production processes. On the other hand, as consumers, people could be said to be re-skilled, and perhaps up-skilled, to competently secure and use the goods and services they need through increasingly complex markets and chains of supply, leading to higher standards of living. However, for many critical commentators through history, the up-skilling of people as creative consumers navigating ever-more diverse opportunities for their gratification is as empty and alienating as the de-skilled work for which it provides escape and compensation. For critical commentators on late-nineteenth-century economy and society such as Thorstein Veblen or William Morris, consumption of mass-produced products of industrial capitalism was potentially as alienating as the labor of producing them. Within the social sciences, consumption was long not considered a realm of skill; rather, it was the passive underside of production, consumers as the dupes of the market. The revalorization of consumption that followed from the cultural turn of the 1980s provided the conceptual grounds for analytically grasping the skills involved in consumption. This recognition of skill in the consumption of mass-produced goods is illustrated by Colin Campbell’s argument for the recognition of the “craft consumer” characterized by the skilled appropriation and combination of massproduced products to create something new. The dimensions of debate as to whether a particular dynamic in consumption is one of de-skilling, re-skilling, or up-skilling can be exemplified in relation to accomplishing the provision of food for a family. As in so many other fields of consumption, convenience and laborsaving technologies can be located in a narrative of de-skilling. The combination of supermarkets, ready-made meals, freezers, and

microwaves can clearly render obsolete the complex skills involved in sourcing basic ingredients from different specialized retailers and managing storage, preparation, and their transformation into meals. Skills, as knowledge and practical ability necessary to accomplish something (here getting food on the table night after night), have been redistributed, with the system of provision behind convenience foods removing the needs for particular skills and knowledge from the consumer and embedding them instead into systems of production, specialist workers, and the products themselves. At the same time, this shift entails consumers re-skilling to navigate the spaces and choices of the supermarket; manage the freezer; assess the meanings of “use by”; master the microwave; and, possibly, decide into which bins to put the different components of packaging and food waste. Arguing that one system involves more, and somehow more worthwhile, skills on the part of the food provider can only be done from a particular normative position that requires articulation and defense. At the same time, so far as one system enables food providers to accomplish the task of feeding the family with less time commitment, it may possibly free them up to up-skill in another field. The debate over skill and consumption mirrors the debate Braverman joined over production—what to one commentator looks like up-skilling, as individuals become equipped to undertake new tasks, looks to another commentator like down-skilling, as it entails individuals losing what, from a given value position, looks like more personally and socially valuable skills. Whether an overall process of change in skills and activities is a process of de-skilling or of up-skilling depends on the value position from which the process is considered and the particular aspects of the process that are given analytical precedence. Nevertheless, they stand as useful analytical instruments for understanding the dynamics between labor, capital, technology, and consumption. Matthew Watson See also Alienation; Appropriation; Convenience; Craft Consumer; Craft Production; Cultural Turn; Marx, Karl; McDonaldization

Further Readings Braverman, Harry, and Paul M. Sweezy. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.

Diaspora Campbell, Colin. “The Craft Consumer: Culture, Craft and Consumption in a Postmodern Society.” Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 1 (2005): 23–42. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Ritzer, George. The Mcdonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand, and Jack Ingram. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

DIASPORA The term diaspora, deriving from the Greek speir (“to sow,” “to scatter”), refers to a people dispersed by whatever cause to one or more foreign destinations who may never be fully assimilated in their host countries and may harbor thoughts of return. The term interprets, as well as the people who are dispersed, the land across which dispersal occurs. Along with related terms addressing complex flows of goods and people, diversity and multilocality, the category of diaspora can cause conceptual confusion between what are different experiences and practices as, for example, the diaspora caused by the compelling desire to move and that prompted by a voluntary migration. However, at its simplest diaspora points to the forms of hybrid consumer cultures that emerge as different ethnic cultures mix and interact, as demonstrated by varieties of cuisines and clothing found within societies across the globe. Although scholars have pointed out that the verb diasperein was used to describe the Greek colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean (800–600 BC), it is now widely accepted that the origin of the term can be found in the translation of the Hebrew scripts by Alexandrian Greek-speaking Jews in the third century BC. They adopted the term in order to interpret Jewish exile outside Palestine, after the destruction of Solomon’s temple in 586 BC by the Babylonian empire. Residing outside the Holy Land was understood as a transitory, however miserable, sojourn; it was an intermediate stage, pending until the final divine gathering in Jerusalem. The concept

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of diaspora was thus born out of an interpretation of history with respect to God’s saving grace, favoring the development of a Jewish theology of exile and religious and ethnic identity. In the first century AD, Christians adopted the term to their eschatology, whereby the early church was depicted as a pilgrim and dispersed community. More than a millennium later, once Christianity became the established dominant religion, the term came into usage again, as, in the course of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Protestant minorities had to live in Catholic environments, and vice versa, as Catholic minorities were “dispersed” in Protestant cultures. The modern disciplinary application of the term to non-Jewish and non-Christian people was first undertaken within African studies as early as 1965, when George Shepperson spoke of the enforced expatriation of sub-Saharan Africans through the colonial slave trade as the African diaspora, accompanied by a longing to return to the homeland. Later, African diaspora subsumed the global dispersion of Africans throughout history and the consequent emergence of a cultural identity based on origin and social condition. As the term took off, it also became applied within social sciences; in 1976, John Armstrong’s Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas investigated migrant groups with regard to their socioeconomic position and the range of tolerance and repression they faced in multiethnic states. Diaspora came to be understood in its social and political relations to homeland and the hosting nation-state and culture. The Jewish and the African exiles represent two cases of prototypical diaspora, along with those suffered by Armenians and the Irish. The late-nineteenthcentury massacres and forced mass displacement of Armenians by the Turks during 1915–1916 and the migration of the Irish from 1845 to 1852 following the famine are examples of “victim diasporas” (Cohen 2008), whereby the forcibly dispersed group conceives its scattering as arising from a trauma central to a historical experience of victimhood. However, the extension of scholarly discourse on dispersion to diaspora came only in the late 1980s, culminating in the publication of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, edited by Armenian scholar Kachig Tölölyan. The first issue included the path-breaking article “Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” by William Safran who, while specifying that members of a diaspora retain an idealized memory of their

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original homeland, to which they continue to relate in various ways, observed that many other peoples had suffered similar events: Cubans and Mexicans in the United States, Pakistanis in Britain, Turks in Germany, or Poles in the North America. The term diaspora thus started to cover the experiences of a multitude of ethnic groups, and even of social formations not defined exclusively by ethnicity and religion, such as expatriates, refugees and guest workers. Diaspora studies, thus established, included research on the labor or proletarian diaspora of Indians and the Chinese; on the imperial diaspora of the British and other colonial powers; on the trade diaspora of the Lebanese and the Chinese; and on the “new” victim diasporas of Palestinians, Serbs, and Croats. Diaspora was deployed as a metaphor to describe a vast array of people who either applied the term to themselves or had the label conferred on them, up to the contemporary use of diaspora to describe intellectuals, engineers, scientists, and football players. Once so many other cases sheltered under the increasing diasporic umbrella, several methodological problems emerged, primarily the need to draw inferences from the Jewish tradition and to be sensitive to the inevitable dilutions of meaning produced by the parallel debate on diaspora within ethnography, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. Here, the refashioning of the idea of diaspora provided conceptual means to understand revived forms of transnational movements and global migration, of emerging identities and oscillating patterns of settlement and integration. In particular, the seminal writings of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and James Clifford contributed to the contemporary relevance of the term by deconstructing some of the building blocks demarcating the diasporic, such as homeland, ethnic-religious community, and nationalism, and by theorizing different formations of deterritorialized diasporas (Cohen 2008). Hall’s example is the people of the Caribbean, whose identity is not a simple transposition of the African one to the New World, since the trauma of slavery and the admixture of other migrants built into the Caribbean people a sense of hybridity and difference. Hall thus invites a move away from the imperializing notion of diasporic people as scattered communities whose identity, defined by essence, purity, and authenticity, can only be measured in relation to some sacred homeland, in order to look at their experience as based on heterogeneity and diversity. A similar concept of hybrid

diasporic identities is advanced by Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic, where he describes the formation of the double consciousness of the African diaspora as a complex cultural and social intermingling between the heritage of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. In exploring diaspora as a historical and theoretical formation, Clifford adds to such a reevaluation of “diaspora as hybridity” a criticism of the concepts of acculturation and assimilation that had dominated the study of Jewish, African, and other diasporas. His idea, quickly embraced and expanded by other critics, was to rethink dispersion and proximity in an era of hypermobility, which not only divides and disperses people and activities that once occupied a contiguous space but also collapses and reinscribes spaces of dispersal thanks to new information and communication technologies, whereby diasporas are often re-created through artifacts and practices of glocalization. The study of such deterritorialized diasporas implies interrogating the ways through which a nation-state or a religion prescribes forms of identification and the peoples in the diaspora respond to such demands, not only restoring or maintaining a homeland but also imagining it anew, as in the case of the Kurds or the Sikhs. A way to escape such a risk as that of using the term diaspora too superficially, or as associated merely with postmodernity, without either dismissing the potentiality of hybrid cultures or celebrating them uncritically, is to look at the transformations of diasporic identities in consumer culture, that is, to investigate how diaspora is effectively lived and reinterpreted in processes of cultural production such as popular music, dance, food, and fashion. A peculiar and effective example is hip-hop music, which, emerging as an hybrid product of American black culture, has become a mainstream and itself a diasporic effect which transcends ethnic, linguistic, and geographical boundaries, not only giving voice to members of global “connective marginalities” but also constituting a lucrative market of music and associated paraphernalia. The study of the economies, practices, and spaces of contemporary commercial culture may indeed challenge the dualistic thinking that separates production from consumption, the local from the global, not only showing how the market is embedded in a range of transcultural processes but also how the thinking of and about diasporas can gain clarity when facing the actual outcomes of the circuits

Diderot Effect

and network of existing contemporary transnational commodity cultures. The dangers of the “hype of hybridity,” which had triggered the criticism of many black and postcolonial scholars warning against the risks of “ethnicity becoming spice,” may be corrected by looking at the complex processes which transcultural products undergo in order to confirm, translate, adapt, or invent their authenticity, as suggested by Peter Jackson. By examining the existing research on the general revival of ethnic fashion among middle-class urban-educated consumers in India and throughout the diaspora, Jackson describes the ways many traditional items of clothing, the veil or the sari, have been substantially reworked by Asian women in the diaspora to create new local interpretations of their cultural identity, showing a sophisticated command of the symbolic and political economies in which they are located. Parallel to the Western explosion of the Asian chic, a cultural creativity that flows in the other direction has emerged, brought about by women that continuously reformulate their ethnic traditions through the filters of their class and local cultures. And while 9/11 has partly drawn the discussion on diaspora into the security agenda and many diasporic communities are still showing a continuing or newly asserted attachment to places of origin, in ways which are still to be fully investigated, the activities of those cultural intermediaries that generated new interpretations of ethnicities, new consumer styles, and material economies also and still need to be further interrogated in order to explore “the politically contested middle ground where cultural cannibalism and economic exploitation rub shoulders with the emergence of more critical forms of multiculturalism” (Jackson 2002, 16). Cristina Demaria See also Acculturation; Colonialism; Ethnicity/Race; Globalization; Identity; Migration; Multiculturalism; Transnational Capitalism

Further Readings Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Current Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302–338. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2008. Dufoix, Stéphane, Diasporas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

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Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J. Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Jackson, Peter. “Commercial Cultures: Transcending the Cultural and the Economic.” Progress in Human Geography 26, no. 3 (2002): 3–18 Motley, Carol M., and Geraldine R. Henderson. “The Global Hip-Hop Diaspora: Understanding the Culture.” Journal of Business Research 61 (2008): 243–253. Safran, William. “Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 83–99.

DIDEROT EFFECT The Diderot effect is a term used to describe the impact of acquiring a good so superior in quality and style to one that is currently owned by a consumer that this good immediately renders the current item, along with all others used in the same context as the item, unacceptable. The term has its roots in an essay written by the French Enlightenment scholar Denis Diderot in 1769 and first published in 1772. In this essay, which Diderot never shared during his lifetime, the author ruminates on the fact that a new scarlet dressing gown has spurred him to completely transform his shabbily furnished study into a room with objects that are more congruent in taste and style with this luxurious new gift. In this essay, Diderot anthropomorphizes, or attributes human qualities to, the robe, a technique Susan Fournier observes consumers often use when they describe their relationships with goods or services. For example, Diderot describes the new gown as a “scarlet intruder” (1956, 311) and bemoans how he was “master of my old dressing gown, but . . . slave to my new one” (310). Diderot identifies several immediate outcomes associated with acquiring this gown besides removing other shabby items because they do not meet the luxurious standards of the new robe. For example, Diderot recounts how he disguises or covers up some of the other goods he chooses to retain to downplay their shabby appearance. Diderot also describes his deliberate decision to leave a well-worn braided carpet on the floor of his study, even though its condition is in stark contrast to all of his other, newer, higher-quality items. Of this combination of

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new opulence and more careworn items, Diderot laments, “Now the harmony is destroyed. Now there is no more consistency, no more unity, and no more beauty” (311). He describes how this choice is motivated by his desire to not fall privy to the seductions of a luxury-laden lifestyle and to remain grounded to his original sense of self. Furthermore, Diderot also specifically mentions “consumption emotions” that emerge as he considers the acquisition of this new robe—including regret, guilt, disgust, and desire. Related to these emotions, Diderot warns the reader to not develop a “fatal taste for luxury” (312), to not neglect other aspects of one’s life (such as family obligations) in the pursuit of a lavish lifestyle, and to avoid being trapped by the pride and entitlement that may result from owning fine things. In his seminal book on culture and consumption, Grant McCracken discusses the Diderot effect in detail. McCracken asserts that it can impact the behavior of a consumer in essentially three different ways. First, as Diderot himself demonstrated, the effect can spur a consumer’s desire to replace other goods that coexist with the new item—or those in the “consumption constellation” in which that good is embedded—to restore harmony and balance across the dimensions of taste, style, and opulence within the set. However, McCracken notes, the more common outcome of the Diderot effect is that consumers typically reject any good that would upset an existing constellation of items. This action reflects a consumer’s awareness that adding this new item to a set will destabilize the coherence that currently exists within a constellation of goods. Furthermore, as these goods reflect the consumer’s lifestyle, a consumer’s identity is also impacted by the imbalance that might occur from acquiring a good that is “above” the others in a mosaic of possession. Thus, McCracken asserts, the consumer anticipates the lack of coherence (and possible chaos) that can result when accepting an item that is not “in line” with others in terms of cultural capital. McCracken observes that if Diderot himself had “been ruled by the conventional operation [of the effect] . . . he would never have worn the new dressing gown” (1988, 123). Finally, McCracken observes that the most radical implementation of the Diderot effect occurs when the consumer deliberately seeks out such “disruptive goods” (126) and experiments with them in order to contemplate a new identity or new sense of self. McCracken notes that when consumers take this

approach, they “hope that this revolt will transform the material world and the self, giving entirely new symbolic properties to both” (127). This variant of the Diderot effect reflects the postmodern concept of bricolage, in which the consumer essentially selects any goods or services he or she desires from the environment to foster a new sense of self without considering whether these goods and services typically are regarded as “belonging together” to reflect any particular identity or social class. McCracken also makes a key observation about the Diderot effect—one that is evident in the original essay—specifically, that it typically emerges when a consumer acquires goods that possess more cultural capital than the previous variant. Then, once consumers “trade up” for one good, they desire higherstatus goods to replace others in their possession, creating what McCracken describes as an upward spiral effect. As such, there is never a time when all of the goods that consumers can possess are equal in stature or style, as they are constantly replacing older versions with newer, superior ones. Thus, “the consumer is locked into an ever-ascending spiral of consumption” (127). McCracken also discusses a concept that is related to the Diderot effect—that of the Diderot unity. This term refers to consistent sets of goods that consumers attempt to acquire in order to inhabit and reflect a particular lifestyle. McCracken argues that the Diderot effect is the mechanism by which Diderot unities become realized. McCracken argues that the importance of Diderot unities rests in their ability to illuminate how culture valorizes specific groups of goods over others and associates them with desired lifestyles that typically reflect affluence and continual upward mobility. Furthermore, goods that are imbued with high levels of social and symbolic meanings acquire their connotations through two main forces: mass-mediated images and “innovative groups . . . such as hippies, yuppies and punks” (120–121). Teresa Davis and Gary Gregory explore the relevance of Diderot unities to the lives of actual consumers, examining whether impulse purchases in particular lead to the creation of a new “consumption constellation” of goods (and, therefore, a new Diderot unity). The authors find that certain consumers are motivated by an emotional impulse to acquire the initial “departure good” (or item that would lead them to depart from their old consumption

Dieting

constellation in their desire for a new Diderot unity). In addition, however, other aspects of consumers’ lives—notably, life-cycle transitions such as graduation from college or transitioning to an empty-nest household—also spur consumers’ desires to replace existing sets of goods (and the consumer identities that they reflect) with “new and improved” ones. To date, the work by Davis and Gregory is the only empirical research in consumer behavior to actually test the relevance of the Diderot effect on actual purchasing behavior. And while Diderot’s essay was written hundreds of years before the term consumer culture became prevalent, it reflects many of the themes that consumer-culture scholars find compelling. For example, Diderot’s essay illuminates such topics as the symbolic nature of consumer culture, the nature of desire, pride and greed, issues pertaining to taste and aesthetics, the consumption of sumptuous luxury goods, and goods as indicators of social mobility. Finally, Diderot reveals in the last paragraph of his essay that all of the luxury goods he has received are gifts. Nevertheless, even though he has not paid for these items, they still make him aware that he could fall privy to the tendency to become an elitist consumer and to shun the goods he has owned for so long in favor of more luxurious variants. As such, the relevance of the Diderot effect to modern consumer culture might be located more in the sphere of consumer welfare. Simply put, the term has found its way into many consumer-oriented blogs, websites, and other discussions where the dangers of getting caught in the “upward spiral” of acquisition that McCracken discusses are set forth. For example, some discussions revolve around the debt incurred if the Diderot effect takes over one’s life or the diminishment of a life defined by material goods rather than spiritual aspects. As a result, the Diderot effect has now become somewhat synonymous with the cycle of desire that Russell W. Belk, Guliz Ger, and Søren Askegaard discuss in their article “The Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry into Consumer Passion.” They note that the passion and desire for consumer goods often runs counter to mechanisms for rational thought and self-control and that acting on desire can result in negative outcomes such as the experience of guilt and sin, and even addiction. Regardless of whether it influences an individual consumer in these ways, it is fascinating that an essay that predates the creation of easy credit,

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the proliferation of luxury consumer goods, and the mass-mediated message systems that transport these goods and their cultivated brand images around the globe resonates with so many concerns about consumption that are highly salient in consumer-oriented cultures today. Cele C. Otnes See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Conspicuous Consumption; Luxury and Luxuries; Social Class; Social Distinction; Status

Further Readings Belk, Russell W., Guliz Ger, and Søren Askegaard. “The Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry into Consumer Passion.” Journal of Consumer Research 30 (December 2003): 326–351. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Brown, Stephen. “Marketing Science in a Postmodern World: Introduction to the Special Issue.” European Journal of Marketing 31, nos. 3–4 (1997): 167–182. Davis, Teresa, and Gary Gregory. “Creating Diderot Unities: Quest for Possible Selves?” Journal of Consumer Marketing 20, no. 1 (2003): 44–54. Diderot, Denis. “Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown.” In Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, translated by Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen, 309–317. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001. First published 1772. Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Solomon, Michael. “Mapping Product Constellations: A Social Categorization Approach to Consumption Symbolism.” Psychology and Marketing 5, no. 3 (1988): 233–258.

DIETING Dieting refers to social practices with the goal of losing weight, such as decreasing food intake, increasing exercise, “watching” what one eats, and sharing food as well as discourse practices that socialize individuals into gender-appropriate body images and weight-loss norms.

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The practice of dieting is commonplace in Western countries and is increasingly becoming a global issue. In the United States, a 2006 study by Edward Weiss and colleagues found that 34 percent of men and 48 percent of women had tried to lose weight during the previous year. The most common weight-loss practices reported were food restrictions, followed by exercising, eating less fat, and switching to lowercalorie foods. Marita McCabe and Lina Ricciardelli report that dieting is far more prevalent among women than among men as adolescent boys and men typically endorse an ideal male body that is both lean and muscular. As a result, men who are dissatisfied with their bodies are less concerned with dieting and more concerned with sculpting their muscles and toning their bodies. Media images are a pervasive component of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Mimi Nichter estimates that Americans view between 400 and 600 advertisements daily, many of which use ultra-thin models to sell products. These ideal models lead individuals to think of their own identity in terms of ideal body shapes and foster dissatisfaction with self. Mass-media messages encourage people to achieve the thin body ideal through dieting and self-control while flooding the public with advertisements for junk foods, fast foods, and soda. The social meaning of body weight and shape and the need to diet has shifted throughout history. During the mid-nineteenth century, corpulence symbolized economic prosperity in the United States, whereas by the end of the nineteenth century, social power was more closely connected to the ability to control labor resources than it was to material wealth or body size. At the beginning of the twentieth century, health and body-image norms became institutionalized through the medical practice of measuring, weighing, and documenting individuals’ body size and weight. By the mid-1900s, insurance companies were using biomedical standards of height and weight to assess morbidity risk in individuals. This practice further institutionalized a normative standard for body weight as well as the ranking of individuals according to their adherence to this standard. Women have been judged at the site of the body for many years. Fashion and media of the 1920s promoted a slender image of the female body and a postwar shift in attitude from conservative to carefree, prompting women to replace the outward constraint of the corset with the internal constraint of

dieting and slimming. Movies and fashion magazines began encouraging girls to constantly “try on new identities” through clothing, makeup, and hairstyles. Whereas dieting efforts of girls in the 1920s tended to be intermittent, by the 1960s, dieting efforts of girls were more consistent. As fashionable clothing for women continued to become more revealing, baring a woman’s midriff and thighs, women’s obsession with dieting continued. In the 1980s, diet and fitness industries expanded along with mass-media advertisements to sell slimming products. Increasingly, the locus of control and management of the body focused more on the consumer, who was considered responsible for his or her own body weight. As a result, overweight bodies increasingly came to represent laziness, weakness, and a lack of impulse control, while thin, toned bodies indexed discipline and willpower. Anthony Giddens reminds us that underpinning the increasing focus on the slim, controlled body is an emphasis on the body’s perceived malleability. In effect, Giddens notes, “we have become responsible for the design of our own bodies” (1991, 102). Michel Foucault asserts that discipline in modern society occurs partially through the institutionalized establishment of norms so that individuals are measured and judged by their ability to adhere to those norms. Discipline occurs specifically at the site of the body as social norms become internalized by individuals who self-regulate their behavior. Feminists have adapted Foucault’s theoretical concept of disciplined bodies to examine the ways in which modern gendered body practices, such as bodily comportment, dieting, and a range of beauty rituals, operate as forms of institutionalized social control for women. In the world of beauty, advertised messages offer hope after undermining self-confidence. Beauty and thinness have become symbols of moral self-worth, as well as commodities purchased at a cost. One of the hidden costs of buying into beauty work, including dieting, is that individuals come to feel that they are required to transform their appearance to meet an elusive cultural ideal. Advertisers create the illusion of a community of consumption whose membership requirement is possession of popular brands, products, and styles. Edward Weiss and colleagues estimate that expenditures on dieting products in the United States are as high as $50 billion per year. Dieting as a social practice is problematic to define as individuals may define and enact this behavior in

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a range of ways. Adolescent girls, for example, have been found to be reluctant to label a weight-loss attempt as a diet, a word that implies formal weight programs such as Weight Watchers. Some girls and women resist the word diet because it implies being controlled. In contrast to dieting, many young women report that they “watch what they eat,” a positive behavior that affords them greater freedom, partially because it includes eating healthfully in addition to or instead of eating less. “Watching” made girls feel better about themselves because they tended to be more successful at it than at dieting, reports Mimi Nichter. Similarly, Nicole Taylor found that teenaged girls share food as a means of “watching” what they ate. Sharing food helped them control the amount of food they ate and made them feel less guilty about eating fattening foods. To date, much of the literature on slimming and dieting appears in the fields of psychology and public health. While these studies provide valuable quantitative data on the prevalence of dieting behaviors among women and men, they fail to provide an understanding of the social contexts in which dieting takes place and the lived experience of those who choose to engage or not engage in these practices. The dieting/nondieting dichotomy commonly described in the public-health literature is simplistic because it fails to capture the range of behaviors—both positive and negative—that individuals engage in their attempts to lose weight. Given the current obesity epidemic combined with global advertising displaying ultra-thin models, it will be important to continue to conduct research on issues of consumption, body image, and dieting. Mimi Nichter and Nicole Taylor See also Anorexia; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Food Consumption; Gender Advertising; Gender and the Media; Obesity

Further Readings Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

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Grogan, Sarah, and Helen Richards. “Body Image: Focus Groups with Boys and Men.” Men and Masculinities 4 (2002): 219–232. Huff, Joyce. “A ‘Horror of Corpulence’: Interrogating Bantingism and Mid-Nineteenth Century Fat-Phobia.” In Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, edited by J. E. Braziel and K. LeBesco, 39–59. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. McCabe, Marita P., and Lina A. Ricciardelli. “Weight and Shape Concerns of Body and Men.” In Handbook of Eating Disorders and Obesity, edited by J. Kevin Thompson, 606–634. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004. McLaren, Margaret. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Nichter, Mimi. Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say About Dieting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Taylor, Nicole. “‘Guys, She’s Humongous’: Gender and Weight Based Teasing in Adolescence.” Journal of Adolescent Research 26, no. 2 (March 2011): 1–22. First published online May 17, 2010. http://jar.sagepub .com/content/26/2/178.full.pdf. Taylor, Nicole. “Negotiating Popular Obesity Discourses in Adolescence: School Food, Personal Responsibility, and Gendered Food Consumption Behaviors.” Food, Culture & Society (in press). Weiss, Edward C., Deborah Galuska, Laura Kahn, and Mary Serdula. “Weight-Control Practices among U.S. Adults, 2001–2002.” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 31, no. 1 (2006): 18–24.

DIFFUSION STUDIES TRICKLE DOWN

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Diffusion studies investigate the process of how an innovation spreads through a social system. The framework called diffusion of innovations theory was studied first by rural sociologists including Bryce Ryan and George Beal to understand the diffusion of high-yielding hybrid seed corn, chemical fertilizers, and weed sprays. Questions were asked about why some farmers embraced these obviously beneficial innovations while others shied away from it. Whenever individuals adopt or reject an innovation or consume a product, this behavior at some level leads to personal change, and if enough number of individuals adopts an innovation, it certainly leads

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to changes in the larger culture. Thus, the theory also helps explains cultural shifts shedding light on present-day consumerism and the development of mass culture. Diffusion studies underwent a pathbreaking insight when Everett M. Rogers, in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, reviewed existing studies analyzing the diffusion process of all kinds of innovations that included agricultural innovations, educational innovations, medical innovations, and marketing innovations. He found several similarities in the way diffusion of innovations across fields happened. The theory is one of the most influential social scientific theories that primarily explains the process of social change. Rogers’s intention was to understand the adoption of new behaviors with the main premise that innovations diffuse over time according to individuals’ stages. Having reviewed over five hundred empirical studies in the early 1960s, Rogers characterized diffusion as a process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. An innovation is an idea, practice, or object perceived as new by an individual or an organization or culture. Earliest research in diffusion studies can be traced to the work of Gabriel Tarde, a French sociologist and legal scholar. Tarde’s ideas were further investigated by anthropologists such as Clark Wissler, who studied the diffusion of the horse among the Plains Indians. Wissler’s analysis concluded that the introduction of the horse led the Indians to wage continual warfare with neighboring tribes. Diffusion studies garnered paradigmatic academic status after multiple studies conducted by Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross and others to analyze the diffusion of hybrid seed corn among Iowa farmers. While the innovation led to increased corn yields of 20 percent per acre, the state agricultural officials wondered why such an obviously advantageous agricultural technology required a dozen years to achieve widespread use. Ryan and Gross highlighted the difficulties in adopting this innovation, claiming that the average farmer needed seven years to progress from initial awareness of the innovation to full-scale adoption. Adopting the hybrid corn seed meant crucial decisions that involved purchasing expensive hybrid corn from the seed corn company at a price per bushel—a change that involved discontinuance of their previous cultural practice in which healthy ears of corn were used as seed for the following year.

Thus, it involved changing not only personal behavior but also, at some level, family and communal cultural practices. The 1950s saw an explosion in diffusion studies particularly by rural sociologists. Further, the diffusion approach was adopted by other social sciences, including marketing, political science, and education. By this time, Rogers argued for a general model of diffusion, and the field became even more popular across disciplines after the landmark study conducted by James S. Coleman, Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel that examined the diffusion of tetracycline among physicians. The drug study helped illuminate the nature of interpersonal diffusion networks, suggesting the role that opinion leaders play in the take off of the diffusion curve. Rogers posited five stages through which an individual passes in the adoption of innovations: awareness, knowledge and interest, decision, trial, and adoption/rejection. Populations were divided in different groups according to their propensity to incorporate innovations and timing in actually adopting them. The first venturesome individuals to adopt an innovation were characterized as innovators who took enormous risks. This small group is usually followed by the early adopters who act as models to emulate and generate a climate of acceptance and an appetite for change. Further, as other individuals embrace the innovation, they tend to form the early majority. Finally, those who are slow to adopt are termed laggards. From a mass-culture-shift standpoint, this latter category was assumed to describe the vast majority of the population in the world. An important aspect of diffusion theory underlines that for most members of a social system, the innovation decision depends heavily on the innovation decisions of the other members of the system. In fact, empirically, it can be observed that the successful spread of an innovation follows an S-shaped curve (see Figure 1). After about 10 to 25 percent of system members adopt an innovation, there is relatively rapid adoption by the remaining members and then a period in which the holdouts finally adopt. Rogers outlined that the innovation decision is made through a cost-benefit analysis where the major obstacle is uncertainty. Individuals tend to adopt an innovation if they believe that it will, all things considered, enhance their utility. Thus, they must believe that the innovation may yield some relative advantage to the idea it supersedes. Also, in consideration

Adopters

Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down

Time

Figure 1

The Diffusion of Innovations

Source: Adapted from Rogers 2003, 23.

of costs, again, individuals determine to what degree the innovation would disrupt other functioning facets of their daily life. Is it compatible with existing habits and values? Is it hard to use? The newness and unfamiliarity of an innovation infuse the cost-benefit analysis with a large dose of uncertainty. As the majority of individuals in a social system are on average risk averse, the uncertainty will often result in a postponement of the decision until further evidence can be gathered. However, each individual’s innovation decision is largely framed by personal characteristics, and this diversity helps in facilitating diffusion. As mentioned earlier, diffusion scholars divide this bell-shaped curve to characterize five categories of system member innovativeness, where innovativeness is defined as the degree to which an individual is relatively earlier in adopting new ideas than other members of a system. A key aspect of the diffusion is its emphasis on interpersonal networks (Rogers, Singhal, and Quilan 2009). The first step in this process involves spreading awareness and knowledge about the innovation using mass-communication channels such as television and radio and, in the present day, using socialnetworking sites and the Internet. Present research also outlines that the time it takes to diffuse an innovation has substantially reduced with the new mass-mediated communication channels. Thus, until recently, the Internet was the fastest diffused innovation as it took only a decade to reach the S-curve; however, more recently, the rapid diffusion of the social-networking site Facebook has taken only less than five years to reach the S-curve. Diffusion research has persevered and continues to grow as the number of diffusion studies has increased steeply in past decades. By 2003, Rogers

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estimated some 5,200 diffusion publications, increasing at a rate of 120 to 125 articles per year. Recently, the number of diffusion publications has grown to over six thousand articles in 2008 (Singhal and Quinlan 2008). One of the criticisms of diffusion studies is its heavy reliance on expert-driven, topdown approaches, which inherently overlook local solutions (Papa, Singhal, and Papa 2006; Singhal and Dearing, 2006). Further, it is pointed out that the diffusion of innovations generally causes wider socioeconomic gaps within a social system. This increased inequality occurs because innovators and early adopters have favorable attitudes toward new ideas and are more likely to search actively for innovations. Professional change agents concentrate their client contacts on innovators and early adopters in hope that the opinion leaders among these adopting categories will then pass along the new ideas they have learned to their followers. However, most interpersonal network links connect individuals who are similar in their adopter category and socioeconomic status, thus innovations generally trickle across rather than trickle down in the interpersonal communication networks of a system. Since the mid to late 1970s, Rogers has incorporated changes in the theoretical model and argued for a bottom-up, community-centered approach to diffusion of innovations (Rogers and Kincaid 1981). Communication, in the changed model, was no longer focused on mere persuasion of people but was now understood as a process by which participants create and share information about an innovation in order to reach a mutual understanding. Thus, at present, diffusion of innovations is pragmatically used to undertake strategic use of communication for social change. Avinash Thombre See also Communication Studies; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Demand; Economics; Innovation Studies; Mass Production and Consumption; Mimesis; Taste

Further Readings Coleman, James S., Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel. Medical Innovation: Diffusion of a Medical Drug among Doctors. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Papa, Michael J., Arvind Singhal, and Wendy. H. Papa. Organizing for Social Change: A Dialectic Journey of Theory and Praxis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006.

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Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. 5th ed. New York: Free Press, 2003. Rogers, Everett M., and D. Lawrence Kincaid. Communication Networks: A New Paradigm for Research. New York: Free Press, 1981. Rogers, Everett M., Arvind Singhal, and Margaret M. Quinlan. “Diffusion of Innovations.” In An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research, 2nd ed., edited by Don Stacks and Michael Salwen, 418–434. New York: Routledge, 2009. Ryan, Bryce, and Neal C. Gross. “The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities.” Rural Sociology 8 (1943): 15–24. Singhal, Arvind, and James W. Dearing. Communication of Innovations: A Journey with Ev Rogers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. Singhal, Arvind, and Margaret M. Quilan. “Diffusion of Innovations and Political Communication.” Encyclopedia of Political Communication, edited by Lynda Lee Kaid, 182–186. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008.

DINING OUT Dining out is a nuanced term; while many refer to it as frequenting a commercial establishment, namely, a restaurant, it can also be associated with eating out at a wedding reception, a school cafeteria, or the local coffee shop. Most individuals, however, define dining out as a separation from the domestic sphere, or home, and food being prepared by others with some sort of monetary payment involved. Whichever of these locations a person decides to eat at, the act of dining in the public sphere provides an effective case study of consumption in that it presents the commodification of individual desires. Current estimates suggest that in the United States, over 30 percent of all meals are consumed away from home, amounting to about 40 percent of food budgets. Restaurants sell not only food but also lifestyles and the packaging of human emotions as they provide a space in which people can publicly express their personal tastes and realize their private wishes. Today, restaurants have become platforms for new ideas, fashions, and, at times, political actions. Their proprietors, owners, and chefs may become celebrities because of their prominence. Eateries are ideal spots to examine conspicuous consumption and, as David Beriss and David Sutton argue, are arenas of “total social phenomena” in that they convey many symbols of postmodern life. The places where people dine out

can provide insight into numerous aspects of cultural life as well as mirror historical shifts—such as the lack of French cuisine in the United States during the Prohibition era because many of its dishes required alcohol. Simply put, “restaurants matter,” according to Beriss and Sutton.

History The first places to “eat out” were in fact other people’s homes. This can most clearly be seen in the rituals of courtly banquets. With the onset of modernization and increased geographical mobility, the need for places to eat outside the home became prevalent. Inns and local households designed to service travelers provided food along with basic lodging. Some of the earliest examples of places where food was consumed outside the home for pleasure, rather than necessity, were found in China during the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907). However, dining out for gratification had a slow start in Europe. Coffeehouses of the early seventeenth century were the first examples within Europe of places where those outside of the gentry went for the pleasure of eating outside of the home. In France, the café was a site for food and drink for all people, yet in England, the coffeehouse was mostly frequented by workers and businessmen. Street vendors also were among some of the first places to dine out, providing simple foods, such as fish and chips, for the English working class. Despite the places where food was consumed, the restaurant as we know it today is largely a French invention. The word restaurant originally was not a place to eat but, as Rebecca L. Spang discovered, a thing to eat—a medical bouillon originating in the fifteenth century that was made to order for ailing patrons, that is, a restorative. Restaurants sprang up in France in the early eighteenth century, particularly in urban centers such as Paris, for individuals who were in poor health to display and share their frailty. Thus, restaurants from early on became places that emphasized atmosphere over food. With the advent of the Enlightenment, restaurants began to transform their selection of foods from just medical drinks to finer ones, such as cheeses and fruits, and by the end of the eighteenth century restaurants had become an institution in French public life. Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. van Otterloo have argued that the restaurant was a product of the French Revolution—former chefs of the aristocrats created

Dining Out

dining rooms and in turn opened up haute cuisine for all that could afford it. The restaurant of postrevolutionary France became the center of literary and artistic debate and also began to take on the French cultural personality. Guidebooks of the period created an imaginary France where all of one’s desires could be fulfilled within the restaurant. American and British visitors defined dining out as particularly French. Tourists wrote in their diaries and in letters to friends not necessarily about the food but rather about the atmosphere of the French eatery. From its origins in France the modern-day restaurant has evolved into an extensive commodified market. However, not all people dine out in the same way, and today’s hospitality industry provides a wealth of choices of where one can obtain a meal. Researchers have created varying typologies to classify the places where we choose to dine. Joanne Finkelstein outlines several types of American restaurants, organizing them by cost and prestige, including the “fête spéciale” restaurant, the “amusement” restaurant, and the “convenience” restaurant. Meanwhile, Alan Warde and Lydia Martens use three criteria: the primary intention of a customer, mode of the food presentation, and style of food preparation. The creation of these restaurant typologies speaks to the numerous factors that influence consumption habits. Age, gender, and socioeconomic status interact to affect the choice of where one dines. For example, recent research has argued for a theory of social “omnivorousness” among diners of higher social class and urban dwellers. It is suggested that these individuals frequent a wider range of eateries (both those typically characterized as high class and low-class ones) to demonstrate their “cultural competency.”

Theories But why do people eat out? Many individuals argue that dining out saves time and sometimes money; however, consuming meals outside of the home is not always time saving. A common rationalization is that of gratification—eating out is an enjoyable leisure activity. However, sociological theory attempting to understand food consumption in the public sphere takes an approach away from such explanations. Pierre Bourdieu theorized that aesthetic choices, such as what kind of food one eats and which restaurant one dines at, indicate class and cultural capital. Restaurants can be locations in

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which status is claimed and displayed. Restaurants become tools for people to indicate their sophistication in public spaces. In an important sense, you are where you eat. Eating is an inherently social activity and consuming food outside of the home is the epitome of such an exercise. In early England, for example, street vendors served as sites of gossip, and the contemporary restaurant is an extension of such sociability. Finkelstein argued that when a consumer chooses to dine out, he or she is seeking to develop a particular self-image. Theorists of consumption suggest that restaurant goers seek to see and, more importantly, to be seen, although such an argument is relevant only to the highest class or most “trendy” restaurants and likely overstates the case. In addition, eateries commodify diners’ emotions not only through the food but also via décor and atmosphere. However, the relationship guests have with the ambiance and menu at the restaurant of their selection, Finkelstein writes, is an example of “uncivilized society.” In this view, patrons partake of a disciplined exercise in manners. Thus, a visitor to a restaurant must simultaneously seek to fulfill private desires while upholding social rules. Within this “uncivil society,” restaurants can also be seen as sites of discipline in which customers may be manipulated by servers and punished for any resistance. Hence, explanations of dining out simply for gratification or cost-benefit trade-offs are only part of the story of how we can theorize why people choose the places to eat that they do.

Research While the study of food and consumption has long been marginalized by those in academia, an emergence of scholarly work on eating habits has taken place in quantitative and qualitative studies alike. Still, few works have attempted to theorize why people dine out, namely, those of Finkelstein and of Warde and Martins, and even fewer have studied the interactions that take place within the restaurants consumers select. However, as the hospitality industry grows and more attention is given to food as consumption, it is hoped that academics will realize the importance that eating food in the public sphere has in expressing attitudes toward consumption and that further research will explain these unique sites of conspicuous consumption. Daphne Demetry and Gary Alan Fine

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See also Civilizing Processes; Coffee Shops; Food Consumption; History of Food; Leisure; Public Sphere; Pubs and Wine Bars; Social Distinction

Further Readings Beardsworth, Alan, and Teresa Keil. Sociology of the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. New York: Routledge, 1997. Beriss, David, and David E. Sutton. The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Fine, Gary Alan. Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Finkelstein, Joanne. Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners. Cambridge: Polity, 1989. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. “Democracy versus Distinction: A Study of Omnivorousness in Gourmet Food Writing.” American Journal of Sociology 113 (2007): 165–204. Mennell, Stephen, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. van Otterloo. The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet, and Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Shelton, Allen. “A Theater for Eating, Looking, and Thinking: The Restaurant as Symbolic Stage.” Sociological Spectrum 10 (1990): 507–526. Spang, Rebecca L. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Warde, Alan, and Lydia Martens. Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption, and Pleasure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

DISCOUNT STORES Discount stores, unusually, are defined neither by their size (supercenter, hypermarket) nor by types of goods sold (grocer). Instead, for discount stores to exist, there must be some full-price norm against which to benchmark them. Retail definitions are notoriously imprecise: Eurostat defines a discount store as a retailing establishment selling a range of rapid-turnover, cut-price goods and with virtually no floor service at all. We infer that discounters trade from fixed retail units and employ few—mainly parttime—staff. They thus create work for the type of consumer that they also serve. Discount stores range across both food and nonfood formats and exist

in major economies with advanced retail systems. Discounting naturally appeals to (diverse) notions of thrift (see Miller 1998, 61).

Origins The “wheel” model proposes that retailers enter at the low-cost end of the price spectrum and later trade up to become mainstream themselves. After the Industrial Revolution, low-entry-point retailers on both sides of the Atlantic chose similar discount formats. In the United Kingdom, Marks and Spencer began life with Russian émigré Michael Marks’s Penny Bazaar and his slogan, “Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny.” Marks was offering easy, comfortable shopping to a mass market: some illiterate and innumerate. U.K. market traders who, like charity/ thrift shops, are rivals to discounters now offer a fixed-price scoop of produce, inviting the same lowengagement customer relationship. In the United States, from 1878, F. W. Woolworth led the five-anddime revolution where, again, neither customer nor salesperson needed advanced interpersonal skills.

Nonfood Discounting Several formats have evolved from F. W. Woolworth’s generalist product range and low-margin goods. These, when combined with its choice of expensive town center locations, finally saw its closure in the United Kingdom in 2009 (in the United States, it earlier transformed into Foot Locker). The dominant name in discount is Walmart, which started with a single nonfood discount outlet in Arkansas. Curiously, rivals Target and K-Mart (formerly Kresge, now Sears) also commenced operations in 1962. In recent years, and with its adoption of the supercenter format selling food, Walmart has largely moved away from straightforward discounting. Unlike Marks and Spencer, however, Walmart never deserted its “everyday low price” image and lowcost operating base: many see this as pressuring staff, suppliers, and the environment. Numerous aspects of Walmart operations, notably sourcing low-cost consumer goods from China—it is China’s fifth largest export market—attract attention. Its preparedness to dally with antitrust regulations has rendered it constantly controversial. Researchers have noted its antipathy toward trade unions and that a significant percentage of its U.S. workforce does not have healthcare coverage. Sustainability and fair-trade

Discourse

lobbyists persistently challenge the high cost of low price. The issue of sourcing is one that has troubled many other discount chains. Fordist economics drives outsourcing to low-labor-cost counties as a route to price-cutting. Lobbyists are constantly seeking instances of poor working conditions and several fashion chains (including UK Primark, rivals to New Look and Matalan) have been forced to revise their ethical statements. With cut-price clothing on sale in supermarkets, debates are now surfacing over the suitability of allegedly oversexualized clothing for children. Growing inequality and the rise of a significant underclass in the United Kingdom as in the United States has fueled the recent rise of Poundland and Poundstretcher. In the United States, Dollar General and Dollar Tree (in Canada, Dollarama) are the inheritors of the five-and-dime tradition.

Food Discounting U.S. supermarkets introduced a price emphasis to food retailing during the Depression years. Postwar, many major retail economies saw food retailing become more focused on the increasingly wealthy and mobile majority. In the United Kingdom, a few food stores, notably Kwik-Save, remained devoted to the smaller discount format and to more traditional shopping locations that otherwise risked becoming food deserts. In 1989, Kwik-Save was seen as cash rich and had a market capitalization two-thirds that of mainstream U.K. retailer ASDA. By 1998, KwikSave had been taken over by rival Somerfield and the identity was later lost. At much the same time, Walmart bought ASDA—with its larger format stores—and has expanded the chain. Several factors explain these contrasted fortunes: one is that discount pricing is open to retailers other than discounters. Mainstream rivals offer up to four price ranges, the lowest of which is “discount.” With a U.K. public increasingly educated to shop at the four main grocery chains that hold nearly 80 percent of the total food market, the power of big purchasers is brought to bear. Kwik-Save dominantly retailed branded goods—though not always the leading brand. In the mid-1970s, its proportion of own-branded goods was—like ASDA—in single figures. Today, the four main U.K. grocery chains have over 50 percent of their grocery range in own-brand. Monopsonistic buying power and control of shelf space make the big four U.K. retailers hard to compete with: a power

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that challenges notions of consumer sovereignty. Further competition for Kwik-Save arrived with German discounters entering the United Kingdom in the 1990s. This drove postrecession growth to 10 percent per annum and is being repeated in the post-2008 downturn. The combination of the 1990s recession and reports of high U.K. profit margins attracted chains such as ALDI and Lidl. Interestingly, such retailers also dominantly retailed own-label products and were therefore able to further undercut Kwik-Save prices. With the less-affluent shopper now attuned to the message that low-cost equated to own-label, Kwik-Save was fatally undermined, according to Leigh Sparks. We should not leave the German discounters without noting that their smallsized, centrally located format is unlikely to cause problems in countries where planning and environmental issues are important. Also, German shopping hours were traditionally more restricted while their product ranges are a good mix for German shopping habits in a country where food specialists still thrive. Alan Hallsworth See also Consumer Co-Operatives; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Convenience; Fashion; Lifestyle; Shopping; Supermarkets; Walmart

Further Readings Eurostat. Retailing in the Single European Market. Luxembourg: Author, 1993. Graff, Tom, and Ashton Dub. “Spatial Diffusion of WalMart: Contagious and Reverse Hierarchical Elements.” Professional Geographer 46, no. 1 (1994): 19–29. Miller, Danny. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity, 1998 Sparks, Leigh. “Spatial-Structural Relationships in Retail Corporate Growth: A Case Study of Kwik-Save.” Service Industries Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 25–84.

DISCOURSE The term discourse refers to a series of utterances or statements connected through their institutional context, the form of language used, and its meaning or significance. It may refer to a single text, such as a formal discussion in writing, or it may refer to a group of related texts by various authors. It may also refer to spoken discussion or debate. The analysis of

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discourse is associated with different traditions of contemporary thought, but all emphasize the use of language to sustain and express a society’s culture. In one tradition, the term grows out of linguistics, particularly sociolinguistics, and refers to the analysis of language—spoken or written—in units larger than a sentence. Grammar and syntax are focused on the sentence, while phonology, morphology, and semantics focus on the form and meaning of individual words. When linguists address the structural properties of discourse, how any one sentence is formed is related to previous sentences and its impact on subsequent sentences and the overall meaning of the discourse. Whether in a sustained speech, a continuous text, or a conversational exchange, the linguistic features—the length of sentences, the complexity of subclauses, the range of vocabulary, for example— contribute to the meaning of the discourse. An analysis of discourse in this linguistic style will also consider how the type of language used is directed to particular listeners or readers. There is considerable overlap between the study of pragmatics in linguistics, the ethnography of talk, conversation analysis, and the analysis of speech as discourse. A second tradition treats discourse as a cultural form and derives from the work of structuralist and poststructuralist writers including Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Here the emphasis shifts from the linguistic properties of the discourse to its structural properties as meaning and as knowledge. Claims to know are made in what Foucault calls “statements,” and their cumulative effect in discourse is to produce a “positivity,” a series of positive statements on a particular topic that might also be thought of as a discipline or subject (e.g., political economy, biology, or philology). The series of statements in a discourse does not derive from a single source because an author will refer to, incorporate, and modify earlier statements by others, using their concepts and ideas even when disagreeing with them. Any possible origin of knowledge becomes culturally significant only once it is given a linguistic form of presentation as speech or writing through which it can be shared and responded to. Even knowledge that is heavily dependent on mathematics, diagrams, or images needs to be uttered or expressed in a discursive—that is, linguistic—form. One of the major consequences of Foucault’s conceptualization of discourse is that he shows its role in the

operation of power in society and the institutional processes that sustain it. To be able to make statements that are heard, incorporated, and responded to is to be able to enter the circuits of power. To have no voice—to be rebutted, silenced, excluded, or ridiculed—is to be deprived of influence on the content of discourse and, ultimately, on its material effects on bodies. A third tradition is critical discourse analysis (CDA). This draws on the critique of power entailed in Foucault’s approach to discourse but addresses the sociolinguistic features of contemporary discourse rather than historical discursive formations. CDA considers the political and powerful effects of linguistic forms and specifically addresses how language operates as ideology, in media texts and institutional contexts. To identify the effects of power, the analysis is of the content of speech or text, the practices through which the speech or text was produced, and the sociocultural and institutional context of its production. For example, a speaker in a conversational setting may exert authority by interrupting or speaking over another speaker, or may implicitly claim authority through his or her subject position (e.g., as doctor, judge, or bank manager). CDA can draw out the ideological implications of the ways in which different discursive conventions are brought together, as when political analysis on television is conducted as a friendly chat and presented as entertainment. A fourth tradition is discursive psychology, which draws on all three earlier traditions but addresses discursive constructions as actions—such as accounting or describing—that realize the cognitive interests or social stakes of actors. Particular ways of saying things—devices or repertoires—may appear to be neutral cognitive practices, such as remembering or reporting, but can, in practice, achieve powerful effects. Discourse contributes to consumer culture in two ways. First, it plays a role in enhancing or promoting particular commodities through advertisements, commentaries, reviews, and discussion. For some consumers, there is, however, as much pleasure to be gained from reading or talking about their consumption (of, e.g., fashion or electronic goods) as from their possession or use of the goods. So, second, discourse itself may be what is consumed. To study a particular area of consumer culture—that of photography, for example—a researcher may choose to

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study the discourse; how practices are described in advertisements, magazine articles, instruction manuals; and how the field is referred to in newspapers, television programs, books, and Internet sites. The discussions and talk of photographers, both professional and amateur and those who use photographs such as customers and picture editors, may also be analyzed discursively to contribute to an understanding of the field. It could be argued that the discourse of institutions such as schools, universities, churches, political parties, and pressure groups is also “consumed,” even where there is no direct exchange of money for an identifiable commodity. Discourse always involves the transmission of values and ideas that may be about commodities but will at the same time also be about aspects of the culture at large. It is through discourse that truths are established, actions legitimated, beliefs sustained, morals approved of, and consensus reached. Tim Dant See also Barthes, Roland; Communications Studies; Content Analysis; Culture-Ideology of Consumerism; Discourse Analysis; Ethnography; Political Economy

Further Readings Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock, 1970. Potter, Jonathan, and Derek Edwards. Discursive Psychology. London: Sage, 1992.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Discourse analysis is a general term for analyzing written or spoken use of a language. Developed by Zellig Harris in 1952, discourse analysis first looked at formal equivalence relations among sentences of a discourse, where equivalent units of information appear together. Discourse in linguistics is defined as “language in use” or “socially situated text and talk.” In other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, communication studies, and marketing, discourse is seen as a system of power and knowledge situated in a specific time and space. Discourse analysis in consumer culture refers to an analysis of oral

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and written speech of consumers (and producers) in order to understand related meanings, cultures, and practices in making theoretical explanations. The outcome of discourse analysis might be a different reading of the same text and an awareness of powerful and weak points of a particular statement, research method, or interpretation. Although discourse analysis is a methodological orientation, it does not provide a particular method of collecting or analyzing data but rather provides a method of approaching a research question. In consumer-behavior studies, as well as in many other disciplines, it is characterized by deconstructive reading and interpretation of written or oral texts, assuming that every text is conditioned in a discourse. A careful and sensitive reading of a text would unravel tight systematic structures and reveal what runs counter to apparent meanings, and thus demonstrate subtle and sometimes hidden meanings. Discourse analysis reads beyond the text per se and tries to understand the underlying conditions behind the problem by extending the perspective of inquiry. Discourse analysis focuses on language use in the form of sentences, phrases, and words that are used in communicating with others. These sentences, which constitute both spoken and written text, are assumed to affect relationships among people and be affected by participants who use them. In other words, discourse analysis focuses on relationships between linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior. It draws from the idea that particular phrases in language are specific to particular situations. The primary purpose is to focus on this relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used, as well as understand how language becomes meaningful to participants at that specific context. For instance, when an instructor says “class is full,” a university student may easily understand that it means all students who take the course are present when the class starts, while another person may think that the classroom is full of people, or a nonnative English speaker may not even capture the meaning of this sentence. Discourse analysis, in its simplest sense, tries to understand this relationship between sentences and people who use those sentences. Related to the concept of discourse, the notion of pragmatics involves what people mean by those

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sentences in the real world. For example, the phrase “class is full” may actually mean “we do not need to take attendance” or “we can start the class” rather than just a statement of the fact that all students are present. Another related method is called conversation analysis, which looks at casual conversations and focuses on pauses, overlaps, and voice changes in trying to understand the meanings in a particular situation. Conversation analysts are often reluctant to utilize predetermined categories and thus follow an inductive approach in their analyses. In this way, one can understand a culture more deeply, which arises from the idea that the same sentence can mean different things in different cultures. This is referred to as ethnomethodology, which gives utmost importance to the observability of social activities in everyday life so that the researcher fully grasps knowledge of what is happening in a social setting. Discourse analysis can be more descriptive and noncritical from one perspective, or more focused on social problems and critical from another. The second form of discourse analysis permits the researcher to understand inequalities and divisions in the society. According to the critical perspective, language cannot be viewed in isolation from the society, as it is interwoven with particular social organizations. For instance, Michel Foucault claimed that a person’s identity is not fixed, but rather, identity is a way of talking about the self and communicating with others, which is a discourse. This view uses a social constructionist orientation, a view that assumes the domination of a particular group on the creation of a concept or practice. Regularities that produce and reproduce these discourses are called discursive formations, which relate to large bodies of knowledge, such as political economy and natural history. Other scholars such as Jürgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu examine ideologies and power relations involved in discourse. The concept of intertextuality reflects the view that all texts are in relationship to other texts. Therefore, concepts and meanings drawn from one text can be shaped by using another text. It can be in the form of a simultaneous or subsequent reading of different texts, or it can be the researcher’s previous readings of different texts. On the other hand, written and spoken forms of the same language are manifested in different ways. Although they may use the same grammatical system, they may encode different meanings.

In its narrow definition, discourse analysis ignores nonverbal text, such as audible and visual forms of communication. However, it has been argued that language is just one of the many forms of signs. Linguistics, therefore, can be seen as a subdiscipline of semiotics, the science of sign systems, where visual text is as important as verbal text. In other words, social practices have both discursive and nondiscursive elements. However, in marketing literature, discourse analysis is also used to analyze advertisements. It is argued that the language of the print media is different from the visual language of television, film, and videos. Several researchers argue that through a discourse analysis of advertisements, the researcher can trace the production process and cues in the process of interpretation. From this perspective, advertising is conceptualized as an institutional practice constructed through language. Discourse analysis can be applied in advertising in order to trace how arguments are built within texts and variations across different texts. More specifically, in consumer behavior, the term discourse refers to either oral or written speech, such as texts in the media, marketplace discourses, and even consumers’ everyday speech in oral (e.g., interviews) and written (e.g., journal entries) form. In a consumer-behavior study, researchers may search texts, such as the Internet or discussion groups, by using specific keywords. From different texts, themes and concepts can be developed through several iterations. The purpose of making these iterations is to identify and interpret commonalities, differences, linkages, and patterns throughout different texts. From this analysis, different “discourses” on a theoretical issue can be developed, which may further provide insights into broader social and cultural concepts. In consumer studies, through discourse analysis, it is possible to generate textual material through indepth ethnographic or phenomenological interviews. Interviews are usually recorded and then transcribed word by word, often including researcher notes about changes in voices, silences, and other interpretations that might aid in the analysis of textual data. Interviews are conducted around certain topics, sometimes accompanied by projective questions when the topic is sensitive or difficult to articulate by informants. Analysis is carried out involving an iterative, part-to-whole reading of verbatim interview transcripts, allowing a holistic understanding of

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textual data within and across different interviews. Experienced researchers are likely to notice deviations from norms and often-internalized social practices, or different or conflicting meanings brought by informants. Since discourse analysis does not rely on particular ways of collecting or analyzing data, reliability and validity of research conducted through discourse analysis would mostly depend on the researcher’s own background and knowledge. Some discourse analysts propose four criteria of reliability and validity for discourse analysis: revealing the coherence of the discourse, using participants’ orientation in explaining phenomena, generation of new problems, and the fruitfulness of the analysis to cope with new types of discourse. Discourse analysis from a consumer-culture perspective may not presume a need for reliability or validity because each interpretation is unique to a specific culture by its definition. Just as there are culturally different ways of doing things, especially including shopping and other consumer behavior, the ways of using language is also different, even for the same language. Berna Tari See also Communication Studies; Consumer Interviews; Content Analysis; Conversation Analysis; Discourse; Ethnography; Markets and Marketing; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

Further Readings Fairclough, Norman. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity, 1992. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1970. Harris, Zellig. “Discourse Analysis.” Language 28, no. 1 (January–March 1952): 1–30. Paltridge, Brian. Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. London: Continuum, 2006. Potter, Jonathan, and Margaret Wetherell. Discourse and Social Psychology. London: Sage, 1987. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983. Thompson, Craig J. “Marketplace Mythology and Discourses of Power.” Journal of Consumer Research 31, no. 1 (June 2004): 162–180. Thompson, Craig J., and Diana L. Haytko. “Speaking of Fashion: Consumers’ Uses of Fashion Discourses and

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the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings.” Journal of Consumer Research 24, no. 1 (June 1997): 15–42.

DISNEY Although referring to the entertainment conglomerate founded by Walt Disney, in cultural terms, Disney and Disneyfication have come to represent immersive ways of structuring consumption experiences. Walt Disney, the founder of the Disney entertainment empire, was born in 1901 and died in 1966. Disney and Disneyfication have shaped consumer culture— especially in the entertainment arena—in major and often defining ways.

Historical Disney Milestones The entire list of culture-shaping events from Disney enterprises could be rather long. Even a short list, however, should include the following milestones: • 1928: first two Mickey Mouse short films released • 1937: other key characters—Donald Duck, Pluto, Goofy, and so forth—introduced; also, first animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs released • 1950: Disney television special launched • 1955: Disneyland opens in Anaheim, California • 1971: Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom opens in Orlando, Florida • 1982: EPCOT Center opens in Orlando • 1983: Tokyo Disneyland opens • 1987: first Disney Store opens • 1992: Euro Disney (now renamed Disneyland Paris) opens • 1996: Capital Cities/ABC acquired • 1998: Disney Cruise Line sets sail • 2006: Apple and Pixar cofounder Steve Jobs becomes largest Disney shareholder because of acquisition of Pixar by Disney

Disneyfication The cultural-economic success of Disney, especially of the theme parks, triggered emulative processes of Disneyfication. This is the process of non-Disney contexts employing the operational principles of Disney

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parks to achieve cultural appeal and economic success similar to Disney’s. Nikhilesh Dholakia and Jonathan Schroeder outline the basic building blocks of Disneyfication: spectacles, themes, dreams (fantasies), and adventures. The key is the “intensification and management of experience” via playfulness, acceleration, integration, and classification. Ersatz elements of nostalgia, atavistic imagery, and folklore are employed liberally to achieve instant identification by and engagement of consumers. Disney environments have expanded to create diverse immersive and interpretive consumer spaces, from museums to retail shops—and also virtual worlds. EPCOT Center in Orlando, combining futuristic pavilions with crafted national simulacra in the World Showcase Section, is an example of the prototypical visionary, fantastic, and novel Disney context (Beard 1982). Disney’s emphasis on creating and panoptically managing risk-free, clean, and sanitized immersive spaces is reassuring to consumers and reinforces the power of vision, fantasy, and novelty. The theming used in Disney parks is presentational rather than representational. Rather than simply replicating what is in the “outside” world, they either present something completely new and unique (e.g., newly developed technologies showcased in pavilions, such as Innovations at EPCOT Center) or they transform something that already exists into ersatz but relatable forms (e.g., the sanitized and simplified version of American history found in the U.S. pavilion of the World Showcase Section at EPCOT Center, excluding the unpleasant narratives of slavery and civil war). Disney parks offer fun infused with manufactured meaning; they are contexts that offer “edutainment.” Disney Parks are, to use Michel Foucault’s term, a heterotopia. They are real sites but they represent the society in a distorted way to emphasize the simplified and sanitized ideals of a culture. As heterotopic spaces, Disney parks make the magic real. In other words, they create the feelings of magical authenticity. Imagineering, which emphasizes the key roles of both imagining and engineering in creating effective designs, is pioneering Disney-invented process for realizing this magic. Disney parks are museums of idealized pasts and futures (King 1981). Linking to noble and desirable ideals makes Disney settings attractive to many

companies for showcasing their brands and corporate social-responsibility programs.

Disneyfication as Transmodern Consumption Ethos Modern thought privileged the real and considered that the real existed outside of, and independent of, humans. In modernity, people sought to take control of nature, which was the source of all that they encountered that was not of their making. Modernity constructed and changed human existence to an unprecedented degree. As modern society progressively intervened in what nature offered, humanity became increasingly surrounded by the products of its own making, which not only mediated the impact of nature on people but also incrementally began to change nature. Most significantly, people’s relationship with nature changed—transforming their understanding of reality. Consequently, there is a growing and tacit understanding that most of what people encounter as their reality is humanly created. Our urban and rural environments, our way of life, what is proper and can be done without legal or social ramifications are all our own making. As a result, in late modernity, people increasingly feel the license to indeed imagine and construct their world. The distinction between fantasy and reality thus diminishes. In places like Las Vegas, Disney World’s towns of Celebration and Boardwalk, and EPCOT Center, designers of the human environment go forth boldly to create new worlds, unfettered by whatever “reality” they encountered heretofore and limited only by their imagination and technology. The environments we now inhabit, therefore, increasingly simulate the designs of the dreammaker extraordinaire, the Disney enterprises, instead of our fantasies simulating what we know of “reality.” That is why cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, grown out of the desert, are, to those who still hold on to the old distinctions, “unreal.” To the new generations that understand the illusion of such distinctions, these new realities are just another experience (Fırat 2001). This is the Disneyfication of our existence. Nikhilesh Dholakia, A. Fuat Fırat, and Ebru Ulusoy Akgun

Disorganized Capitalism See also American Dream; Branding; Commercialization; Desire; Leisure; Mass Tourism; Spaces and Places; Spectacles

Further Readings Beard, Richard R. Walt Disney’s Epcot Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982. Dholakia, Nikhilesh, and Jonathan Schroeder. “Disney: Delights and Doubts.” Journal of Research for Consumers 2 (2001). http://www.jrconsumers.com/ academic_articles/issue_2. Fırat, A. Fuat. “The Meanings and Messages of Las Vegas: The Present of Our Future.” M@n@gement 4, no. 3 (2001): 101–120. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. King, M. J. “Disneyland and Walt Disney World: Traditional Values in Futuristic Form.” Journal of Popular Culture 15, no. 1 (1981): 116–140.

DISORGANIZED CAPITALISM Organized capitalism originates in Marxist political sociology. Capitalism as an organizing social principle refers to the role market forces play in our contemporary world. Market forces favor the concentration of the modes of production in the hands of a minority, may work against government control, and become the underlying cause of social inequalities. With the revolutionization of production to achieve savings in labor time comes a restructuring of human relations across time and space and the rise of a working class that is destined to overturn the status quo and dissolve class boundaries. Marxist theory found various implementations in centrally planned economies of communist and socialist countries that worked against capitalist principles to restrict, if not abolish, private ownership and lay the foundations of a classless society. Organized capitalism inspired cross-national research, focusing on the changes economic development introduces in social and political structures. Coming under the label of dependency theory or world-system theory, such cross-national analyses compose part of globalization studies. The concept sprang from the political writings of Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and other political

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figures of the left, but also from economic theorists such Rudolf Hilferding and social historians such as Jürgen Kocka, who noted the emergence of some socioeconomic and political changes from the mid1870s. These involved the centralization of industrial, banking, and commercial capital and an increasing interconnection of banks and industry that revolutionized consumption practices. A bureaucratization of control placed the state at the center of large monopolies or collective organizations and favored the growth of a managerial hierarchy. These changes produced their own nemesis—they contributed, for example, to the growth of collective organizations in the labor market, including trade unions and employers’ associations. Multiethnic administrative complexes (empires) contributed to the development and increasing control of new overseas markets. For Marxists, colonialism’s organizing principle was capitalism, as it encouraged the exploitation of human beings and resources of countries of settlement, leading to a reorganization of their economies that favored the colonial machine rather than native cultures. This led to sociocultural restructuring with global repercussions, with migrations to (of travelers, traders, administrators, and missionaries who wanted to learn about, govern, and civilize “natives”) and from colonial peripheries (slaves from Africa to Americas to produce sugar for European consumption). Organized capitalism produced an administrative machine whose primary aim was not to safeguard “order” but to promote the national good even at the expense of imperial peripheries (e.g., Indian raw cotton would be sent to English factories for cloth manufacturing, only to be sold back to India, generating economic crisis in the Indian colonies). Simultaneous ideological changes relating to the glorification of science and technology displaced humans from the center of universally shared values, promoting ideological hierarchies (e.g., racism) that haunt developed and developing societies to date. Organized capitalism bolstered the cultural-ideological configurations known as modernism and nationalism: the principal causes of global conflict are often associated with imperialist competition that transmuted in colonial centers into the sort of rampant nationalist feeling that produces authoritarian regimes (German Nazism and Italian Fascism). These changes intensified between 1882

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and 1945 (the era of both world wars), leading to an even tighter organization of capitalism. Organized capitalism is rooted in Western structures of experience—notably, of countries such as Britain or France (two former colonial powers) or the United States (one of the world superpowers) that either once comprised or eventually developed into components of the “world system.” The revision of this thesis by Scott Lash and John Urry in 1987 followed the same model, building a disorganized capitalism argument on Marxian premises. Their work developed around five country cases (Germany, Sweden, Britain, France, and the United States) to claim that that the principles that fostered organization are now unraveling the capitalist system: nowadays, world markets cannot be controlled by a single center, dispersing thus into multiple capitalist bases that challenge the state monopolies of the modern era. The continued expansion of blue-collar workers replaced the idea of working class–led revolutions in nation-states with transnational service class–led changes. This service class resembles the colonial service class (upper-caste native administrators nominated as executive organs of colonial orders by a colonial apparatus that had no cultural or racial ties with the colonized): the Indian professional of middleclass origins but immigrant parentage is the service class subject par excellence. These changes did not eradicate sociocultural hierarchies: the working-class subject of the past has now been replaced by what is known as the dehypostacized, accented voice of call centers or the working-class Bangladeshi or Nigerian workers of local supermarkets. Changes in production and distribution regimes form thus a continuum with the consumption experience. Paramount to these societal changes has been the technocultural revolution that led to business expansion and constant outsourcing of human capacity in poorer countries. The negative aspects of this shift have been similar to those of the colonial era: the racialization and feminization of poverty that for the first time equated social with geographical distance or, alternatively, the feminization of flexible work with little or less recognition (e.g., technology-aided work at home reserved for stay-at-home mothers or even disabled workers). The moment Internet banking (a de facto positional good out of reach for segments of the world population) connects people from different continents, it sets them apart in more than one way. Educational attainment has also driven this change, making upward social mobility

possible for some disadvantaged segments of society: the proliferation of universities democratized (but also marketized) education for the middle classes, transforming the category of “middle class” into a battleground for the acquisition of more social capital (knowledge for better jobs and social recognition) by ethnic minorities and women. Although Lash and Urry’s theoretical model mainly develops on ideal types drawn from the European experience (notably, Germany is used as an example of both bureaucratic and political organization), it has been successfully applied to nonEuropean cases. The mobilization of a non-European example (the United States) was pertinent at a time of global political transformations, making Lash and Urry’s thesis prophetic: two years after its publication, the 1989 revolutions precipitated the collapse of the Soviet regime and its replacement by open market values, providing us with the case of bureaucratic and economic disorganization par excellence. The recent military and economic growth of former global “pariahs,” such as China, a direct product of post-Maoist policies of “reform and opening” to counter political isolation, support political defense and embrace the principles of market competition, gestures toward the idea of emerging economic and political multipolarity. It also highlights an oversight in the original thesis—namely, the importance of military power in capitalist organization. Germany and China, as well as other former colonized countries such as Pakistan, are excellent examples of this phenomenon: all these countries used military-strategic policy as both a way to secure national independence and a stepping-stone to imperialist expansion. A less-developed aspect of the disorganized capitalism thesis pointed to the relationship between capitalism and modernity. Whereas all the changes Lash and Urry explored were facets of modernization (the process of industrialization marks these epochal shifts), “modernity” as such comprises a variety of experiential structures sidelined in the book. Their astute reading of Marshall Berman’s much-quoted Marxist dictum “all that is solid melts into air” as both a longing and fear for the ephemerality of urban life was not followed up in later chapters. Viewed in conjunction with Ulrich Beck’s “cosmopolitan manifesto,” this comment could open up possibilities to explore how urban–rural clashes of mentality are played out on the global plateau. This was rectified in Lash and Urry’s Economies of Sign and Space that opened up their thesis to numerous

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other possibilities of application in as diverse sectors of world economy as tourism, film, and other cultural industries. There, Lash and Urry expanded their comparative examination of postindustrial economies (United Kingdom and the United States, new Germany and Japan) to provide more in-depth analysis of social inequalities and changing experiences of time, space, culture, travel, the environment, and globalization. The analysis followed the original disorganized capitalism thesis, presenting social change as the product of a single social force (service class) that shapes the new knowledge economies. To this they develop the argument that the emergence of flexible social actors and organizations creates the growth of a widespread aesthetic reflexivity, which generates a proactive and creative reading of social life in the spheres of both production and consumption. Rodanthi Tzanelli See also Capitalism; Colonialism; Consumer Policy (China); Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Policy (Japan); Consumer Policy (United States); Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization); Culture Industries; Globalization; Marx, Karl; Political Economy; Postmodernism

Further Readings Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity.” British Journal of Sociology 51 (2000): 79–105. Bermann, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. Hilferding, Rudolf. “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy?” Modern Review 1 (1947): 266–271. Hilferding, Rudolf. Finance Capital. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. First published 1910. Kautsky, Karl. “Finance-Capital and Crises.” Social Democrat 15 (1911): 326. Kocka, Jürgen. Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Oxford: Berghahn, 1999. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. The End of Organized Capitalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage, 1994. Lenin, Vladimir I. “The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Process of the Formation of a Home Market for Large-Scale Industry.” In Collected Works. Vol. 3, 21–608. Moscow: Progress, 1964. Loomba, Annia. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 2005.

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Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

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Since Plato’s Republic (ca. 830 BC), the division of labor has occupied an important space in social and political thought. However, it was given its decisive modern formulation in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). The story here is as follows: prior to the Industrial Revolution, the predominant unit of production was the family, and each family was responsible for producing the vast majority of what it consumed. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, however, the factory became the primary unit of production, and individual workers specialized in distinct and discrete productive tasks. Smith suggested that this brought about increases in productivity and efficiency. To illustrate: imagine two workers who are both producing bread and beer for themselves. If one were to specialize in the production of bread and the other in the production of beer, it is likely that they will become better at producing the commodity in which they have specialized such that more bread and more beer are produced. Consequently, they could both enjoy increased consumption of both commodities. From an economist’s perspective, specialization creates specialists who are in a position to get better at their respective tasks through learning and repetition just as they can acquire the technologies that help improve productivity for a particular task. Indeed, it is much more cost effective to purchase the equipment required for one specialized task than it is to try to purchase several sets of equipment in an attempt to be a jackof-all-trades. Similarly, no time is lost or wasted by having to move between tasks or learn new ones, just as there is no need to waste time or effort on tasks for which one has no aptitude. By contrast, economists recognize several problems with the division of labor, including the monotony and boredom that results from occupational specialization and the reductions in productivity that this might bring about. Similarly,

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there is the possibility of being left with a highly skilled but very inflexible workforce. Finally, the shift from family to factory as the primary productive unit might involve a move toward an impersonal and rigid working environment dominated by the “tyranny of the clock” and industrial rhythms of work. In addition to the economic division of labor, it is important to recognize that a social division of labor arises as a result of occupational specialization. On the one hand, a situation in which the family or household is no longer the primary unit of production will necessarily bring about the fragmentation of social life into different institutions. For example, it means that the family becomes distinct from the workplace, which is distinct from the state, which is distinct from the economy, and so on. More importantly, it is not difficult to see that an occupational division of labor will bring about occupational hierarchies and, in turn, various forms of social stratification. Most notably, social class has traditionally been defined in relation to the position of individuals within occupational hierarchies, and it is well understood that a good deal of inequality exists across social classes. It follows that the division of labor produces and reproduces social inequalities. Furthermore, these inequalities are not limited to differences in social class. Sociologists have also focused on ethnic divisions alongside the ways in which gender inequalities are manifest in the relative positions of men and women in the occupational structure and gendered differences in access to the higher positions within this structure. On the topic of gender, it is important to note that inequalities exist in terms of the domestic division of labor, especially in light of more women entering the workplace. Finally, in the context of globalization, there is a spatial (international and national) division of labor through which further inequalities can be found. For example, low-waged, low-status, and even dangerous work tends to be located in lessdeveloped countries and disadvantaged or marginal regions within affluent societies. Occupational specialization raises questions about what a socially just division of labor might look like. Most commonly, it is thought that this would resemble a meritocracy in which one’s specialism is determined by one’s ability and aptitude. However, from Karl Marx onward, it has been suggested that it is not a level playing field insofar as powerful groups in society can exploit the division of labor to ensure that they remain in their

position of privilege. For example, a wealthy family whose social class is a reflection of its relatively high position within an occupational hierarchy is likely to be in a position to ensure that the children get a good education that will equip them for roles in similar positions. Similarly, their children are likely to be equipped with the social skills required—manners, speech, and disposition—to make a good impression and secure a privileged post. Furthermore, it is likely that those in privileged positions are well connected to other people in privileged positions and that these connections will help their children into similar positions. The division of labor requires and results in interdependence and mutual reliance. In terms of economics, the division of labor makes trade necessary. It follows that in a global economic system, the parts are connected to the whole in a complex string of webs. For example, the accountant is dependent on the baker for her bread who is in turn dependent on yeast and flour producers for raw ingredients, just as they are all dependent on retailers and distributors to ensure the supply and availability of commodities. Similarly, the accountant is dependent on any number of other agents for the range of goods and services she consumes just as others are dependent on the accountant to balance their books and file their tax returns. Of course, in a situation where everybody is dependent on everybody else, there exists the possibility for the unequal exercise of power. For example, a large retailer might demand that its suppliers sell to them at a lower price by threatening to find another supplier. The supplier, whose livelihood depends on the retailer purchasing its produce, may not have enough market influence to respond by, for example, threatening to supply to the retailer’s key rival. More positively, Émile Durkheim has suggested that the division of labor and mutual interdependency form the basis of solidarity in modern societies. Using the metaphor of the human body—in which the organs are all different to one another but work together for the good of the body as whole— he suggests that modern societies are characterized by organic solidarity. Organic solidarity, argues Durkheim, fosters an awareness of individuality but also an awareness of mutual interdependence and the idea that society is something greater than the sum of its parts. Viewed as such, the division of labor performs a vital social and moral function. However, it is worth noting that Durkheim recognized that the

Do-It-Yourself

division of labor could fail, especially when it is not matched by a framework of moral regulation or if social inequalities prevent a level playing field when it comes to occupational specialization. Finally, the division of labor is a useful tool for thinking about consumption and consumer culture. For a start, occupational specialization and the move from family to factory create a situation in which nobody has to produce all of the things that are consumed. Similarly, the increases in productivity and production mean that there is more available for consumption and, arguably, this creates increases in welfare. The division of labor and the system of interdependency that it brings about makes trade and exchange necessary. Consequently, in order to consume, individuals have to enter into this system, and it is under these conditions that consumer culture can flourish. Interestingly enough, resistance to the consumer culture and the division of labor can be found in advocates of self-sufficiency. These range from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to more recent interest in downshifting and voluntary simplicity. Against the claim that the division of labor allows for increased consumption and increased welfare, it is well known that social inequalities are manifest in patterns of consumption. Similarly, the relationship between the division of labor and consumption can be thought of as one of alienation insofar as it distances workers from the fruits of their labor. For example, if one is performing a specialized task in a production line, it is entirely probable that one will never see the finished product, less still have the chance to enjoy it. Indeed, perhaps one of the most perverse consequences of the division of labor is that a low-paid worker could be producing a high-price commodity that she will never be able to afford or consume. David Evans See also Alienation; Domestic Division of Labor; Downshifting; Households; Inequalities; Moral Economy; Social Class; Surplus Value

Further Readings Bottero, Wendy. Stratification: Social division and Inequality. London: Routledge, 2005. Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labour in Society. New York: Free Press, 1964. First published 1893. Newman, Katherine. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

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Smith, Adam. An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1976. First published 1776. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. First published 1854.

DO-IT-YOURSELF Do-it-yourself refers to people providing for themselves services that they could be expected to pay a professional to provide. While a vast range of activities can be undertaken under the label of do-ityourself (DIY), the term emerged as a recognizable cultural phenomenon in relation to home maintenance and repair, and that remains its core field of reference and is the main focus of this entry. Throughout history and across cultures, householders have of course done home maintenance and improvement, and even construction, themselves. Yet DIY and the use of the term to refer to a more or less bounded field of meanings and activities is both culturally specific and historically recent. Understanding the emergence of the term helps to further illuminate the position of DIY within both consumer culture and the progress of advanced capitalism. To begin with, what makes the execution of a particular task DIY is the expectation that the practitioner might have paid someone else to do it. The emergence of DIY can be seen as a reflection of ongoing processes of professionalization and specialization of paid work in the division of labor. Beyond this basic definitional point, the rise of DIY can be seen to result from its role as a recreation from, or even resistance to, the ongoing evacuation of craft skills and manual production from paid employment, particularly for the urban and suburban middle classes. Indeed, the sorts of activities that might now be recognized as DIY, at least in its more skilled expressions, were valorized by artisanal ideals inherited from the Arts and Crafts movement and its valorization of skilled productive manual labor. Home maintenance and improvement provided a recreational release from a working life largely evacuated of productive skilled manual labor, at least for the burgeoning middle classes of suburban white-collar workers who provided the seedbed for the growth of DIY. DIY has always been understood overwhelmingly as a male pursuit and, despite rapidly widening

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female participation, it remains so today. For Steven Gelber, the rise of DIY is inseparable from the dynamics of gender and household divisions of labor in the twentieth century. In postwar America, household maintenance and improvement enabled suburban husbands to respond to growing expectations that they should be actively involved in the home without compromising masculine identities. The requirements of the work could legitimate the carving out of space in the home for a bench or workshop, and allow men to claim time in the domestic economy, enabling them to retain separation from the routines of daily reproduction while rewarding the household with the material products of their skilled labor as a contribution within the domestic division of labor. By the 1950s, undertaking home maintenance and improvement was an established element of typical suburban masculinity, in the United States at least. However, it was the 1970s that saw the stabilization of DIY as an idea and as a consumer market. Before the 1970s, securing the wherewithal for a DIY project meant visiting potentially intimidating places like builders’ yards or plumbers’ merchants. From the late 1960s, dedicated DIY retailers began to be established, like B&Q in the United Kingdom or Castorama in France (both in 1969), designed to be accessible one-stop shops for the DIYer. The 1970s also saw a proliferation of DIY magazines and manuals, providing not only the competence but also inspiration and legitimation of DIY as a normal thing to do. Television also responded to and fueled the growth of DIY, most visibly from the 1990s with the emergence of home-makeover shows and programs based around finding profitable ways to increase the value of home as an investment. From the same period, the Internet has become a means of sharing of know-how and ideas. Another important element has been the increasingly rapid rate of development in tools and materials. Central to the story of DIY has been the power drill, which became accessible to enthusiastic and relatively affluent DIYers in the 1950s. As the DIY market took shape, drills were increasingly engineered to lower tolerances, making them adequate for occasional amateur use while being at a more accessible price, while the globalization of production meant that by the end of the twentieth century, power drills were available so cheaply as to be a viable purchase for even the most occasional user. Clearly, a DIYer with a power drill has a greater

range of capabilities than one without, shifting the boundary between what can be taken on as DIY and what a professional is needed for. This boundary is similarly shifted by innovations in materials. For example, push-fit plastic fittings make a wider range of plumbing jobs accessible to someone without the skill needed to solder joints in copper piping. The practice of DIY therefore generates market demands, leading to innovations in products, retail, and media that serve in turn to progressively normalize and potentially extend the practice of DIY, according to Elizabeth Shove and colleagues. DIY provides a means to a range of ends, from increasing property value through judicious changes, to moving a house toward an ideal vision of home. While DIY can be undertaken in pursuit of such grand designs, it is more often a means to continually adapt the physical and aesthetic space of the home to the shifting needs and purposes of the household. This is evident in the clustering of DIY activity in a home over time as major changes, such as initially moving in, the start of parenthood, children leaving home, or elderly parents arriving, can each be the impetus for DIY remodeling of the home. However, focusing on the purposes served through the end result is to miss what is interesting about DIY. The physical changes made in pursuit of exchange value, aesthetic style, social aspiration, or the changing needs of the household could usually be just as well served by paying a professional. This leaves open the question of why people DIY. Part of the answer of course is that sometimes householders cannot afford to pay someone to do the job for them. However, according to Colin C. Williams, statistical evidence shows that ability to pay does not adequately account for the decision to DIY. To grapple directly with DIY, it is necessary to tangle with the actual doing of DIY. Such a focus serves to emphasize the active bringing together of human body and its capacities of physical and mental engagement with the fabric of the building, mediated through tools and materials. As such, DIY can serve in the appropriation of a property, gaining the particular sense of ownership and belonging that comes from mixing one’s own labor with the house, notes Daniel Miller. It emphasizes also a distinctive property of DIY as a field of consumption. Like certain other fields, for example, cooking or hobbies like needlecraft, DIY involves the purchase of commodities whose use depends on their

Domestic Division of Labor

transformation and their being skillfully brought together with other commodities and materials, generally with the ambition of creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is in these processes that DIY contests classification as either consumption or production. These characteristics align DIY with Colin Campbell’s account of craft consumption. DIY refuses to fit within the key conceptual divisions. It is clearly a field of consumption, generally depending on the practitioner acquiring and using a range of tools, materials, and fixings, along with ideas and aspirations, much of which resources are provided by a multibillion-dollar manufacturing and retail industry. Yet DIY is also clearly production, making physical changes to a property that can often result in some sort of added value, whether in the use or in the exchange value of the property. DIY can clearly be hard physical work, undertaken reluctantly to serve inescapable obligations. Yet it also fits in to some practitioners’ lives as a form of leisure, bringing rewards through skilled manual engagement with materials, producing things or changes through processes with qualities of craft activity. Through the specific ways in which it challenges divisions, such as those between consumption and production, leisure and work, DIY provides a challenging lens on debates around consumption. Matthew Watson See also Appropriation; Capitalism; Craft Consumer; Craft Production; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling; Division of Labor; Leisure

Further Readings Campbell, Colin. “The Craft Consumer: Culture, Craft and Consumption in a Postmodern Society.” Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 1 (2005): 23–42. Clarke, Alison. “The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration.” In Home Possessions, edited by D. Miller, 23–46. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Gelber, Steven. “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity.” American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1997): 66–112. Goldstein, Carolyn. Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998. Miller, Daniel. “Consumption and Its Consequences.” In Consumption and Everyday Life, edited by H. Mackay, 13–64. London: Sage and the Open University, 1997.

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Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand, and Jack Ingram. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Watson, Matthew, and Elizabeth Shove. “Product, Competence, Project and Practice.” Journal of Consumer Culture 8, no. 1 (2008): 69–89. Williams, Colin C. “A Lifestyle Choice? Evaluating the Motives of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Consumers.” International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 32, no. 5 (2004): 270–278.

DOMESTIC DIVISION

OF

LABOR

Domestic labor refers to the unpaid caring and housework tasks undertaken within households to provide for the needs of family and other household members. Activities in Western societies typically encompass a range of tasks such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, gardening, pet care, and household repairs, in addition to child care and obtaining goods and services. This work is often referred to as committed time in the literature on time use. Domestic labor is an important component of gender-identity formation with much research arguing that the performance of housework produces gender, at the same time as accomplishing domestic activities. It may also be argued that domestic labor is an increasingly important component of consumer identity, particularly as it encompasses outsourcing of some domestic work to certain groups or classes, purchasing of goods and services, and the maintenance of home and lifestyles, all of which act to produce and affirm social identities and class distinctions. The activities defined as domestic labor are not static across time. A number of forces shape the nature and content of domestic labor, including changes in the nature and location of paid work, technological changes in household appliances, changes in family structure and size, changes in the architecture and décor of the family home, changes in patterns and styles of food consumption and clothing, as well as changes in the definitions and meaning of care work, in particular parenting. Historically, the tasks commonly associated with housework in the West only emerged after industrialization as family life was increasingly separated from industrial production. Prior to industrialization, many of the goods and services essential to the maintenance of family life were produced within households. The

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development of a wage economy led to the increasing separation of home and paid work and a redefinition of the activities carried out in households as unproductive labor. As industrialization developed, work came to be defined as activities done by men outside the household in return for a wage, while the home and family were increasingly defined as women’s sphere, a private, nonproductive world separate from the public world of commerce and industry. The nature of domestic labor was further transformed in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the domestic-economy movement with its emphasis on scientific training and the desire to teach women, particularly working-class women and the domestic servant class, the principles of hygienic cleaning and cooking. For middle-class women, domestic-economy experts promoted housework as a new profession, combining a range of managerial, creative, and scientific skills. New tasks, such as compiling schedules, timetables, and record keeping, were created to make housework more efficient but actually resulted in an increase in the amount of time spent on housework. Additionally, the architecture of the home was revised to accommodate the new image of the kitchen as a laboratory where the woman of the house spent a great deal of her time. The introduction of gas, and later electricity, to many private homes in the early part of the twentieth century led to a number of other architectural changes in the family home. Space had now to be made in the kitchen for the refrigerator, stove, and hot-water service. Some years later, the washing machine and vacuum cleaner became essential household appliances, promoted as both laborsaving appliances and essential consumer goods for the middle-class household. As many feminists and historians have noted, however, it is debatable whether these technological changes led to a lightening of women’s loads. The introduction of domestic machines such as the washing machine and vacuum cleaner went hand-in-hand with new standards of cleanliness and may have led to an increase in women’s time on domestic work. The idea of a spring clean disappeared and was replaced with the necessity of daily dusting and vacuuming. Rather than a weekly wash day, daily clothes washing became a necessity that in turn increased the amount of time spent folding and ironing clothes. One of the forms of labor that has emerged since the mid-twentieth century as an integral and everexpanding component of domestic labor is shopping.

This includes both purchasing goods for immediate consumption, such as groceries and other household goods, as well as consumption as a means of identity formation and a symbolic indicator of lifestyle, class position, and status. Some research in this area has focused on the architecture of the home, such as the kitchen, showing how the consumption of particular housing styles, décor, and appliances is associated with symbolic mechanisms of identity formation and class or individually derived lifestyles. Others have focused on the consumption of expensive leisure goods by high-income earners as symbols of a desired, but unattainable, lifestyle. In work-rich but time-poor households, Oriel Sullivan and Jonathan Gershuny show how expensive leisure equipment, in contrast to other kinds of expensive items bought for conspicuous display, form an important component of an imaginary future lifestyle when more time is available to pursue leisure activities. Parenting is an also an area of domestic work that has changed considerably over time, requiring increasing amounts of time and showing clear differences in style and nature across social class. Despite the decline in fertility levels in much of the Western world, evidence suggests that both men and women are investing greater amounts of time in child care, with women in full-time employment spending as much time with their children as nonemployed mothers, usually by giving up leisure. Like other aspects of domestic work, child-care labor is gendered in important ways, with men typically spending more time playing with children and taking them to sporting activities, while women spend more time on routine physical care. Research suggests that perceptions of good fathering have changed over time, with fathering no longer perceived solely in terms of the provision of economic support but increasingly including the social, emotional, and physical care of children, while, similarly, notions of good mothering increasingly combine perceptions of women as a good earner as well as someone who provides quality emotional, physical, and educational care to their children. Some of the most recent research on the domestic division of labor has examined within-individual variation over time. As individuals move through different life-course stages such as marriage and parenthood, and as households are formed and reconstituted over time as a result of separation, divorce, and remarriage, the amount of domestic labor to be performed varies, and the factors contributing

Domestic Services

to men and women’s levels of involvement also vary. For example, research has shown that remarried men and women have more equal divisions of labor than those in their first marriages, while other work has shown that cohabiting couples have more egalitarian divisions of labor than married couples. Similarly, there is evidence that the domestic division of labor is more traditional in households with children and also that the timing and age of children is important in shaping men’s level of involvement in domestic work. Moreover, the pathway individuals take as they move through the life course may influence domestic divisions of labor, with some research suggesting that married couples who have cohabited prior to marriage have more egalitarian domestic arrangements than those who marry directly without a period of cohabitation. Feminist researchers have long been concerned with the gendering of domestic labor. This concern stems from the view that women’s responsibility for the bulk of unpaid child care and housework lies at the heart of gender inequality in modern societies. Many researchers, policymakers, and activists have argued that women’s responsibility for unpaid labor and caring work underlies broader patterns of gender inequality. The widespread entry of married women into paid market work from the 1970s onward was expected to herald an associated change in men’s levels of involvement in unpaid and caring work. But there are mixed views about just how much the observed changes have led to greater equality in domestic divisions of labor and whether we are witnessing the emergence of new areas of gender inequality, particularly in access to leisure. Many studies of Western societies report that women are still responsible for about 70 percent of domestic labor and that women have much less free time than men, particularly when they have young children. Janeen Baxter See also Architecture; Domestic Services; Domestic Technologies; Emotional Labor; Industrial Society; Lifestyle; Shopping

Further Readings Baxter, Janeen. “To Marry or Not to Marry: Marital Status and the Household Division of Labor.” Journal of Family Issues 26 (2005): 300–321. Baxter, Janeen, Belinda Hewitt, and Michele Haynes. “Life Course Transitions and Housework: Marriage,

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Parenthood and Time on Housework.” Journal of Marriage and Family 70 (2008): 259–272. Coltrane, Scott. Family Man: Fatherhood, Housework, and Gender Equity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Cowan, Ruth. More Work for Mother. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. London: Pluto, 1979. Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Reiger, Kerreen. The Disenchantment of the Home. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Southerton, Dale. “Consuming Kitchens: Taste, Context and Identity Formation.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1 (2001): 179–203. Sullivan, Oriel. “The Division of Housework among ‘Remarried’ Couples.” Journal of Family Issues 18 (1997): 205–224. Sullivan, Oriel, and Jonathan Gershuny. “Inconspicuous Consumption: Work-Rich, Time-Poor in the Liberal Market Economy.” Journal of Consumer Culture 4 (2004): 79–100.

DOMESTIC SERVICES In recent decades, there has emerged an assumption that in commercial consumer cultures, domestic services have become increasingly commodified. Domestic services refers to household work tasks that allow the social reproduction of members of the household. Routine domestic services range from everyday housework tasks (e.g., housecleaning, laundry, ironing, cooking, and washing up) through household administration and gardening to caring activities (e.g., child care, elder care, and pet care). Nonroutine domestic services, meanwhile, range from house-maintenance tasks (e.g., outdoor painting, plastering, decorating, and mending broken windows and appliances) to home improvement activities (e.g., installing double glazing, insulation, putting in a bathroom suite, building an extension or loft conversion, putting in central heating, and carpentry). Each and every one of these domestic services can be conducted using various sources of labor. For example, it cannot be asserted that cooking is always conducted as unpaid domestic work, and window

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cleaning by formal employees. Cooking, for instance, can be conducted as unpaid domestic work (e.g., where one cooks for oneself or one’s family), unpaid community work (e.g., where one cooks for neighbors or friends on an unpaid basis), paid informal work (e.g., where one cooks in a restaurant on an off-the-books basis for “informal” payments that are not declared to the government for tax, benefit, or labor-law purposes), or formal employment (e.g., where one is a formally employed chef either registered self-employed or paid on a pay-as-you-earn basis). Different domestic services, therefore, do not belong to different types of work. Instead, all domestic services can be undertaken using each and every form of work. Four basic types of work, therefore, can be used to provide domestic services. They are • self-provisioning, which is unpaid work undertaken by household members for themselves and other members of their household; • unpaid community work, which is work provided on an unpaid basis by and for the extended family, social or neighborhood networks, and more formal voluntary and community groups, and ranges from kinship exchange through friendship/neighborly reciprocal exchanges to one-way volunteering for voluntary organizations; • paid informal work, where legal goods and services are exchanged for money, but these exchanges are unregistered by, or hidden from, the state for tax, social security, or labor-law purposes; and • paid formal employment, which is paid work that is declared to the state for tax, social security and labor law purposes.

Domestic Services in Historical Perspective A widespread belief is that over the long run of history, the provision of domestic services has steadily shifted from the informal economy (e.g., self-provisioning, paid informal work) into the formal economy. Indeed, this is the assumption underpinning the view that households are outsourcing ever-greater amounts of their domestic service provision to the formal economy. Examining the household in historical perspective, a major historical shift has taken place away from

household production for domestic consumption to a situation in which household members work for employers in exchange for wages. Household members have increasingly secured the livelihood of themselves and their codependents by selling their labor as a commodity within the labor market rather than by producing goods that satisfy their own immediate needs. This development is itself part of the wider separation of people from the means of production. Unable to produce their own goods for immediate consumption, modern workers (or their “breadwinners”) must sell their labor in exchange for cash to purchase goods on consumer markets. Goods, which had been made in the home or by local craftsmen for barter and only occasionally for market exchange, were gradually replaced by goods production en masse in factories. This led to a separation of home and production. Those who had previously made goods for their own use started to use their wages to purchase factory-made items. The transfer of domesticservice provision (rather than goods production) out of the sphere of self-provisioning and into the formal economy, however, has been rather slower. Indeed, and unlike goods production, the vast majority of domestic services are perhaps still met through selfprovisioning. Whether domestic services will follow the same path as goods production from the home to the formal economy is therefore open to question.

Contemporary Debates Regarding Domestic Services A long-standing belief has been that over the long run of history, there would be a steady formalization of the domestic services sphere and that an evergreater proportion of all domestic services would be provided by those in formal jobs. In recent years, however, this has started to be questioned, not least because there is little evidence that there has been an outsourcing of domestic services to the formal economy. Most studies of how people spend their working time based on time-use diaries have revealed that self-provisioning remains rife in cotemporary societies. Even if self-sufficiency, by which is meant a total reliance on self-provisioning, is therefore today rare, self-reliance, by which is meant the use of self-provisioning as one of a plurality of economic practices, remains a ubiquitous strategy throughout the world. It is also a practice that, if anything, is growing relative to the formal economy. Most time-budget studies

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reveal no reduction in the time spent on unpaid work relative to paid work in the advanced economies over the past half century. Instead, quite the opposite is the case. There has been an informalization, not formalization, of working time in many Western nations. There is therefore a growing desire to understand not only the different sources of labor used to provide domestic services and how this varies across populations and temporally but also how this impacts the gender divisions of domestic labor. On the latter issue, in particular, it is now widely recognized that when domestic services are conducted using selfprovisioning, women remain responsible for the vast bulk of such work and that although men might help out to a slightly greater extent than in the past, men largely still do not take responsibility for organizing such work. In dual-earner heterosexual-couple households, for example, women remain responsible for producing the shopping lists for the supermarket or remembering that birthday and anniversary cards need to be bought. Where such women have managed to reduce their domestic workload, it is largely not due to men doing more. Rather, it is because women are outsourcing the work to other women. The outcome has been a debate over the implications of this trend. The widely held view has been that it is creating low-paid, low-skilled, and exploitative jobs and re-creating the master-servant relationship. This is currently exemplified in the tendency for relatively affluent women to employ women who are less well off to conduct their domestic services, rather than forcing men to do a greater share of the domestic workload. This tendency toward a commodification of domestic services has been further compounded throughout the Western world by many governments actively encouraging households to outsource their domestic services to formal service providers. In many European countries, for example, service vouchers have been introduced that enable households to purchase formal domestic services that are subsidized by the state.

Domestic Services: The Future In the future, it is likely that the further encroachment of commercial businesses into the realm of domestic services will be put under greater scrutiny, not least in terms of the quality of jobs being created and the implications of such a trend on gender inequalities.

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At the same time, nevertheless, how commercial business can increase their market share of the domesticservices sector will be actively investigated, not least how the numerous barriers to the further commodification of the domestic services sector can be combated. For example, households do not outsource simply because of cost constraints or opposition to employing others to do their “dirty work.” Other reasons relate not so much to household circumstances but to formal services. Ease of access to formal service providers, the availability of formal enterprises, their reliability, the quality of their end product, and trust issues are all reasons for not using commercial domestic services and for turning toward other forms of provision. How these might be tackled will be a fertile area for future research not only for those seeking to facilitate a commercialization of the domestic services sector but also for those seeking to understand the blockages to commodification in contemporary societies and therefore cultures of resistance to commodification. Whether the quality of jobs in this potentially expanding domestic-services sector can be improved in terms of both pay and conditions is another issue that will become increasingly important. Until now, it has been perhaps simply accepted as inevitable and immutable that jobs in the domestic services sphere are low paid and of poor quality. How they might be upgraded will be an important issue for the future not just due to the increasing proportion of workers who might earn a living in this sphere but also for tackling gender inequalities in the formal labor market. Colin C. Williams See also Commodification; Division of Labor; Domestic Division of Labor; Emotional Labor; Informalization; Outsourcing; Self-Service Economy; Service Industry

Further Readings Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, Nicholas Faraclas, and Claudia von Werlhof, eds. There Is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization. London: Zed, 2001. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, and Marie Mies. The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy. London: Zed, 1999. Gershuny, Jonathan. After Industrial Society: The Emerging Self-Service Economy. London: Macmillan, 1978.

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Gershuny, Jonathan. Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Oakley, Anne. The Sociology of Housework. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974. Pahl, Raymond. Divisions of Labour. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Williams, Colin C. Re-Thinking the Future of Work: Directions and Visions, Basingstoke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007. Windebank, Jan. “Dual-Earner Couples in Britain and France: Gender Divisions of Domestic Labour and Parenting Work in Different Welfare States.” Work, Employment & Society 15 (2001): 269–290.

DOMESTIC TECHNOLOGIES Domestic technologies encompass a vast array of tools, devices, and machines that are commonly used within the home. Such technologies are often categorized under headings including domestic appliances (e.g., vacuum cleaners and food processors), white goods (e.g., washing machines, dishwashers, and refrigerators), brown goods (e.g., ovens and microwaves), and entertainment items (e.g., televisions, DVD players, VCRs, PCs, and laptops) but are often used for multiple purposes—and are increasingly integrated into what has been referred to as the “SMART” home. Domestic technologies are both practically and symbolically significant to the emergence of consumer culture—practical in the sense of shifting patterns of time use to facilitate the growth of leisure, and symbolic of the household as a critical unit of consumption. In the social sciences, there has been a long history of research that has attempted to examine and document the development of domestic technologies. This has included the evolution of specific technologies through time (see Shove and Southerton 2002), patterns of adoption and use (e.g., Rogers 1962), and how technologies are appropriated within everyday household and family life (Cowan 1985) as well as reflect—and perpetuate—the insistently gendered character of domestic life and division of labor (Wajcman 2007a).

Given the widespread diffusion of many domestic technologies in Western societies, it has often been assumed that such objects have led to the automation of various domestic tasks and activities and have consequently decreased the amount of time individuals spend conducting household work. However, empirical evidence supporting this claim is far from conclusive. For example, Michael Bittman and colleagues, in their analysis of the Australian 1997 Time Use Survey, argued that domestic technologies seldom reduce the time that women (who historically have the foremost responsibility for carrying out domestic work) spend conducting domestic labor and, paradoxically, in some instances, the use of such objects actually increases the time conducting household chores and activities. Their findings suggest that even though technologies such as washing machines have reduced the time required to launder clothing, we are washing our clothes much more regularly than we did in the past. In Bittman and colleagues’ words, “Appliances are used to increase output and not to save labour time” (2004, 413). In addition to emphasizing the symbolic importance of domestic technologies in terms of ownership and display, studies have also revealed the inherent gendered nature of domestic tools, machines, and devices and how they are entangled in the sociospatial relations of families and households. Indeed, the purchase and use of such objects have as such been acknowledged as being powerful household practices that are entrenched in the subjective construction and politics of households. Domestic technologies that are routinely used in unpaid domestic work (such as cooking, cleaning, and child care) often evoke strong feminine connotations, whereas those that are used for economically valued producing activities (such as do-it-yourself) are more likely to symbolize more masculine ideals and traits. Consequently, the consumption of domestic technologies can have a significant role in the constitution of masculine and feminine subjectivities as well as the gendering of domestic space. Furthermore, while domestic technologies are used by men (e.g., vacuum cleaners, microwaves), they are generally not considered “men’s machines.” Jennifer Scanlon, for example, argues that the use of items such as barbeque equipment and carving knives enables men to take part in household cultures without compromising their masculine identities. Gender symbolism has, therefore, been suggested

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by Judy Wajcman (2000) as a means to instill technologies as a male-orientated domain, embodied in metaphors, symbols, and values that evoke strong male connotations. Consequently, some technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc.) are more likely designed to perpetuate feminine values such as user-friendliness and care, whereas more high-tech machines are used outside the home. Given the proliferation and multifaceted uses of information and communications technologies within the home in recent years, it has become recognized that the boundaries of the home have become increasingly blurred as a consequence of the gradual permeability of information, presence flow, and behavior that have long been associated with the “outside” world. In particular, it is often claimed that the Internet and related technologies (facilitated by home PCs, laptops, and mobile technologies) have served to increase the integration between the spheres of home, leisure, work, and other spaces (through home working, online shopping, gaming, etc.). However, little attention has been focused on how such technologies could potentially displace, reorganize, and fracture time to “fit in” with the plethora of routines and rituals conducted within the household as well as the responsibilities which fell under the remit of domestic commitments outside of the home (see Dijst, Kwan, and Schwanen 2009). Jonathan Elms See also Appropriation; Consumption and Time Use; Do-It-Yourself; Domestic Division of Labor; Households; Information Technology

Further Readings Bittman, Michael, James M. Rice, and Judy Wajcman. “Appliances and Their Impact: The Ownership of Domestic Technology and Time Spent on Household Work.” The British Journal of Sociology 5, no. 3 (2004): 401–423. Cowan, R. Schwartz. “How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum.” In Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcam. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1994 Dijst, Martin, Mei-Po Kwan, and Tim Schwanen. “Guest Editorial: Decomposing, Transforming, and Contextualising (E)-Shopping.” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 36 (2009): 195–203. Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1962.

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Scanlon, Jennifer. The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Shapiro, Stuart. “Places and Spaces: The Historical Interaction of Technology, Home and Privacy.” Information Society 14 (1998): 275–284. Shove, Elizabeth, and Dale Southerton. “Defrosting the Freezer: From Novelty to Convenience—Narratives of Normalization.” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 3 (2002): 301–319. Wajcman, Judy. “Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies: In What State Is the Art?” Social Studies of Sciences 30, no. 3 (2000): 447–464. Wajcman, Judy. “From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience.” Information, Communication & Society 10, no. 3 (2007a): 287–298. Wajcman, Judy. “ICTs and Inequality: Net Gains for Women?” In Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies, edited by Robin Mansell, Chrisanthi Avgerou, Danny Quah, and Roger Silverstone, 581–600. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007b.

DOUGLAS, MARY (1921–2007) Mary Douglas, one of the most celebrated social anthropologists of her time, was born in 1921 and died in 2007. She was the author of more than a dozen books. Her first book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo, published in 1966, established her reputation. Among her other books are Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970), Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975), The World of Goods: An Anthropological Theory of Consumption (1979), written with Baron Isherwood, and Risk and Culture (1980), written with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. She received her PhD in anthropology from Oxford University, where she was a student of the distinguished anthropologist E. E. Evans-Prichard. Douglas taught at the University of London from 1952 to 1978, was a resident scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York for a few years, and then taught at Northwestern University (1981–1985) and Princeton University (1985–1988). She wrote on a wide variety of topics, from rituals, religions, and taboos in preliterate cultures to behavior in contemporary consumer cultures. Douglas has a discussion in her book Natural Symbols that led to the development of grid-group

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theory, the topic of most significance to those interested in consumer cultures. Douglas applied gridgroup theory in a seminal article, “In Defence of Shopping,” which appeared originally in her collection of essays Objects and Objections, published by the Toronto Semiotic Circle, and later in Pasi Falk and Colin Cambell’s edited book, The Shopping Experience. Grid-group theory suggests that individuals face two questions in establishing an identity: “Who am I?” and “What should I do?” They arrive at their identities by becoming members of groups—Douglas calls them lifestyles—with either strong boundaries that contain them tightly or with weak boundaries that allow them to pass in and out of the group with ease. They answer the second question by becoming members of groups that have either few rules or numerous and varied rules and prescriptions. This generates four, and only four, lifestyles, which are shown here: Group (Boundaries) Strong boundaries Weak boundaries Strong boundaries Weak boundaries Grid (Prescriptions) Numerous prescriptions Numerous prescriptions Few prescriptions Few prescriptions Lifestyle Hierarchical (Elitists) Fatalist (Isolates) Egalitarian (Enclavists) Individualists

Douglas offers an important insight about these four cultural types in her article on shopping: None of these four lifestyles (individualist, hierarchical, enclavist, isolated) is new to students of consumer behaviour. What may be new and unacceptable is the point that these are the only four distinctive lifestyles to be taken into account, and the other point, that each is set up in competition with the others. Mutual hostility is the force that accounts for their stability. (1997, 19)

These groups are important, Douglas suggests, because they shape our consumer choices. It is our cultural alignments, she explains, that are the strongest predictors of our consumer preferences. When we are wandering around shopping centers or doing any shopping, we are actualizing the lifestyle to which we are attached and rejecting the kinds of choices made by members of other lifestyles. She writes, We have to make a radical shift away from thinking about consumption as a manifestation of individual choices. Culture itself is the result of a myriad of individual choices, not primarily between commodities but between kinds of relationships. The basic choice a rational individual has to make is the choice about what kind of society to live in. According to that choice, the rest follows. Artefacts are selected to demonstrate that choice. Food is eaten, clothes are worn, cinema, books, music, holidays, all the rest are choices that conform with the initial choice for a form or society. (17)

When she writes the word society, she is referring to lifestyles. Her thesis flies in the face of those who argue that it is individual taste that shapes our consumer behavior. What seems to be individual taste, her argument suggests, is based on unconscious imperatives located in the lifestyle to which people belong. What is more interesting, according to her theory, cultural bias shapes our behavior. “Shopping,” she writes, “is agonistic, a struggle not to define what one is, but what one is not” (30), which means that shopping is, since we are rejecting other lifestyles, ultimately an act of cultural defiance. Arthur Asa Berger See also Collective Identity; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Identity; Lifestyle; Material Culture; Rituals; Shopping; Theories of Practice

Further Readings Berger, Arthur Asa. Shop ’til You Drop: Consumer Behavior and American Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Douglas, Mary. “In Defence of Shopping.” In The Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell, 15–30. London: Sage, 1997.

Downshifting

DOWNSHIFTING Downshifting is a concept that spread in the United States during the 1990s, starting with the Amy Salzman’s book Down-Shifting: Reinventing Success on a Slower Track. Downshifting involves focusing less on paid work in order to have time to do more of the things one wants to do while cutting out unnecessary expenditure. But it does not mean going to the extremes and deviating too far from common behavior or attempting self-sufficiency. The concept is also used in England, Australia, and other industrialized countries, for example, in Sweden, where it quickly won acceptance in 2008. The term is derived from the process of changing gears in a car to drive more slowly. It can be defined as making a voluntary, long-term change in one’s lifestyle that involves accepting significantly less income and consumption. Downshifting often has to do with practical changes that reflect a relatively low level of orientation toward work and consumption. Ideas about an ascetic or simple life, coupled with frugality and limited aspirations, are well known in most major religions, as well as in literature. An example is the still popular book Walden (1855) by Henry David Thoreau, which describes a simple life in the forest far from urban stress. Media often use downshifting and the term voluntary simplicity as exchangeable concepts. The latter term was spread through the 1980s through a book by Duane Elgin titled Voluntary Simplicity: Towards a Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. The subtitle of the book has become a slogan for the American simplicity movement. However, these concepts can be seen as separate categories. One difference is that the simplifier may have lived simple all her life, while the downshifter per definition must have made a significant change. Another major difference is that the simplifier, but not the downshifter, is driven by a coherent and articulated philosophy that includes a concern for environmental issues. This goes beyond just buying environmentally friendly products by also focusing on the moral imperative of a low level of consumption. The concept of downshifting has gained importance in a context of long working hours and frequent overtime work. Reports on stress, time pressure, consumerism, rat race, and problems of maintaining a balance

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between work and private life are quite common. Many also find Western societies too materialistic and focused on money and consumption. Downshifting is a reaction to our work-oriented consumer culture and an antithesis of the yuppies of the 1980s. Downshifters often suggest that the marginal utility from consumption is declining when consumption levels are increasing. Downshifting has become a concept that catches the dream of a lifestyle with more time and balance. A popular joke in books on downshifting is that the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you are still a rat. Is downshifting widely practiced or is it just a common dream? The most cited academic survey on downshifting, Juliet Schor’s The Overspent American, states that 19 percent of the U.S. respondents declared that they voluntarily had made a longterm lifestyle change in the last five years—other than taking a regularly scheduled retirement—which had resulted in making less money. Similarly, Clive Hamilton found the numbers to be around 25 percent in telephone surveys in Great Britain and Australia. Voluntary downward earning mobility has also been analyzed by Rachel Dwyer using longitudinal data (1983–1992) from the United States. She shows that almost 10 percent of the employees below the age of sixty had voluntarily changed to a job with at least 10 percent less pay during the last ten years. Dwyer concludes that a significant number of workers are trading extrinsic values of the job such as pay and status for intrinsic values such as flexibility and a reduced amount of working hours. Some were motivated to take a job with lower pay in order to get greater autonomy through self-employment or a move to another geographic location. But the most common reason to accept reduced income was that the new job demanded fewer working hours. Several quantitative studies support the efficiency of downshifting through a strong association between shorter hours and lower feelings of time pressure. It is often proposed that downshifters usually are professionals with high incomes and therefore can more easily make do with a cut in pay. But the study by Dwyer found that the pay from the last job was only about 30 percent higher for downshifters compared with individuals changing to a job with similar or higher pay. Schor also found that the majority of the downshifters don’t have high incomes and thus calls her analysis The Downshifter Next Door.

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The amount of websites and self-help books on downshifting are almost overwhelming. Jörgen Larsson and Christer Sanne’s content analysis of some of these books claims that two of the core suggestions were to lower the aspirations of career success and of “having it all.” Surveys on work-hour preferences reveal a widespread wish for shorter hours even when it involves a cut in pay. But even if the focus on downshifting seems to be increasing in many Western countries, it isn’t something that large portions of the population practice. The advice from the downshifting literature—to focus less on career and money, and more on relationships and balance in life—are well in line with the research on what enhances life satisfaction. Implementing this singlehandedly, lacking the support of one’s partners, friends, and colleagues, along with supporting societal structures, entails major obstacles. One obstacle is that most workplaces are organized around full-time jobs that do not admit cuts in working hours. In most sectors, there is also a full-time norm, and it might be viewed as disloyal toward both the employer and colleagues to work less. Another problem is that even if shorter hours are agreed on formally, the reduction of tasks and responsibilities might not follow automatically. The lack of good part-time jobs might also make it more difficult to find a job where one uses one’s skills and abilities to the fullest. This is not only increasing the risk of getting a less interesting job and of getting a job that pays less per hour, according to Robert H. Frank. These problems, note Peter Meiksins and Peter Whalley, are reasons for many downshifters to try the route of becoming self-employed. Another obstacle is that work and consumption are central for shaping our identity, both through being a professional in a certain field of work and through the consumption possibilities that the salary entails. With a lower focus on work and consumption, the downshifter has fewer possibilities of signaling status and shaping a positive identity. An illustration of these problems is Amitai Etzioni’s report that some downshifters are wearing one expensive or stylistic item in order to distinguish from the poor—something that can be described as conspicuous nonconsumption, paraphrasing what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption more than a century ago. Due to these obstacles, downshifting is hardly a solution for relieving the problems of long hours and

time pressures experienced by everyone today; it is rather a private adaptation in absence of a general solution. However, if a sufficient amount of pioneers would overcome these obstacles, it would change norms related to work and consumption, which would make it easier for others aspiring to downshift. Jörgen Larsson See also Affluent Society; Dematerialization; Environmental Social Science and Sustainable Consumption; Life(style) Politics; Lifestyle; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Needs and Wants; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings Dwyer, Rachel. “Downward Earnings Mobility after Voluntary Employer Exits.” Work and Occupations 31, no. 1 (2004): 111–139. Elgin, Duane. Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. New York: Quill, 1981. Etzioni, Amitai. “Voluntary Simplicity: Characterization, Select Psychological Implications, and Societal Consequences.” Journal of Economic Psychology 19 (1998): 619–643. Frank, Robert H. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. New York: Free Press, 1999. Larsson, Jörgen, and Christer Sanne. “Self Help Books on Avoiding Time Shortage.” Time & Society 14, nos. 2–3 (2005): 213–230. Lippe, Tanya van der. “Dutch Workers and Time Pressure: Household and Workplace Characteristics.” Work, Employment and Society 21, no. 4 (2007): 693–711. Meiksins, Peter, and Peter Whalley. Putting Work in Its Place: A Quiet Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Salzman, Amy. Down-Shifting: Reinventing Success on a Slower Track. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Schor, Juliet. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: Basic Books, 1998. Veblen, Thorstein. A Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. First published 1899.

DURKHEIM, ÉMILE (1858–1917) Émile Durkheim, the father of French sociology and one of the greatest sociologists of the nineteenth century, was born in 1858 and died in 1917. Durkheim planned to become a rabbi since his father was a rabbi

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and came from a long line of rabbis, but in his adolescence, Durkheim abandoned the idea due to his interest in the new social science of sociology. He held the first chair of sociology in France and did a great deal to establish sociology as an empirical discipline. He wrote a number of seminal books such as Suicide, The Division of Labor in Society, Moral Education, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim was interested in what he called “social facts,” which he defined in The Rules of Sociological Method as “every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint” (1950, 2). What happened, he maintained, is that normally individuals internalize moral rules, which they get from society, and these moral rules guide their conduct. Durkheim made a distinction between what he called mechanical and organic solidarity. In mechanical solidarity, people’s differences are minimized and the focus is on what is good for all. The family would be a good example of mechanical solidarity. Organic solidarity, the opposite of mechanical solidarity, is characterized by a focus on differences among people. In a differentiated society, people focus on themselves and their goals and aspirations, and not on the common good. The corporation would be a good example of an institution characterized by organic solidarity. When problems arise in societies and moral rules are no longer seen as valid, you get what he called “anomie.” It refers to a lack of accepted rules of conduct in society that individuals can use to guide their behavior. Durkheim showed that suicide was connected to anomie, and the more integrated individuals are within organizations and the less anomic they are, the less likely they are to commit suicide. One cause of anomie, he suggested, was affluence. He argued that in anomic societies, affluent people are deceived into thinking that society is irrelevant. Anomie, he wrote, deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only, which leads to a corrosive individualism. “The less one has the less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely,” he wrote in Suicide (1951, 254). In his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim analyzes the complicated relationship that exists between individuals and society. He writes, Man is a double. There are two beings in him: an individual being which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is

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therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation—I mean society. . . . In so far as he belongs to society, the individual transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts. (1965, 29)

We have a double nature, then. We are individuals who live in society, and society lives in us as the values, rules of behavior, and moral codes that we learn as members of society. For Durkheim, a problem arises when our focus on our “needs” or desires becomes too strong. Affluence leads people to insatiable desires and the formation of what we now call consumer cultures. It is society that must help individuals learn to limit their desires, Durkheim argues. In language that reminds one of Max Weber’s analysis of Calvinist Protestantism and capitalism, Durkheim writes about human appetites that escape from a sense of limitation: The appetites thus awakened are freed from any limiting authority. By sanctifying these appetites, . . . this deification of material well being has placed them above human law . . . from the top to the bottom of the scale covetous desires are around without it being known where they might level out. (Thompson 1985, 111)

This materialism and focus on insatiable individual desires leads to anomie and a chaotic loss of a moral center in society. It is the creation, by social institutions such as advertising, of a belief in large numbers of people in modern societies—with rare exceptions—that they must consume endlessly to show that they are successful and worthy of love and admiration, among other things, that has created the modern consumer society, with all its pleasures and problems. Arthur Asa Berger See also Advertising; Affluent Society; Anomie; Division of Labor; Individualization; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Sociology; Weber, Max

Further Readings Berger, Arthur Asa. Durkheim Is Dead: Sherlock Holmes Is Introduced to Sociological Theory. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003. Durkheim, Émile. The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press, 1950.

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Durkheim, Émile. Suicide. Translated by John A Spaulding. New York: Free Press, 1951. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Free Press, 1965.

Thompson, Kenneth, ed. Readings from Émile Durkheim. London: Routledge, 1985.

E German “Blue Angel” from 1978 is the first ecolabel of this sort, and in the next ten to fifteen years followed a lot of both national and regional labels: the U.S. Green Seal (1989), the Japanese Eco-mark (1989), the Nordic Swan (1989), and the European Flower (1993). In 1994, the nonprofit organization Global Ecolabelling Network was established, and in 2009, more than twenty eco-labeling programs from all over the world were members. Energy-consuming appliances have their own label systems like the EU Energy Arrows (1992), which, contrary to other eco-labels, is mandatory for all appliances put on the market in the European Union, or the U.S. Energy Star (1993). Both focus on energy consumption during the use phase rather than the production of the products. Finally, there are also stewardship labels related to forest and marine use, focusing on how to prevent the “tragedy of the commons,” meaning exploitation and destruction of common natural ecosystems we all are dependent on. Also, here the initiative and the third-party control often lies with NGOs like Forest Stewardship Council, an international organization established in 1993 representing social, environmental, and business interests in forestry. Development of eco-labels took place concurrently with more general shifts in environmental policy that went from focusing on pollution prevention to cleaner production and then to focus on sustainable consumption. This shift represents an acknowledgement of the fact that it is not enough to focus on how things are produced; the consumption itself, including the amount of consumed items, their use, and their disposal, is of equal environmental importance. Concurrently with this shift of focus, a regulatory shift

EATING DISORDERS See Addiction; Anorexia; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies

ECO-LABELING Eco-labeling refers to the procedure for labeling products intended to inform consumers whether the product lives up to specified environmental standards. The standards are defined by a third party, often a nonprofit organization including both public authorities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), that also controls and certifies the products. The ecolabel is a tool to help concerned consumers choose the most environmentally sound products available. There are different types of consumer products, and there are also different kinds of eco-labels. The oldest is the Demeter label established by the Steiner movement in the 1920s for food produced by biodynamic farming methods. In the 1970s, organic farming flourished in many Western countries as a social-ecological movement and different national NGOs initiated national labels. In 1972, some of these movements joined the International Federation of Organic Agriculture (IFOA), and in the early 1990s, IFOA played a strong role in establishing EU regulation on organic farming and labeling. Another type of eco-label focuses on products like cleansing agents, papers, and so on, gradually expanding to include ever more product types. The 483

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occurs from command and control toward voluntary agreements, also called “from government to governance.” Eco-labeling is part of the new environmental policy instruments, together with other types of voluntary agreements, eco-taxis, and tradable permits, which have been described as market-based, costeffective, flexible, and consumer-driven instruments. Eco-labeling should also be seen in relation to developments in consumer culture and consumer politics. Political consumerism is not a new phenomenon, though it has become ever more widespread together with trends such as globalization of production, individualization in late-modern society, and risk handling in everyday life. Political consumption includes both boycotts and “buycotts,” and for the latter, the consumer needs information, such as ecolabels, when choosing between different products to determine which of them is the better according to political, moral, or environmental arguments. Eco-labels can also be regarded like other aspects of consumer culture where different types of consumers buy different products as expressions of different tastes and lifestyles. Thus, buying eco-labeled products can be a political or moral statement as well as a lifestyle message to other consumers. Consumer studies show that certain consumer groups (middleaged, well-educated, leftist women) have a higher tendency to buy eco-labeled products than others. There are different kinds of considerations and discussions regarding eco-labels. First, the question to what extent eco-labeling will actually support a sustainable society. Within the environmental political thought known as ecological modernization, there is firm belief in the problem-solving capacity of modern techniques and institutions. Eco-labels are seen as part of this, and it is believed that enlightened consumers will chose eco-products and thereby support the most eco-friendly producers and concurrently create winwin scenarios between economic and environmental development. Dating back to the radical environmental movement in the 1970s, other environmental viewpoints are more skeptical. They put forward “limits to growth” and “small is beautiful,” and in this scenario, eco-labels are of minor relevance, as local self-sufficiency is seen as the way toward a sustainable future, and obviously eco-labels are of little relevance if the goal is to consume less. Quite another relevant question is whether it is actually fair to put all responsibility for the environment on the shoulders of the consumer to make the choice in the supermarket with a cart in an already hectic everyday life.

Another type of consideration regarding ecolabels is the question of what should be considered more or less environmental. Many eco-labels use scientific lifecycle analysis to answer this question, though the fact that most labels are certified by organizations with joint representations from different relevant actors indicates that there are different opinions and that questions of sustainability cannot be answered objectively. This is also a question of not complicating the labels too much and thus confusing the consumers more than enlightening them. Thus, different labels emphasize different aspects. Organic food labels do not consider energy consumption, and energy labels omit reduction of harmful materials. Furthermore, there are relevant questions, such as whether some product types—for instance, cars—are just too unsustainable to be labeled at all. Kirsten Gram-Hanssen See also Carbon Trading; Consumer Protest: Environment; Environmental Footprinting; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Life(style) Politics; Moral Economy; Political and Ethical Consumption

Further Readings Boström, Magnus, and Mikael Klintman. Eco-Standards, Product Labelling and Green Consumerism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Micheletti, Michele, Andreas Follesdal, and Dietland Stolle. Politics, Products and Markets: Exploring Political Consumerism Past and Present. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004.

Website Global Ecolabelling Network. http://www .globalecolabelling.net/index.html.

E-COMMERCE E-commerce is a term that refers to electronically mediated financial transactions between two parties, and these commercial interchanges can be between organizations, individuals, or a combination of both. In 1989, the networks forming the backbone of the Internet became accessible to business and commercial users. The liberalization of the Internet networks

E-Commerce

(originally designed for military, then educational and research use only) to allow commercial transactions led to rapid and exponential growth of the number of Internet users and commercially orientated websites. During this period, the term e-commerce came into popular usage as a result of the commercialization of computer networks forming the Internet and the growing number of firms that rushed to sell online. Business trading rapidly expanded as commercial organizations across the United States, and then Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world entered into financial exchanges via the Internet. The rate of adoption of e-commerce websites has continued to grow to the present day, and in many nations over 90 percent of firms have websites. Not all websites are e-commerce enabled, however, as more consumers and firms move online; more websites include transactional facilities. Growth in commercial online trading has given rise to a proliferation of new phrases, acronyms, and terms—for instance, e-commerce, business-to-business e-commerce (B2B); business-to-government e-commerce (B2G); business-to-consumer e-commerce (B2C); consumer-to-consumer e-commerce (C2C). The parties involved in the exchange provide details of the context in which the e-commerce transaction takes place and indicate where it takes place in the supply chain; for instance, B2C transactions are between retail suppliers and the end consumer of the product or service. Buy-side e-commerce is an interaction between buyers and sellers in the supply chain and generally refers to the procurement of supplies and resources needed by an organization such as product constituents, components, materials, plant equipment, and business services. In certain settings, e-commerce transactions can be considered part of the wider process of e-procurement. E-procurement is defined to include specification of goods and services, notification of suppliers, tendering procedures, evaluation of tenders and agreement, and acceptance of contract signatures plus fulfillment processing (Muffato and Payaro 2004). Sell-side e-commerce refers to commercial interactions, in other words, financial exchanges between sellers and their customers. However, there are various types of websites that not only facilitate e-commerce but also support the development of sell-side e-commerce. According to Dave Chaffey, there are four dominant types of sell-side e-commerce websites: 1. Transactional e-commerce site. This takes place in a commercial website setting and allows

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the purchasing of online products and services like those offered by Amazon.com, dell.com, and buy. com. Firms engaging in this type of e-commerce are able to benefit from the sale of products and services, for instance, insurance products. These types of websites also offer other support services and provide information for consumers who might want to purchase products via physical stores, mail-order catalogues, or other offline methods of purchasing. This type of sell-side e-commerce is typically used by retailers, travel companies, retail banks, and car-insurance providers. In parts of the world where this type of e-commerce is well established, “online shopping is moving rapidly from a minority hobby, to an everyday part of most peoples’ lives and a quiet revolution is taking place which is empowering consumers and shifting the balance of power in the supply chain towards the consumers” (Doherty and Ellis-Chadwick, 2010). 2. Services-oriented relationship-building website. This type of site provides information that will help build customer relationships and acts as a precursor to the actual purchase. These types of sites do not typically offer goods for sale online, as the primary objective is to develop relationships and engage the interest of potential customers, but rather play an important role in the development of transactions. They provide information through the web and encourage potential customers to sign up for e-newsletters, which can then inform purchase decisions—for instance, Motley Fool, which is, according to its own website, a website that “champions shareholder values and advocates tirelessly for the individual investor.” The main contribution to e-commerce is by encouraging offline sales and generating inquiries or leads from potential customers. These sites can add value for existing customers who can glean additional information about the products and services of interest. 3. Brand-building site. These types of sites are used to present an online experience of the brand; they are usually developed to enhance the brand presence of manufacturers (e.g., Nestle, Kraft, DANONE, and PepsiCo) and exclusive fashion and leading fragrance houses (e.g., Prada, Gucci, Ted Baker, Channel). This type of website seeks to present the brand experience rather than sell products. However, some fashion brands are beginning to offer transactional capacity within their website (e.g., Gucci.com,

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Versace.com). Nevertheless, the key contribution to e-commerce is to support the brand and to educate website visitors to the meaning of the brand and its values. 4. Portal or media site. This type of site provides access to other e-commerce sites and in doing so also provides “wrap-around” services in the form of information, news, updates, offers, and promotions. The term portal refers to a gateway. Portal sites contribute to e-commerce revenue through advertising, commission-based sales, and sale of customer data (lists). Since the early 1990s, e-commerce has developed significantly in terms of the range of firms and organizations engaging in online transactions, and technology innovations have extended the reach. For instance, wireless devices, such as mobile phones, netbooks, and other peripheral devices, now enable e-commerce transactions to be conducted in remote locations. This development is frequently referred to as mobile commerce or m-commerce, and mobile access appears to attract more individuals and firms because of flexible access to the Internet (Sumita and Yoshii 2010). However, while mobile computing is bringing e-commerce closer to more individuals, the perceived risk of security breaches to data and information continues to act as a barrier to the development of e-commerce, especially in the B2C context (McCole, Ramsey, and Williams 2010). E-commerce is sometimes confused with the term e-business. Originally, IBM marketing staff coined this phrase in 1997 to promote the sale of its business-computer-solution services and used advertising slogans like e-business solutions to transform key business processes through the use of Internet technologies. What IBM was offering were solutions for organizational processes that include research and development, marketing, manufacturing, inbound and outbound logistics, and buy- and sell-side (e-commerce) transactions with suppliers and customers. In other words, e-business is all encompassing, and it is now widely accepted that e-commerce is part of a wide range of applications and activities which come under the heading e-business. Fiona Ellis-Chadwick See also Branding; Collecting and Collectibles; Globalization; Information Technology; Innovation Studies; Internet; Network Society; Spaces of Shopping

Further Readings Chaffey, Dave. E-Business and E-Commerce Management. 4th ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2009. Chaffey, Dave, Fiona E. Ellis-Chadwick, Kevin Johnston, and Richard Mayer. Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. 4th ed. Harlow, UK: FT Prentice Hall, 2009. Doherty, Neil F., and Fiona E. Ellis-Chadwick. “Internet Retailing: The Past, the Present and the Future.” International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management 38, nos. 11–12 (2010): 943–965. McCole, Patrick, Elaine Ramsey, and John Williams. “Trust Considerations on Attitudes towards Online Purchasing: The Moderating Effect of Privacy and Security Concerns.” Journal of Business Research 63, nos. 9–10 (September–October 2010): 1018–1024. Muffato, Moreno, and Andrea Payaro. “Implementation of E-Procurement and E-Fulfilment Processes: A Comparison of Case in the Motor Cycle Industry.” International Journal of Production Economics 89 (2004): 339–351. Sumita, Ushio, and Jun Yoshii. “Enhancement of E-commerce via Mobile Accesses to the Internet.” Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 9, no. 3 (May–June 2010): 217–227.

Website The Motley Fool. http://www.fool.co.uk/help/aboutus.aspx (accessed December 2010).

ECONOMETRICS According to Douglas Harper, the word econometrics is derived from two Greek words: oikonomia, meaning the study of the management of a household or administration, and metriks, which means measurement. This decomposition shows that econometrics at its core involves “measuring” economic variables, like income, consumption, and so on, to discover relationships among them. In spite of this rather unambiguous role of econometrics, author Peter Kennedy laments about the fact that there is no universally agreed-on definition of econometrics. The lack of a general definition for econometrics may stem from the fact that the discipline of econometrics is an “amalgam of economic theory, mathematical economics, economic statistics and mathematical statistics” (Gujarati 2003, 2). In spite of this difficulty of not having an all-encompassing definition, a

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reasonable approximation that adequately captures the various facets of econometrics would be to define econometrics as “the application of mathematical statistics to economic data to lend empirical support to the models constructed by mathematical economics and to obtain numerical results” (Titner 1968, 74). This definition can be especially appreciated while considering the role that econometrics has played in consumer research. For almost a hundred years, statistical techniques like linear regression have been used on agricultural data to estimate demand and supply curves and to test certain hypotheses postulated by economic theory. Moreover, a lot of the contemporary research in the field of consumer behavior is quantitative in character and involves direct application of advanced econometric techniques that have been developed exclusively to address some of the issues arising from consumer research.

History of Econometrics David C. Colander and Harry Landreth give a fascinating account of the development of econometrics starting from the early work of William Stanley Jevons. According to these scholars, the earliest contributions to econometrics were made by Jevons who proposed, in a first systematic, data-oriented or statistical (albeit unscientific) attempt to explain business cycles, that these cycles were actuated by sun spots. One of the earliest proponents of proper statistical research within economics was Henry L. Moore in the early 1900s. Using the methodology developed by statisticians like Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and others, Moore tried to use statistical methods to decipher the relationship between wages and labor productivity. Moore also made the first (unsuccessful) attempt to calculate a demand curve and measure business cycles, thus making contributions to both macro- and microeconometrics. Moore’s work was refined and developed by Henry Schultz who corrected Moore’s method to accurately estimate a demand curve. Schultz also propounded the distinction between dependent and independent variables and noted that this distinction should be informed by theory. There were fundamental contributions to the data collection and organization by Simon Kuznets and by Wassily Leontief during the 1920s and 1930s. These contributions led to fundamental advances in macroeconometrics during the 1920s and 1930s

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spearheaded by Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch and by Jan Tinbergen. Importantly, Frisch coined the term econometrics and made several fundamental contributions to the field. Frisch contributed, among other things, to what is today known as production theory and also to the theory and techniques of the linear regression model. He also founded the Econometric Society, devoted to the advancement of economic theory and econometrics. Tinbergen, along with Frisch, developed the first comprehensive largescale macro models that were used to successfully inform and direct public policy. Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1969 along with Tinbergen. At about this time, fellow Norwegian economist Trygve Haavelmo introduced probability theory into econometrics, thereby formalizing the theoretical foundations of econometrics. Haavelmo won the Nobel Prize for econometrics in 1989. Haavelmo’s approach was adopted by the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. Using the Haavelmo paradigm, several researchers in the Cowles Commission went on to make many significant contributions to both theoretical and applied econometrics including, among other things, the Monte Carlo method of simulation. Mainly spurred by the contributions from the Cowles Foundation and the formalization by Haavelmo, the new field of what is now called applied macroeconomics boomed in the 1930s. In the 1950s, this field was enriched by contributions from stalwart economists like Lawrence Klein who, along with his student Arthur Goldberger, pioneered the use of simultaneous equation econometric models of the U.S. economy. Klein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1980. Significant advances in computer technology and the development of new statistical methods of analysis and the increased availability of newer forms of data (e.g., panel data) in the late 1980s spurred new developments in econometrics. The field of microeconometrics, in particular, benefited enormously from all these new developments in technology and data collection. In this field, the pioneers were James Heckman and Daniel McFadden. Heckman is noted for the development of the Heckit models that have been successfully used for econometric analysis that allow for self-selection of economic agents into, for example, training programs. McFadden is the pioneer of discrete choice analysis where the outcome of interest is not a continuous quantity but discrete (such as occupational choice). For their contributions in the field of

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microeconometrics, Heckman and McFadden were both awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000. Other notable contributors to the field of econometrics include Robert Engle and Clive Granger, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003. Both these authors have contributed to the study of time-series analysis. Engle made fundamental contributions to the modeling of financial time-series data by inventing the ARCH (Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity) model, while Granger pioneered cointegration analysis (which studies long-term stochastic relation of two or more time series) and invented Granger causality (which helps make causal inference in a time-series context).

Objectives of Econometrics While economic theory can pose and answer interesting questions, it can only outline broad qualitative relations between economic variables. However, interest can focus on not only whether the variables are related but also to what extent. To take an example from Damodar Gujarati, economic theory postulates a negative relationship between the price of a good, say, bread, and the quantity of bread demanded at any point in time. But the theory, by itself, cannot give us any numerical idea of the strength of the relationship between the price and the quantity of bread. Here, econometrics can be used to estimate a demand curve that gives an idea about the magnitude of the numerical relationship between price and quantity. Apart from ascertaining these quantitative effects, econometrics can be used to test hypotheses (e.g., whether bread prices are the same in different stores of one retailer) and in prediction (e.g., given a certain level of income what is the forecasted level of consumption). There is one essential feature in all econometric relationships that must be kept in mind. All econometric models are not exact or deterministic, like mathematical relation, but only approximate. For the price-quantity example earlier, the relationship between price and quantity is never precisely determined since other things affect the quantity of bread (e.g., income) and also because there is a certain inherent randomness in human nature (in this case, for the consumption of a certain quantity of bread). This fundamental uncertainty leads to all relations being stochastic. The uncertainty is formally captured in all econometric models by the disturbance term. The uncertainty leads to some amount of error

in all forecasting, hypotheses testing, and so on. However, one can put bounds on these errors under some reasonable assumptions.

Regression Analysis Regression analysis has an important role in econometrics, since most of the theoretical and applied econometrics is based on it. The basic idea of regression analysis is to model the relationship between one variable Y, called the dependent variable, and one or more variables X, called explanatory (or independent) variables. Although regression analysis can be used for different purposes, it is most typically employed to investigate how change in one explanatory variable affects the dependent variable, while the other explanatory variables are held fixed. Besides estimating the relationship between Y and X based on some observed or experimental data set, one can also use regression analysis to test statistical significance of explanatory variables (hypothesis testing). For example, in economics, it is frequently used to estimate and test the impact of price change on a product’s demand when other important factors (such as income) are kept constant. In econometrics (and statistics), a large number of different regression models have been developed based on the type of the dependent variable (continuous, binary, etc.) and the functional form defining the relationship between Y and X. Despite the various models and techniques to estimate them, most of the quantitative work done in econometrics and more generally in social sciences is still based on the linear regression model. In the case of one explanatory variable, the linear regression model can be written as Y = α + βX + ε, where α and β are unknown parameters and ε is the error term that includes all other factors affecting Y. The parameters α and β can be estimated from data on Y and X using the method called ordinary least squares. Although there are many reasons behind the success of the linear regression model in econometrics, maybe the most important ones are its (1) simplicity and (2) applicability to a wide variety of situations. Regarding the latter, one can use it also to estimate relatively general nonlinear relationships, because the model only requires that the model is linear in parameters. In addition, although linear regression model has been mainly designed for applications where Y is continuous, it can be used at least for explanatory purposes also when Y is binary or count variable.

Economic Indicators

Econometrics in Consumer Behavior Research One of the first application areas for econometrics and for regression analysis in particular was agricultural and resource markets (Bessley et al. 2010). Already during the 1910s and 1920s, linear regression was used to study demand and supply of food and agricultural products (e.g., grain) as well as to investigate quality factors affecting prices of various agricultural commodities (e.g., vegetables). It is worth emphasizing that these early econometric applications on consumption and prices of agricultural commodities established the groundwork for applied econometrics also in other areas in economics. The role of econometrics for economic research on consumer behavior has been important since the 1920s. One indication of this is the fact that several different econometric models and techniques have been developed to address a number of empirical challenges that consumption data sets typically create. Among others, econometricians have developed various limited (or qualitative) dependent-variable models, which arise when a dependent variable in a regression model is restricted in some way. Examples include the models developed for the cases where the dependent variable (1) is discrete unordered (e.g., brand choice), (2) is discrete ordered (e.g., Likert scale variable in questionnaire), or (3) has values lying within a certain range (e.g., cigarette consumption). Another important methodological contribution tailored for economic applications of consumer behavior was the development of demand systems that meets the constraints of microeconomic theory (Unnvehr et al. 2010). The demand system models have been used extensively in food demand applications but also quite often in other areas such as in alcohol and energy consumption studies. Another contribution related to demand models was the socalled revealed preference approach to test whether individual or collective behavior is rational. More recently, quite a lot of work has been done to develop modern econometric methods suitable for applications employing either scanner data from one retailer or home-scanner data collected by some market research firm. In addition, many recent studies have investigated the appearance of measurement errors in consumption data set and the methods that can deal with them or reduce their impact. During recent years, a major amount of applied econometric work has concentrated on accounting

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for heterogeneity in consumer preferences as well as studying the impacts of information and quality attributes on consumer behavior. Nowadays, these studies are quite often based on either scanner data or experimental data. However, it seems that future empirical research on this area will increasingly use different types of data in the same study. In addition, improvements both in data quality and in econometric methods will allow one to study causal relationships in more credible ways. Mika Kortelainen and Jibonayan Raychaudhuri See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Demand; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Economic Indicators; Economics; Households; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Multivariate Analysis

Further Readings Angrist, Joshua, and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist’s Companion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Bessler, David A., Jeffrey H. Dorfman, Matthew T. Tolt, and Jeffrey T. LaFrance. “Econometric Developments in Agricultural and Resource Economics: The First 100 Years.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 92, no. 2 (2010): 571–589. Colander, David C., and Harry Landreth. History of Economic Thought. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Epstein, R. J. A History of Econometrics. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1987. Gujarati, Damodar. Basic Econometrics. 4th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Kennedy, Peter. A Guide to Econometrics. 5th ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Titner, Gerhard. Methodology of Mathematical Economics and Econometrics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Unnvehr, Laurian, James Eales, Helen Jensen, Jayson Lusk, Jill McCluskey, and Jean Kinsey. “Food and Consumer Economics.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 92, no. 2 (2010): 506–521. Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach. 4th ed. Mason, OH: Thompson Learning, 2009.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS The earliest economic indicators were developed during the 1930s in response to U.S. policymakers’ demand for economic data that could be used to

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inform and direct policy to cure the nation of the massive depression prevailing at that time (generally known as the Great Depression). Chapter 1 of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Account (USBEA NIPA) Handbook gives a concise history of the process of development of these indicators during that period. In response to the need for economy-wide indicators, Simon Kuznets and his staff at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the U.S. Department of Commerce developed several indicators to estimate the national income of the United States. These indicators were later “consolidated” into one single indicator called the gross national product (GNP) during the 1940s as U.S. entry into World War II made a detailed measure of the wartime economy a necessity for wartime planning. In 1991, the USBEA began to use gross domestic product (GDP) instead of GNP as the single measure of U.S. production (therefore, GNP is not discussed here). Since then, according to the U.S. government’s guide to the NIPA, GDP and its components have become the single most important measure of production in all major economies of the world. Indeed, as the USBEA NIPA Handbook claims, GDP, along with its component indicators, now also forms the mainstay of modern macroeconomic analysis of the economy. The most important component of GDP is undoubtedly consumption. Fluctuations in consumption can cause recession or even depression and is reflected in a dip in GDP figures. Therefore, consumption and GDP are intimately related. This entry discusses GDP and its “constituent” indicators that form a substantive core within the class of all economic indicators. It also discusses several issues that are involved in calculating these indicators.

Gross Domestic Product Noted economic analyst and forecasting guru Bernard Baumohl has called GDP “the mother of all economic indicators” (2005, 100). GDP, simply, is defined as the money value of all goods and services produced in the economy in a given year. That is, as Baumohl (100) so vividly puts it, if we add up the “total price tag” on all “hammers, cars, new homes, baby cribs, videogames, medical fees, books, toothpaste, hot dogs, haircuts, eyeglasses, yachts, kites, and computers” (100), and so on, produced during a year, the total value that we would get for this sum is the GDP. Clearly, the

higher this number the better the economy is doing, since more output is better. Also, total GDP equals total national income (see later for why this is so). So as GDP increases, so does the total national income, which is good for a country. There is one important caveat with regard to the conclusion that the higher the GDP, the higher the output, which necessitates a correction in the way GDP is computed. Normally, GDP is calculated as the value of goods and services produced in a year using the current or prevailing prices for that year. If the quantity of goods produced in the economy remain the same and if only prices rise, then the product of prices and quantities (or the values) of these goods and services and hence the sum of these values (i.e., GDP) increases as well. But this increase in total value does not really mean that the economy is producing any more output in real terms than it was producing before the prices rose. Therefore, if only prices rise, then this price rise might artificially inflate the value of GDP at an unchanged level of output. To make the measure of GDP reflect the “real” or material value of what is only actually physically produced during the current year, economists usually measure GDP at constant prices, that is, in terms of prices that prevail in a certain “base” year. With unchanged prices that are pegged to a certain year, the only way for GDP to increase is through an increase in the quantity or output. This price-change corrected measure of GDP is known as real GDP (at a certain year’s prices), and this corrected measure gives a measure of actual output production in the economy. In practice, to correctly measure real changes in production, GDP deflators are constructed, which are in essence price indices that can be used to “deflate” money or “nominal” GDP figures to obtain real GDP figures. In a similar vein, we have real counterparts to many value or nominal indicators in economics (e.g., disposable income). In recent years, chain indices have been developed to convert nominal GDP to real GDP. These chained indices have the advantage that they give us the percentage changes in quantities and prices that are not tied to the choice of a specific year as a base year. These indices also help avoid several biases and distortions in the real GDP figures.

Gross National Income As mentioned earlier, GDP is important because the other side of the GDP coin is gross national income

Economic Indicators

(GNI). As Baumohl puts it, looking at GNI is a way of figuring “where all the monies generated in the production of GDP end up” (2005, 110). The value of all the goods and services produced by all sectors of the economy is also the value of the income generated in the economy. This is so because according to the neoclassical paradigm in economics, whatever the different factors of production, like labor and capital, are paid is just their (partial) contribution in the market value of their product. Therefore, it follows that the sum of their incomes must be equal to the total value of the product. Thus, for the economy as a whole, the sum of the remuneration going to, say, for example, labor and capital (i.e., wages and profits) must equal the contribution of these factors in the production process for the economy as a whole. Extending this result to all factors of production, we have the result that the sum of all national income is equal to the value of total production of GDP. Therefore, another way of measuring GDP is to measure the total income in the economy. The value of national income thus calculated is also known as the national income (NI). Usually, the money values of GDP and NI (or GNI) are the same and the only discrepancy that sometimes crops up between them is because of accounting or measurement errors. This income measure of GDP or NI can be subdivided into several important components or constituent indicators as outlined next. According to the USBEA’s guide to NIPA, NI can conceptually be divided into the following major components: employee compensation (including supplements to wages and salaries), net operating surplus, taxes and subsidies, and a term for the statistical discrepancy, as mentioned earlier. John Sloman provides detailed definitions and examples of these components of NI. The first three components try to measure factor contributions in the national income, that is, they are indicators for the contribution of each factor of production in the national income. Employee compensation, as the term indicates, is the sum total of all employees’ wages and salaries and also includes the contributions from salaries for pension, insurance funds, and so on. Net operating surplus is (approximately) the total profit that accrues to corporate business owners after subtracting labor costs but before adjusting the costs of business financing. Taxes include national excise taxes, state level duties, and sales taxes (or VAT) and license and property taxes. Subsidies include monetary grants to

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business enterprises. The sum of these three components are clumped together as total factor income, which, as the name indicates, is an indicator for the income of all factors of production combined and hence equal to the total GDP.

Calculation Issues There are several aspects regarding the calculation of GDP that deserve mention. These apply equally well to the other indicators discussed here. First, GDP calculates only the value of the final goods and services. For example, consider a table made of wood. The retail price at which this table is sold to a consumer is included in the GDP. However, in calculating the final GDP value, the value of the wood or timber that made the table is not added to the GDP figures to avoid falsely inflating the GDP figure by “double counting” the value of the wood that made up the table as well as the value of the table itself. Therefore, final GDP figures leave out the values of intermediate goods or inputs in production and consider only the value of “final” goods. GDP also excludes remittances, transfer payments (e.g., pensions), and so on. In other words, as Sloman puts it, GDP actually calculates the sum of “value added” by the factors of production (like labor and capital) in different stages of the production process (2004, 388). Second, the raw GDP estimates are actually “gross” estimates in the sense that they do not take into account the depreciation of capital, that is, these raw GDP figures do not adjust for the fact that the capital machinery and goods used in the production process tend to get worn out in production, and this loss or capital consumption must be accounted for in the final estimates of GDP. In other words, no allowance is made in the raw GDP figures for replacement, repair, and servicing expenses. If we adjust for the depreciation in GDP by subtracting the figure for capital wear and tear from the gross GDP figures, what we get is the net national product (NNP) that is the net production in the economy in a year. A concept closely related but not identical to GDP is GNP. GNP refers to the market value of the final goods and services produced by labor and capital that is provided by a country’s nationals. Anything produced inside a country’s physical boundaries is GDP. However, some of the firms and factories inside a nation’s boundaries are actually owned by foreigners. The production in these firms and factories that

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are within a country’s territorial borders but have foreign ownership count as a part of that country’s GDP but not its GNP. On the other hand, factories and firms owned by the country’s nationals but that have been set up in a foreign country count as part of GNP of the country but is not a part of its GDP. While discussing the definitions of some of the indicators outlined in the previous pages, a question that naturally comes to mind is how these indicators are in practice calculated. To be specific, let us take the calculation of GDP, for example. The definition of GDP makes it clear that the calculation of the economy-wide GDP figures is a stupendous task. Baumohl gives a detailed picture of the complexity involved in the computation of GDP. To calculate GDP, the government accounting bureaus survey a large number of firms and government agencies. These bureaus collect detailed information on the sales revenue (which in value is equal to the income of the factors involved in production) from firms in manufacturing, service industries, and also companies in the construction sector. Information is collected basically on retail sales at the retail level, revenue accruing through the sale (or resale) of houses, and so on. Information is also collected from government departments for government expenditures on important sectors of the economy like health, education, and the military. Of course, there are several other components and sources from where the figures are collected so that each sector of the economy is well covered. All these figures are thereafter put together to get a single figure for the value of all goods sold or the GDP. Since the figures for GDP come from several sources, it is not surprising that all of this information is not available precisely at the same time when the official figure for GDP is released. As a result, there are periodic revisions of the GDP based on the figures that come in later. Similar approaches are used to compute other indicators. This illustration of the method of collecting data from various sources to obtain GDP estimates would seem to suggest that there are several components to GDP that allow us to see how much contribution there is to GDP from any sector. In general, the main sectoral components of GDP are personal consumption expenditure, private investment expenditure, government expenditure, and investment and net exports. The meaning of these components should be clear from their names. Baumohl gives a detailed and accurate description of these components. Consumption

expenditure is the total amount of spending by consumers on all durable and nondurable goods and services. This is the major component of GDP and is usually a fall in this component of GDP that mainly drives a real fall in GDP or what in economic jargon is called a recession. The second component is actual investment by businessmen and can be further divided into two components, one of which is business fixed investment and the other is the change in private inventories. Business fixed investment is itself divided into two components, one of which is nonresidential spending and the other is residential spending. Nonresidential spending comprises expenditure on “office goods,” like printers, machines, fax machines, and so on, whereas residential spending is money spent, say, on building apartments, condominiums, and so on. Change in inventories refers to the stocks of goods that are produced but not sold in a given year. Recall that GDP gives the final value of all output produced, but not everything that is produced is sold. GDP can therefore also be thought of as comprising a portion that is sold and a portion that is placed in inventory or stock. Inventories are carried over to the next year and must be adjusted for while looking at output for the next year. The third component is expenditure by government at the federal, state, or local level. These include defense spending, expenditure on infrastructure (like bridges, roads, etc.), expenditure on police, and on maintaining parks and public libraries. The final component is the difference between what a country (produces itself and) exports and what it (does not produce itself but) imports. Since exports are goods that a country produces (albeit those goods that are not domestically consumed but sold to foreigners), they have to be added to the list of items that the country produces. The reverse logic works for imports. We adjust the GDP figures for the fact that people buy foreign goods that were not produced in their home country but manufactured in another country.

Balance of Payments In the context of imports and exports, a few words about the concepts related to the balance of payments are necessary. The balance of payments (or BOP for short) is an indicator that records the sum of all transactions between a country and the rest of the world in a given year. The BOP gives us a number that is the net of the amount of foreign currency that

Economic Indicators

flows into the country and the amount of domestic currency that flows out or is paid out of the country. The BOP for an economy keeps track of both the net flow of physical goods, services, and income payments (comprising wages, interest payments, etc.) and also the funds for (direct and portfolio) investments and loans into and out of a country. The BOP has three components: the capital account, the current account, and the financial account. Sloman gives a detailed picture of the BOP and its components. The current account is an indicator that gives the country’s total net spending on goods and services. It is the sum of a number of components: the balance of trade in goods, the balance of trade in services, factor income flows, and the current transfers of money. The balance of trade in goods is just the earnings on exports minus the expenditures made for imports. The balance of trade in services is the equivalent indicator for trade in services. Similarly, factor income flows capture the net income (comprising wages, interest, and profits) flows in and out of a country. Cash transfers refer to net monetary remittances between the home country and the rest of the world by private individuals as well as money transfers by the government or by international organizations in and out of the country. If, on balance, the current account shows a positive figure, that is, if the sum of all the three components is on balance positive, then we say that the current account of a country is in surplus; otherwise, if the net balance is negative, then we say that the account is in deficit. The capital account records the net flow of funds in and out of a country associated with the net (i.e., domestic minus foreign) acquisition of assets. The capital account comprises components like the remittances to their home country by migrant labor, government grants for foreign projects, and so on. The financial account of the balance of payments comprises several components like foreign direct investment (FDI; defined as the net flow of long-term investments in “real assets” like building, machinery, and equipment), portfolio investment (i.e., investment in stocks, bonds, or company shares, or what collectively are called paper assets), and the flows to and from the reserve account of a nation’s central bank). Overall, therefore, the BOP captures both the real and the financial aspects of a country’s net expenditure. Ideally, the BOP must balance to zero when all components are included. A deficit on the current

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account must be counterbalanced by a surplus on the capital account. This balance holds because when, for example, a country imports more than it exports (current account deficit), it has to finance the deficit, that is, pay for these “additional” imports somehow, from other sources, say, by borrowing loans from foreigners (which is counted as a surplus in the capital or financial account). Of course, individual components of the BOP, say, one of the components of the current account, might well be in deficit. In recent times, a recurring source of worry is the huge trade deficit (a component of the current account) that the United States and the United Kingdom have with the rest of the world. There is long-standing debate as to whether the imbalances in these individual components of the BOP are by themselves a cause for concern and how governments should be correcting them. Also it must be pointed out that, in reality, the BOP is never exactly balanced, and one might often have to use an adjusting term item to correct for any errors. This necessitates a third component of the BOP: a balancing item for any errors or omissions that compensates for these differences and balances the overall BOP current and capital accounts.

Other Indicators Although GDP can serve as an indicator of the material well-being of an economy, there are several drawbacks that GDP has as an indicator of overall well-being. The use of GDP as the single and only indicator of “success” has come under scrutiny in recent years. While, as Jon Gertner points out, it is true that the GDP is “a figure that compresses the immensity of a national economy into a single data point of surpassing density” and that GDP is often positively correlated with the standard of living, one must be cognizant that more goods and services does not always translate into more welfare and happiness. In fact, this was one of the worries that Kuznets, the Nobel prize–winning American economist who developed this indicator, had about GDP as an indicator of overall well-being. When Kuznets developed indicators to measure NI, he intended it to function as a first attempt to make sense of the overall direction toward which the economy was moving. There were no indicators of a nation’s overall economic activity (and economic health) at that time that could justifiably address the questions and concerns of policymakers regarding the overall direction of the economy. At that time,

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GDP was developed as a “first pass” indicator for overall economic activity and health. However, in recent years, as Jon Gertner has highlighted in his article, it has increasingly been pointed out that GDP does not take into account the quality of life (e.g., the amount of leisure enjoyed by an individual), the quality of products available to consumers, the noninternalized effects of production externalities like pollution, effects on the environment, resource depletion, the value of nonmarket items (like household work), the black market economy, and so on. Several other indicators have been developed that try to close this lacunae between measuring material well-being and overall well-being. Some of these other indicators that serve to capture the effects of well-being, and probably more relevant from a sustainable viewpoint, are the genuine progress indicator (GPI), gross national happiness (GNH), and sustainable national income (SNI). However, perhaps, the best-known alternative to GDP as an measure of well-being is the human development index (HDI) developed by the United Nations that combines a nation’s GDP and its adult literacy and life-expectancy statistics into a single index. The HDI has emerged as a universally accepted overall indicator of well-being, although this measure is far from perfect. Jibonayan Raychaudhuri See also Consumption Patterns and Trends; Economics; Measuring Standards of Living; Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption; Well-Being

Further Readings Baumohl, Bernard. The Secrets of Economic Indicators: Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and Investment Opportunities. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2005. Gertner, Jon. “The Rise and Fall of the GDP.” The New York Times, May 10, 2010. http://www.nytimes. com/2010/05/16/magazine/16GDP-t.html?_r=1. Sloman, John. Economics. London: Penguin, 2004. United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report 1999. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. United States Bureau of Economic Analysis (USBEA). Concepts and Methods of the United States National Income and Product Assets. National Income and Product Account Handbook. Chapters 1–5. Washington, DC: United States Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2009.

ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY Economic psychology is the study of phenomena common to the disciplines of economics and psychology. Perhaps because economic psychology has such a potentially enormous and rather poorly defined domain, while the term is frequently used in Europe, it is not much used in the United States. In the United States, the subject area exists. Indeed, it is flourishing. However, the study is embraced by the slightly narrower overlapping areas of judgment and decision making, behavioral economics, and consumer research. Industrial and organizational psychology, which mainly studies psychological processes in the employee, is frequently taken as outside the area, although there are a number of common threads. The disciplines of economics and psychology overlap in a host of different ways, but economic psychology has mostly been concerned with understanding the psychological and behavioral processes that underlie—and, at least at the individual level, appear to produce—economic behavior and phenomena. The majority of the economic phenomena studied to date have related to the consumer market, but there has also been attention paid to the capital and labor markets. There has also been considerable research into the psychology of government actions in the economy. Some psychological aspects of government-provided services are described in more detail subsequently. In general, economic psychology has always been closely linked to the psychology of the consumer, and even where economic psychology appears to depart somewhat from the traditional concerns of consumer psychology, the research has important implications for our understanding of consumption. Some explicit examples of this are discussed in later sections. Traditionally, economics has been mainly oriented toward producing mathematical theories, while psychology has focused more on developing experimental and other empirical methods. Thus, to some extent, economic psychology has entailed using methods developed within psychology to test theories developed by economists. However, it would be a vast oversimplification to define economic psychology as an attempt to put together economic theoretical sophistication with psychological methodological expertise. Economics has long had its own traditions of empirical data gathering, and recent

Economic Psychology

years have seen both more data gathered and the development of new empirical techniques, such as the growth of experimental economics. On the other hand, there is also a long history of psychological theorizing, and even of mathematical theories of psychology. In consequence, cross-fertilization between economics and psychology has sometimes been at the more purely methodological or theoretical levels. For example, the economist Bruno Frey’s book Not Just for the Money: An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation (1997) takes a theory that was originally developed in psychology of how personal motivation can be undermined by extrinsic rewards and shows how this theory can be used to encourage blood donation or raise a community’s environmental consciousness. As a second and different example, both psychology and economics have long been concerned with what it means to measure concepts such as utility, and work on mathematical theories of measurement can be found and cross-referenced in both psychological and economic journals.

History The history of economic psychology can be dated at least as far back as Aristotle’s definition of money as a measure of human need (Nicomachean Ethics, 1133 a, b). Adam Smith and other eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury writers frequently mixed psychological and economic theorizing. The first use of the term economic psychology may have been in the title of Gabrielle Tarde’s book La Psychologie Economique (1902). In the twentieth century, George Katona provided an early model for how psychological methods might be useful in economic forecasting and theorizing. In the 1940s, he and colleagues at the University of Michigan developed and began the regular survey series known as the Index of Consumer Sentiment. The index, which is essentially a measure of the expectations that consumers have, correctly predicted that 1949 would be a prosperous year in the United States when more conventional economic indices did not. Ever since that time, the index has been used as a leading indicator of economic activity in countries all around the world. Two psychologists have won or shared the Nobel Prize in economics: Herbert Simon in 1978, “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations,” and Daniel Kahneman in 2002, for integrating “insights from

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psychology into economics, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.” It is no accident that both men’s work centers on decision making: decision making in various economic environments has been and remains the most important single strand in economic psychology. Interest in economic psychology, however named or defined, has increased enormously in recent years. There is a Journal of Economic Psychology, first published in 1981 under the editorship of Fred van Raaij. Some indication of the interdisciplinary nature of this journal as well as the disciplinary relationships of economic psychology is given by a recent survey of the journals that have been cited by its authors. After the Journal of Economic Psychology itself, over the first twenty-five years of publication, the most frequent citations were to the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Marketing Research, as noted by Erich Kirchler and Erik Hölzl. Other journals are of more recent origin. For example, the online journal Judgment and Decision Making was founded in 2006 as the journal of the U.S.-based Society of Judgment and Decision Making. The rise of experimental economics as a specialized field within economics has been marked with the introduction of the specialist journal Experimental Economics. Nor has publication been confined to specialist journals, as a good deal of this interdisciplinary work can be found in the more mainstream economics, management, or psychological journals.

Current Research Books that summarize recent research in the area appear periodically. Three recent examples are those edited by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin; Alan Lewis; and Shlomo Maital. Kirchler and Hölzl sorted the articles published in the first twenty-five years of the Journal of Economic Psychology into sixteen categories. The six top categories, in descending order of frequency, were consumer behavior, individual decision making, financial behavior and investment, cooperation and competition, tax, and consumer expectations. As in any area, the specific topics that interest researchers have varied over time. In economic psychology, the variation results partly from developments within the research field itself and partly from what is

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happening in the world’s economies. The recent development of neuroeconomics is an example of the former. Neuroeconomics is concerned with assessing the relationship between the operation of different parts of the brain and people’s actual economic behavior or thinking. The use of magnetic resonance imaging to track the course of decision making has shown particularly rapid growth. As an example of the influence of the world’s economies, the inflation that was common in advanced industrialized economies in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by a wave of research into inflation that died down somewhat as inflation rates themselves decreased. The adoption of a single currency, the euro, by many countries of the European Union during 1999–2002 was preceded by studies of people’s expectations of the new currency and followed by studies of their perception of it and memory for past prices. Interestingly, in some countries, particularly Germany, there was a widespread perception that many sellers took advantage of the change to raise their prices even though the official statistics showed no marked increase in the consumer price index. The possible causes of this misperception have been researched in a number of articles (e.g., Mussweiler and Strack 2004). An obvious question for the present reader to ask is, what does the field of economic psychology have to offer me that I cannot readily find within the field of consumer research? At least two answers can be given to this question. First, economic psychology and consumer psychology have long been interwoven, and it is often difficult to separate them. Second, some of the topics studied within economic psychology both overlap with consumer research and offer a somewhat broader (if also sometimes shallower) perspective. There are a number of examples of such topics. For instance, children are socialized into an understanding of the wider economy as well as into a consumer culture. Social norms appear to be important in whether or not people evade taxes, or how they behave in the workplace, just as they are in consumption. By way of illustration, we now examine in a little more detail two phenomena that seem to offer the potential to broaden our understanding of consumption by taking a broader perspective.

Saving and Investment Although the capital market has been less frequently studied by psychologists than the consumer or labor

markets, it has not been completely neglected. It has long been obvious that psychological factors are important in the stock market and that stock prices do not simply reflect a purely economic reality (e.g., Wärneryd 2001). Some of Katona’s work was concerned with the psychology of saving. On a slightly different tack, in recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in why and how people save that has been partly motivated by concern in a number of countries about low savings rates and the impending retirement of an aging work force. Some results have started to emerge from the research. A number of these can be summarized in the general finding that many people do not have well-thought-out rational savings or investment plans. So, for example, Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea studied the choices made by people investing in U.S. 401(k) retirement plans and found that many people simply opted for a company’s default plan. When, for unrelated reasons, the default plan was changed, new employees opted for the new default plan. Such results suggest the importance of inertia rather than rational planning (although it is not at all clear how a twenty- or thirty-year-old might rationally choose among the various options). Karl-Erik Wärneryd’s study of Swedish stockholders indicates that most of them are relatively passive and tend to hold their stocks rather than trade them frequently. It is possible that their passivity provides a stabilizing influence on the market. At least in New Zealand, the recently concluded housing boom seems to have been partly motivated by investors having greater trust in housing than in other forms of investment (Braithwaite and Kemp 2006). Finally, we should note that both saving and stock-market investment are characterized by large individual differences, and it is possible to cluster out types of savers or investors. Aspects of this work have implications for understanding consumption. At the simplest theoretical level, saving and consumption may be seen as mutually exclusive, so a decision that an individual makes to save is simultaneously a decision not to consume, or at least not immediately. However, there are other and less obvious ways in which savings and consumption decisions are linked. For example, a decision to opt for sustainable or green consumption may be linked to a decision to invest in companies that emphasize sustainable and nonpolluting production. People who invest in companies that sell over the Internet also tend to buy over the Internet

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themselves, according to Katrina Hunter and Simon Kemp. At a more theoretical level, Wärneryd has used Icek Ajzen and Martin Fishbein’s theory of reasoned action to explain and understand saving just as it has been used to explain and understand consumption. One might note also that it is not always true that saving and consumption are mutually exclusive. For example, buying a house may be regarded both as a form of saving and as a consumption decision. The 2008–2010 global financial crisis illustrates that people may go into debt or become bankrupt in consequence of their investment decisions, taking out a subprime mortgage, for example, just as readily as in consequence of their consumption decisions. Overall, then, saving and consumption are closely linked, and studying the one is likely to yield insight into the other.

Government-Provided Services Governments influence consumption in a vast variety of ways. For example, they often seek to protect consumers by insisting that information be provided or by banning some products altogether. Government tax policies restrict and sometimes steer consumption. They may restrict access to imported products through their trade policies. All of these can and have been subject to psychological analysis to a greater or lesser extent. This section focuses on something a little different: the services that governments provide to people. The provision of such services often bypasses the usual consumer market, as in many countries services such as education, imprisoning criminals, medical treatment, and defense are either free or offered at less than the cost of providing them. The lack of a market implies difficulty in knowing what government services should be provided and to what level. Thus, there is a strong motivation to find nonmarket means of valuing government services so as to effectively decide whether the community would be better off with a reduction in waiting times for surgery, a new squadron of fighter aircraft, or increased old-age pensions. Or maybe people would be better off if the government did none of these and cut taxes instead? A variety of ways to assess such benefits have been developed. Different medical treatments have often been compared using measures such as quality-adjusted life years. The overall success of societies might be compared using measures of subjective well-being. Survey methods have been

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used to compare the value (or perhaps desirability) of increased spending on health versus education. Overall, it is probably fair to say that none of these measures has proven completely satisfactory, but at the same time, they have uncovered the consistent anomaly that, in general, most people in democratic societies would like to devote more resources to both health and education than actually occurs. Resolution of the anomaly is not as straightforward as it might appear at first sight. People generally have a poor idea of the pattern of government spending, and overall their understanding of government-provided goods is not as sophisticated as their understanding of market-supplied goods. On the other hand, there is little public enthusiasm anywhere (including the United States) for turning the provision of most government services over to the market and, in the case of health services, strong opposition toward adopting a market system in the event of shortages (see Kemp 2002). Again, the research in this area has implications for consumer psychology. In the first place, it serves as a reminder that a good proportion of the goods and services people consume, including many that people hold to be of key importance, are not provided by the market system at all and thus are subject to rather different influences and constraints. Second, although our ability to value goods and services outside of the market system is still quite primitive, such valuation methods may prove useful in the future not only for valuing government-provided goods but also, for example, for informing other suppliers about which goods might or might not be worth developing and bringing to market.

Future of Economic Psychology The last dozen years have seen a growth in both research and applications that have integrated economic and psychological theories and methods. In particular, psychological methods and ideas now appear to be more welcome within mainstream economics. It seems extremely likely that such integration will persist and increase over at least the next dozen years. An indication of this is given by the increased interest at both the academic and popular levels in psychological explanations of the 2008– 2010 financial and economic crisis. That said, it is not clear what direction or directions this increased integration will take. On a minor

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point, for example, it may well be that the umbrella term economic psychology, never widespread in the United States, will fall into disuse. A more interesting question is whether the integrated subdiscipline will continue to flourish in a wide range of disciplines (especially economics, management, and psychology) or whether it will be increasingly bound to one of them. The perception of some scholars is that, in recent years, economists have generally learned more from psychologists than psychologists have from economists. (For example, the economists’ powerful tool of marginal analysis is still rarely used in psychology.) Extrapolation of this trend would see the subdiscipline gradually merge into the disciplines of management and economics and disappear from psychology departments. It is also likely that the different topics studied by economic psychologists (or psychological economists) will continue to vary from time to time. As an obvious example, at present, there is great interest in the psychological aspects of the collapse of the financial sector. The next few years are likely to see a growth of research in the psychology of recession and a resurgence of work on unemployment. Of course, these and other developments will have important implications for consumer psychology and for changes to consumer culture. Simon Kemp See also Consumer Behavior; Economic Sociology; Economics; Experimental Economics; Markets and Marketing; Psychology; Public Goods; Well-Being

Further Readings Braithwaite, Faye, and Simon Kemp. “Safe as Houses: Investor Confidence in New Zealand.” New Zealand Economic Papers 41, no. 2 (2007): 225–236. Camerer, Colin, George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin, eds. Advances in Behavioural Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Hunter, Katrina, and Simon Kemp. “The Personality of E-Commerce Investors.” Journal of Economic Psychology 25, no. 4 (2004): 529–543. Katona, George. Psychological Economics. New York: Elsevier, 1975. Kemp, Simon. Public Goods and Private Wants: A Psychological Approach to Government Spending. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2002. Kirchler, Erich, and Erik Hölzl. “Twenty-Five Years of the Journal of Economic Psychology (1981–2005): A Report

on the Development of an Interdisciplinary Field of Research.” Journal of Economic Psychology 27, no. 6 (2006): 793–804. Lewis, Alan, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Economic Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Madrian, Brigitte, and Dennis Shea. “The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401(K) Participation and Savings Behaviour.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4 (2001): 1149–1187. Maital, Shlomo, ed. Recent Advances in Behavioral Economics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007. Mussweiler, Thomas, and Fritz Strack. “The Euro in the Common European Market: A Single Currency Increases the Comparability of Prices.” Journal of Economic Psychology 25, no. 5 (2004): 557–563. Wärneryd, Karl-Erik. The Psychology of Saving. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999. Wärneryd, Karl-Erik. Stock-Market Psychology: How People Value and Trade Stocks. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2001.

ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY Economic sociology, or new economic sociology, is defined as the sociological approach applied to the economy. This broad definition raises two questions: what is the sociological approach and what is the economy? Sociology is usually defined as the science of society or of the social, and economy (derived from the Greek notion of “household”) as the management of scarce resources. Economic sociology then becomes the study of the social dimension of the management of scarce resources. This not entirely successful definition, furthermore, suggests that whenever a sociologist studies what is called the economy, he or she is doing economic sociology. New economic sociology was developed in the late 1980s in the United States, primarily at top-ranked universities, and it is today a well-established field also in Europe. This subdiscipline of sociology is, for example, manifested in several readers, encyclopedia, theme issues, and The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Richard Swedberg is the person who has written most extensively on economic sociology— writings that have substantially contributed to the constitution of the field. Classical economic sociology can be found in the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim,

Economic Sociology

and Bronislaw Malinowski. Economic sociology has focused on the production side of the economy, stressing the role of coordination in firms and markets. Markets are a large field of economic sociological research; most studies deal with business-to-business markets and producers, some with labor markets, and fewer with consumer markets. Economic sociologists have shown less interest in the work done by sociologists who have studied the economy of consumption. The way economic sociologists have regarded, and made use of, the findings of sociology of consumption, however, is not much different from how consumer sociologists have treated the works of economic sociology. Both sides have to a large extent neglected the other and not made due use of each others’ findings, and it is hard to see that anyone has gained by this division of labor and the current situation of mutual neglect. The main contribution of economic sociology to the field of consumption is to show the relevance of production, and the implicit suggestion is that this matters also for consumption. In this way, economic sociology adds ideas of how producers organize their activities and affect markets and forms of sale, issues that are underdeveloped in consumption studies. To combine the study of production and consumption also opens up the possibility for a better understanding of the economy at large.

History The history of economic sociology is as old as the discipline of sociology. Though it was August Comte who launched the notion of sociology in 1839, it was the work of the founding fathers Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber, about sixty to eighty years later, that gave the notion its current meaning. They not only constituted sociology but also made substantial contributions to economic sociology. Marx made the first major contribution to what today is called economic sociology by analyzing the quickly changing society in relation to the dynamics of capitalism. Marx was, on the one hand, astonished by the economic development that was created by capitalism, but it was also clear to him, on the other hand, that great inequalities were produced. Marx’s historically rooted analysis clearly stresses the production perspective by tracing the causes of exploitation and transfer of wealth from workers who are not fully paid for their effort in the factories back to the

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capitalists. According to Marx, the material conditions that determine the social relations—including man himself—are formed in the economy. Despite this focus on production, Marx also brings in the role of consumption and commodities, though this is not central in his analysis. Marx observes that capitalism, with its specialization, has separated production from consumption. Consumption of commodities under capitalism, along with religion, has a coveringup function, so that peoples’ expectations, interest, and focus are taken away from what really matters, namely, ownership and the corresponding possibility to extract profit. Marxist analysis has had a great impact on sociology, and the writings of Werner Sombart, Weber, and Joseph Schumpeter on capitalism should be understood in the light of Marx’s texts. Marx’s work represents a broad social science approach. This is true also of economist Alfred Marshall, who even more strongly integrated the analysis of production and consumption. Marshall, in his discussion of preferences—or wants, as he calls them—stresses that these emerge in processes in which people are engaged in activities, of which production is central. Though he only points to this interdependence of supply and demand at a general level, few have attempted to follow this idea, though it is at least acknowledged by sociologist Talcott Parsons and economist Gary Becker. Another major contribution of Marshall is that he stresses how people consume, not only to meet their own utility function (which by definition only refers to utility that is independent of others’ utility) but also, for example, to build houses to gain social recognition. The work of sociologist Durkheim is also to be understood in relation to the growing body that economists have generated. His work Division of Labor in Society makes two important contributions to a sociological understanding of economic activities. One is that economic contracts to be made need a noncontractual baseline of trust and order. The second major idea is that the economy also brings about order in society as the division of labor creates interdependencies among people in society. Another well-known economist who put consumption on the map is Thorstein Veblen. Veblen addresses the issue of “conspicuous consumption” from a sociological perspective. He noticed, more explicitly than Marshall, that consumption could be understood not merely as atomistic utility maximation but only as a social act: wealth is displayed for

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its own sake, and not to generate profit. Veblen, as most other economists, has tended to see such consumption as irrational. Simmel was the first sociologist who addressed the issue of consumption in a way that resembles contemporary analyses. He shows how consumption of, for example, fashion garments is to be analyzed in the light of two central social forces, the one of belonging to a group and the other of becoming unique. Simmel, furthermore, analyzes the role of money and value in markets and society. This is still a classical text for sociologists studying value endowments of goods in social processes, as well as for those studying money. Weber is the most important classical economic sociologist. His main contribution is the discussion of how modern capitalism, or what he calls rational capitalism, emerged in the sixteenth century. Though various forms of capitalism have existed for thousands of years, it is only with the separation of the value spheres, so that the economy became a sphere of its own, that one can talk of rational capitalism, with capital accumulation as its sole goal. Earlier forms of capitalism, such as robbery capitalism, did not have capital accumulation as an underlying cultural value. How did this form of capitalism emerge? In contrast to Marx’s explanation, which boils down to technology, Weber makes a comparative study in which he says that the material conditions of capitalism were present in more than one place. The reason why it was developed only in the West is that interpretations of religious texts ethically justified capital accumulations. Later, and due to the force of competitions, this logic of capital accumulation continued, though the ethical base was gradually replaced by capitalistic values: capital accumulation for its own sake or for the display of wealth (as we have just seen). Marx makes an analysis of social classes based on ownership and, more profoundly, based on market relations. Weber sees consumption as an important dimension for stratification in society. Weber adds, however, the idea of status groups, which are defined in terms of what they are and their ways of life, that is, a form of consumption. Pareto, as most of the thinkers discussed so far, made contributions to several areas, including economic sociology. It was Pareto who made the distinction between economics and sociology by defining the former as the study of logical actions and the latter as the study of nonlogical actions. According to Pareto, economic sociology is made up of those

actions that cannot be justified by empirical or by logical means-ends relations. Furthermore, Pareto, like Marshall, meant that actors’ motives are much broader than what many contemporary economists have claimed and include social distinctions and honors. Pareto did not discuss consumption extensively, but his apparatus of sentiments and residuals as “irrational” reasons for human activities is clearly in line with the general view of associating consumption with irrationality. Parsons may be seen as the last of the classical economic sociologists, but he contributed to the division of labor by integrating Pareto’s distinction between economics and sociology. In addition to Parsons, Karl Polanyi’s historical analysis of the emergent market society and Schumpeter’s study of capitalism are important contributions to economic sociology. Anthropologists, in contrast to sociologists, continued to study the economy. The economic sociological work of Malinowski on the Kula-ring and Marcel Mauss on gift exchange are important contributions, not the least since both show how “consumption” and “production,” if applicable at all, are embedded in a larger whole. We must understand the aforementioned scholars’ works in the light of their time. The first thing to remember is that they wrote in a time when academic disciplines were in formation and in which the research questions were not yet determined by disciplinary boundaries. The “Battle of Methods” in economics between historically oriented scholars and those favoring the universal method of marginal utility took part in the German-speaking academia. At this time, not only economics but also social economy (Sozialökonomie), political economics, and economic sociology were used as attempts to define how and what should be studied. The central question, around which research revolved, was the emergent capitalism and the associated changes of society. To revisit classical economic sociologists—in the broad sense of the term—may be a way of rediscovering questions and approaches that have become covered up by later normal science research. For some reasons, sociologists turned away from the economy after World War II. Naturally, some studied labor market and the effects of welfare states and the like, but hardly any sociologists focused on the economy proper and tried to develop sociological theory and knowledge of the economy. It is for this reason, and the long pause of sociological work

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on the economy, that we talk of the new economic sociology, as the movement that got started in the mid-1980s.

New Economic Sociology The U.S.-driven new economic sociology was essentially formed against the dominating theory of the economy—neoclassical economics—and network theory played a central role from the start. Economic sociology can to a certain extent be seen as an “add on” approach, which adds sociological flesh to the insights, findings, and theories used by economists. Mark Granovetter’s important manifesto of economic sociology, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” addresses the issue of the degree of embeddedness of actors in the contemporary economy. This network approach put emphasis on an idea that sociologists share, namely, that actors’ behavior must be understood in relation to the context and, more specifically, in relation to the social relations in which they are embedded. New economic sociology also shares the idea of the economy as a social construction, according to Swedberg, which sets it apart from neoclassical economics, which stresses the natural—and law-based— development of economic institutions. The new economic sociology is composed of three broad approaches: network analysis, organizational analysis, and the cultural (value) approach. Granovetter’s work represents the dominating network approach, which has both a theoretical and a methodological side. Granovetter’s book Getting a Job shows that to get a job it is important for a job seeker to have many so-called weak ties, each of which is tied to a separate network of information. In this sense, the person gets information from different networks, which increases the number of job openings that he or she is informed about. There are plenty of studies on markets that show the role of social relations, often in the form of networks in markets. Organizational analysis may be linked to network analysis, especially if a network method is used to analyze the internal relations of a firm. Network approaches have also been used to show how actors gain positions in markets. Population ecology has been used by economic sociologists for analyzing organizations (firms), but then in the form of markets or industries. Some have gone further and also studied more of the “inside” of firms.

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To focus on culture is often seen as the third approach in new economic sociology. The general idea is that culture should be used to analyze and explain economic phenomena. Viviana Zelizer is the mostknown proponent of this approach, which ought to be understood partly as a critique of the network approach. The network school emerged at the sociology department at Harvard University in the early years of the 1970s, where the people around Harrison White strongly rejected the value approach of Parsons. Though the network approach stresses the role of social structure, and few would deny the importance of social structure, this often comes with the downside of not including values. Zelizer has studied the relation between sacred and economic values and shown how the one can be turned into the other. It also shows how consumption is framed in markets. In addition to these three approaches that constitute the core of new economic sociology, one should mention the works of Niklas Luhmann and above all Pierre Bourdieu, both of whom have studied the relation between the economy and neighboring fields. Bourdieu has in several texts, especially in the book Distinction, analyzed the role of consumption and how it is connected with social structure. Research on markets has gradually become a central field of the research in economic sociology. Most sociological works draw on White’s producer market model, which assumes that a market is ordered as a result of producers who watch and orient to their consumers. An array of producers is carved out as a result of the interaction in markets, and some can sell their commodities for more money than others. However, consumers are treated as an anonymous mass in his model. In more recent works, attempts have been made to integrate the two sides of the market—production and consumption—in studies on fashion market.

Future Developments Economic sociology, both classical and new, has increased our understanding of the economy. Economic sociology has grown into a stable field that continues to attract more sociologists and addresses central research topics. Several important institutions have been studied, such as market, money, and organization, often with innovative methods and approaches, such as network theory. There are nonetheless a number of issues that need further attention

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if a more complete and coherent understanding of the economy is to emerge. One fundamental problem concerns the relation between structure and value, two issues that seldom have been integrated in empirical and theoretical analyses. Thus, despite the fact that people grow up as consumers, which takes many years—a time that also is increasing in developed countries—before people make a “productive contribution” to the economy, most theories follow Marx and define and understand people essentially as producers. The two fields of production and consumption, which were clearly integrated in the economic writings of economists like Marshall and Sombart, are still largely treated as separate by economic sociologist and sociologists of consumption. Bridging this gap must be a central task for both parties. Patrik Aspers See also Commodities; Economics; Markets and Marketing; Political Economy; Social Distinction; Social Networks; Sociology; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings Aspers, Patrik. Orderly Fashion: A Sociology of Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2010. Burt, Ronald. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Fligstein, Neil. The Transformation of Corporate Control. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Granovetter, Mark. Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge, 1922. Parsons, Talcott. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press, 1968. Parsons, Talcott, and Neil Smelser. Economy and Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon, 1957. Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Smelser, Neil, and Richard Swedberg. The Handbook of Economic Sociology. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Swedberg, Richard. “Economic Sociology: Past and Present.” Current Sociology 35 (1987): 1–122.

Swedberg, Richard. “New Economic Sociology: What Has Been Accomplished, What Is Ahead?” Acta Sociologica 40 (1997): 161–182. Swedberg, Richard. Principles of Economic Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. White, Harrison. “Where Do Markets Come From?” The American Journal of Sociology 87 (1981): 517–547. White, Harrison. Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Zelizer, Viviana. “The Price and Value of Children: The Case of Children’s Insurance.” The American Journal of Sociology 86 (1981): 1036–1056.

ECONOMICS Most economic literature assumes that consumers are rational, that is to say, that they choose optimal combinations of goods. To model this core paradigm, we have to identify the constraints on consumers and find ways to characterize the best choice given these constraints. The classic paradigm focuses on the case where there is only one constraint, namely, the budget. The consumer has a budget, that is, a certain amount of money to spend, and thus can buy any combination of goods whose total cost does not exceed the budget. Usually the prices of goods are taken as given and cannot be changed by the consumer and are not influenced by an individual consumer’s choice. In this way, the total cost of any combination of goods is simply the sum of the costs of all goods bought where the cost of a good is the quantity of that good bought multiplied by the unit price of that good. Taking the budget and prices as given, the consumer is left choosing the quantities of the various goods—so much bread or rice, so much meat, so much clothing, and so on. The feasible set facing the consumer is the set of all those combinations of quantities that satisfy the budget constraint. Clearly, this set depends on the budget and the prices. At the end of the day, the consumer’s budget is determined by his or her wealth. Typically, individual consumers are assumed to have no control or influence on prices; rather, prices are determined by the market. In other words, it is aggregate demand and aggregate supply, rather than individual consumers, that determine prices. This immediately suggests that two key determinants of an individual consumer’s choice are that individual’s wealth and

Economics

the market prices of goods. That is not to say that every consumer with the same wealth and facing the same prices will choose the same bundle of goods; the model allows consumers to have different preferences and thus to choose different bundles when facing the same budget constraint. So wealth and prices do not determine choice but they do influence choice. A consumer can only choose a feasible option, an option that satisfies all constraints. Just what is chosen given the set of feasible options depends on the consumer’s preferences. To progress this viewpoint, it is necessary to clarify how economists understand preferences and optimal choice. On the one hand, consumers are assumed to have strict preferences; for example, you may think one brand of cola to be better than another. Here, “better” is an assessment of one good against the other, ignoring differences in prices, as opposed to the view that a preferred item will always be bought. If one option is strictly preferred over another, we can say the first dominates the second. At the same time, individuals may be indifferent between some goods; some may consider all forms of long grain rice to be the same and are thus indifferent between brands. A consumer is understood to have a weak preference of one choice over another if the consumer either prefers the first choice to the second or is indifferent between the two choices. That is to say, weak preference allows indifference. Three important assumptions about preferences are standard. First, it is assumed that consumers have a complete set of preferences; that is to say, given any pair of choices, the consumer has a weak preference of one over the other. Faced with a menu of possible meals, all with the same price, the consumer can state a weak preference over all pairs of meals; sea bass is better than salmon, salmon is better than lamb, and so on. A second assumption is that the preferences are transitive. For example, in the case of the menu, given a preference of sea bass over salmon and a preference of salmon over lamb, transitivity would imply a preference of sea bass over lamb. A third assumption may seem odd, but it is necessary to maintain a logical framework. It is reasoned that a consumer does not strictly prefer an option over itself. Sea bass is not strictly preferred to sea bass! Essentially, the consumer is assumed to be indifferent between any option and that same option. This assumption of reflexivity combined with transitivity can be summed up as by saying the consumer has consistent preferences.

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With these assumptions, we can define an optimal choice in one of two ways. A feasible choice is optimal if the consumer has a weak preference for that choice over all other feasible choices; for example, in the case of the menu, sea base is optimal if the individual weakly prefers sea bass to all other options on the menu. Alternatively, we can say a feasible option is optimal if there is no other feasible choice that dominates that option. Sea bass is optimal if there is no other meal the consumer strictly prefers to sea bass. The first definition stresses that the optimal choice is at least as good as all other possibilities, while the second stresses that the optimal choice is not dominated by other possibilities. With complete consistent preferences, the two definitions are equivalent. Transitivity is important here. If the menu has only the three meals mentioned and yet the individual prefers sea bass to salmon, prefers salmon to lamb, and prefers lamb to sea bass, then all options are dominated and there is no optimal choice. We would find it difficult to argue the individual’s choice was determined by their preferences. So in this model, a consumer has a complete and consistent set of preferences that identifies the optimal choice of goods given the budget constraint. It is the combination of the individual’s wealth, market prices, and preferences that determine the individual’s choice. All the individual influences on choice over and above wealth, such as being a vegetarian or health conscious or a gourmet, are subsumed into the individual’s preferences. There is nothing in this model that contradicts the proposition that preferences are socially determined. Indeed, in applied work, economists often stress the need to look at the “demographics” of the individuals. Yet it is fair to say that economists often focus on the role of wealth and prices and take variations in preferences as given. In applications of this model, it is assumed that an individual’s preferences are fixed over the period under study.

Utility For the most part, economists use the idea of utility to summarize preferences. For each logically possible basket of goods, a number is assigned, which is the consumer’s utility derived from that basket. The important property of these numbers is that if the consumer strictly prefers one option to another, then the utility assigned to the first option is greater than the utility assigned to the second option. Furthermore,

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if the consumer is indifferent between two options, then they are assigned the same utility. Assuming that preferences are such that utilities can be assigned, an optimal choice can be redefined as being the feasible option that has the highest utility. Sea bass is optimal if the utility assigned to sea bass is greater than or equal to the utilities assigned to all other meals on the menu. Rationality in the classic model is reduced to saying that the consumer maximizes utility subject to the budget constraint. The specific choice of the numerical value of utilities is not important; it is only their relative values. For example, in the case of the three meals (sea bass, salmon, and lamb), the utilities may be ten, eight, and six, respectively, or they may be five, four, and three, respectively. In both cases, the consumer’s preferences over the three meals implied by the utilities is the same, namely, sea bass is better than salmon, which in turn is better than lamb. It is the consumer’s preferences that are important, not the specific numerical value of utilities. From this perspective, the use of utilities is a useful device rather than a fundamental idea.

more expensive lamb cutlets may reflect the difference in price more than my preferences. Nevertheless, the interplay between preferences, prices, and wealth can be exploited. For example, if I choose sea bass even though salmon is cheaper, I not only reveal that sea bass dominates salmon but also reveal information about how much more money I am willing to pay for sea bass. The price difference between sea bass and salmon gives a monetary measure of the strength of preferences and my ability to pay for the better option. Insofar as we can estimate a consumer’s willingness to pay, we have a monetary measure of how much better off the consumer is with the preferred option. Second, a revealed preference perspective may seek to observe a number of choices with the aim of seeing if those choices are consistent with the rationalist model. Such experiments are part of modern economics, and, not surprisingly, people do fall short of meeting the demands of having a complete and consistent set of preferences in the context of relatively complex decisions. This is an issue returned to in the final section on behavioral economics.

Revealed Preferences

Marginalism

While complete and consistent preferences are the theoretical basis of the rationalist model of consumer choice, there is an interesting alternative perspective that starts with the following question: what do the actual choices of a consumer reveal about his or her preferences? An economist building on the rationalist model can offer the following answer: a consumer choosing an option reveals a weak preference for that option over all alternatives that do not cost more than the chosen option. If I choose sea bass from the menu, I am revealing that sea bass is my optimal choice and thus weakly dominates all other options that cost no more than the sea bass. If I choose sea bass when salmon is cheaper, then, given the rationalist assumption, sea bass must dominate salmon; if this were not true, I would buy salmon and walk away with more money. This perspective raises two key issues. While preferences are seen to be independent of wealth and prices, it is clear that my choice of sea bass depends not only on my preferences but also on my wealth and the prices of the various options on the menu. Actual choices are contingent on prices and the consumer’s wealth as well as preferences. Hence, choices do not necessarily reveal preferences. My choice of sea bass and not the

Consider doing your weekly shop at your chosen food store. As you wander around, you place additional items into your basket. The rationalist model implies that you only add items that offer you a net gain. By buying the item, you will gain some direct utility from its consumption, but at the same time, you give up the money needed to pay for the item. Your net gain from the purchase is the direct utility from consuming the item minus the opportunity cost, namely, the utility that could have been obtained by using the money in some other way. It is useful to talk about the utility of money here, but it has to be stressed that this is the indirect utility of money, namely, the utility a consumer gains from items bought with that money. With this terminology, the net gain is the direct utility of the item minus the (indirect) utility of the item’s price. As you move around the store and add items to your basket, you are reducing the amount of money you will have after leaving the store. Each reduction in your residual budget will reduce your opportunities for future purchases and increase the opportunity cost; each item added increases the marginal utility of money. While the prices in the store do not change as you move through it, the more you buy, the higher the opportunity cost of items becomes. A rational choice

Economics

of a basket of goods implies that the last item added to the basket has near to zero net gain—the marginal direct gain from the marginal item just about matches its marginal indirect loss. If the marginal net gain is significantly positive, you are not fully realizing the gains from your visit to the store, while if the marginal net gain is negative, some of your items will yield a net loss. An important conclusion from the rationalist model is that the price of the marginal item is a monetary measure of the gain to the consumer from that item.

Wealth and Substitution Continuing the food store example, for each potential purchase, the consumer has to balance the direct gains against indirect losses. Those losses reflect the consumer’s marginal utility of money, which in turn will reflect the consumer’s wealth. Typically, marginal utility of money decreases as wealth increases. In this way, the simple approach used in the food store example automatically accommodates differences in the wealth of different consumers. The wealthier individuals will have a lower marginal utility of money and a smaller opportunity cost for each purchase. Such individuals will be willing and able to pay more. In 2008, the world economy suffered a major setback as the financial system was near collapse and governments had to provide vast amounts of support. For most people, their estimated personal wealth fell significantly, this being particularly true for those who lost their jobs or had unsustainable mortgages on their homes. For these individuals, the marginal utility of money rose significantly, and thus the opportunity cost of all purchases increased. In the case of food, individuals moved to cheaper brands, if not cheaper stores, even where prices had not changed. Such shifts in consumption due to changes in perceived wealth and no change in prices are called wealth effects. Also, in the early twentyfirst century, there have been periods when the world harvest of core food crops was greatly reduced, leading to significant increases in food prices. For poorer people, such prices changes can greatly reduce their real wealth. When we think about the impact of price changes, we need to be aware that a change in price more or less implies a change in consumer’s real wealth. If the price of wheat goes up, then all food items that are directly or indirectly dependent on wheat will see their prices rising. The opportunity cost of buying those items goes up, and consumers

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will be less willing to buy them and will tend to substitute away from those goods toward alternatives that are less dependent on wheat. There are two effects here: the relative prices of wheat dependent products rise, inducing consumers to substitute alternatives, and consumer’s real wealth falls. The impact of a price change is seen to be a combination of a substitution effect and a wealth effect. The wealth effect is the change that would have occurred if the consumer had suffered the same fall in real wealth but had not experienced the change in relative price. In a complementary manner, the substitution effect is the change that would have occurred if the consumer had experienced the change in relative prices but no change in real wealth. Substitution effects are seen to be predicable—consumers will tend to move away from those goods whose relative price increase, toward those goods whose relative price has fallen. Wealth effects are not so clear. It is useful to talk of normal goods, namely, those goods that a consumer buys more when wealth increases. For normal goods, a price rise leads to a negative substitution effect, as the consumer moves toward the relatively cheaper goods and to a negative wealth effect as real wealth has fallen. Overall, the price rise leads to a fall in the quantity demanded—the socalled law of demand. If a good is inferior, that is to say, the consumer buys less as wealth increases, then the impact of a price rise is less clear. The substitution effect is still negative, but now the wealth effect is positive. There is the theoretical possibility of a Giffen good, that is, a good whose demand increases when its price rises.

Work and Leisure The basic paradigm outlined thus far can be modified to model an individual’s choice of working hours. The first step is to focus on the individual’s choice of leisure hours, with the understanding that time not spent at leisure is time spent at work. The advantage of this focus is that leisure can be considered another good—the greater the hours spent at leisure, the better off is the individual. The second step is to modify the budget constraint. The simplest case is where the individual’s only source of money is earnings from work. Hence, to buy consumption goods, such as food and clothing, the individual must work. Given the market hourly rate of pay, the more hours the individual spends at work, the more goods the

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individual can buy. Spending an extra hour at work yields the utility gain from the goods bought with the earnings but reduces the utility gained from leisure. The rationalist perspective leads to the conclusion that the individual will push hours of work up to the point where the marginal (indirect) utility gain from the additional hour’s pay is equal to the marginal utility loss from reduced leisure. In this way, the basic paradigm becomes much richer and capable of addressing broader lifestyle choices. For most individuals, their most important asset is their ability to work. Those individuals who possess skills with greater market value will be offered greater hourly earnings, and their lifetime earnings will be higher. The market value of those lifetime earnings is, for most of us, the main determinant of our wealth and thus a major determinant of choice of consumption goods. A number of important observations are raised by this approach. Insofar as skills can be acquired through training and education, individuals have to decide how much of their time to invest in acquiring such skills. Leisure and consumption soon become complements rather than substitutes. To get the best from our consumption goods requires us to have the leisure time to savor them. It is not surprising that those individuals who can command higher wages do not necessarily work longer hours. Some individuals have a great deal of unearned income arising from the ownership of land or financial assets such as bonds and shares. If this income is sufficiently large, the net gain from work may be negative, and they will choose not to work in the traditional sense of the term, but it is likely they will have to spend some time managing their wealth. At the other extreme, some of the poorest individuals in developed economies may find themselves in a benefit trap. The reduction in benefits arising from moving from being unemployed to being employed may exceed the earnings from work, in which case they will rationally choose not to work.

Intertemporal Choice One of the opportunity costs of consuming goods such as food today is the reduced ability to purchase goods in the future (unless it is an investment good that retains or increases its monetary value over time); either we reduce our savings or we borrow money. The marginal (indirect) utility of money reflects our future as much as our present. Even our

most basic purchases reflect an implicit choice about ongoing lifestyles and thus reflect our preferences over lifelong consumption streams and our fundamental wealth, not current earnings. Intertemporal preferences take account of these observations. On the one hand, there is evidence that individuals discount future utility; that is to say, their preferences favor consumption streams with more consumption today. On the other hand, individuals have more or less access to capital markets where they can lend or borrow money, where savings earn interest and debt incurs an interest payment. Three important examples illustrate the issues raised by intertemporal preferences. First is the possibility of investing time in education and training with the aim of increasing future earnings. Apart from the loss of leisure time, such training implies lost earnings as well as course fees. Funding such investment can be problematic, particularly for children coming from poorer families. In a perfect capital market, individuals should be able to use their future enhanced earnings as collateral to underwrite a loan. In practice, this is not always possible. Second, purchasing high monetary value goods often requires forms of credit. For example, buying a home usually involves taking a substantial loan from a bank. In part, this loan will be set against future earnings but typically will take the form of a mortgage where the home acts as collateral for the loan. When all goes well, we exchange a stream of payments to the bank for a stream of services offered by the home and, at the end of the loan, a valuable asset. When it goes badly, as it did for many in the recent financial crisis, we can lose our homes and make significant losses. Finally, pension schemes for retirement represent long-term saving plans typically financed by deductions from our earnings. These three examples not only draw attention to consumer decisions being part of a choice of lifelong consumption streams but also stresses the underlying life cycle: when we are young, we invest in skills; when possible, we invest in homes and pension schemes; finally, when we are old, we draw on our pensions. All of this is more or less financed by our earnings. All involve risks.

Uncertainty and Risk As has been made clear by the near collapse of the financial system in 2008, life is full of uncertainty

Economics

and risk. Some risks are limited in their impact; a minor injury usually impacts only the individual and, perhaps, his or her immediate family. Some risks such as damaging weather, pandemics, and unstable financial systems impact many individuals. A rational consumer has to evaluate potential risks and take appropriate action to help reduce their impact. A key assumption economists often adopt is that, by and large, people are risk averse. Consider a simple example. You are offered the following gamble: you get $200 if the toss of a fair coin comes down heads but you get nothing if it comes down tails. How much will you pay to play this game? The expected value of the game is $100: half the time it pays out $200 and half the time it pays out nothing, so on average it pays out $100. Would you pay $100 to play this game? A risk-averse individual would pay less than $100; the difference between $100 and the price the individual would pay is a measure of that individual’s degree of risk aversion. Essentially, risk-averse individuals prefer certainty to uncertainty and would be willing to pay a premium to reduce uncertainty; at the same time, such individuals would require a premium to take on a risk. Not surprisingly, risk-averse individuals will pay insurance companies to reduce risks and expect companies to reward them for carrying some of the company’s risks by buying their shares. Furthermore, such individuals would contribute, through taxation, to government schemes designed to offer some form of insurance in situations private companies are reluctant to cover—for example, pandemics and failing financial systems! Given that an individual’s wealth is a major influence on even his or her basic purchases and that for most individuals their main asset is their “human capital,” namely, their ability to earn income from work, in an uncertain world, the stream of income we can expect to earn is itself uncertain. For riskaverse individuals, the greater the uncertainty, the smaller their real wealth. To clarify, consider two potential jobs, both offering to pay the same average salary, but one is riskier; for example, the riskier job may pay a lower basic salary but offer higher bonuses if all goes well with the work. The riskaverse individual would prefer the less-risky job and would only consider the riskier job if it offered a higher average salary. In effect, the individual would consider the riskier job as offering a lower wealth— essentially, the individual would need to seek out

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forms of insurance against the additional risks, for example, keeping savings in a low-interest instantaccess form to cover periods of low earnings. One of the impacts of recessions, including those arising from the recent financial crisis, is to increase the sense of uncertainty, particularly with respect to a fear of redundancy. That in itself will decrease many people’s perceived wealth and lead to a reduction in expenditure even though their current income has not changed.

Welfare and Political Economy Economics has always been concerned with government economic policies. The first task is to understand how individuals will respond to policies; the second task is to decide if a policy is good or bad. The rationalist approach to the consumer is the dominant model for predicting responses to policies, but it can also form the basis of a normative framework to assess the impact of policies on a nation’s welfare. Utilitarianism is the oldest form of normative analysis or welfare economics. Put crudely, in utilitarianism, a policy is good if it increases the total utility of the citizens. Note that a policy may be judged to be good even if it makes some worse off and some better off; to be good, the gains must outweigh the losses. Many economists reject the idea that utilities of different individuals can be compared, which is an essential requirement if we are to talk about total utility. Without comparability, we are left with the relatively weak concept of Pareto efficiency. A policy is said to be a Pareto improvement if no one is made worse off and at least one person is made better off. For new welfare economists, a Pareto improving policy is good. A government’s overall policy framework is Pareto efficient if there are no Pareto improving policies it can implement. The problem with this framework is that it remains silent on any policy that makes some better off and some worse off. It does not allow us to conclude whether the policy is good or bad. However, few policies are Pareto improvements, and new welfare economics defers judgment on many important policies to politics. Noble laureate Amartya Sen has tried to develop a third approach that rejects utilitarianism but allows us to make comparisons across individuals and thus allows discussion of inequality and justice. While Sen’s work has abstract appeal, particularly

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to the more philosophical minded, it is a relatively complex framework to use in practice. When it comes to the crunch, economists often revert to utilitarian-like cost-benefit analysis in which we put a monetary value on the costs and the benefits of the policy and conclude it is a good policy if the benefits are greater than the costs. An individual’s willingness to pay is used to attribute a monetary value to a person’s utility or well-being. Recall the simple example of a consumer in the store. The argument was that items will be added to the individual’s basket if the net gain is positive. This idea can be rephrased using the individual’s demand price, namely, the maximum amount of money the individual is willing to pay for the item. If the demand price is greater than the item’s actual price, then the item should be purchased. The difference between the individual’s demand price and the actual price is consumer surplus and is a monetary measure of the individual’s gain from purchasing the good. When evaluating the impact of a policy, economists often revert to a calculation of the changes in consumer surplus that would arise from the policy.

Market Failure One of the most ambitious applications of this cost-benefit analysis is the Stern Review on global warming. This report commissioned by the U.K. government compared the costs and benefits of a “business as usual” approach to global warming with the costs and benefits of introducing policies, such as a global carbon tax, which would reduce the level of greenhouse gas emissions. The Review concluded that the net payoff from such interventionist policies would be positive and significant. Indeed, the Review suggested that global warming was an extreme example of market failure arising from the presence of externalities. When an individual burns petrol in a car or uses gas to heat a home, he or she gains direct personal benefits but also imposes an external cost on future generations by adding to the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Without intervention, market prices reflect only private costs and not those external costs, and individual rational choices will reflect the lower price. At the heart of the debate that followed the Review’s publication was the choice of discount rate, some arguing it was too low and some arguing it was too high. While not free from criticism, the broad recommendation for

intervention reflects the views of many economists. It is worth stressing here that the classical analysis of market failures, such as those arising from externalities, is based on the assumption that individuals act rationally.

Coase and Asymmetric Information Modern analysis of market failure traces the problem to our limited capacity to construct contractual arrangements that would lead to socially efficient outcomes. This approach can be traced back to the work of Ronald Coase and his emphasis on transaction costs, which in turn are based on the premise that there are bounds to our ability to live up to the rationalist ideal. Many issues arise from asymmetric information; for example, the seller of a secondhand car has more information about the state of the car than the buyer. In this situation, there is a danger of the “bad” cars driving out the “good” cars as the willingness to pay is sufficiently reduced by the presence of bad cars that sellers of good cars are unwilling to sell. To the extent this happens, we clearly have market failure. This ongoing and all-pervasive program of research on asymmetric information maintains the assumption of individual rationality albeit with modified assumptions about information.

Behavioral Economics A much more radical program of research is behavioral economics, which questions the assumption of rationality and aims to build an alternative psychological framework. This is relatively early days for this program, so there is no unified framework at hand. One key idea is that preferences depend on a reference point against which alternatives are judged. An option is given a value akin to a utility value, but the value is based on a comparison of the option to the reference point. Values exhibit loss aversion. Consider a loss of $100 and a gain of $100. The reference point is taken to be the status quo, namely, one’s current wealth. Loss aversion implies that the loss, in value terms, from losing $100 is greater than the gain, in value terms, from winning $100. For example, the value of losing $100 may be –12, so that in value terms, the loss is 12, while the value of gaining $100 may be +10, so that in value terms the gain is 10. The value loss is greater than the value gain. Furthermore, it is assumed the marginal gains are decreasing as the

Economics

gain increases and, more importantly, the marginal losses decrease as the loss increases. For example, the value of gaining $200 may be +15, so in value terms, the gain from the second $100 is only 5 and not 10. Likewise, the value of a loss of $200 may be –18, so that in value terms, the loss is 18 and the loss in value terms of the second $100 is 6 and not 12. So in what ways does this differ from the standard economic approach? First, note that preferences are relative to the reference point, which, in this example, is the individual’s wealth when the decision is made; in the standard model, the assumption is that preferences are independent of wealth and prices. Second, the diminishing marginal loss in value terms runs counter to the standard assumption of risk aversion. If values were utilities, then marginal loss in value terms would increase as the loss increases. Consider the following standard illustration presented in a seminal paper by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1981. Imagine that you are about to purchase a jacket for ($125)[$15] and a calculator for ($15)[$125]. The calculator salesman informs you that the calculator you wish to buy is on sale for ($10)[$120] at the other branch of the store located 20 minutes drive away. Would you make the trip to the other store?

Read this with the numbers in parenthesis: $125 for the jacket, $15 for the calculator, or $10 for the calculator at the other branch. Now read this with the numbers in brackets, that is, $15, $125, and $120. A standard utility analysis compares paying $140 for the two items without additional traveling with the alternative of paying $135 dollars with additional traveling. This suggests that it makes no difference if you are saving $5 on a $15 calculator or saving $5 on a $125 calculator. Yet most people say they would travel to save $5 on the $15 calculator but not travel if the calculator costs $125. How does the value analysis work? Part of the framework suggests a piecemeal approach and focuses on the decision where to buy the calculator. Assume the loss in value terms of paying $10 is –3, and the matching value losses for $15, $120, and $125 are –4, –11, and –11.2, respectively. These numbers are consistent with the assumption of diminishing marginal losses in value terms. The reduction in loss due to paying $5 less is 1 if the calculator costs $15, while the reduction is only 0.2 if the price is $125. This would be consistent with the responses reported previously

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if the loss in value terms arising from the extra traveling lies between 0.2 and 1. One important application is Richard Thaler’s recommendation on savings. In the United States, the tax-advantaged 401(k) retirement savings schemes can be presented to employees in two ways: either they have to opt in to the scheme or they have to opt out. Evidence suggests that significantly more employees take up the scheme when they are required to opt out. Traditional analysis suggests that a rational employee would make the same decision regardless of how the decision is framed. Value analysis suggests that the reference point is the default contract offered and is thus different in the two cases. When we are asked to opt in, we have to agree to lose the donations, but if we are asked to opt out, we look at the gain from not making the donations. Given loss aversion we are less likely to opt in than we are not to opt out. Finally, we can note that Nouriel Roubini, who predicted in detail the recent financial meltdown, has offered a recent analysis to explain why such crises are predictable—that analysis is in part founded on the work of behavioral economists such as Robert Shiller. Chris R. Birchenhall See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Demand; Economic Indicators; Economic Psychology; Experimental Economics; Markets and Marketing; Price and Price Mechanisms

Further Readings Akerlof, George A., and Robert J. Shiller. Animal Spirits. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Areily, Dan. Predictably Irrational. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. Bernheim, B. Douglas, and Micheal D. Whinston. Microeconomics. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Camerer, Colin F., George Loewenstein, and Matthew Rabin. Advances in Behavioral Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Deaton, Angus, and John Muellbauer. Economics and Consumer Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Roubini, Nouriel, and Stephen Mihm. Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance. New York: Penguin, 2010. Sen, Amartya. The Standard of Living. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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Stern, Nicholas. The Economics of Climate Change (The Stern Review). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

ELECTRONIC POINT SALE (EPOS)

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Electronic point of sale (EPOS), also called more simply point of sale (POS), is a system that performs all the tasks at checkout and provides transactional data. The POS data can be shared and can be used to aid vendors in tracking merchandise on consignment, defined by Michael Levy and Barton Weitz as items not paid for by the retailer until they are sold. Checkout is the location where transactions occur usually involving the exchange of funds (cash, credit, debit, or checks) for products or services received. POS provides data when a transaction occurs using specially designed hardware and software. The EPOS can be thought of as an updated, data-rich version of the cash register. Data are useful for sales tracking, financial transfers, and inventory control. For example, a store or restaurant can see immediately whether or not a coupon offer or other promotion is popular and can change advertising and promotion to produce better results. Research studies on POS systems show that they provide agility, better alignment, and improved performance. For example, Celik Parkan studied eight Hong Kong drug stores and found significantly improved performance after they added POS systems. POS terminals can stand alone or be connected to store headquarters or to greater systems that track, for example, all grocery store sales of a particular cereal in a single day. Stores may collaborate with a marketing research firm conducting these types of mass-market analyses. In this case, the sale registers are connected to a server or multiple servers that may be referred to as a central control units or master controllers. Not only can data be reported but they can also be stored so that, at the end of the month or year, sales can be compared to the previous month or year. In a typical retail situation, an EPOS would include a computer, monitor, cash drawer, credit-card processor, receipt printer, a touch screen, customer display, a place for customer signature, and a barcode scanner. Sometimes a customer signature is not required, especially if the sale amount is small as, for

example, in a fast-food or quick-serve restaurant or, increasingly, in grocery and specialty shops. In the future, the need for a customer signature will likely be less frequent in more venues. This need for an actual signature is referred to in the business as signage. Customers prefer not having to sign because it is more convenient and it saves time at the transaction. Stores like it because it moves customers along more efficiently. EPOS systems decrease the amount of time spent in sales transactions and, hence, increases customer satisfaction and efficiency of orders. Retailers save on labor costs in shelf stocking and accounting. Managers can see what is selling so it helps them allocate labor, service, and products. Thus, this affects scheduling as well as the ordering and stocking of products. The earliest EPOS systems came from IBM in the 1970s and were used in department stores and restaurants. The first barcode scanners were introduced in 1974 by an Ohio supermarket. Later, many companies began producing EPOS systems, including Microsoft, Apple, NCR Corporation, and Epson. As more companies entered the market, there was more competition for features such as appearance, ease of use, initial cost and upkeep, functionality, speed, consistency, and reliability. The initial cost to a store is substantial, and any decisions to change systems are also costly. At the National Retail Federation annual meeting held in New York City, many companies exhibit the newest systems and try to persuade stores to buy their system or components of it. Over time, standards have been set that have made updating systems less difficult, and different brands of POS terminals and computers can be substituted for each other. As Barry Berman and Joel Evans point out, Among the recent advances in scanning technology are hand-held scanners: wearable, hands-free scanners; and miniaturized data transceivers. . . . One scanning option is self-scanning, whereby the consumer himself or herself scans items being purchased at a checkout counter, pays by credit or debit cards, and bags items. (2010, 368–369)

This technology can be seen in grocery stores and home supply stores. Retailers draw on extensive knowledge to help make informed decisions in an ever-changing market. EPOS increases their knowledge. POS is related to category management, a standard practice in drug store chains, supermarkets,

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convenience stores, and mass merchandisers that is spreading to smaller retailers. Levy and Weitz define category management as the process of managing a retail business with the objective of maximizing sales—and hence profits—in a category. In this type of management, a retailer is like a category manager. A particular store chain may call them captains or advisors. This person leverages detailed knowledge about POS information as well as other knowledge about consumers and consumer trends. This information is used to create specific modulars that may have different stores or facings to meet specific needs in the market, for example, snow boots in St. Paul but not in Miami. That is an obvious example, but a preference for a certain type of candy or sandwich may not be so obvious by location. So, the category manager impacts the role of supplier. He or she takes a new approach to optimizing store layout and attempts to maximize the gross margin dollars produced per unit of space. Sometimes, this results in competitive stores looking very much the same inside, and a consumer might notice that two drugstores across the street from each other may be running the same specials. If they wait long enough, they will see the same deals from Store X as from Store Y. In summary, POS is important to retail in terms of operations, data sharing, and productivity/performance. Elizabeth Goldsmith See also Consumer Demand; Department Stores; Information Technology; Markets and Marketing; Self-Service Economy; Shopping; Store Loyalty Cards; Supermarkets

Further Readings Berman, Barry, and Joel R. Evans. Retail Management. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2010. Boddy, David, and Robert Paton. “Maintaining Alignment over the Long Term: Lessons from the Evolution of an Electronic Point of Sale System.” Journal of Information Technology 20 (2005): 141–151. Christopher, Martin. “The Agile Supply Chain: Competing in Volatile Markets.” Industrial Marketing Management 29, no. 1 (2000): 37–44. Levy, Michael, and Barton Weitz. Retailing Management. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Parkan, Celik. “Measuring the Effect of a New Point of Sale System on the Performance of Drug Store Operations.” Computers & Operative Research 30, no. 5 (2003): 729–744.

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ELECTRONIC VIDEO GAMING Video gaming is a popular activity in contemporary society. Over 25 million gaming devices and more than 335 million computer and video games have been sold in the United Kingdom in the last ten years. The combined video and computer game sales in the United States was over $10.5 billion in 2009, and 67 percent of American households own some form of video game entertainment hardware. Gaming involves a variety of technologies, spaces, and practices of consumption that are increasingly social. Early research on gaming was driven by concerns about the consequences of exposure to violent game content and the encouragement of aggressive behavior. This focus has expanded in recent years, and gaming has been increasingly researched from a number of different theoretical and thematic perspectives by academics from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., psychology, sociology, film and cultural studies, computing). Despite the broadening of academic interest in this area, there has been a lack of research on the meanings and motivations associated with gaming, its place within everyday practices of consumption, and its relation to identity. This is consistent with research on media consumption and ethnographies of technology that highlights the importance of understanding technologies through the value and meaning associated with their consumption within everyday communities and practices. Recent research has begun to examine the situated aspects of playing video games within everyday contexts, their facilitation of social cohesion between peer groups, and its relationship with other leisure practices. An important focus of such research has been the gendered consumption and social practices associated with video gaming. Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter claim that the lack of female participation and representation in gaming is consistent with broader gender dynamics of leisure and consumption, and the reinforcement and reproduction of established gender roles. Researchers such as Marsha Kinder have identified female representations within game content as sexualized and stereotypical, contributing to the perception that gaming embodies masculine activities and culture, and excluding females through the promotion of the idea of female technological inferiority and the gendering of technological artifacts.

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However, Bryce and Rutter have criticized such approaches for taking a passive view of the meanings constructed around representations of masculinity and femininity in games, assuming a direct causal relationship between female (and male) representations and their consumption. This contrasts with research examining gender differences in the productive consumption of texts and computer games that demonstrates possibilities for a variety of gendered readings. Research has also examined the gender dynamics of gaming in public and private, as well as domestic and online, spaces. Constraints and possibilities for female participation in these contexts have been examined by Angela McRobbie and by Bryce and Rutter, who suggest that they are highly gendered. Domestic gaming spaces and technologies, for example, show evidence of males assuming the role of “expert,” undermining female skills and controlling access. Online gaming environments provide opportunities to reduce constraints on female participation consistent with female participation in other leisure activities previously perceived to be “male” (e.g., football/soccer). This can be understood within a context of resistance to the constraints placed on female leisure in contemporary society and can potentially alter the gender dynamics of gaming. The role of consumption in the development of identity has not specifically addressed gaming as a set of practices and the social networks through which identity is expressed and developed. The embodiment of the ideal self and expression of identity through character creation in online gaming environments, and the extent to which this reproduces or resists existing gender stereotypes, are important areas for developing understanding of the gender dynamics of video gaming. This can also contribute to wider theoretical understanding of the relationship between gender, identity and consumption. Innovation in gaming technologies (e.g., new game controllers, mobile gaming, social networking), and their influence on practices of consumption, is another area for future research. Bryce and Rutter claim that the increasing convergence associated with technological change increases the social nature of gaming, encourages female participation, and changes societal perceptions of gaming as a masculine activity. Research in this area can also inform theoretical understanding of wider relationships between technology and consumption. Another future area for research on video gaming is the relationship between producers and consumers.

Henry Jenkins has highlighted the importance of the modification and production of gaming products and services by end consumers (e.g., mods, maps, skins, and new game-level creation). These new products are distributed through gaming communities and demonstrate the increasingly blurred boundaries between commercial and noncommercial production and consumption in gaming. Understanding the role of user-generated content within gaming communities, and its impact on concepts of copyright, ownership, and commercial exploitation, can also inform wider perspectives on the relationship between production and consumption in online spaces. Jo Bryce See also Bricolage; Ethnography; Gender and the Media; Home Computer; Internet; Leisure Studies; Virtual Communities; Youth Culture

Further Readings Bryce, Jo, and Jason Rutter. “Gendered Gaming in Gendered Spaces.” In Handbook of Computer Game Studies, edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, 301–310. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Crawford, Garry. “The Cult of Champ Man: The Culture and Pleasures of Championship Manager/Football Manager Gamers.” Information, Communication & Society 9, no. 4 (2006): 496–514. Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSA). Facts and Figures, 2008. http://www. askaboutgames.com/?c=/pages/factsFigures.jsp (accessed January 23, 2008). Entertainment Software Association (ESA). Essential Factors about the Computer and Video Game Industry. ESA, 2010. http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_ Essential_Facts_2010.PDF (accessed September 2010). Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Kinder, Marsha. “Contextualising Video Game Violence: From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 to Mortal Kombat 2.” In Interacting with Video, edited by Patricia M. Greenfield and Rodney R. Cocking, 25–37. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996. Lunt, Peter, and Sonia Livingstone. Mass Consumption and Personal Identity: Everyday Economic Experience. Buckingham UK: Open University Press, 1992. McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. London: Macmillan, 1992. Schott, Gareth R., and Kirsty R. Horrel. “Girl Gamers and Their Relationship with the Gaming Culture.” Convergence 6 (2000): 36–53.

Elias, Norbert Yates, Simeon J., and Karen Littleton. “Understanding Computer Game Cultures: A Situated Approach.” Information, Communication and Society 2 (1999): 566–583.

ELIAS, NORBERT (1897–1990) Norbert Elias was a German-Jewish sociologist born in Breslau, Silesia (then Germany, today Poland). After studying philosophy in Breslau and a temporary involvement in Zionism, Elias turned to sociology, first in Heidelberg and then in Frankfurt, where he completed his Habilitation in 1933; a re-worked version, translated as The Court Society, was not published before 1969. Like so many others, he left Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. After two years in Paris, he went to England in 1935, where he completed his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process. Years of internment on the Isle of Man and years of work in adult education and group therapy were followed by his first academic post in England at the University of Leicester (1954–1962). Long overdue official recognition of his work and person took place in the 1970s, when a fruitful reception climate shaped by the crisis of academic Marxism renewed interest in a longue durée history of body and psyche. Elias’s contribution to the study of consumer culture is manifold but was never intended to be labeled as such. Four lines of departure for the fruitful application of his insights can be located, as discussed next. Deriving from the central conclusion of Elias’s research on the European transformation of upperclass habits and affect structure from the wild, rather unrefined feudal past to the more inhibited, pacified, and refined ways of behavior of a courtly aristocracy in the eighteenth century, we might obtain a more realistic picture of the gains and losses also experienced by the majority of people living in the contemporary, postindustrial consumer society, compared with extreme positions that hold it to be either a hedonist paradise or a late-capitalist hell in disguise. Although Elias was accused by adherents to the Frankfurt school (e.g., Buck-Morss 1978) of neglecting both exploitation in the workplace and permissiveness in the sphere of modern mass consumption, he was aware of the huge difference between courtly faceto-face communication and bourgeois transaction guided by the dynamics of money, profession, and commodities. In his later sketch of “informalization”

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processes occurring in the twentieth century (developed in collaboration with the Dutch sociologist Cas Wouters), Elias took into account the higher visibility and ease of the expression of emotions corresponding to a more liberal attitude to sex, authority, and pleasure in consumption by adopting the formula “controlled de-controlling of emotions.” In particular, Elias has contributed to a better understanding of the dynamics of status competition, distinction, extravagance, and lavishness, of assimilation and demarcation, practiced between members of ruling classes and aspiring upwardly mobile people of bourgeois origin. Elias’s concept of “habitus” can be compared to that of Pierre Bourdieu, but while the latter concentrated on style and taste, the former dealt with the “affective household” of a person as a whole. Elias developed a historical sociology of sports and leisure. He called the corresponding process one of sportization, English counterpart to French courtization. The Quest for Excitement aims at the acting out of civilizational tensions by way of sporting activities and, mimetically, by watching violence-controlled team competition. This balanced expression of affects takes place in largely unexciting mass societies and forces people to a complex self-steering process between the risk of boredom and the risk of physical harm, which is often prevented by sticking to rules of “fairness.” And, finally, his understanding of the development of the human capacity to use “symbols,” whose storage and transmission—as “knowledge”— to further generations is indispensable for the rise of human “culture,” integrates speech, thinking, and knowledge as three aspects of one process. Elias tried to overcome the legacy of a European tradition of dualist philosophy (mind/body, reason/emotion, etc.). He attributed this tendency both to structuralism and phenomenology. Elias also opposed the neo-Marxist critique of capitalist culture, as in the work of Theodor W. Adorno or Herbert Marcuse, because of its economic reductionism. His objections would certainly also include French postmodernism or the cultural studies of British provenience, and, as a remote child of mind/body dualism, the very idea of a pure sociology of the body. Helmut Kuzmics See also Civilizing Processes; Emotions; Habitus; Informalization; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Semiotics; Sex; Social Class; Social Distinction; Sports; Status

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Further Readings Buck-Morss, Susan. “Review of The Civilization Process, by Norbert Elias.” Telos 37 (1978): 181–198. Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Elias, Norbert. The Symbol Theory. Edited with an introduction by Richard Kilminster. London: Sage, 1991. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Elias, Norbert, and Eric Dunning. Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

ELITES The term elite emerged in the seventeenth century to describe commodities that were particularly prized, and the usage was later extended to designate those groups that occupy the top rung of the social ladder. Interestingly, through this dual linguistic origin, we can already detect a significant connection between the theme of consumption and that of the upper ranks of society. It was not until the latenineteenth century, however, that the term was established as a scientific concept, chiefly as a result of the work of two Italian scholars: Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. According to these two fathers of elite theory, at the top of every society inevitably lies a small minority that holds power, controls the key resources, and makes the major decisions. Since then, the concept of elite(s) has been used in various disciplines but not necessarily in reference to this (rather controversial) perspective. Some social scientists find the concept particularly useful insofar as it potentially subsumes all sorts of upper groups. Admittedly, such breadth is also liable to be viewed as a problem because bringing together members from disparate sectors often entails a certain degree of imprecision. As a matter of fact, configurations can be, objectively and subjectively, quite different from one context to another. For instance, we may be dealing with a monolithic elite or with a plurality of subgroups controlling various fields—hence, some hesitations over the use of the singular or the plural—and eliteness may prove to be related to various criteria of social influence (ancestry, economic wealth, knowledge, etc.). It should be added that the concept is strongly rejected by many “progressive” researchers because

of its elitist or snobbish denotation. However, it is quite possible to consider elites simply as an appropriate object of scholarly attention without any evaluative implications whatsoever.

Elite Distinction and Consumption While the birth date of consumer society is contested, most authors concur that, originally, consumption was essentially related to intra-elite competition. For aristocrats—or bourgeois aiming to live “nobly”— it was an investment of sorts with a view to bearing out their social worth. Consumption was principally directed to categories of expenditure such as household, adornment, and military equipment, but also to art and liturgical apparatus, for instance. This intraelite competition was often affected by the adoption of sumptuary laws aimed at bringing manifestations of social eminence under control. Although other purposes may be distinguished (notably moralizing and protectionist ones), sumptuary exclusivity should mainly be understood as a defensive reaction by established elites concerned with preserving an exclusive access to prestige goods ostensibly “materializing” their higher position. In this respect, it appears that such legislation has been enacted particularly when conventional markers of social superiority were challenged from below. A classic example is found in the symbolic rivalry between the nobility and the rising merchant class in Western Europe, throughout those centuries witnessing the long transition from social structuration through hereditary statuses to new logics based on socioeconomic achievements. The significant role played by acquisition practices in intra-elite competition during those past centuries was especially crucial within court societies. Of importance here are the contributions of Werner Sombart and Norbert Elias. In his book on Luxury and Capitalism, Sombart analyzed how lecherous kings and courtiers used desirable femininity and erotic conquests as a central emblem of distinction. According to Sombart, by showering presents on their mistresses, elites led to intensification on the demand for luxuries. On his side, in his famous work on The Court Society, Elias insisted on the imperative pressure for competitive display between courtiers eager to defend their prestige around the figure of the king. Although they have been extended by more systematic historical explorations, these pioneering reflections on the links between elite distinction and consumption can still be regarded as fundamental.

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The subsequent expansion of the consumer society (increasingly involving middle classes) during the eighteenth century, and the transition to a mass market in the two following ones, had a profound impact on the ways in which consumption was experienced by the dominant groups. As a result of the broader availability of goods to ever-larger sections of the population, distinction through commodities was no longer essentially a struggle for respectability within their own milieu but also vis-à-vis a growing number of challenging outsiders. Many products that had been the prerogative of the all-powerful and the wealthiest families for generations tended to be abandoned by them because standardized (often luxurious-seeming) ones deprived the originals of their symbolic value. Historians have demonstrated that the luxury goods of one generation may become the “standard items” of the next and the “necessities” of the third (McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982). As they move from being rare to being commonplace, many commodities thus lose their high-status connotation—as has happened with cars during the last one hundred years, even though the most prestigious models remain unattainable for the greater part of the population. Another important factor affecting the image of elites has been the development of more anonymous contexts. The familiar social world and lasting appraisals among members of small communities often gave way to the impersonal, momentary, and often doubtful evaluations between urbanites. In large cities, external appearance rarely confirms an already known status but pertains to a constant reassertion of self. Not only are social actors consistently led to come across unknown strangers (and to be scrutinized by them) but one is also likely to meet significant others on an irregular basis, which calls for the maintenance of a consistent, valorizing image. Other important dynamics of change include, for instance, the outcome of more individualistic societies, the democratizing aspects of consumerism, a succession of revolutions into casualness, and the advent of pluralistic postmodern logics entailing an unprecedented diversification of products and styles.

Theoretical Models and Contributions The few background evolutions presented in this brief overview are by no means exhaustive. However, they are consequential for what concerns us here. Studies of elites tend to concentrate on standard questions

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such as formation, domination, reproduction, circulation, or (in)compatibility with democracy. When considered in relation with the theme of consumption, what is at stake are more symbolic dimensions and notably the subject of elitist distinction. Students interested in this field have many classical, as well as more recent, models of interpretations at their disposal. Several founders of the discipline of sociology whose contributions appeared between 1880 and 1920 have devoted some attention to that subject within a context of enormous changes. With few exceptions, individual theoreticians or schools of thought tackled it, however, as a rather subsidiary theme—their primary preoccupation being to provide explanatory schemes consonant with their own grand theory. Valuable contributions include, among others, Thorstein Veblen’s seminal writings on conspicuous consumption, invidious distinction, and pecuniary emulation and canons of taste, or Gabriel de Tarde’s pioneering analysis in terms of imitation, which opens a whole field of study on elites as paragons. One may also mention Georg Simmel, who underlined the tension between a desire to communicate upper-echelons membership—which entails representing the standard of that group—and the pretension of having a personal style. Max Weber also provided important reflections about elites’ styles of life and social closure strategies and, of course, introduced the fundamental distinction between status and class. Regarding major subsequent contributions, one should make reference to American functionalist approaches on social standing and achievement through commodity consumption—within communities supposedly sharing the same belief in the potential for upward mobility—or Goffmanian views in terms of presentation of self and impression management. Pierre Bourdieu’s model tackling the field of consumption in relation with taste and the manifestation of cultural capital as well as sociopsychological perspectives on social comparisons equally prove to be landmark works. Furthermore, socioeconomic perspectives are important for the study of elites and consumption in several respects. James Duesenberry, Harvey Leibenstein, and Fred Hirsch elaborated important frameworks in terms of demonstration effect, snob effect, and positional goods, respectively, which seriously challenged orthodox thinking in economics by showing how consumption patterns depend heavily on how spending compares with that of significant others, and how it becomes increasingly

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social and symbolic as incomes rise. Last but not least, the rich marketing literature emphasizes the importance of brand choice in relation to elitist image. All these theoretical models (one could have mentioned Jean Baudrillard or analysts of postmodernity as well) have generated insights. However, most of them have usually developed overwhelming universalistic ambitions and, from a comparative perspective, they prove more or less operational according to the contexts studied. Many illustrations could be given to discuss the (in)applicability of tools of analysis. Let us take two examples. The Veblenian concept of conspicuous consumption has been used retrospectively by historians to refer to various periods such as the end of the Middle Ages; the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries; and even antiquity. It is also currently employed when it comes to interpreting the contemporary attitudes of Asian new elite consumers, for instance. It may be considered that this concept, elaborated with regard to the specific Northern American context at the end of the nineteenth century, is relevant in the case of “upstart” societies where social superiority must be put on display. Yet, the enormous cultural differences between the societies and periods considered should not be neglected, and one should beware of universalistic generalizations and extrapolations. The second example concerns what is usually referred to as trickle-down mechanisms, which have been studied by sociologists such as Herbert Spencer, Tarde, Veblen, Simmel, and later by some American functionalists (who, so said in passing, took no notice at all of one another). What is meant by this is the tendency for commodities to pass down through the status hierarchy. In the course of their descent, they lose their ability to express superior position and may come to be considered as dispensable by the upper groups, which are driven to continually adopt new signs to differentiate themselves. We are touching on the topic of fashion (which also used to be a Western elitist phenomenon originally). Once again, it matters to develop a complex view here. Even among fashion-conscious societies, one meets elites who resolutely play the card of “distinction through antiquity.” The desire to own ancient commodities may be accorded preeminent importance insofar as it serves to legitimize them by anchoring their social worth in the past. Clearly, such a conservative code is especially frequent among well-established elites eager to demonstrate their long-standing status. Nevertheless,

it can also be found among more recent ones who, rather than acquiring the latest products available on the market (that might betray the fact that they have “arrived” in fairly recent times), instead prefer to invest in ancient things. Moreover, in those cases, where there is no possibility of satisfactory novelty or sophistication, elites may have no other alternative than a retreat to previous manners when being imitated. Consider gloves. During the eighteenth century, in France, they were seldom worn in public, being perceived as connoting rusticity, and it was compulsory to take them off in the presence of important others. Later on, an inverted code of politeness prevailed, and members of the elite were supposed to keep gloves most of the time. Being displeased by the downward diffusion of this standard to the rising classes, some members of the highest circles had no other option than to give up such items and thus return to the eighteenth-century situation. What should be concluded is that it is imperative to contrast the varying degrees of social prestige accorded to the “old” and the “new” depending on the actual perceptions of the elites under consideration. More generally speaking, while there is much to admire in many classical models of interpretation, it is nevertheless advisable to consider them along with the patterns of meanings that give them significance. It is not a difficult task to show how many theorizations tend to be typical products of the societies in which they originated. For example, according to Veblen, conspicuousness is an absolute necessity for the social groups at the apex of societies—which was probably obvious in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century. This indeed remains valid in some parts of the United States, as a 2006 study by Jeremy Schulz of the meaning and uses of the Hummer H2—a massive and expensive sport-utility vehicle— in California demonstrates. However, while there are contexts where the assertion of superiority is durably related to visible signs of wealth, there are other contexts where, especially for elites enjoying a wellestablished superiority, a relative understatement of outward forms of superiority is often expected. Working on the Parisian bourgeoisie, Bourdieu developed a different conception of social distinction, denoting the seemingly natural superiority arguably manifested in the dominant class. Therefore, within his analytical framework, distinction is understood as the opposite of conspicuous display—whereas social climbers, driven by their feelings of anxiety,

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feel the need to boast, which reveals their underlying lack of confidence. Bourdieu’s attempt to concentrate attention on more elusive aspects such as the sphere of the judgment of taste and cultivated dispositions is certainly a fertile research direction. It runs the risk, however, of neglecting ostentatious features that remain at the heart of elite distinction practices through consumption in many societies (from contemporary Russia to the Middle and the Far East, as well as many African or Latin American countries). Consequently, the point is not to consider whether some social theoreticians are more convincing than others; it is rather to understand that their statements often make sense within the respective contexts they have studied (e.g., Bourdieu’s France of the 1970s) but not necessarily everywhere.

Contemporary Elite Consumption This becomes even more obvious when one pays attention to elite consumption in the contemporary world. Undeniably, the current globalization process widens horizons more than ever before. As far as status markers are concerned, this involves a growing awareness of the commodities produced in many different countries as well as an increasing acuteness of comparison. Social groups in the highest echelons of societies may show an interest in a variety of commodities that perhaps help give them the impression that they belong to international elite circles beyond their respective origins. Nevertheless, the question remains as to how the possible introduction of globalized merchandises is actually perceived, understood, and evaluated. Elites may prove more sensitive to quantity or to quality, and to styles of consumption manifested at various levels, from countries near and far, via all sorts of intermediaries, and directly as well as virtually through the media. Non-Western elites may willingly resort to some imported status symbols (prestige cars, yachts, helicopters, etc.) but are likely to reject the ones liable to threaten their own identity (e.g., certain clothes, food, alcohol, beauty treatments, and even living in a condominium). There are also clear processes of adoption/ adaptation. For instance, Chinese elites frequently consume global luxury brands by adapting them to their own tastes—for example, mixing fine whiskies and green tea. Similarly, wealthy Malayans particularly appear to fancy Harley Davidsons but without any “Hells Angels” American connotations.

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Although rich and well-informed members of the elites may potentially acquire whatever they desire, it is not insignificant to underline that priorities in terms of consumption vary considerably from one society to another, possibly because social actors particularly try to project a desirable image to others through certain attributes (impressive dwelling, luxurious eating, the most perfect body, exclusive club membership, education in prestigious universities for children, prestige cars, elegant clothing, latest gadgets, to name a few) whereas others are, interestingly, deemed secondary. This may be related to deeply engrained cultural dispositions as well as to functionalist dimensions (a well-equipped home is quite understandably a main concern in a cold environment, a good car is a logical priority in Los Angeles, and so on). One should also mention a variety of attitudes regarding elitist obligations (such as lavish entertainments) and the modern quest for private comfort. Here, self-perceptions and cross-cultural judgments of which consumption goods should be considered must-haves, or not, are particularly relevant to study. It would certainly be misleading to interpret these dissimilarities from a purely teleological point of view, seeing them as related to more or less advanced or “backward” societies, or to postulate a limited number of mono-causal readings of structural determination. Jean-Pascal Daloz See also Conspicuous Consumption; Cultural Capital; Luxury and Luxuries; Positional Goods; Postmodernism; Social Distinction; Status; Taste

Further Readings Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Daloz, Jean-Pascal. The Sociology of Elite Distinction: From Theoretical to Comparative Perspectives. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010. Duesenberry, James. Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969. Goldthwaite, Richard A. Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300–1600. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977.

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Leibenstein, Harvey. “Bandwagon, Snob and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers’ Demand.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 64 (1950): 183–207. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society. London: Europa Publications, 1982. Schulz, Jeremy. “Vehicle of the Self: The Social and Cultural Work of the H2 Hummer.” Journal of Consumer Culture 6, no. 1 (2006): 57–86. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” The American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 541–558. First published 1904. Sombart, Werner. Luxury and Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967. First published 1913. Tarde (Gabriel de). The Laws of Imitation. Gloucester, UK: P. Smith, 1962. First published 1890. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. First published 1899. Welch, Evelyn S. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

EMBODIMENT Consumption is an embodied practice. It is shaped by habits, desires, tastes, and an embodied knowhow that informs both selection and use of items purchased. To consume is to physically do something: to purchase or use what one has purchased. And in some cases, most obviously regarding food and drink, it involves taking foreign objects and substances into one’s own body. Sociological work on and interest in embodiment has a long history that can be traced back to the origin of the discipline. However, the contemporary concern for embodiment within the discipline can be dated to the mid-1980s. Bryan Turner’s Body and Society was an early landmark study in what has proved to be a growth area for social research. This growth was consolidated, in the mid-1990s, with the launch of the Body and Society journal. The area remains diverse, however, and lacks the coherence and shared focus that are apparent in certain other social scientific research areas. One of the key arguments of much of the work in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that sociology prior to this point had adopted a disembodied view of the social actor. Sociologists were said to have tacitly accepted the—by this time largely discredited— philosophical view that mind and body are separate

entities or “substances,” a view famously advocated by Descartes in the early 1600s but with a genealogy dating back to Plato, and to have both accepted that an actor’s mind is her essence (again echoing Descartes) and focused on this aspect of agency to the detriment of a proper consideration of embodiment. This claim is, at the very least, overstated. There is good reason to believe that sociology, from its inception, has managed to circumvent the problem of dualism, and there are many examples, from Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim through to the present, of sociologists addressing themselves to bodily themes. The concern to re-embody sociology has generated various interesting and important research agendas, however, and there is good reason to believe that a disembodied model of the actor has found its way into studies of consumption by means of the economics discipline. Though neoclassical economics has its origins in the work of empiricist and utilitarian authors, for whom bodies, their pleasures, and pains were central, the embrace of highly abstract (mathematical) rational choice models in economics has led to a rather disembodied image of the consumer. The concept of taste is sometimes used in sociology in a way equivalent to what economists call preference. Our tastes are our purchasing and design preferences. The more literal meaning refers to our embodied sense of taste, however, as indeed the related notion of “aesthetics” references our ability to physically experience the world and objects within it (a denotation more obvious in relation to the “anesthetics” that remove this capacity). Empiricist aesthetic theories, such as that of David Hume, worked with this link. Beauty, for Hume, is that which brings pleasure to our senses, and our tastes therefore have a direct embodied component. In the work of Immanuel Kant, however, this connection was broken or at least challenged. Recognition of beauty, for Kant, entails that we rise above our basic physical pleasures and engage our rationality. Beauty may still strike the eye or the ear but it is a cultivated, even “rational,” eye or ear. Within sociology, Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has reworked this idea further, suggesting that Kant’s is a bourgeois aesthetic. The claim that immediate pleasures are somehow base and inferior to acquired tastes and to that which is rationally judged beautiful, Bourdieu argues, is a strategy that allows middle-class consumers to distinguish their tastes and preferences, elevating them above those of the

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working classes. It universalizes bourgeois taste, making it a standard against which other tastes are (negatively) evaluated. In this way, it both lends legitimacy to bourgeois dominance and suppresses, as crude and inappropriate, the physical impulses that find expression in working class cultures. Bourgeois taste remains embodied, however. The acquisition of tastes, whether mediated by reason or not, involves bodily transformation. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of alcoholic drinks (e.g., wine), which children typically find horrible but later learn to like—a transformed physical response—and which some adults learn to distinguish quite finely. Bourdieu and also Howard Becker apply the same logic to the visual appreciation of art works, which one can learn to “read” as one learns to read a language. The body is modified through the acquisition of a technique, a particular way of looking and visually dissecting. And Becker extends this further, beyond bourgeois taste and into the subcultural worlds of jazz and marijuana consumption. Needless to say, learning to like such stimulation is but a step to acquiring a desire for it. Art and jazz lovers are passionate about their object. They feel drawn, physically, to it. The other side of this, of course, is that we can acquire a sense of disgust. Having given up taking sugar in our tea, for example, we might find the taste of sweetened tea sickly sweet. And having acquired a “taste” for “good” wine, we may find the brands that first introduced us to it cheap and nasty. Consumption also involves “body techniques”’ (Mauss 1979) and a range of largely unreflective (embodied) habits, however. The use of the knife and fork in eating, as compared to chopsticks or hands, is one example, as is the ability to walk on high-heeled shoes and even to tie one’s shoelaces. These techniques affect what we purchase because the decision to purchase ordinarily entails a decision about what one is able to do with the purchase: people who cannot drive (an embodied skill) presumably do not buy cars. Beyond technique, moreover, where we shop and what we are likely to spot are affected by embodied know-how and a sense of ease: we often shop in the shops we are familiar with, whose layout we have a “feel” for. In short, to end where this entry began, consumption is an embodied practice. Nick Crossley See also Aesthetics; Art and Cultural Worlds; Body, The; Bourdieu, Pierre; Dieting; Habitus; Kant, Immanuel; Taste

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Further Readings Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Becker, Howard. Outsiders. New York: Free Press, 1991. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. London: Routledge, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Crossley, Nick. “Merleau-Ponty, the Elusive Body and Carnal Sociology.” Body and Society 1, no. 1 (1995): 43–63. Crossley, Nick. The Social Body. London: Sage, 2001. Crossley, Nick. “Researching Embodiment by Way of ‘Body Techniques.’” In Embodying Sociology: Retrospect, Progress, and Prospects, edited by Chris Shilling, 80–94. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Hertz, Robert. Death and the Right Hand. New York: Free Press, 1960. Mauss, M. “Body Techniques.” In Sociology and Psychology: Essays, 95–123. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Turner, Bryan. Body and Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.

EMOTIONAL LABOR In a consumer culture, people consume not only products but also services provided by individuals and companies. Just as these consumers want particular goods to meet their needs and desires, they also expect these services to be provided in a way that makes them feel good about consuming or, at least, does not interfere with their consumption. Companies rely on their employees’ abilities to provide services with a smile, regardless of their own feelings. When workers suppress or produce emotions to do their job, this process is called emotional labor. Put another way, consumers (and employers) expect employees to fulfill certain social roles that carry with them emotional obligations. This is a required but unpaid part of their work. For example, a news anchor must remain emotionally neutral during tragedy, a telemarketer must be genuinely pleasant to an angry customer, a Disney employee must always put on a show of fun and never be seen to be unhappy, and a debt collector must quickly summon anger. Thus, an important, often invisible part of the work that face-to-face and voice-to-voice workers provide is to hold back (“manage”) or to create emotions to put forward a suitable physical or emotional appearance to a customer. In short, emotional labor elicits the appropriate response from the consumer,

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creating value for the consumer, profit for employers, but no extra wages for the employee. Emotional labor exists mainly in the industrialized countries with a large service economy such as the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia. It is especially widespread in the United States, where nearly three-quarters of all jobs are located in the service sector. The term emotional labor was coined by Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart. Hochschild was strongly influenced by Erving Goffman’s idea of “impression management,” the social acting that all people do to display their desired image to others. Hochschild applied impression management to emotions. She showed that part of the desired image that employees such as flight attendants and bill collectors must present to customers is a “managed heart”: a proper emotional appearance, regardless of what they really feel. This presentation requires two types of acting: “surface acting,” which obligates workers to strongly suppress feelings to provide the appropriate appearance, and “deep acting,” which requires them to summon the necessary emotion that they then come to feel.

Case Studies and Contemporary Applications Studies in sociology and business have developed Hochschild’s ideas. They have identified a number of occupations where emotional labor is required (e.g., caregivers, casino employees, counter attendants, engineers, fantasy occupations such as Disney workers, flight attendants, lawyers, manicurists, nurses, paralegals, prostitutes, etc.). They have illustrated how emotional labor is done to retain customers, to make them feel good or right, to increase their satisfaction, and to enhance their experience. For example, Jeffrey J. Sallaz details his shift as a dealer at a $5 blackjack table where the players tip only occasionally. He shows how he uses humor and facial expressions to establish rapport and to create an atmosphere of fun with his customers to gain and retain customers and to earn tips: Soon the table is in an uproar and they are offering token bets practically every hand. In fact, when my shift ends, the woman at third base hands me a $5 chip and tells me with a big, genuine smile, “You were fun!” (2002, 414)

Studies have also revealed that the emotional labor workers must do differs between jobs and even

within the same job. Though most service occupations require an ongoing display of positive emotions, some (e.g., debt collectors, police officers, prison guards) require negative, neutral, or changing emotions. For example, according to Robert I. Sutton, debt collectors may respond differently to delinquent accounts depending on how long the accounts are overdue. A collector who works on bills that are thirty days overdue on Monday, ninety days overdue on Tuesday, and six months overdue on Wednesday must exhibit a wide variety of emotions because different kinds of delinquent accounts requires different amounts of coaxing, sympathy, and anger. Societal gender norms, roles, and the gendered nature of institutions strongly influence consumer and organizational expectations around emotional labor. Ronnie J. Steinberg and Deborah M. Figart found that in the United States, women are more likely to be hired by a service organization because it is believed that they are more emotive—that they smile more frequently and display more warmth than men. Men, on the other hand, are expected to do emotional work associated with aggressiveness and competition. Failure to present the proper gendered emotional response in the proper setting creates problems for employees. For instance, masculine norms of aggression require litigators to do the emotional labor of intimidation. But women attorneys face a gendered dilemma: a woman who uses the ideal litigator tactic of aggression will be seen as inappropriate, but a woman who does not use this tactic will be seen as ineffective, notes Jennifer Pierce. Beyond gender, consumers’ and workers’ race and class statuses can also impact emotional labor expectations. In a study of immigrant female Korean manicurists, Miliann Kang shows how women manicurists who serve other women are expected to do emotional labor and even physical work differently based on their clients’ race and class. That is, they are expected by white professional women to provide emotional and physical pampering. Black working class women instead expect them to minimize pampering and “focus on the appearance, originality, and durability of the nails themselves” (2003, 835). White and black middle-class women, on the other hand, expect a routine, hassle-free manicure that provides them a good value. Large-scale changes such as women’s increasing participation in the paid labor force, aging populations, declining governmental safety nets, and an

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increasing supply of globally mobile labor has also produced a growth of industries that demand emotional labor and a growing supply of workers to fill this demand. Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich explore this “global heart transplant” in their 2003 book Global Women. They illustrate the care demands that drive a steady supply of migrant women primarily from developing countries such as Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines to the United States. These nannies, maids, and sex workers leave their children behind to care and provide friendship and love for children and adults in the United States.

Implications and Future Research How, then, should emotional labor be viewed? On the one hand, researchers have critiqued it for exploiting workers. They have showed that it is unrecognized, unpaid, and dehumanizing. They have associated it with worker alienation, low job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and worker burnout. Conversely, some have taken a more pragmatic approach, addressing emotional labor as a necessary part of organizational performance that benefits both customer and employee. J. Andrew Morris and Daniel C. Feldman note that emotional labor helps gain loyal customers, increases customer satisfaction, improves both customer and employee enthusiasm, and potentially builds employee discipline and professionalism. Some studies have combined both critique and pragmatism. That is, several researchers have attempted to measure the extent to which people do surface and deep emotional labor, to explore how these types differ empirically, and to assess their effects. An interesting study in occupational psychology by Céleste M. Brotheridge and Raymond T. Lee assessed both types of emotional labor in service and nonservice jobs through development and application of an emotional labor scale. It found that surface acting appeared to impact employees more negatively than deep acting. Finally, it is possible that jobs requiring emotional labor might actually provide spaces for communication between groups who normally do not interact socially. Kang posits that some sites of emotional labor (e.g., the nail salon) might actually provide a space where women could “rewrite” the unspoken rules around emotional labor to genuinely interact with women of different ethnic and class backgrounds.

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The study of emotional labor continues to expand in accordance with the recognition that emotions sell products in an increasingly globalized and technologically advanced marketplace. New questions emerge about emotional labor and consumer and employee experiences. For instance, a number of changes have taken place in recent years. Automated phone lines regularly replace human operators with prerecorded technology. Casinos employ virtual women to deal poker hands. Students routinely take classes or complete whole programs of study from online instructors whom they will never see. If consumers expect emotionally pleasing experiences along with the goods they receive, then how will unfeeling machines deliver a comparably satisfying product? Do consumers expect less emotional labor as machine-assisted transactions increase? Questions also arise about the real human workers who perform emotional labor in increasingly competitive service-oriented economies. That is, as service-work economies continue to look for satisfied customers and increased market share, will employers expect their real human workers to rely more heavily on emotional appeal to sell services? Will employee performance be monitored more strictly for such appeal with an increased presence of instant feedback systems to monitor customer transaction satisfaction? Will employers recognize emotional labor as real work and reward it with increased pay? Susan L. Wortmann and Jie Gao See also Alienation; Beauty Myth; Commodification; Domestic Division of Labor; Emotions; Gender; Hair Care/Hairdressing; Service Industry

Further Readings Brotheridge, Céleste M., and Raymond T. Lee. “Development and Validation of an Emotional Labor Scale.” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 76, no. 3 (2003): 365–379. Hochschild, Arlie. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hochschild, Arlie, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Owl Books, 2004. Kang, Miliann. “The Managed Hand: The Commercialization of Bodies and Emotions in Korean Immigrant-Owned Nail Salons.” Gender and Society 17, no. 6 (2003): 820–839.

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Morris, J. Andrew, and Daniel C. Feldman. “The Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences of Emotional Labor.” Academy of Management Review 21, no. 4 (1996): 986–1010. Pierce, Jennifer. Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Sallaz, Jeffrey J. “The House Rules: Autonomy and Interests among Service Workers in the Contemporary Casino Industry.” Work and Occupations 29, no. 4 (2002): 394–427. Steinberg, Ronnie J., and Deborah M. Figart. “Emotion Labor since the Managed Heart.” Annuls of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 561 (1999): 8–26. Sutton, Robert I. “Maintaining Norms about Expressed Emotions: The Case of Bill Collectors.” Administrative Science Quarterly 36 (1991): 245–268.

EMOTIONS To study consumer culture means to study emotions. If we simply assume the existence of eight basic emotions, such as fear, anger, joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, expectation, and surprise, we will see immediately that each act and experience of consumption will presuppose or trigger at least one of these. Joy will or should be a permanent companion of consumption; sadness might arise if we are disappointed by the act. If we add shame to this list, we gain insight into a central aspect of consumption, namely, its social character and the effect that consuming has on respect and self-respect. It was a development within American sociology that led to the formulation and formation of an explicit sociology of emotions, but it has since then also spread to Europe (see Barbalet 1998; Flam 2002). Its most central goal was to correct and complement implicit or explicit assumptions about rational actions and actors by giving emotions their due after their neglect perceived to be a major shortcoming of mainstream sociology. Finally, not every culture is a “consumer culture,” although people in all ages and spaces “consume.” What is meant here is a culture with a quite specific attitude toward consumption, a relatively stable but changing system of man-made goods, meanings, and habitualized emotional dispositions which are transferred from one generation to the next. This entry deals, first, with the (pre)history of consumer culture and

explanations of its emotional aspects; second, with the mass-consumption societies of the twentieth century and the various voices articulating support, benevolent understanding, or ferocious critique of their emotional consequences; and third, with emotions and their neglected role in the study of contemporary consumption under a more general aspect.

From Courtly Lavishness and Puritan Asceticism to the Romantic Ethic of Modern Consumption Among those trying to explain the roots of modern capitalism, two different lines of argumentation can be found out. There is a dominant tradition that links them to Western urban, mercantile, and artisan strata, but the idea to seek them in the aristocratic environment of courts and palaces has also never disappeared. As Jean-Christophe Agnew outlined, the answers to the question of the birth of consumer societies have moved from the eighteenth to the fifteenth century, while the temporal location of their final arrival as a mass-consumer society has shifted to the middle of the twentieth, not earlier. Norbert Elias showed that the rich courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented the centers of command and consumption of the aristocratically dominated societies of the ancien régime, turning thus into centers of taste refinement at the expense of growing inhibitions on the expression of emotion and under the demand of postulates to behave in a nonviolent manner (pacification). These three dimensions were joined by the art of observing the behavior of others (psychologization) and conscious self-control (courtly rationality—rationalization). Nonworking people of high, aristocratic rank were forced to a wasteful and often ruinous status competition. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “distinction” is anticipated here. Chandra Mukerji’s highly influential study has also shown that luxury consumption antedates the advent of industrial capitalism by centuries by pointing to the Elizabethan court of the sixteenth century. Aristocratic models were imitated by the rising bourgeoisie; the aristocracy answered with strategies securing distinction. In the second stage of this process, people of working, bourgeois origin started to develop their own lines of demarcation, their own imperatives and standards, until both codes merged, while the elaborate courtly standard for refined behavior (so central for the “good society” on the basis of personal contact) gave way to

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an “affective household,” shaped by the demands of work and profession in the sphere of work and education. How these might have looked like has been told by Max Weber in his now equally famous and often-criticized narrative on the Protestant ethic and English Puritanism: gregariousness, luxury, bad language, even sleeping longer than six or seven hours was to be eschewed. The result was the breaking of the spontaneity of life and enjoyment, engendering melancholy and moroseness. Constant reflection was called for, watchfulness an imperative. Work was the royal road to ecstasy. Sexuality—unless for reproductive purposes—was condemned. God did not condone seigneurial ostentation (or the gentleman’s focus on standing and rank). All forms of enjoyment were to be shunned—whether these were football, lyric poetry, singing, the theater, nudity, fashion, or simply idle speech. Colin Campbell’s much-appreciated study, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, pointed to England as the birthplace of attitudes prior to and favorable for the rise of mass consumption. As Agnew stated, the dichotomy between an ascetic Puritanism, hostile to the expression of feeling, and a feeling-centered Romanticism has to be abandoned since the explosion of wants and needs, their anticipation in daydreams, and their frustration in reality created the space for sentimentality. This was the correlate of what Campbell called affective self-indulgence. The canon was first practiced by a leisured class, at a great distance from the “common people.” But in the end, the corresponding codes were merged, as had been in the case of the fusion between aristocracy and rising bourgeoisie.

Mass-Consumption Societies of the Twentieth Century and Their Emotional Consequences The main message of critical social science about the consumer culture of the twentieth century was communicated in stories of betrayal and treason, not of priests but of manipulating agents or the system of (late) capitalism. It was Georg Simmel in his Philosophy of Money who drew a more neutral, perhaps slightly cynical, portrait of the emotions associated with the use of money—the indulgence of money. Besides his point that money allows both for individualization and more dispassion, he developed models of character (or “habitus”) of people in their dealing with money by stressing the role of emotions: according

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to the weight the person gives either to “having” or to spending, he described the psychology of avarice, wastefulness, asceticism, cynicism, and extravagance. In the case of avarice, people enjoy the potentiality of money and, with it, the “power” it lends. In the case of the squanderer, things are the other way around: he or she can only experience emotions if money turns into the liquid form of allowing immediate sensual pleasures—and even the feeling of power occurs in the moment of free choice of a commodity or service. Much of what was written by Frankfurt theorists like Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, and what was later adopted by authors like Christopher Lasch, can be seen as an attempt to fill in the psychological void in Simmel by introducing Freud and to use it for a description of the transition from avarice to wastefulness linked to two ideal-typical stages of industrial capitalism. The heroic, bourgeois subject of the nineteenth century has been transformed into an orally dependent creature, with fantasies of oral grandiosity and simultaneous massive anxieties, sucking at the nipples of an expanding welfare bureaucracy and crippled by a private, corporate bureaucracy equally unfit to provide anything but unfulfilled dreams and promises. Important corrections of too-linear assumptions about this process were made by a number of American historians, who stressed the hesitant entry of immigrant workers and their families into the new world of goods, sticking often to their old ways rather than accommodating to the new. It was also shown that the impact of televised dreams on the experienced reality of American workers was more complex than is usually assumed: the dream producers had to make concessions to a harder reality, and TV consumers were more than passive victims of persuasion. But Warren Susman’s essays on America in the 1930s and 1940s—during the worst economic crisis ever— have also shed light on the essentially conservative and tranquillizing influence the new consumer culture had on workers by creating feelings of belonging as part of a new American way of life.

Emotions and Their Neglected Role in the Study of Contemporary Consumption One of the major insights produced by a sociologyof-emotions perspective leads to the revision of the idea of the consumer as a rational, utility-maximizing, sovereign being. People depend on all forms of advice

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literature; this is also true for everyday decisions such as where better to spend the holidays or where and what to buy, in matters of fashion, and so on. They are often well informed about the goods themselves but are in desperate need for confirmation and reassurance. What they lack is help in emotional terms. The average attitude toward money and commodities is anything but self-confidential and rational; indeed, people are often irrational or emotional, not very dominant but often rather insecure in their handling of money. They might be ashamed and envious if they are not able to keep up with their neighbors as soon as the experts of advertisement manage to persuade them of certain new needs. Indeed, one of the central emotions here is envy. “Orality” is the basic metaphor for Pasi Falk’s notion of the consuming body. It is not at all clear what kind of emotions really correspond to this new kind of “hedonism.” If we take the single act of consumption as our analytical point of departure (thus neglecting its socially embedded character), we should at least distinguish between the end stage of consumption (skiing, listening to pop music) and the other links in the whole action chain of consumption, notes Fred Hirsch. Many consumer goods (e.g., a motor saw) are rather embedded in a culture of work and not of orgiastic frenzy. The same goes for the rising expenditure on health and a healthy body, according to Chris Shilling, and the effort to secure a healthy or morally acceptable diet. Bulimia and anorexia can be seen as examples of the failure of some individuals to come to terms with the growing need for self-regulation according to shifting social norms of appearance; a similar interpretation might also shed light on the phenomenon of compulsive and addictive shopaholics. It may well be that it is less “fun” than fear of rejection or envy that is the motive behind many consumer activities. It should not be forgotten that progress in medicine, reduction of infant mortality, broadened access to higher education, and changes in patterns of authority relations between superiors and inferiors, men and women, and parents and children toward what Cas Wouters describes as greater “informality” and a “controlled de-controlling of emotions,” accompanied or permitted the explosion of wants held responsible for the visibly different emotional climate of a mass-consumer culture compared with their thrifty predecessors. Simmel’s categories of wastefulness and extravagance have been shown as being empirically helpful for the understanding

of American young urban professionals (yuppies) in their consuming behavior. For some people, money may serve as a means to express their love of another person they are caring for (paternal or marital love, as in the case of a life-insurance policy).

Summary The conceptual reorientation toward a sociology-ofemotions perspective on consumer culture is, as has hopefully been shown, fruitful. The history of consumption reveals that emotions linked to refined forms of consumption had already developed long before industrial capitalism; aristocratic wastefulness had to merge with bourgeois sentimentality to create that social space that led to the explosion of wants and needs we are familiar with today. Emotions of avarice, wastefulness, asceticism, cynicism, and extravagance have accompanied the rise of a mass-consumer culture since its beginnings. The “heroic bourgeois subject” with its ability to defer gratification has often been seen, in critical perspective, as giving way to “oral grandiosity,” self-indulgence, and superficiality, but a more detailed empirical analysis of the transition to mass-consumer society has shown that we easily underrate the autonomy of consumers from the working class and also the resistance of social habitus. Much of what looks like pure hedonist consumption can be related to the emotions of envy, shame, or fear. These emotions are probably as often the background of rising expenditures for a healthy and beautiful body as the pleasure to enjoy the fruits of these consuming efforts. Finally, a sociology-of-emotions perspective helps us to see the mythical element in all assumptions of a rational, autonomous, and utility-maximizing consumer behavior. To keep the explanatory promise of introducing emotions means more empirical work, though. We are still in the beginnings. Helmut Kuzmics See also Alienation; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Elias, Norbert; Emotional Labor; Happiness; Informalization; Luxury and Luxuries; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School)

Further Readings Agnew, Jean Christophe. “Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective.” In Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 19–39. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1994.

Energy Consumption Barbalet, Jack. Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macro-sociological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Flam, Helena. Soziologie der Emotionen: eine Einführung [Sociology of emotions: An introduction]. Konstanz, Germany: UVK, 2002. Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Mukerji, Chandra. From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1993. Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984 Wouters, Cas. Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.

ENERGY CONSUMPTION Energy consumption refers to the consumption of energy, in the form of raw biomass, processed fuels, or electricity, to provide heat, cooling, light, motive power, and other services that support and enhance human activity. Energy consumption did not really become a subject of academic or policy interest until after the so-called oil shocks of the 1970s. Prior to the 1970s, access to energy was considered to be infinite, and growth in the consumption of energy was taken for granted. Energy planning was a forecasting activity in which future demand was based on recent growth trends. The task was to bring enough production on line to meet the projected demand. The environmental side effects of energy use were not an issue in energy planning. The theory and policies concerning energy consumption at mid-twentieth century were either positive or indifferent to growth. The oil shocks of the 1970s shook up bedrock assumptions about energy. The so-called Arab oil embargo shut down energy supplies in Europe and the United States overnight. By the time Jimmy Carter took office as U.S. president in 1977, he declared the “saving” of energy as “the moral equivalent of war”

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and created the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct it. The idea of energy conservation was born, and scrutiny was given to the ways that energy is consumed. The first theories to be brought to bear on how to reduce energy consumption came from technologists and economists. The technologists saw the problem as one of technical inefficiency. The solution lay in increasing the efficiency of the multitude of energy-using technologies that by the 1970s had saturated everyday life. A policy effort was put in place to increase research and development on technical efficiency of things like cars, refrigerators, food appliances, home heating systems, and light fixtures. On the policy side, new laws and regulations were put in place to force manufacturers to increase the energy efficiency of their products. Economists saw the problem of reducing energy consumption in terms of economic efficiency. From this perspective, the effort to save energy should aim at improving the economic efficiency of markets, both energy markets and markets for energy using products. Consumers in this model were assumed to be autonomous economic actors; consumption was reduced to weighing of the economic benefits and costs of choice alternatives (utility maximization). Social, cultural, and material considerations and constraints were ignored. These economic and technical perspectives together constituted a powerful discourse that would dominate the theory and policy of energy consumption for decades. The methodologically individualistic view of consumption yielded a policy portfolio consisting mainly of price incentives: information and motivational campaigns intended to get individual consumers to conserve energy. By the mid-1980s, there was a growing body of evidence that techno-economic models were not living up to their predictions. Energy consumption was continuing to grow in spite of efficiency gains. This allowed for the entry of noneconomic social science into the theory and practice of energy consumption, first in the United States in the mid-1980s, then in Europe by the end of the decade. A number of empirical studies conducted by sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists cast doubt on the assumptions of reductionist economic models. Their findings showed that people were concerned about prices and costs but that economics were only one of many considerations. People consume energy to create a solid, cozy home; to make a statement about their home and family; to conform to ideas

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about how a normal family should consume; and so on. In spite of these new insights, energy conservation research agendas were stubbornly resistant to incorporating a broader social view of consumption and sociotechnical change. However, the specter of climate change brought a new set of pressures to the theory and policies of energy conservation: 80 percent of climate gas emissions can be attributed to energy production and consumption. There was a grudging recognition that while changes to nonfossil energy sources will make a contribution to emission reductions, national commitments to reducing climate gas emissions would not be achieved without significant reductions in energy consumption. The mandate to reduce energy-related emissions by as much as 20 to 25 percent over a couple of decades opened for new thinking and innovations on the techno-economic and individualist theories which had dominated energy consumption for decades. One of the important theoretical innovations of recent years has been to situate energy consumption within broader studies of consumption. This makes good sense because in the rich Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, energy is not consumed directly but rather in conjunction with the consumption of products, technologies, and services such as electric lighting, clean clothes, travel, refrigeration, and entertainment. This theoretical move opened energy consumption to increasing attention from sociology, anthropology, institutional economics, cultural studies, and the social science of technology. Theories of energy consumption now engage with many of the central issues of social and technological inquiry. One important strand of theory that has been brought to bear on energy consumption is derived from Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, later developed and extended by social scientists such as Jean Baudrillard and Pierre Bourdieu. From this perspective, consumption is about more than materiality and material needs: people consume to satisfy some inner, symbolic need or to make a social statement about themselves. Thus, a car is consumed not only because it is a vehicle for getting efficiently and quickly from point A to B but also because it is representative of the owner’s identity. From this perspective, a corporate executive would not be likely to acquire and use a Volkswagen Beetle, even if she were interested in saving energy or minimizing environmental impacts. On the other hand,

the car cannot be “flashier” than those of her superiors. She has to be careful to locate the choice of car at her appropriate status level in the corporate hierarchy. Symbolic and performative theories have been useful in understanding some forms of consumption of some kinds of things; however, signs, symbols, and performance have less explanatory power for many kinds of energy consumption, including the energyusing household appliances, such as refrigerators, washing machines, water heaters, and so on. Elizabeth Shove has used the term inconspicuous consumption to characterize how household appliances are consumed. Consumption of these appliances takes place inside homes, where the designs and layouts of modern kitchens and washing areas create spaces in which the appropriate appliance is to fit. Another related point is that many aspects of consumption of cleanliness, food, and thermal comfort are routinized and done without much reflection over alternatives. Bourdieu’s theory of practice has relevance for understanding how energy consumption can only be understood in relation to the routinized ways it fits into home practices. Another relevant new line of consumption theorizing involves examining the ways that energy-using technologies are agentive in energy consumption, not simply in improving efficiency, as the technology positivists would have it, but in structuring consumption in ways that often increase the energy intensity of practices such as food preparation, thermal heating and cooling, mobility, and so on (see Bijer and Law 2004; Southerton, Chappels, and Vliet 2004). The geographical focus of energy consumption, confined mainly to Europe, North America, and a few Asian countries until recently, has broadened in the past decade to encompass consumption in the middle classes and elites of rapidly developing economies in Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. This shift has brought with it the need for a theoretical lens that is capable of capturing the ways that local practices and global forces interact to produce new forms for energy consumption. Globalizing markets and transnational capital are bringing new products and ideas to places like China and India, where energy consumption is growing rapidly. The experience thus far is that these forces do not wipe over and homogenize consumption but are nonetheless responsible for dramatic changes in domains such as food, cleaning, mobility, and thermal comfort (Wilhite 2008). Movement of people through the transnationalization of work is also affecting the way that millions of people in Asia,

Africa, and Latin America consume goods and energy. The consumption of energy using technologies such as air conditioners and televisions in these places may have a social biography that begins in one part of the world and ends up in another (see Appadurai 1996). This complex journey is implicated in, and influenced by, social contexts such as those of the extended family, gender roles, notions of cleanliness, and so on. Understanding these changing contexts is essential to understanding how and why people in these emerging economies acquire new goods and how they become normalized in local consumption practices. Harold Wilhite See also Automobiles; Consumer Demand; Consumer Regulation; Eco-Labeling; Environmental Footprinting; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Infrastructures and Utilities; Sociotechnical Systems

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 1996. First published 1968. Bijker, Wiebe, and John Law, eds. Shaping Technology/ Building Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness + Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappels, and Bas Van Vliet, eds. Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Wilhite, Harold. Consumption and the Transformation of Everyday Life: A View from South India. Basingstroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

ENGEL’S LAW Engel’s law is the name that has been given to a robust relationship between income levels and expenditure on food first discovered by the German statistician

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Level of Income

Engel’s Law

Quantity Demanded

Figure 1

Engel curve

Ernst Engel. In its most basic form, Engel’s law states that, other things being equal, the share of the household budget spent on food will rise as household income falls. Conversely, as household income rises, a smaller relative share of the household budget will be spent on food, even as expenditure on food increases in absolute terms. Engel’s law can be expressed graphically as a curve where the level of household income is measured on the y axis and the quantity demanded of food is measured on the x axis such that it takes the form of a positively sloped curve with an increasing gradient as household income rises to higher levels (see Figure 1). The shape of the curve implies that the income elasticity of demand for food (a coefficient measuring the responsiveness of demand to changes in income) is between one and zero, which is the range for all so-called “normal” goods such as food and other necessities. “Inferior” goods, by contrast, are ones that have an inverse (negative) relationship between changes in levels of income and quantity demanded of those goods; consumption of them falls as income levels rise and households switch expenditure from these goods to higher quality substitutes. Inferior goods thus have an income elasticity of demand that is less than zero. Luxury goods, on the other hand, reveal a positive relationship with changing levels of income (i.e., income elasticity of demand is greater than one) so that as incomes rise, proportionally greater quantities of these goods are desired. Engel’s law (and the associated curve) implies that

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the relationship between the level of income and expenditure on food is dynamic: initially, increases in the level of income yield increases in the quantity demanded of food, but this relationship weakens as income levels rise to the point where large increases in household income yield little or no additional demand for food. In other words, at lower levels of income, demand for food is like demand for a luxury good until a point is reached at higher levels of income when it becomes an inferior good. At that point, any additional expenditure on food is substituted by expenditure on luxury goods. It should be noted that the foregoing discussion has been simplified for the sake of clarity and that other characteristics of households also determine consumption patterns, notably the composition of the household (number, age, and gender), seasonal effects, and price discrepancies, among other things. Moreover, there is considerable variation within the income elasticity of demand of food: some are inferior goods (cabbage) while others are luxuries (caviar). What became known as Engel’s law was first observed by Engel while analyzing the household budgets of Belgian workers in the 1850s. Engel was influenced in this by his teacher Frédéric LePlay with whom he had studied in Paris in the late 1840s and who had pioneered an inductive method of social inquiry stressing the importance of direct field investigation and studying the family unit. Another important influence on Engel was the Belgian astronomer and statistician Adolfe Quetelet with whom Engel developed contacts after leaving Paris. Quetelet had applied the mean values used in astronomy to suicide, which he showed occurring with uncanny regularity in large population groups and which he believed suggested an underlying causal factor. Applying these empirical and statistical techniques, Engel set out to investigate the standard of living of workers aided by the work of Belgian journalist and statistician Édouard Ducpétiaux, who had collected detailed information from some two hundred Belgian worker budgets. Engel discovered that lower worker incomes had corresponding budgets that devoted a larger proportion of that income to food than those of workers with higher incomes. Engel subsequently tested the validity of his observations by extending his study of consumption to his native Saxony, where he had been appointed head of the Royal Statistical Bureau in 1854. In 1857, he published an article titled “The Consumption-Production Relationships in the Kingdom of Saxony” in which

he confirmed his Belgian observations and formally stated his budget law, as Engel’s law was first known. Engel came to believe that the proportion of household budget spent on food was the most accurate measure of the material standard of living. Today, Engel’s law enjoys the status of being one of the first functional economic relationships ever discovered using quantitative techniques, and as such, its discovery marks the beginnings of the subfield of econometrics. It was not until the early-twentieth century, however, that Engel’s law was fully integrated into economic theory and that the mathematical models of the Engel curve were adequately developed to allow for statistical testing and estimation of the shape of the Engel curve for different goods. Of all empirical relationships tested in economics, Engels’s law is probably the most robust and widely accepted. The relationship has also been extended—with less success—to other necessities such as clothing, fuel, and housing. A variant of the law was devised for housing rents by Engel’s contemporary, Berlin statistician Heinrich Schwabe, and is sometimes known as Schwabe’s law. Nevertheless, the link between levels of household income and expenditure on housing is less robust than that between household income and food. Beyond its obvious value to the discipline of economics as a basic component of the theory of demand and price, Engel’s law has had a number of important implications for public finance and economic policy. Since the late-nineteenth century, the insights of Engel’s law have motivated social reformers to seek to reduce or eliminate excise, sales, and valueadded taxes on food and other necessities, since the burden of these indirect taxes fall more heavily on lower income groups (i.e., they are regressive in nature). Head and poll taxes were criticized on similar grounds. Instead, reformers proposed graduated (progressive) income taxes whose rates fall for lower and rise for higher income groups. Similar arguments were also extended to housing, providing a rationale for limiting rent increases and preventing speculation in the property market through regulation and special taxes, especially within the segment of housing with lower income tenants. Engel’s law also has implications for economic development. It asserts a declining budget share for food as incomes rise, suggesting that agriculture will contribute a declining share to national income as an economy grows and develops. That is, Engel’s law predicts the relative decline of the agricultural sector

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over time and the outmigration of labor and capital from farming to industry and services as income levels rise. The upshot of this for economic development is that a developing country that pursues a policy of protecting farming from these adjustments in the interest of balancing growth between rural and urban areas will face falling per capita income and thus rising levels of poverty. The basic relationship between rising income levels and falling relative demand for food embodied in Engel’s law also means that greater agricultural productivity will tend to hasten agriculture’s relative decline vis-à-vis industry and services, other things being equal. This has been confirmed by the strong decline of agriculture as a component of national income and the dramatic fall of employment in this sector seen in all economically developed countries. Erik Grimmer-Solem See also Consumer Demand; Income; Inequalities; Measuring Standards of Living; Needs and Wants; Preference Formation; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings Engel, Ernst. “Die vorherrschenden Gewerbezweige in den Gerichtsämtern mit Beziehung auf die Productions- und Consumptionsverhältnisse des Königreichs Sachsen” [The predominant industries of the court offices with reference to the production and consumption conditions in the Kingdom of Saxony]. Zeitschrift des Statistischen Büreaus des Königlich Sächsischen Ministerium des Innern 3 (1857): 129–182. Engel, Ernst. Die Lebenskosten belgischer Arbeiter-Familien früher und jetzt: Ermittelt aus FamilienHaushaltrechnungen und vergleichend zusammengestellt [The cost of living of Belgian workers’ families then and now: Determined from family accounts and collected for comparison]. Dresden, Germany: C. Heinrich, 1895. Hacking, Ian. “Prussian Numbers 1860–1882.” In The Probabilistic Revolution, vol. 1, edited by Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger, 377–394. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Houthakker, H. S. “An International Comparison of Household Expenditure Patterns, Commemorating the Centenary of Engel’s Law.” Econometrica 25, no. 4 (October 1957): 532–551. Houthakker, H. S. “Engel Curve” and “Engel’s Law.” In New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, vol. 2, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, 142–144. London: Macmillan, 1987.

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Laitner, John. “Structural Change and Economic Growth.” The Review of Economic Studies 67, no. 3 (July 2000): 545–561. Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Zimmerman, Carle E. “Ernst Engel’s Law of Expenditures for Food.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 47, no. 1 (November 1932): 78–101.

ENLIGHTENMENT There are many ways to define the Enlightenment, and identifying a distinct set of characteristically Enlightenment ideas is notoriously difficult. Though dispute exists over the boundaries of what might properly claim inclusion in the Enlightenment, its core identity is relatively uncontested. The Enlightenment was a movement devoted to rational meliorism. It was committed to the notion that collective application of reason could improve the conditions of life. Distinctive styles of consumption and debate on consumption formed an important part of that movement. The histories of consumption and the Enlightenment intersect in two domains. New sites of consumption, in particular the coffeehouse and the salon, as well as new objects of consumption, such as journals and newspapers, offered the material ground for the Enlightenment as a social movement. Consumption was also the object of sustained intellectual attention. The ubiquity of consumption in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries provoked the luxury debate. Consumption was one of the central pillars around which political economists and social theorists constructed their account of the new commercial civilization they saw being built around them. The two threads, material and intellectual, came together at the end of the eighteenth century. The ubiquity of new kinds of objects—colonial consumption goods, such as sugar, as well as capital goods, such as the machines so lovingly described and illustrated in the supplementary volumes of the Encyclopédie—created a new idea of “the improvement of humanity.” Everyday life could be transformed, it was argued, not through moral and political reform alone, but through the dissemination and use of things. This technological ideal was not universally endorsed. “The system of the moderns” was condemned in principle by Rousseau and for its reliance on slavery and exploitation in the Histoire des Deux-Indes, Diderot and Raynal’s best-selling critique

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of the commercial empires that sustained commercial society and “polished manners.” By the late-eighteenth century, the debate on consumption formed one element of the wider cultural crisis of European states that foreshadowed the French Revolution.

Sites of Consumption The Enlightenment started in London and Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, but it quickly became a trans-European and then transAtlantic phenomenon. The coherence of the world of the Enlightenment was maintained and sustained by the circulation and consumption of print. The spread of the Enlightenment can be traced against the dissemination of print media. In England, about 6,000 book titles were published in the 1620s; by the 1710s, that number had climbed to around 21,000; and by the close of the century, it had reached over 56,000. Across Europe, the scale of the market for books was transformed and so was its nature. Whole new genres of “enlightened” literature appeared. Between 1715 and 1789, 2,525 new titles in political economy, the archetypical enlightened genre, were published in Paris alone. A new kind of reading public was fashioned from the consumption of books. Religious literature still poured from the presses in the eighteenth century but it was swamped by the new genres such as novels, encyclopedias, natural history compendia, and works on economic reform, not to mention philosophy. According to Roger Chartier, half of all books published in Paris in the late-seventeenth century were religious in content; by the 1720s, that had reduced to a third, to a quarter in the 1750s, and one-tenth by 1790. The world of the Enlightenment mapped most closely onto the circulation and consumption of its most characteristic book: the Encyclopédie. Edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, it was originally published by a syndicate around André-François Le Breton in seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plate from 1751 to 1772. The first edition was a successful business venture, realizing as much as 2,500,000 livres in profit, and the later octavo editions turned it into a huge cultural phenomenon as well. By 1789, as many as 24,000 copies of this work were in circulation (Darnton 1979). One easy way to identify the membership of the late Enlightenment is through the subscriptions to the various editions of this work.

Book readership constituted the world of the Enlightenment, but communication, a more interactive ideal, rather than reading, was at its heart. Periodical and ephemeral literature, especially newspapers, pamphlets, and journals, allowed for a far more active mode of consumption than reading alone could provide. England produced the first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, which began publication in 1702. England enjoyed the most robust periodical press in Europe. In 1746, London had six daily newspapers, six tri-weeklies, and six weeklies, according to James Van Horn Melton. The country did not monopolize this kind of publishing. The paradigmatic journal of opinion was the Nouvelles extraordinaires de divers endroits, more commonly known as the Gazette de Leyde, founded in 1680 by the Huguenot refugee Jean de la Font. The Gazette enjoyed its heyday as the journal of enlightened European opinion under the editorship of Jean Luzac after 1750. European outrage at the great causes célèbres of Calas and the Chevalier de la Barre was orchestrated through the pages of the gazette. Journals and pamphlets literature tried to approximate to the immediacy and flexibility of conversation, particularly to the experience of the coffeehouse. The Tatler advertised that it would bring the news from the coffeehouses of London and in its early numbers gave the bylines as Will’s, Garraway’s, White’s, and the other prominent London coffeehouses. London was the European capital of coffee. The first coffeehouse in Europe west of Venice opened in Oxford in 1650; by 1700, there were more than two thousand coffeehouses in London. Coffeehouses were exotic, derived from the sociability of the Middle East, and transformative, since they expressly organized themselves around conversation rather than social status; as an anonymous poet described it, Gentry, tradesmen all are welcome hither And may without affront sit down together. Print culture and the coffeehouse were curiously symbiotic since one of the attractions of coffeehouses was that they provided newspapers for their patrons. The coffeehouse united the new urban culture of consumption with new patterns of intellectual sociability. Robert Hooke, one of the founders of the Royal Society, used the coffeehouse as a neutral site where he could negotiate the construction of new scientific instruments with artisans such as Thomas Tompion.

Enlightenment

Coffeehouses put new commodities, new ideas, and new objects into circulation. The other classic site of Enlightenment sociability was even more conspicuously a site of consumption. The salon was a French institution in which a female patron united the socially prominent with the culturally elevated. The prototype was the salon of Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, Madame de Lambert, who began her Tuesday gatherings in her apartments on the Rue de Richelieu in 1710. The salon initially referred to the new intimate rooms for receptions that replaced the older, larger, great halls. Salons were sumptuously furnished, designed to display the personal taste of the salonnière through the best of the emerging Paris luxury trade. Madame de Lambert’s salon was designed and built by Robert de Cotte, one of the most prominent architects of the late-seventeenth century. The intensity of the connection between intellectual life and luxury consumption even created an archetype. Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin offered velvet breeches as a New Year’s gift to the literary men who frequented her salon so that they could be properly attired in polite society. The more rough and ready writers who lacked a patron and could not afford fashionable velvet breeches, or culottes, were termed sans-culottes. This joke about consumption and culture was to lend a name to the most radical wing of French revolutionaries.

Luxury Debate Enlightenment and consumption were implicated from the first, but the term consumption was not central to debate in the early Enlightenment. It did exist in its modern form but as such was usually confined to discussions of trade. Consumption was viewed as a problem and a threat to productivity in works such as those of Thomas Mun, who prescribed that “we soberly refrain from excessive consumption of forreign wares” as the key to England’s trade policy (1664, 127). Daniel Defoe used the idea of consumption in a new way. In his notes advising Robert Harley on the best policy the British cabinet should adopt toward Scotland, he argued that it should encourage “consumption of provisions” as a means of stimulating the economy, raising the value of land and so integrating the Scottish gentry. Defoe was idiosyncratic, though. Most thinkers saw consumption as waste, a threat to the ability of the nation to

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mobilize resources. They developed their ideas about the increasing social importance of things within the register of the luxury debate. Luxury was a specific term in early-modern moral and political thought. Luxury was a moral failing, the capacity of the mind to affix value to objects outside the self and so lose moral autonomy. It was a central term in the neo-stoic lexicon that was central to languages of moral and political value. The criticism of luxury was given a new impetus by the opposition to Louis XIV, who was understood to have promoted luxury as a tool of domination. François de Fénélon’s Telemachus, of 1699, reforged the classical connection between luxury and political corruption. Absolute power was the twin of luxury: “As arbitrary power is the bane of kings, so luxury poisons a whole nation. . . . Wealth is the sole pursuit” (297). Luxury and femininity were associated in a cluster of metaphors of softness and hybridity that contrasted with definite, masculine individuality. Men were ideally characterized by self-command, and to lose that self-command to luxury was a form of feminization. These underlying assumptions created difficulties for female writers and thinkers. Mary Astell, arguing for female educational institutions in 1697, reassured her readers that in making their living arrangements the members, “I doubt not will make choice of what is most plain and decent, what nature not luxury requires” (57). What Christopher Berry refers to as the “demoralization of luxury” in the eighteenth century would be paralleled by the assertion of women in intellectual life, primarily as natural historians, novelists and salonnières. The most important moment in the inversion of the value of luxury was Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. First published in 1705 as The Grumbling Hive, the 1714 re-edition caused sensation. Mandeville embraced luxury as the condition of prosperity: Fraud, Luxury and Pride must live, While we the Benefits receive: Hunger’s a dreadful plague, no doubt, Yet who digests or thrives without? (1:36) Mandeville did not revolutionize the meaning of luxury, he just abandoned the ambition to impose a rigorous ethic on human behavior, remarking that “most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are” (39). The transvaluation of luxury into a positive good was performed

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by French thinkers in the 1730s. Voltaire, JeanFrançois Melon, and Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, extrapolated a new ethic from their reflections on the English experiment on a commercial society. Melon defined a new consumption ethic: “Luxury, is an extraordinary sumptuousness, proceeding from the riches and security of a government. It will be always found attendant, upon every well-governed society. Whoever finds himself possessed of great plenty, will be desirous to enjoy it” (1738, 174). From posing a threat to the integrity of the society, luxury, and so consumption, had been transformed into the mark of civilization. Scottish natural philosophers offered a systematic account of modern life organized around consumption. David Hume dramatized the argument in favor of luxury in his essay “Of Commerce” when he observed that once a community had acquired the necessities of life through the efforts of “husbandmen and manufacturers,” the superfluous hands “apply themselves to the finer arts, which are commonly denominated the arts of luxury.” He considered whether these hands might be better employed strengthening the power of the state in armies and navies and came to the conclusion that they would be wasted if directed in this way. Indeed, such a militarization of society would be nothing more than a modern form of barbarism. Luxury was morally preferable to martial virtue in modern conditions. Flourishing consumption encourages trade and peace and even, in the event of war, sustains the wealth by which the community can protect itself. Luxury promoted peace but allowed for the successful prosecution of defensive war if necessary. Hume’s friend Adam Smith came to the same conclusion and generated a principle that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” He went on to remark that “the maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it” (1776, 660). A central thread of Enlightenment thought concerned itself with consumption, in particular increased consumption, as the defining characteristic of a modern society. Thinkers such as Voltaire, Melon, and Hume redefined human happiness as the rational enjoyment of the goods of the world. A new discussion of underdevelopment concentrated on strategies that could stimulate increased consumption areas of Europe that had not enjoyed the

Industrious Revolution. Yet the relationship between the Enlightenment and consumption is not exhausted by the creation of the intellectual capacities to understand the nature of a modern commercial society. The terms of modern debate on consumption were also set by the response to and criticism of this new understanding of modern life. The terms for this renewed discussion were set by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality” (1754), he argued that a society devoted to the production and consumption of goods necessarily generated radical inequality. Scottish political philosophers generally argued that this was irrelevant since every individual’s situation improved in a commercial society; the rising tide lifted all boats. Rousseau’s innovation was to abandon the critique of luxury in favor of a more systematic critique of property. He argued that radical inequality could only be sustained if property, a relationship to things, was elevated to a moral quality. The politics of the maintenance of inequality and property would eliminate the other virtues, render humans indistinguishable from things, and so create the conditions for despotism. This criticism was made credible for contemporaries by the intensification of slavery and its centrality to the production of the commodities such as sugar and coffee, most associated with the pleasures of a commercial society. Paradoxically, one of the most effective elements of the abolitionist politics would be the mobilization of consumer boycotts, one of the first examples of an explicit politics of consumption. Boycotts of sugar and rum were first mounted in England in 1791. The politics of consumption were also deployed in ranges of Wedgwood pottery produced carrying the abolitionist slogan, “Am I not a man and a brother?”

Relation to Contemporary Debate The Enlightenment generated the categories of modern life. Consideration of the implications of a commercial society had to address the issue of consumption. Neo-stoic moral theories provided the initial vocabulary through which the implications of widened consumption could be understood. By 1750, new norms generated from political economy and political theory were being used to address consumption. The terms of this eighteenth-century debate, polarized between issues of development and equality, remain central to contemporary debate. James Livesey

Entrepreneurs See also Civilizing Processes; History; Industrial Society; Luxury and Luxuries; Modernization Theory; Political Economy; Print Media; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings Astell, Mary. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest. London: Richard Wilkin, 1697. Berry, Christopher. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979. de Fénélon, François. 1699. Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Translated by Patrick Riley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. 2 vols. Edited by F. B. Kaye. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1988. First published 1924. Melon, Jean-François. A Political Essay on Commerce. Translated by David Bindon. Dublin, Ireland: P. Crampton, 1738. Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Mun, Thomas. England’s Treasure by Forreign Trade. London, 1664. Robertson, John. The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 2 vols. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981.

ENTREPRENEURS An entrepreneur is someone who owns an economic activity, producing goods or services to be traded on the market. To this end, he coordinates production factors and assumes the risks involved in running a business venture. The aim of entrepreneurial action is to maximize profits by using a particular

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combination of production factors—which can in turn be acquired on the market—whereby goods are produced and then placed on the outlet markets. Thus, the classic definition of entrepreneur emphasizes instrumental, tangible, and concrete action. This, in any case, is also the etymological meaning of the term, which comes from the French entreprendre: to do something. However, entrepreneurship should not be considered just a supply-side matter. Within a complex and diversified economy, entrepreneurial choices are also increasingly shaped by consumer needs, which express themselves in a heterogeneous commodities demand. Thus, entrepreneurship is a good point of view to analyze the mutual tension between economic action and consumption pattern. Introduced to the scientific debate by Richard Cantillon in the first half of the eighteenth century, the concept of the entrepreneur gained general currency among economists thanks to the work of John Stuart Mill and later entered the lexicon of many other disciplines: sociology, psychology, economic history, and economic anthropology. Two of the seminal figures in the literature on entrepreneurship are Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber. Schumpeter underscores the central role of the entrepreneur in processes of innovation: he introduces new combinations of production factors, employs previously unknown raw materials, and reshapes the organization of work. By combining existing resources in an innovative way, the entrepreneur shakes up the existing economic equilibrium and implements new production functions. A series of psychological elements that make up the entrepreneurial personality stand at the root of these innovative processes: strong will, creativity, intuitiveness. Weber, for his part, considers the entrepreneur as part of his analysis of the interrelationship between the development of capitalism and the Calvinist ethos. In his view, Protestant asceticism made an aptitude for business—once stigmatized—socially acceptable and introduced new orientations in economic life. In this setting, modern capitalism’s entrepreneur is quite different from the economic actors of the past: he acts rationally toward an end, systematically works to maximize profit, and foregoes self-indulgence for a life of frugality and temperance, the better to pursue the process of accumulation. The work of these two authors suggests the complexity of the topic, which provides fertile ground for

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a number of lines of thought: from entrepreneurship as a case of exceptionality stemming from specific individual traits to studying the sociocultural variables in the context that impact the development of acquisitive market behavior; from the processes that are decisive for entrepreneurial success to identifying the social groups that are particularly important in fueling entrepreneurship; from decision-making processes to the entrepreneur as risk bearer. Broadly speaking, studies of entrepreneurs tend to be arrayed along a continuum, whose endpoints are the micro-view approach, which investigates the psychological and sociological characteristics of entrepreneurs, and—on the opposite end—the macro-view approach, which investigates the context in which entrepreneurs act. In recent years, a multilevel approach has gained ground, which brings these two extremes together with the aid of action theory. The entrepreneur is thus seen as an actor possessed of cognitive rationality (i.e., he defines the situation and makes his choices on the basis of reasons he thinks to be good) who acts in a context of constraints and opportunities arising out of the relational structures in which it is set and the more general characteristics of the economic and social organization. Recently, this approach has given new impetus to studies of entrepreneurship, clearing the ground of the difficulties that had made it something of a quagmire that sociologists and economists—apart from the classic thinkers mentioned earlier—were loath to approach. The topic of entrepreneurship was long absent from the sociological and economic mainstream, which—as William Baumol remarked— was like expunging the Prince of Denmark from the discussion of Hamlet. It is perhaps paradoxical, but understandable nonetheless: for economists, entrepreneurial action could not be reduced to Walras’s theory of equilibrium and the model of pure economic rationality. For sociologists, the risk was that of being caught up in the study of intra-individual variables, casting about for some way of getting a grip on the mysterious character of the entrepreneur, and thus infringing on the psychologist’s territory. As a result, sociologists and economists alike have concentrated more on the enterprise than on the entrepreneur. By contrast, the paradigm of action offers more solid guidance, centering analysis on actors who not only have cognitive brilliance but are also able to mobilize the social resources in the networks to which they belong. This is the perspective taken by adherents of

the new economic sociology, who see entrepreneurship as a socially embedded, process-based phenomenon. The entrepreneur’s conduct, according to Mark Granovetter, is thus that of a social actor who can change existing social structures and find innovative ways of bridging social networks that would otherwise not be in contact with one another. Attention thus focuses on the figure of the entrepreneur as the decisive actor in development processes. Theoretically reinvigorated, the debate revolving around entrepreneurship has lately found two promising areas of empirical application: the presence of widespread entrepreneurship in localized settings, with clusters of small and medium enterprises, and the growing number of entrepreneurial activities among immigrant groups. In the full flood of Fordism, the driving role was taken by the large, vertically integrated firm, which produced standardized goods for the mass market, where production was all important and there was little concern for product differentiation: the technical/production apparatus, in other words, dictated both the rate and content of consumption. Now, as we know, this model has disappeared, superseded by forms of lean manufacturing. Accordingly, studies focusing chiefly on the internal structure of the entrepreneurial class and the relationships between entrepreneurs and managers have given way to investigations that seek to analyze the processes whereby entrepreneurship is formed. Some, for instance, address the rise of new styles of consumption: we are now seeing diversified demand for higher-quality goods by consumers who are less homogeneous and whose needs are no longer uniform. In response, entrepreneurs whose businesses turn out small production runs can show an ability to react quickly in organizing flexible, high-quality production, occupying market niches that provide growing space for small enterprises, which may be located near each other. With these premises, any analysis of entrepreneurial action must not only bear in mind the resources provided by social structures but also consider the actors’ ability to perceive latent, fast-changing, and niche demand. In this connection, studies of entrepreneurship can benefit from analytical approaches that scrutinize the complex links between production and consumption, notes Roberta Sassatelli. A second main topic is that of so-called ethnic entrepreneurship. The self-employment rate is growing in many different contexts and among a number

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of different foreign-born groups. Immigrant entrepreneurs often own small businesses that offer ethnic products such as handicrafts from their home countries, traditional foodstuffs, and so forth. Sociological studies of ethnic entrepreneurship, such as that of Luca Storti, have shown that the economic destinies of immigrants, given their limited language skills and the difficulties in having their academic qualifications recognized in their host county, are heavily dependent on whatever social capital they can draw from their relational networks. In general, immigrants have relatively homogenous networks, from which they derive bonding social capital resources that are chiefly useful for raising start-up money and finding employees. Though there are significant differences among the case studies examined, the empirical literature on immigrant entrepreneurs has highlighted the importance of bounded solidarity and enforceable trust to immigrants’ business success. These are forms of social capital that promote bonds of trust between customers, suppliers, employers, employees, and consumers, reducing transaction costs and keeping the market closed. Studies of immigrant entrepreneurism have also opened up new prospects for consumption research. In particular, investigations have addressed the ambivalences entailed in the consumption of ethnic cuisine. On the one hand, immigrant entrepreneurs purvey ethnic food to their fellow countrymen, for whom it is a way of remaining anchored to their origins and traditions. On the other hand, in reproducing their cuisine in another place, immigrant entrepreneurs often introduce variations, thus triggering a process of adaptation and hybridization. In so doing, they attract customers from outside their ethnic group, who are drawn to foreign foods and exotic forms of consumption, and thus become important agents of change in the eating habits of the host society. This spurs processes of creolization, blurring the boundaries between ethnic foods and those of the host country. This process involves both consumers and producers. The former are increasingly likely to choose ethnic foods when they eat out, thus fueling demand, according to Alan Warde and Lydia Martens; the latter introduce Schumpeterian innovations, putting previously unknown ethnic food products on the market. As previously mentioned, this process often involves cultural hybridization, with immigrant restaurateurs also acting as cultural entrepreneurs.

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Looking forward, there is reason to be optimistic about the future growth of studies of entrepreneurs. The two areas of research examined in this entry provide new input and prospects for wide-ranging analyses, where the classic issues of entrepreneurism can be cross-fertilized by ideas deriving from consumer topics. In particular, the study of entrepreneurs lends itself to integrated approaches to analysis, where a focus on the social context is flanked by a thorough reconstruction of the course taken by each actor. Here, multidimensional investigations, open to multidisciplinary input and based on a solid empirical foundation, will indeed be welcome. Luca Storti See also Cycles of Production and Consumption; Economic Sociology; Economics; Food Consumption; Individualization; Innovation Studies; Protestant Ethic; Weber, Max

Further Readings Baumol, William. “Entrepreneurship in Economic Theory.” The American Economic Review 58 (1968): 64–71. Granovetter, Mark. “A Theoretical Agenda for Economic Sociology.” In The New Economic Sociology, edited by Mauro Guillen, Randall Collins, Paula England, and Marshall Meyer, 35–60. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory, Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Storti, Luca. Imprese per la gola. Una ricerca sugli imprenditori della gastronomia italiana in Germania [Ethnic food enterprises: A research on Italian immigrant entrepreneurs in Germany]. Rome: Carocci, 2007. Swedberg, Richard. Entrepreneurship: The Social Science View. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Warde, Alan, and Lydia Martens. Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINTING Ecological or environmental footprinting has its roots in an integrated response to two questions, both of which have arisen from a growing awareness that current patterns and scales of consumer culture are destructive of underpinning natural systems. First, what are the implications of a given level of consumption in terms of its environmental impact?

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Second, where should the environmental limits to that consumption lie? The following is an introduction to footprinting concepts, from their beginning to the present day. Sustainability is fundamentally about environmental limits. It is not, as is often suggested in government and business documents, about balancing social, environmental, and economic impacts. Such trade-offs are required, but they are not central to a meaningful definition of sustainability. The need for trade-offs reflects shortcomings in our patterns of economic organization, technology, and other factors in terms of their sustainability performance. Although there are a wide variety of approaches to defining and measuring sustainability, ignoring the key notion of critical environmental limits or thresholds, breach of which leads to our current state of unsustainability, reduces the concept of sustainability to rhetoric, according to Paul Upham. As originally conceived, environmental or ecological footprinting is based on this fundamental premise that there are environmental limits to consumption and that if these are not respected, adverse consequences will follow sooner or later. The term footprinting was initially developed and the concept given a quantitative dimension in the early 1990s, building on the idea of environmental “carrying capacity.” The concept has been applied to individuals and populations, including the world as a whole. Notable sources on environmental footprinting in this sense are the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Global Footprint Network. The calculation method for limits-based footprinting involves associating indicators of economic activity with corresponding environmental indicators. That is, a specific level of environmental “impact” (or, more usually, a proxy for impact, such as emissions) is associated with each monetary unit (e.g., dollars) spent. The level and type of impact varies according to the type and quantity of consumption. Methodological advances have related national environmental accounts data to national material flows and household expenditure at local authority ward level, improving our ability to see where and how consumption impact is distributed (see Wiedman and Barrett 2005). The final stage of limits-based environmental footprinting involves relating consumption to environmental limits to provide an indication of how close (or how far in excess) this consumption is relative to

those limits. This stage is not always undertaken but nonetheless gives the footprint measure its name, as it relates consumption to the amount of biologically productive land and sea area required to produce the resources consumed and to absorb the wastes generated by production and consumption processes. The footprint is thus a measure of consumption in terms of biologically productive area, this being assumed to be the primary environmental limit, given our one planet. The theoretically available area is usually allocated to the planet’s population on an equal per capita basis. This forms the denominator of a fraction in which the numerator is the area actually occupied by the individual’s, region’s, or nation’s consumption. For industrialized nations and their population, the numerator usually exceeds the theoretical allocation. Calculated thus, humanity’s footprint first exceeded earth’s total “biocapacity” in the 1980s (see WWF 2008); this overshoot has been increasing since then and is only possible by some countries consuming other countries’ entitlements. Recently, the term environmental footprint has been used separately from the notion of environmental limits, simply to denote environmental impact. This usage has increased in the context of product and service assessment. More recently still, the term footprint has been used in relation to only the greenhouse gas emissions associated with products, summarily referred to as their carbon footprint. Methodologically, these all involve environmental life-cycle analysis (LCA). While national, regional, and per capita footprinting tends to use national accounts of flows of goods in and out of countries, economic sectors, and sometimes households, and then relates these to relatively coarse national environmental accounts, LCA requires the assembly of process-specific databases of a much higher level of resolution. Such databases may be purchased along with proprietary LCA software, or, if existing databases are unsuitable, new databases may be assembled. The latter may be the case if a process is novel or if a company wants to use data that are wholly specific to its own brand, for example, to support competitive advertising of its “green” credentials or to support an application for an eco-label. A product or service has environmental impacts that are distributed over time and space. Essentially, LCA is a method of detailing and summing these impacts and their precursors (the resource inputs

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and waste outputs) that occur over the full life cycle. Some LCA software can also aggregate this information as a single index of impact, though this needs to be interpreted with knowledge of how the index is constructed. In the 1990s, disagreements around some aspects of LCA prompted the international Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) to undertake an extensive “consensus” process that defined a protocol for LCA. This has informed international standards on LCA: ISO 14040 through 14044. Critical to SETAC’s work and the ISO standards was the separation of LCA into several stages, with impact assessment being the final stage. It is this final stage at which there is most methodological diversity and difference (see UNEP/SETAC, 2009), and this is also the stage into which the areareferenced aspect of environmental footprinting falls. The main stages of LCA are defining the aim and the system boundary (the latter can substantially influence the results); inventory analysis, which consists of a compilation of all material inputs to and outputs from the product system, arranged as a process flow sheet representing the stages of extraction/cultivation, manufacture, recycling, and so on; impact assessment, a stage that may be omitted but that models the environmental impacts of the foregoing consumption of resources and emission of wastes; and interpretation, which may include some form of sensitivity analysis and is the stage at which impact hot-spots in the life cycle and the environmental merits of alternative, substitutable products may be considered. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a good source for more detail. Environmental or ecological footprinting originally referred to a method of environmental assessment in which the impacts of consumption are viewed in terms of the amount of biologically productive space occupied during cultivation, manufacture, or disposal. More recently, the term has also been applied to other forms of environmental assessment, including product and process life-cycle assessment. Carbon footprinting is a recent innovation in this context. The concept of the footprint has achieved widespread appeal and resonance and is in many ways a successful metaphor. However, the extent to which the footprint can help bring about real behavioral change is debatable and connects with the much-debated role of consumer-facing labeling schemes. Growing awareness of environmental problems has not tended

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to feed through to personally relevant attitudes. In the United Kingdom, for example, surveys indicate that few people think about energy consumption or environmental impact when buying appliances, when buying and preparing food, or when traveling. Nonetheless, environmental footprinting at all levels can be expected to continue as an active area of research and education; reducing one’s ecological footprint remains a potent symbol for many. Paul Upham See also Carbon Trading; Consumer Education; Consumer Regulation; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Eco-Labeling; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption

Further Readings Boström, Magnus, and Mikael Klintman. Eco-standards, Product Labelling and Green Consumerism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Brook Lyndhurst. Public Understanding of Sustainable Energy Consumption in the Home. Final Report to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. London: DEFRA, 2007. European Commission. “An Overview of the EU Eco-label Scheme.” Brussels, Belgium: Author, 2008. http://ec. europa.eu/environment/ecolabel/whats_eco/ov_concept_ en.htm. Fava, James, Allan A. Jensen, Lars Lindfors, Steven Pomper, Bea De Smet, John Warren, and Bruce Vigon, eds. Life Cycle Assessment Data Quality: A Conceptual Framework. Pensacola, FL: SETAC, 1994. Giorgi, S., D. Fell, A. Austin, and C. Wilkins. EV0402: Public Understanding of Links between Climate Change and (i) Food and (ii) Energy Use: Final Report. A Report to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. London: Brook Lyndhurst & Defra, 2009. King, Suzanne, Mark Dyball, Tara Webster, Angela Sharpe, Alan Worley, Jennifer DeWitt, Greg Marsden, Helen Harwatt, Mary Kimble, and Ann Jopson. Exploring Public Attitudes to Climate Change and Travel Choices: Deliberative Research. Final Report for Department for Transport, People Science & Policy Ltd & ITS. Leeds, UK: DfT, 2009. http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/ scienceresearch/social/climatechange/ attitudestoclimatechange.pdf. Klöpffer, Walter. “Life Cycle Assessment: From the Beginning to the Current State.” Environmental Science and Pollution Research International 4, no. 4 (1997): 223–228.

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Rees, William E., and Mathis Wackernagel. “Ecological Footprints and an Appropriated Carrying Capacity: Measuring the Natural Capital Requirements of the Human Economy.” In Investing in Natural Capital: The Ecological Economics Approach to Sustainability, edited by Ann Marie Jansson, Carl Folke, Robert Costanza, Monica Hammer, 362–390. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994. United Nations Environmental Programme/SETAC (UNEP/ SETAC). Summary of Life Cycle Impact Assessment Methods. Osaka, Japan: UNEP/SETAC, 2009. http:// jp1.estis.net/includes/file.asp?site=lcinit&file=B322F28AC1F0–4E21–8B14–982328A311D2. Upham, Paul. “A Comparison of Sustainability Theory with UK and European Airports Policy and Practice.” Journal of Environmental Management 63, no. 3 (2001): 237–248. Upham, Paul, Leonie Dendler, and Mercedes Bleda. “Carbon Labelling of Grocery Products: Public Perceptions and Potential Emissions Reductions.” Journal of Cleaner Production 19, no. 4 (2011): 348–355. Wiedman, T., and J. Barrett. The Use of Input-Output Analysis in REAP to Allocate Ecological Footprints and Material Flows to Final Consumption Categories (Stockholm Environment Institute Report 2). York, UK: University of York, 2005. http://resource-accounting.org .uk/reports. World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Living Planet Report 2008. Gland, Switzerland: Author, 2008. http://www.panda.org/ about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report.

Websites Global Footprint Network. http://www.footprintnetwork .org/en/index.php/GFN. Stockholm Environment Institute. http://resourceaccounting.org.uk. US Environmental Protection Agency. http://www.epa.gov/ NRMRL/lcaccess/lca101.html.

ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL SCIENCES AND SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION Although consumption is recognized as bringing pleasure, comfort, and convenience, environmental side effects can cast dark shadows over consumption, turning it into an overall negative phenomenon. Confronting consumption for many social analysts (e.g., Princen, Maniates, and Conca 2002) means developing a critical analysis of the “treadmill of consumption” as implied in the capitalist foundation of our modern productionconsumption organization. Among the myriad goods

and services delivered to citizen-consumers to help organize their everyday lives, the car and the hamburger stand out as the negative icons of modern consumer culture. Together with plastic throwaway bags and coffee cups, long-distance flying, and the use of air conditioners and Jacuzzis, they are used by environmental scientists to develop their critical discourse of unsustainable consumption, the dark side of our consumption pleasures. By consuming these products, citizens especially of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries help reproduce a political and economic system that at the global level combines serious environmental deterioration with increased inequalities between social classes, countries, and regions, rendering (distant) people and ecosystems into seemingly powerless victims of our global consumption culture. The main contribution of environmental social sciences refers to exposing, discussing, and criticizing the dark side of consumption. Up until now, most social scientific analyses of (un)sustainable consumption focus on identifying and diagnosing the root causes of the environmental impacts of consumption. They aim at gaining a better understanding of the drivers behind consumption growth and the increased environmental impacts of modern lifestyles. Among the wide variety of causes discussed in the literature are the “work and spend” culture and its exclusive focus on materialist values, as analyzed by Juliet Schor; the global spread of the car system as documented by John Urry, in particular; the concentration of power in the hands of transnational food retail chains; the lock-in effects of cheap-oil-based energy systems; the lack of awareness and information from the side of individual citizen-consumers; and the inherent tendency of social groups to use goods for distinction and social positioning. Because of the almost exclusive focus on the shadow side of consumption and on the drivers behind the enhanced environmental footprints of our daily lives, the environmental social sciences literature does not deliver many insights when it comes to analyzing solutions to environmental problems. Most of the time, a penetrating analysis of the problem is followed by a general conclusion that we need to consume less or that a fundamental transformation of the present system of production and consumption is asked for. When compared to the extensive and deep-digging analyses of environmental deterioration and decay, there is only a modest amount of work

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done on positive environmental change, on processes of environmental improvements as, for example, the reduction of the footprints of our households, the improvement of the environmental performance of food retailers, the dematerialization of consumption, or the greening of lifestyles and everyday-life consumption practices. In this entry, some of the major themes and theories within the environmental social sciences are presented, discussing the societal roots of environmental risks and decay, on the one hand, and the development of (policy) approaches toward the proper management of these risks and problems by governments, companies, households, and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), on the other. It is argued that both environmental deterioration and environmental management or control need to be studied as societal phenomena, using a multidisciplinary, policyrelevant, and global perspective. Throughout the entry, the central focus is on consumption as a crucial topic within the broader environmental agenda. A selective overview of the different schools and discipline-bound theoretical perspectives in environmental studies are presented, arguing that this field is of recent origin and still very much under construction. This area of environmental studies is shown to mirror some of the conceptual issues and dilemmas characteristic of the general social sciences disciplines. For each school or perspective, its relevance for the study of sustainable consumption is indicated in a general way, with respect to both theoretical and empirical contributions made in the past. In conclusion, a few key themes and issues crucial for the future study of (un)sustainable consumption are mentioned.

Environmental Social Sciences as an Emerging Field of Study The origin of environmental studies in their present form can be found in the 1970s, when the 1972 United Nations conference in Stockholm and the publication of the Club of Rome Report “Limits to Growth” initiated a first wave of environmental concern, particularly in OECD societies. This first round of environmental debate was triggered by the findings of the natural sciences. Ecology, biology, and chemistry, and their application to the study of water, air, and soil degradation, shaped the agenda of environmental policies in the 1970s and 1980s in a direct way and to a considerable extent. When compared

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to the natural and bio-ecological sciences, the social sciences were late and hesitant in showing an academic interest in environmental problems. When talking about environmental studies as an emerging field of academic teaching and research, a distinction can be made between environmental economics, on the one hand, and the other social sciences—history, sociology, political sciences, social geography, social psychology, and anthropology, in particular—on the other. Although environmental economics share with the other social sciences an interest in the study of human behavior and institutions, their disciplinary outlook and history can be said to be different, resulting in divergent methodologies and a research tradition that—generally speaking—has a stronger orientation on applied, quantitative research and a stronger focus on the policy implementation of scientific work. Also, when it comes to studying consumption and consumer behavior, environmental economics are characterized by a specific kind of model that is different from the behavioral models used in, for example, social psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Because of these differences, this entry limits itself to the other social sciences, paying attention in particular to developments in environmental sociology and making short excursions into the neighboring fields when relevant. Partly building on the classical tradition of human ecology studies from the Chicago School in the 1920s and 1930s, some scholars in the United States in the second half of the 1970s started to develop a distinct social scientific approach to the interrelation between societies and their physical environment. Because mainstream sociology, history, and anthropology showed a “theoretical blindness” for environmental problems, these scientists argued for the need of a paradigm shift toward a “new” version of the social sciences that would show greater conceptual sensitivity to ecological and physical factors when explaining behavior and social change. The human-centered human exemptionalist paradigm (HEP) should give way to the new environmental paradigm (NEP) in the study of human societies. Following these front-runners, and mainly inspired by the works of biologists like Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, and Barry Commoner, social scientists in the United States, Japan, and Europe also started to argue for the recognition of the intricate connections between human and nonhuman actors and factors as existing in the Darwinian web of life. Echoing the Club of Rome, they furthermore contended that limits

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should be put to the industrial output, to population growth, and to the ever-intensifying use of energy and material resources. So, from their inception, environmental studies were concerned with limits and with the search for radical alternatives to the existing social (and scientific) order. A further characteristic of this field—next to its more or less outspoken “normative” character—is the openness to interdisciplinary cooperation, especially with ecologists and natural scientists.

Five Streams of Thinking Within Environmental Social Sciences In the 1980s and 1990s, the field of environmental social sciences developed into a full-grown, globally organized network of researchers with a recognizable research agenda and some specified social roles. With the field expanding in depth and in geographical scope, the number of recognizable schools or theoretical perspectives also increased. Even when environmental economics are left aside, it is impossible to cover all streams of thinking that emerged in this period. Five perspectives are presented that contribute to the understanding of sustainable development and sustainable consumption in a specific way. The Neo-Marxist Perspective Neo-Marxist environmental sociology and political sciences have concentrated their studies and analyses around the treadmill of production (ToP) (e.g., Schnaiberg 1980) and the second contradiction of capital as put forward by James O’Connor. Both lines of study focus especially on the continuity of the capitalist character of modern production and consumption systems, which are consistent in jeopardizing the environmental sustenance base that supports these systems. Studies and analyses in this tradition consequently point at the difficulties—or, in fact, impossibilities—of transforming the current systems of production and consumption, due to the inherent structural capitalist character of these systems. Although it is acknowledged that changes might occur in environmental policies, in environmental consciousness, in levels of support for environmental NGOs, and in new environmental technologies and management systems, it is argued that these changes do not affect the fundamental patterns of accumulation and exploitation. The material basis of production and consumption remains intact. There is, according

to these studies, a direct and fundamental relation between the industrial-capitalist mode of production, on the one hand, and ongoing environmental deterioration, on the other. As long as technologies and policies do not affect and alter the industrial-capitalist character of production-consumption systems in modern societies, there will not be any lasting and significant improvement in environmental consequences. With respect to consumption studies, the edited volume of Thomas Princen, Maniates, and Conca might serve as a good example of a study that is organized from within the neo-Marxist tradition and that received considerable attention in the field. In this book, the theme of the impossibility of effective environmental reform and the need for radical change are prominent discussion topics. In his theory on the logic of sufficiency, Princen offers the downscaling of consumption and a fundamental restructuring of present-day consumption culture as an alternative. Arguing for a radical break with the existing organization of production and consumption is, however, not exclusive for the (neo-)Marxist school of thinking. Anticonsumerism in its different formulations— from voluntary simplicity to cultural jamming—goes against the dominant consumption culture as well, looking for radically different lifestyles and localized systems of production and consumption. The plea for radical change in this culturalist perspective, however, tends to go without the kind of structural analyses of the socioeconomic structures of capitalist societies as offered by the neo-Marxist authors. The Ecological Modernization of Production and Consumption The ecological modernization school of thought has been developed partly in reaction to the overall pessimistic (in terms of possibilities to overcome environmental crises) and structuralist outlook characterizing the neo-Marxist perspective. Instead of the impossibilities for environmental reform, this school analyzes and emphasizes the processes of environmental management and reform that have been set in motion since the 1970s. To understand the character of this process of reform, ecological modernization theory developed concepts and understandings on what it calls the emergence of ecological rationalities, interests, and perspectives relevant for the (re)organization of both production and consumption along more sustainable lines. Ecological modernization theorists orient

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themselves toward analyzing environment-informed changes in social practices (e.g., leisure, buying food, transporting) and institutional developments (in markets, state institutions, scientific institutions, etc.). It is emphasized that sociotechnological innovations are the crucial starting points for the emergence of more sustainable practices, with pioneering businesses and environmental NGOs playing an important role in environmental governance next to state organizations. Starting its theoretical work especially on industrial production in northwest European countries, this school has expanded its empirical studies toward Asia and the United States. Most of the work in the ecological modernization tradition is firmly rooted in sociological theories, especially Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory, reflexive modernization theories, consumer sociology, and globalization theories. Political scientists especially have worked on a related theory of political modernization, drawing more on political science and policy science theories. When consumption is discussed by ecological modernization authors, the focus is very much on the eco-improvements that are possible within cycles and networks of production and consumption. It is argued that—when properly mobilized and organized—citizen-consumers, consumer groups, and their organized representation by environmental NGOs and consumer organizations must be regarded in principle as important change agents to help realize a more sustainable organization of production and consumption. Emerging forms of consumer empowerment, green provisioning by companies, sustainable lifestyles, the introduction of product service system, the development and use of (eco-)labeling and certification practices, and the globalization of green consumption are some examples of consumption topics discussed in this tradition. Not all authors within this school, however, share this interest in consumption studies or show great confidence in the effect of consumer empowerment and in policies for the greening of lifestyles and consumption patterns. Risk (Society) Studies The theme of (the perception of) environmental risks is prominent in many social sciences disciplines, receiving different emphases in social psychology, anthropology, and sociology, in particular. Within social psychology, the individual perception of and strategies for dealing with risks take center stage. It is

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shown that risk perception does not simply follow scientific “rational” ways of reasoning and that perceptions differ between individuals and between experts, policymakers, and lay actors, in particular. Within anthropology, the work of Mary Douglas on the different ways in which societies and their dominant cultures deal with risks has been especially influential and has enhanced our awareness of the time-space specific nature of our contemporary ways of dealing with (environmental) risks. What counts as an acceptable risk for an individual is not just determined by individual factors but depends as well on the ways in which risks are culturally framed and discussed. Within sociology, Ulrich Beck’s thesis on the emerging Risk Society has become one of the most discussed topics. Together with Giddens, Beck developed a theory on the special significance of environmental risks in late-modern societies. Within the theory of the risk society, the emergence of new types of environmental risks (notably so-called high-consequence risks like global warming) are analyzed, together with the changes in the scientific and policy institutions of late modernity dealing with these new risks. Furthermore, it is shown that lay perceptions of risks have substantially changed since the mid-1980s, when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster marked the beginning of a period of “reflexive modernization.” Brian Wynne and his colleagues in a number of empirical studies illustrate the changing role of science, scientists, and scientific evidence in dealing with risks. After the “disenchantment of science,” we have to work with broader—also nonscientific—rationalities while giving more attention to the role and significance of lay actors in constructing risk regimes. In environmental sociology, in particular, Steven Yearley and other authors working in the school of social constructivism contributed much to a better understanding of the ways in which environmental risks are recognized, framed, and actively developed into social problems by different groups and stakeholders in society. With respect to consumption studies, risk (society) studies have contributed especially to a better understanding of the ways in which laypeople can or cannot detect and deal with the environmental risks that come along with our modern lifestyles and patterns of consumption. Beck’s statement that nobody is as blind as those who—after Chernobyl—continue to trust their eyes refers to the crucial roles that science and scientists play in the assessment of environmental dangers and related health risks. At the empirical

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level, it was shown that, worldwide, ever more people are becoming aware of environmental risks, that they are aware of risks as risks (i.e., human-made risks), and that the connection between environmental risks and human health risks turns out to be functional for raising risk awareness from the side of citizen-consumers. The cases of enhanced exposure to UV-B radiation— due to the enlarged hole in the ozone layer—and the supposed positive health effects of organic foodstuff can be offered as illustrations of the important role of the human health factor in the increased perception of environmental risks. At the theoretical level, one of the key contributions made by authors from the risk-society school has been the debate they initiated on the concept of trust as being the flipside of anxiety and risk. The concept of trust—so they argue—gains importance especially in situations when production and consumption chains and networks are organized over more distant levels of time-space. Due to globalization, the connections between production and consumption—between “upstream” and “downstream” actors and dynamics of chains and networks—can no longer be properly understood without the key concepts of risks and trust. For example, when studying and designing policies for environmental labeling, branding, and certification, the (lack of) trust invested in the technologies, peoples, and networks behind the labels turns out to be of decisive importance for bridging the information and communication gap between providers and consumers. Also, when it comes to studying the “ethics” of sustainable consumption, the crucial issues are about the ways in which distant practices and agents can become (re)connected in a transparent and effective way. Finally, the relationship between consumption, risks, and individualization has been brought up as an important characteristic of reflexive modernity. Along with Giddens and Beck, Zygmunt Bauman has also pointed to the fact that late-modern consumers are confronted with the fact not just of being empowered and offered more green choice but also of being made individually responsible for environment and health risks that used to be dealt with by collective arrangements and institutions. Cultural Value Change and Environmental Attitudes The schools discussed so far share the conviction that environmental degradation and risk management

have to be studied in close connection to the institutions for production and consumption and their capitalist-industrial characteristics. In their focus on socioeconomic production structures, less attention is paid to the role of individual human agents and their values, motivations, and interests with respect to sustainability. The relationship between individual behaviors, lifestyles, and interests, on the one hand, and structural, institutional developments, on the other, has been the subject of heated debates in the environmental social sciences as well as in general social sciences over the past decennia. Parallel and partly in reaction to structuralist theories, a separate body of literature emerged focusing on the environmental values and behaviors of individual human agents. Not surprisingly, social psychologists took the lead in this, while sociologists in the empirical tradition of environmental attitude survey research and polls took their fair share. Most of the research on environmental attitudes was—and still is—aimed at demonstrating the increased environmental awareness and its distribution among the general public. Standardized instruments have been developed for measuring people’s self-judgment of their eco-awareness and their willingness to pay and to take part in environmental actions and demonstrations, among other things. A broad range of environmental behaviors is included in these studies, with energy, waste, packaging, and mobility being among the most popular topics of research. Nowadays, the regular monitoring of the levels of environmental awareness from the side of the populace is organized in a professional way and at worldwide levels. In general, this research was able to show that levels of environmental awareness are very high in many OECD countries while increasing also on a worldwide scale. Among the theories most often used to underpin this kind of empirical research are the value-change theory of Ronald Inglehart, stating that there is a shift from “materialist” toward “nonmaterialist” values going on in societies with increased levels of economic development, and the equivalent theory of Abraham Maslow on the hierarchy of human needs whereby material needs are first, followed by nonmaterial needs during later phases of development. When it comes to relating value change to the prediction of future environmental behaviors—an issue of great importance to policymakers—the attitudebehavior model as introduced by Martin Fishbein

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and Icek Ajzen in the field of social psychology has been by far the most influential model. The behavior of individuals was predicted from their attitude toward the environment, this attitude being composed of both a cognitive (what does environmentalfriendly behavior deliver for me as an individual?) and a social-normative (what do the neighbors think of me when pursuing this behavior?) component. Value-change and attitude-behavior studies are significant for understanding sustainable consumption. This research tradition has shaped the agenda of consumption research over the past decennia to a considerable extent. If we come to know more about people’s need structures, about their individual norms and motivation with respect to sustainable development, we learn more about the legitimacy and potential effectiveness of certain environmental policies and policy instruments. If we better understand how people go through the process of conscious decision making with respect to a great number of environmental relevant products (cars, phosphate-free detergents, plastic shopping bags, etc.) and courses of conduct (closing the curtains to save energy, washing at lower temperatures, etc.), we are able to develop the relevant products, services, and information campaigns to effectuate this potential for change. Finally, research in this tradition has investigated mechanisms of “spillover” of environmental behaviors from one domain (e.g., separate waste collection) to other domains of action (e.g., waste prevention or the saving of water and energy). Social Practices, Everyday Life, and Sustainable Consumption Because of its roots in social psychology, the attitude-behavior model does not pay significant attention to the interplay between individual behaviors and social structures. If social structures are brought into play at all, it is as a constraint (a limiting determinant) to individual behavior choice primarily. According to its critics, this neglect of social structure in the attitudebehavior model might help explain why this model did not live up to its promises, for instance, why it turned out to be rather difficult to predict environmental behaviors from people’s attitudes only. To meet some of these weaknesses, an alternative theoretical perspective was developed within environmental sociology to organize research on lifestyles and behaviors of individuals in such a way that proper attention is paid to the contextual factors that shape the routinized

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courses of behavior individual human agents are involved in. This social practices or practice perspective is derived from structuration theories as developed by Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu in sociology, with recent inputs also being derived from the works of Theodore Schatzki and Alan Warde, in particular. A basic characteristic of the practice perspective is the combined emphasis on individual and contextual factors as being constitutive for routine consumption practices that groups of individuals adhere to in daily life. Using everyday-life practices such as cooking, washing, gardening, dining out, commuting, or showering as cases, Elizabeth Shove was able to show how innovations in social practices can only be properly understood by analyzing the interplay between the norms and values of the practitioners (what counts as convenient, clean, comfortable, and green for people), technologies (washing machines, detergents, cooking utensils, showers), and the sociomaterial infrastructures that are fueling the social practices with material flows of energy, water, and green products. Because of its explicit focus on the interplay between sociotechnical systems and everyday-life behavioral routines, this perspective borrows elements from the sociology of technology and so-called actor-network theories (ANT) as developed by Bruno Latour, Michael Callon, and others. To discuss the process of the greening of social practices in more detail, some authors combine the social practices approach with the theory of the ecological modernization of production and consumption in an explicit way. Being developed to understand the dynamics of change in the consumption practices that ordinary people are involved in, the social practices approach is aimed at delivering relevant knowledge for sustainable consumption practices and policies as emerging both at the national and international levels. Although the practice model inspired research projects on the politics of sustainable consumption in several countries, the number of empirical studies in this tradition is still low when compared to the attitude-behavior paradigm.

The Research Agenda for Sustainable Consumption This section discusses a selected number of topics and controversies judged to be relevant for the future study of sustainable consumption within the environmental social sciences. Five key future directions are indicated.

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First, while the field of environment and climate change is dominated by the natural sciences and biology/ecology, most analyses of the “sustainability” part of sustainable consumption are technocratic in character. The crucial contribution for social sciences to this field refers to bringing in the symbolic and social dimension of sustainable consumption. How does sustainable consumption connect to images of the good life, to a fair distribution of life chances, to existing views and standards of comfort, cleanliness, convenience, and well-being in general? Second, the neo-Marxist tradition and the anticonsumerism movement have produced many counterimages of the good life and human well-being, whereas until recent times, environmental NGOs have also been associated primarily with de-growth policies and reduced levels of consumption. Investigating alternative lifestyles and modes of production and consumption for their positive contents and dynamics can and should contribute to developing more attractive images of the “green life” and green identities that might perhaps appeal to the broader public as well. Third, alternative visions of the good life as developed outside and in opposition to the existing consumer culture have to be complemented with alternative visions developed for and in relation to the existing (capitalist, industrial) modes of production and consumption. In respect of this, a Brundtland way of thinking about sustainable consumption, combining increased levels of development and well-being with reduced environmental impacts of consumption, both in the north and in the south, is needed. The theory of ecological modernization of consumption and production is targeted at analyzing and helping design future lifestyles and patterns of consumption that show a radical break with the existing situation regarding the environmental impacts and risks attached to them. Fourth, major changes or transitions in the existing organization of production and consumption will only come about when different groups of stakeholders operating at different levels of scale become involved in and show commitment to the process. Following up on the social psychology research tradition, the role of citizen-consumers as important change agents has to be recognized, however, without lapsing into the traditional individualist accounts of environmental change. The powers, rights, and responsibilities of consumers have to be analyzed and assessed in relation to the power of providers—companies and environmental

NGOs, in particular—for reducing the environmental impacts of consumption. The practice perspective seems to present a theoretical perspective that goes beyond the actor-structure divide as existing in the field of sustainable consumption as well. Finally, because of the globalization of production, the greening of consumption also has to be studied from a postnationalist perspective. Taking a global perspective to consumption is crucial in part because of the emerging “new consumers” outside the OECD and in Asia in particular. Taking a global perspective is important for understanding what sustainable consumption is about in the first place. The perspective of environmental networks and flows as recently developed within sociology in particular can be used to organize cross-border scientific work in both theoretical and empirical respects. Gert Spaargaren and Arthur P. J. Mol See also Citizenship; Consumer Protest: Environment; Consuming the Environment; Lifestyle; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Modernization Theory; Political and Ethical Consumption; Risk Society

Further Readings Catton, William R., and Riley E. Dunlap. “Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm.” The American Sociologist 13 (1978): 41–49. Dauvergne Peter. The Shadows of Consumption. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Huber, Joseph. New Technologies and Environmental Innovation. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004. Jackson, Tim, ed. The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Consumption. London: Earthscan, 2006. Mol, Arthur P. J., David A. Sonnenfeld, and Gert Spaargaren, eds. The Ecological Modernization Reader: Environmental Reform in Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 2009. Princen, Thomas, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, eds. Confronting Consumption. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Schnaiberg, Allan. The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Spaargaren, Gert, Arthur P. J. Mol, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. Governing Environmental Flows: Global Challenges to Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Stern, Paul C., Thomas Dietz, Linda Kalof, and Gregory Guagnano. “Values, Beliefs, and Pro-environmental Action: Attitude Formation toward Emergent Attitude

Ethnicity/Race Objects.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25 (1995): 1611–1636. Van Vliet, Bas, Heather Chappells, and Elizabeth Shove. Infrastructures of Consumption: Environmental Innovation in the Utility Industries. London: Earthscan, 2005.

ETHNICITY/RACE Race refers to categories defined by phenotypes, physical or visual markers, that have been afforded significance over time. In contrast, ethnicity refers to groups defined by their shared history, cultural beliefs, rituals, and practices. Both race and ethnicity are socially constructed categories that serve as a basis of group membership. In terms of differences, racial categories are less malleable over time, and race, unlike ethnicity, is often defined externally, leaving less room for subjective conceptualizations. For convenience, race and ethnicity are used interchangeably in this entry. The divergence of racial minorities’ preferences and practices from that of the majority groups’ is often explained as evidence of a subculture, their taste and traditions being rooted in cultural practices different from that of the majority group. But to fully account for the myriad ways that race and ethnic group membership produce both differences in taste and preferences and similarities in patterns of consumption, a more dynamic explanation is needed. This entry extends the discussion of the impact of class and culture on consumption to include a discussion of the consequences of racial alienation, segregation, and discrimination. Currently, three theoretical frameworks exist to account for the function consumption serves for racial minorities: consumption as a response to alienation, as a form of resistance, and a means to demonstrate one’s social identity. Ethnographic evidence is cited to illustrate the impact of race on consumption, using the experience of African American consumers as a case study. Additionally, areas worthy of future research and evidence from the experiences of other racial groups are discussed in the concluding section.

Impact of Class, Culture, and Race on Consumption In many ways, racial and ethnic minorities’ preferences as consumers and the symbolic value they attribute to particular goods reflect prevailing mores and values

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operating on a societal level. However, national contexts differ in the level of ethnic diversity, the degree to which they require minorities to assimilate, and the pervasiveness of racial stigma and inequality. Societies also vary markedly in the degree that they encourage consumption and emphasize values such as materialism and individualism. Often, racial and ethnic minorities have to engage multiple meaning systems and orientations, using goods to negotiate interactions with both in-group and out-group members. Cultural, class-based, and racial dynamics together affect how members of racial and ethnic minority groups engage in consumption. Consequently, racial and ethnic minorities’ orientations toward consumption may diverge from the dominant culture in important ways. For racial minorities, consumption practices are a means of affirming and reinforcing group boundaries. As Viviana Zelizer asserts, distinct cultural sensibilities are expressed through consumption and are often grounded in an ethnic identity. The celebration of unique aspects of a group’s culture is often intricately tied to the consumption of particular goods, as goods are integral to the performance of social rituals that distinguish a group. For racial minorities, the social meaning goods convey may even carry a “double meaning,” notes Dick Hedbidge. Additionally, scholars have argued that internal status hierarchies within groups are often maintained through distinct group practices and that social status is gained “not through adherence to monolithic consumption norms but through displays of localized cultural capital” (Arnould and Thompson 2005, 874). In addition to helping minorities to maintain distinct cultural orientations, patterns of consumption reflect class relations. The impact of class on consumption has been extensively theorized in the sociological literature. It is argued that consumers use goods to draw class boundaries and use goods in interactions to determine social status. Furthermore, according to Pierre Bourdieu, consumption constitutes a class-based practice that facilitates the reproduction of economic inequality. To the extent that racial minorities share material aspirations with the dominant culture, their desires and preferences are similar. Yet as members of racial and ethnic minority groups are often disproportionately located at the lower end of a society’s socioeconomic spectrum, their access to economic resources affects their consumption. Thorstein Veblen argues that low-status groups emulate the elite in their tastes

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and preferences. For Veblen, “standards of worth” and norms of “reputability” are determined by the “leisure class” and are then diffused “down through the social structure to the lowest strata” (1915, 57). Yet many scholars have criticized the top-down explanation of consumer tastes, as marginalized groups have also played a prominent role in shaping popular tastes and consumer preferences. For example, despite their low-status position, poor African American youth are instrumental in determining what constitutes popular culture in the United States. Furthermore, tastes are not static, and, as they evolve, preferences and practices that are initially seen as divergent over time may become mainstream, irrespective of the class origins of their original producers or creators. Pattern of consumption among racial and ethnic minorities also reflect their past and present experiences of racial inequality and alienation. Racial segregation, stigma, and discrimination together result in feelings of exclusion and racial alienation, which impact racial minorities’ consumer preferences, practices, and motivations. Sentiments of racial alienation range along a continuum from feeling incorporated and entitled to societal resources to feeling completely excluded from such benefits, according to Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings. Feelings of racial alienation are integral to a shared system of beliefs maintained by members of minority groups, helping to forge ties between group members. In their research, Bobo and Hutchings find that improving one’s class status does not necessary eliminate feelings of racial alienation. For example, the level of racial alienation increases as African Americans’ incomes rise. The collective experience of societal maltreatment is more determinative of the level of racial alienation that exists for any particular group than individual-level factors, such as personal background and social position. Racial alienation is rooted in historical conditions that have stratified groups and produced racial inequality. Historically, in the United States, prohibitions were placed on where and when minorities could engage in consumption. African Americans were subject to inferior treatment and often targeted for exploitation in retail and commercial settings. As such, much of the activism of civil rights movement focused on the fair treatment of consumers and gaining access to public places such as restaurants. Exclusionary policies and discriminatory practices have direct and indirect consequences for racial

minorities’ consumption. For instance, past conditions may have a durable effect on the practices and patterns of consumption exhibited by minorities today, even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed legal barriers to free participation in consumption. Robert Weems suggests that in the 1940s and 1950s, blacks preferred to stay home and listen to the radio and refrained from going out where they might face discrimination. Even as discrimination in the market has lessened, practices, such as partaking in leisure at home to avert discrimination, may have become ingrained in the lives of blacks. In fact, research by Jeffrey Humphreys suggests that African Americans spend less money dining outside the home compared to nonblacks. Combined with past experiences, present discrimination serves to broaden racial divergence in consumption. For instance, racial segregation, in terms of neighborhoods and friendship networks, produces social worlds in which different values and cultural orientations prevail, and as a result, patterns of consumption differ. Immigrants often reside in ethnic enclaves, and such residential patterns have been shown to impact consumption. For instance, Mexican immigrants who live in ethnic enclaves tend to have similar consumption patterns as those in Mexico. Their consumption is more likely to be tied to the “maintenance of their culture and family ties” (Wilson 2007, 70). However, because minorities live in segregated communities does not mean that they form the basis of a market segment or exhibit homogenous taste and orientations. Yet there are clear differences in consumption among racial groups, which is attributable to differences in class, culture, and the experience of racial discrimination and alienation.

Theoretical Frameworks While the literature on how race affects consumption is sparse, three theoretical frameworks exist to account for minorities’ consumption: consumption as a means to defuse alienation, as a tool of resistance, and as an instrument to display one’s social identity. These theories posit that consumption is not only a means of gaining social status, but, for minorities, it is also used to respond to social exclusion. The first theoretical proposition suggests that racial minorities engage in consumption in an attempt to overcome alienation. Consumption becomes both a response to their stigmatized position and a way

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to avert stereotypes. According to this perspective, minorities attempt to buy “respect” and “dignity” (Weems 1998, 27) and “consume conspicuously as a way of compensating for the humiliation and disappointments they incur” (Austin 1994, 156) because of their low status position. Minorities appear immaculate and wear expensive clothes to reduce the impact of negative stereotypes to such an extent that they are more willing to invest in visible markers of social status than similarly positioned whites. The second theoretical proposition, consumption as resistance, suggests that minorities’ consumption can be interpreted as a form of resistance to dominant society and mainstream cultural norms. Scholars, such as Dick Hebdige, argue that subordinate groups use goods subversively. The consumption as resistance framework suggests the opposite of the consumption as alienation perspective, which argues that minorities use goods to demonstrate their adherence to mainstream values and norms. In contrast, it asserts that minorities consciously use consumption to symbolically protest social stigma and poor treatment based on race or ethnicity. Last, the third proposition, consumption as social identity, contends that social identities are fashioned through consumption. For minorities, consumption is used “to express and transform their collective identity and to acquire social membership, i.e., to signify and claim that they are full and equal members in their society” (Lamont and Molnár 2001, 31). Additionally, consumption helps to distinguish a group’s characteristics and values. Members of stigmatized groups engage in an internal identification process, using goods to identify with other in-group members, as well as an external identification process, using goods to demonstrate their shared values and membership in the larger society. Each of the aforementioned approaches has also been criticized for being underdeveloped, as minorities’ experiences in the market and as consumers is not fully accounted for. Regina Austin criticizes the consumption as alienation perspective, arguing that it (1) over emphasizes and interrupts racial minorities’ actions as a response to whites, (2) fails to address internal differentiation and conflict within racial groups along class lines, and (3) ignores the importance of consumption in individual’s conception of the “good life.” Michelle Lamont and Virag Molnár’s criticism of this approach parallels the third critique made by Austin; they maintain that

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the consumption as alienation approach “downplays the subjective meaning that consumers attach to their consumption practices” and assumes that consumption results from repression (2001, 34). Austin criticizes the consumption as resistance perspective for overemphasizing the idea of symbolic protest. Lamont and Molnár similarly argue the consumption as resistance perspective projects consumers as being too powerful, overestimating their ability to challenge dominant narratives. While the aforementioned theoretical propositions are presented as separate and competing frames, consumers likely use consumption in a variety of ways, demonstrating evidence for each of the approaches. While none of the approaches has been thoroughly tested, examples from a wide range of ethnographic accounts illustrate their usefulness. In the following section, the experiences of African American consumers are reviewed to demonstrate that these frames are used in the everyday lives of racial and ethnic minorities. While the experiences of other groups may parallel that of African Americans, the examples presented here also illustrate how local conditions and factors unique to specific groups structure patterns of consumption, creating divergence.

African American Consumers as a Case Study Ethnographic accounts examining the everyday lives of African Americans provide compelling evidence for the consumption as alienation, resistance, and social identity frameworks, as well as areas worthy of theoretical elaboration. The case of African Americans is a suitable example because, as Lizabeth Cohen has noted, even while African Americans have historically been restricted from full participation in economic life, they nonetheless have remained active consumers. By examining patterns of consumption exhibited by African Americans, insight can be gained with regard to how race, class, and consumption interact. According to the consumption as alienation approach, racial minorities consciously display material goods with the goal of averting discrimination. In her account of the black middle class, Karyn Lacy, in Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (2007), illustrates the myriad ways middle-class blacks create public identities based on their class standing in an effort to avoid racial discrimination. To limit negative and alienating experiences in public settings, particularly while

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shopping, she finds that members of the black middle class put their class status on display. Her respondents “dress with care” and are always mindful of their self-presentation because they anticipate they will be treated badly and have “unpleasant” shopping experiences if they are not dressed formally or donning expensive brands. Through their clothing, they demonstrate their “respectability to white strangers” and “signal that they ‘belong’ in the store” (76). In public settings, indicators of social status, such as one’s level of education, are not easily detected, heightening the role of consumption. While whites may similarly “portray distinct identities as a way of signaling social position” (39), Lacy argues that because of the stigma of race, “blacks who have ‘made it’ must work harder, more deliberately, and more consistently to make their middle-class status known to others” (3). Lacy’s work evidences that blacks use consumption to respond to stereotypes, specifically the stereotype that all blacks are poor. Additional accounts provide evidence of how African Americans use consumption to actively contest their stigmatized position in society. For poor blacks, consumption provides a means to prove “themselves to be worthy” (Austin 1994, 154). Carl Nightingale asserts this idea, arguing that the poor ghetto youth he studied, as a consequence of social stigma and alienation, use conspicuous consumption to demonstrate to others they can achieve the American dream. He finds that the young boys fervently use consumption as a means of gaining a sense of self-worth. Similarly, the young mothers depicted in Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street (1999) use consumption and goods to achieve social status, adorning their babies in expensive clothing and footwear. As he states, “The teenage mother derives status from her baby; hence her preoccupation with the impression that the baby makes and her willingness to spend inordinately large sums toward that end” (165). Similarly, Mary Pattillo-McCoy reveals in Black Picket Fences (1999) that one of her respondents, Neisha, perceives other women in her neighborhood as her social inferiors if they either choose or cannot afford to dress their babies in the latest fashions. These young, poor black women use consumption in ways that do not conform to mainstream projections of what is appropriate, yet they consciously display goods as a means of coping with marginalization and of attaining social honor in communities in which there is little to go around.

The second theoretical perspective, consumption as resistance, asserts that blacks use consumption to resist dominant cultural norms, and by doing so, consumption can be used as a means of both pleasure and protest. The work of Elizabeth Chin, examining how poor, urban black children engage in consumption, lends support to the consumption as resistance framework. She finds that the children she observed use consumption for expressive and social purposes. For them, consumption is “a sphere of creative play” and also a “realm in which they can construct critical assessments of the world around them” (2001, 178). For the children in her study, consumption becomes a means of both resisting and reinterpreting the world around them. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, in their classical work Black Metropolis, first published in 1945, provide additional evidence for this perspective. They suggest that blacks place a premium on “enjoying life” irrespective of their economic position, and they go on to argue that “having a good time” also functions as an “escape from the tensions of contact with white people. Absorption in ‘pleasure’ is, in part at least, a kind of adjustment to their separate, subordinate status in American life” (1993, 387). In her work, Pattillo-McCoy provides evidence that African Americans use consumption to “have a good time.” She states that young people in Groveland, the community she studies, use “fashions to resist and reinterpret their racially marginalized position” all the while “having fun” (1999, 148). She demonstrates the ways in which young people take mainstream brands and radically change them, such that their style demonstrates “a blatant use of popular fashion for locally significant ends” (163). Pattillo-McCoy provides support for the claim that consumption for African Americans can be liberating and used creatively to subvert dominate culture and taste. Her work also demonstrates the importance of the local context in shaping the meaning attributed to material goods and how people use those material goods. Similarly, one of Lacy’s most interesting findings is that middle-class African Americans see themselves as responsible consumers, but “responsible spending doesn’t mean doing without luxuries” (2007, 133). While Lacy does not spell out what set of goods are encompassed in African American’s conception of the good life, she does suggest that African Americans are more likely to indulge themselves with creature comforts that are associated with a

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middle-class lifestyle. While they believe in spending responsibly, middle-class African Americans also consume because they believe that having certain material goods makes their lives more enjoyable. Interestingly, the middle-class African Americans in her study state that they are less concerned with frugality than their middle-class white counterparts but do not see themselves as invested in material things as lower-class African Americans. In fact, they actively criticize African Americans who they believe are living beyond their means or not earning a living legitimately. Lacy’s work evidences just how members of racial groups maintain perceptions of internal differences that exist, particularly along class lines. Lamont and Molnár provide evidence for the third theoretical proposition, that consumption is a means for demonstrating social identity. They find that African American marketing executives promote consumption as a means of expression of group membership and collective identity. It becomes a part of what makes African American culture distinct. But these executives also assert that African Americans should and do use consumption to demonstrate their allegiance to “mainstream” middle-class values. They argue that through consumption, African Americans “affirm and gain recognition of their full membership in U.S. society” (2001, 36). Yet, as Lamont and Molnár argue, it is problematic that consumption is defined as a means of gaining entry into American society, as they state of the exclusiveness inherent in such a criteria: “Equating social membership with buying power makes it largely unreachable for a large number of whites and blacks alike” (42). In many ways, blacks’ protest of discrimination in the sphere of consumption was tied to claims of national identity and rights associated with American citizenship, lending support for the consumption as social identity perspective. Historically, minorities have used the sphere of consumption collectively and individually to fight for greater racial equality in the United States. In her account of the rise of the “consumer republic,” Cohen describes the various collective strategies African Americans employed to assert their citizenship. During the civil rights movement, African American communities used their purchasing power for political ends, boycotting stores, movie theaters, and other public venues in protest of racial prejudice. Cohen describes African Americans’ political activity as part of a larger ideological shift in which consumption became associated with national

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prosperity and equal citizenship. Equal access to consumer goods is associated with a middle-class lifestyle, which was seen as essential to maintaining democracy. African Americans’ struggle for the right to shop was necessary, as the ability of all citizens to spend freely was rendered vital to American prosperity. In addition to providing support for the aforementioned frames, ethnographic accounts indicate where there is room for improvement in the understanding of minorities’ consumption. Such research suggests additional ways minorities use consumption and it also raises important concerns, such as the detrimental role consumption plays. Four areas for theoretical elaboration should be noted. First, minorities may refuse to engage in consumption, and when and why they forfeit spending is of equal importance. Second, it is imperative to note which groups or social spaces shape and inform minorities consumer’s decisions and why. Third, future research must account for the structural conditions that racial and ethnic minorities face, which shapes both their consumption and the social significance of goods they purchase. Lastly, the negative consequences of consumption are worthy of thorough examination. Continuing with the case study of the African American experience, historically, African Americans have refused to spend their money in places where they have been discriminated against. In her research, Jennifer Lee finds that African Americans often employ strategies of avoidance in which they refused to “patronize businesses that do not treat them fairly” (2000, 371). Their refusal to shop or spend money, though not organized on a collective level, has implications for other decisions they make. For instance, some middle-class blacks in Lee’s study remark that discriminatory retail experiences in nonblack neighborhoods was a “chief reason why they prefer living in predominantly black communities” (371). While discrimination “narrows blacks’ choices with regard to where to consume and hinders their ability to enter into efficient commercial transactions,” it might also result in blacks simply refusing to make certain purchases (Austin 1994, 150). Whether African Americans, or other minorities, withdraw from the market because of individual experiences of discrimination or because of inferior goods and services, it is important to note why consumers use this strategy, how frequently they do so, and how effective it is. Furthermore, how does the decision to withdraw from the market in one sphere shape preferences and choices in other spheres?

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Theoretical elaboration is also needed to understand to what degree racial and ethnic minorities’ preferences are shaped by the consumption of similarly situated in-group members, high-status in-group members, or whites of equal or higher status. Austin suggests that status hierarchies within the black community have a significant impact on how and why African Americans consume. She asserts that “blacks in general do not pay that much attention to white people” (163). Pattillo-McCoy provides a more nuanced perspective, arguing that African Americans’ actions are not geared toward any one group but that they buy certain goods to send a message simultaneously to those who are both socially proximate and distant. As she states of African Americans who own Cadillacs, “The driver buys it to signify first to himor herself, then to friends, and finally to ‘the white man,’ that he or she has made it” (1999, 148). In her research on Korean and Chinese second-generation immigrants, Lisa Sun-Hee Park similarly notes that her respondents’ consumer choices often reflected a desire to “prove their ‘Americanness’” or to appear like a “normal American family” (2005, 2–3). But their consumption was also important within their families and the broader immigrant community, as it demonstrated upward mobility and social advancement. While such evidence suggests that racial minorities’ consumption is affected both by in-group and out-group values, without further investigation, there is no way to know which group most significantly shapes patterns of consumption exhibited by racial and ethnic minorities. The degree to which consumption can be detrimental is a question worthy of further investigation. If consumption is crucial in demonstrating upward mobility, racial minorities may be induced to consume when it is not in their long-term financial interests to do so. As Pattillo-McCoy notes, African Americans use “material goods to level the playing field, buying things they often cannot afford in order to give others the impression that they can” (1999, 147). Drake and Cayton similarly found that the lives of Bronzille’s residents were organized around “getting ahead” (1993, 388). “Getting ahead” entails a commitment to economic advancement, of which the consumption of certain goods is emblematic. As they state, In its simplest terms this means progressively moving from low-paid to higher-paid jobs, acquiring a more comfortable home, laying up something for sickness

and old age, and trying to make sure that the children will start out at a higher economic and cultural level than their parents. Individuals symbolized their progress by the way they spend their money—for clothes, real estate, automobiles, donations, entertaining. (388)

Consumption serves as a means of demonstrating upward mobility within the black community; even when limited (legitimate) opportunities exist, this desire to consume remains, sometimes producing deleterious consequences. The works of Drake and Cayton, Anderson, and Pattillo-McCoy all reveal the harmful role consumption can play. Drake and Cayton argue that “maintaining a ‘front’ and ‘showing off’ become very important substitutes for getting ahead in the economic sense” (1993, 389). For those with little other opportunities, like the young women who make up Anderson’s “Baby Club,” consumption can reinforce counterproductive social norms. Pattillo-McCoy provides an account of a young man named Tyson, who at the age of sixteen was lured into selling drugs by the fast money he could earn and then use to consume. As she notes, “Tyson felt he was a man because he could use his drug profits to buy whatever he wanted. And the first things he wanted were clothes and shoes” (1999, 159).

Experiences of Other Racial and Ethnic Groups Similarities exist across racial and ethnic groups in how material goods are used simultaneously to maintain group boundaries, to structure social relations with fellow in-group members, and to gain social acceptance among out-group members. Research on Korean and Chinese second-generation immigrants has revealed that a premium is placed on the consumption of high-status goods because of the social status such goods convey within the group. Additionally, material goods are used to demonstrate social citizenship and membership. Similarly, Sathi Dasgupta found that among Indian immigrants consumption of high-status goods is perceived as instrumental in their efforts to gain acceptance in American society. The work of Raj Mehta and Russell W. Belk on Indian immigrant families also illustrates the importance of consumption and the use of goods to preserve one’s ethnic heritage. Families studied reflected a desire both to adapt to their new context and to preserve various aspects of

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their culture of origin. Research on racial and ethnic groups presents clear evidence for the social identity framework, though more research is needed to determine the applicability of the consumption as a response to alienation and consumption as a form of resistance frameworks to the experiences of ethnic immigrants in the context of the United States and more broadly.

Conclusion Sociological theories of consumption posit that on an aggregate level, consumption is a means by which people demonstrate their social status and group membership. On a microlevel, objects and goods are acquired because they maintain symbolic value, which people use to “construct identities and relations with others who inhabit a similar symbolic universe” (DiMaggio 1994, 44). The preferences and decisions of racial and ethnic minorities as consumers are shaped by their experience of alienation, their resistance, and their desire for leisure and entertainment. But consumption also plays an important role in the construction of racial and class-based identities. Minorities’ conception of consumption is a product of pervasive cultural repertoires, but it also is a product of their social and economic context and the particular set of conditions they face as a consequence of stigma and discrimination. Experiences of differential treatment along racial and ethnic lines, combined with differences in class and culture, result in minorities’ distinct practices, preferences, and motivations with regard to consumption. Cassi L. Pittman See also Conspicuous Consumption; Ghettos; Identity; Leisure; Resistance; Social Distinction; Social Exclusion; Subculture

Further Readings Anderson, Elijah. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Arnould, Eric J., and Craig J. Thompson. “Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research.” Journal of Consumer Research 31, no. 4 (2005): 868–882. Austin, Regina. “‘A Nation of Thieves’: Securing Black People’s Right to Shop and to Sell in White America.” Utah Law Review 1 (1994): 147–177. Bobo, Lawrence, and Vincent L. Hutching. “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of

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Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context.” American Sociological Review 61, no. 6 (1996): 951–962. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Chin, Elizabeth. Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic the Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Corrigan, Peter. The Sociology of Consumption: An Introduction. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Dasgupta, Sathi S. On the Trail of an Uncertain Dream: Indian Immigrant Experience in America. New York: AMS, 1989. DiMaggio, Paul. “Culture and Economy.” In The Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, 27–57. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture the Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 2002. Humphreys, Jeffrey M. The Multicultural Economy, 2008: Minority Buying Power in the New Century. Athens, GA: Selig Center for Economic Growth, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, 2008. Lacy, Karyn R. Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Lamont, Michele, and Virag Molnar. “How Blacks Use Consumption to Shape their Collective Identity: Evidence from Marketing Specialists.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1, no. 1 (2001): 31–45. Lee, Jennifer. “From Civil Relations to Racial Conflict: Merchant-Customer Interactions in Urban America.” American Sociological Review 67, no. 1 (2002): 77–98. Mehta, Raj, and Russell W. Belk. “Artifacts, Identity, and Transition: Favorite Possessions of Indians and Indian Immigrants to the United States.” Journal of Consumer Research 17, no. 4 (1991): 398–411. Nightingale, Carl. On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Park, Lisa Sun-Hee. Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Asian America). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pattillo-McCoy, Mary. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

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Veblen, Thorstein. Conspicuous Consumption. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. First published 1915. Weems, Robert E. Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Wilson, R. T. “Acculturation and Discrimination in the Global Market Place: The Case of Hispanics in the U.S.” Journal of International Consumer Marketing 20, no. 1 (2007): 67–78. Zelizer, Viviana. “Culture and Consumption.” In The Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, 331–354. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

ETHNOGRAPHY Ethnography is the description, interpretation, and analysis of a culture or social group, or of particular social practices, processes, or problems, through field research in naturally occurring settings. Ethnography is the core research practice of social and cultural anthropology and is commonly used in sociology and cultural studies, as well as in studies of science and technology, health, education, crime, and, increasingly, in consumer research, design, and product development. The method of participant observation is central to the practice of ethnography. In anthropology, conventionally, ethnographic fieldwork is a long-term, comprehensive social immersion, usually in a culture alien to that of the researcher. This is contrasted with sociological ethnography, which usually involves more bounded periods of fieldwork and relatively discrete cultural forms and often takes place in the researcher’s own society. Within ethnography, participant observation is commonly supplemented with interviewing, as well as other research methods including, but not limited to, textual analysis and the interpretation of visual representations and material artifacts. However, the practice of ethnography cannot be reduced to particular research methods, or even a single methodological position. As John Brewer notes, different theoretical and philosophical frameworks compete over what ethnography is and how it should be practiced, due to their commitment to different understandings of the nature of society (ontology) and the nature of knowledge (epistemology). While sociologists are far from reaching consensus, British sociologists Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, and Sara

Delemont have described the “ethnographic imagination” as implying a commitment to the interpretation of social action, an understanding of social organization, an analysis of the realization of macrolevel processes in local social contexts, and a recognition of the complexity and multiplicity of cultural meanings in observed social action (2003, 113–115).

The History of Ethnography Ethnography began in the 1890s in anthropology and sociology. Classical ethnography was based on a natural science model of social research. The anthropological ethnographic monograph developed as a distinctive genre of writing with a claim to scientific veracity, as distinct from, for example, travel writing or journalism, as well as accounts of ethnographic fieldwork that foregrounded the experience of the author, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955). Canonical ethnographic monographs, such as Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronisław Malinowski (1922), Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (1928), or The Nuer by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940), as well as Franz Boas’s works on the Kwakiutl of the Pacific North West from 1895 onward, offered total overviews of geographically bounded cultures while also serving as vehicles for advancing general anthropological understanding. In sociology, the major early current was found in the Chicago School of ethnography. Between 1917 and 1942, numerous ethnographies were produced, chiefly by students of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, that portrayed the diverse social worlds of mainly urban, everyday life and the symbolic interactions of specific communities and groups, often the marginalized and deviant (see Deegan 2001). The Chicago style of fieldwork was to have lasting influence. The inheritors of the tradition in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Howard Becker, Anselm Strauss, Blanche Greer, and Leonard Schatzman, addressed the tendency to a lack of methodological reflection among the early ethnographers by producing major methodological works.

The Reflexive Turn Classical ethnography assumed a largely unproblematic stance to issues of representation and methodology. The “postmodern,” “literary,” or “reflexive turn” in ethnography from the mid-1980s onward

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was influenced by post-structuralism, postcolonialist theory, and feminist critiques. James Clifford and George Marcus’s 1986 edited collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography was hugely influential in disseminating ideas of the reflexive turn. The reflexive turn saw a rejection of natural science as an appropriate model for ethnographic inquiry, a questioning of the legitimacy of ethnography’s claims to a privileged perspective (“the crisis of legitimacy”) and of the realist assumption that the language of ethnographic writing was a transparent medium (“the crisis of representation”). The response to these perceived crises is often discussed in terms of a commitment to “reflexivity” and “new ethnography.” Reflexivity implies a sensitivity on the part of the ethnographer to his or her own social, cultural, and historical location (and its values and interests), to the ethical and political context in which the production of ethnographic knowledge takes place, and to a foregrounding of the power relations implicit in ethnographic research and writing. Against conventional, realist ethnography, George Marcus has characterized new ethnography, such as Michael Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987), as drawing on the experimentation of a modernist aesthetic sensibility. Others sympathetic to the interdisciplinary critiques of the reflexive turn (such as Atkinson et al. 2003) have cautioned innovators not to forget the rich resources of ethnographic history. Pierre Bourdieu has criticized the postmodern turn in ethnography as narcissistic and an abandonment of ethnography’s commitment to scientific objectivity. For Bourdieu, reflexivity means a rigorous commitment to explicating the objective social and cultural position of the ethnographer, rather than a focus on the ethnographer’s subjective experience of fieldwork or experiments with ethnographic writing. While for anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz ethnography becomes simply one discourse among other discourses, a dialogue between ethnographer and subject aimed at mutual understanding, for others, such as the Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy, the dialogue is also one between theory and data, with the aim of revealing how macroprinciples such as commodification shape and are shaped by everyday worlds of social interaction. The reflexive turn, then, has led both to ethnography conceived as interpretation and ethnography conceived as political and cultural critique.

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Contemporary Ethnography The traditional ethnographic field as a static locale is increasingly challenged by global mobility, communications technology, and the transnational contexts of research subjects. The ethnographer has become more active in determining the field of study, notes Vered Amit. Contemporary ethnographers are presented with the problem of articulating the microperspective of ethnography with the macroperspective of larger systems (such as capitalist modes of production and consumption) and showing their interconnections over time. George Marcus suggests this may be approached through literally studying multiple locales (multisite ethnography), through a sensitivity to how macroprocesses are articulated in the local ethnographic context, or through new objects of study, such as life histories, objects, markets, or even metaphors.

Ethnographies of Consumption and Consumer Culture The rich, contextualized understandings of ethnography, its attention to the messy complexity of everyday practices and articulation of macro- with microprocesses, provide fertile ground for the study of consumption and consumer culture. Moreover, as Mary Douglas notes, ethnographic tradition assumes that material artifacts communicate social meanings and that goods make and maintain social relationships, above and beyond simply the display of status. Contemporary ethnographers of consumer culture have explored subjects as diverse as the role of personal stereos in everyday life (Michael Bull’s Sounding Out the City, 2000), to the role of commodified “bridal photography” in Taiwanese weddings (Bonnie Adrian’s Framing the Bride, 2003). British anthropologist Daniel Miller has made several notable contributions to the area, such as Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach (1994), a study of how mass consumption in Trinidad expresses key contradictions of modernity, and Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (1997), a study of Trinidadian consumer businesses that provides a perspective of capitalist practices as deeply locally contextualized. This perspective challenges the stereotype of passive, ideologically manipulated consumers, a theme Miller further develops in A Theory of Shopping (1998). Through an ethnography of women’s everyday shopping in London, Miller argues that, far from being the status competition of conspicuous consumption or the

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atomized, alienated pursuit of commodified identities, women’s mundane shopping is a medium through which an affective world of social and family relationships is enacted. Crucially, Miller shows that the act of purchase is only a minor element in a network of social and moral meaning in everyday life in which the purchased commodity gains significance. Dan Welch See also Anthropology; Autoethnography; Bourdieu, Pierre; Cultural Studies; Douglas, Mary; Multisited Ethnography; Postcolonial Theory; Postmodernism; Post-Structuralism; Sociology

Further Readings Amit, Vered, ed. Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge, 2000. Atkinson, Paul, Amanda Coffey, and Sara Delamont. Key Themes in Qualitative Research: Continuities and Change. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2003. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Participant Objectivation.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 281–294. Brewer, John D. Ethnography. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2000. Burawoy, Michael, Alice Burton, Ann Arnett Ferguson, and Kathryn J. Fox, eds. Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Deegan, Mary Jo. “The Chicago School of Ethnography.” In Handbook of Ethnography, edited by Paul A. Atkinson, Amanda Jane Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Ly H. Lofland, 11–25. London: Sage, 2001. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Routledge 1979. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Marcus, George E. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

ETHNOLOGY/FOLKLORE STUDIES What kinds of contributions have European ethnology and folklore made to the general study of

consumption? European ethnology is a branch of general anthropology that developed in Europe during the end of the nineteenth century. While many European nations with strong colonial traditions or imperial ambitions created a global kind of anthropology, small nations like the Scandinavian ones turned to discover “their primitives within,” either in the form of peasant folklore studies or as a more general ethnology of the nation. During the twentieth century, the discipline became more focused on studying contemporary everyday life within a mainly national or European framework. Today, departments of European ethnology combine a fieldworkoriented tradition with links both to cultural history and cultural studies. The strong ethnographic tradition has often meant a focus on the ways in which consumption is embedded in material contexts, daily routines and rituals, and emotionalities and sensibilities. The focus is on situated practices, and this also means that there is a constant attempt to bring theoretical perspectives into dialogue with concrete empirical materials. The phenomenological tradition is strong, as well as the use of actor-network theory. In terms of methods, there is a constant experimentation with different ethnographic techniques and, in the case of folklore, studies of narrativity and genre analysis. Three main ethnological perspectives are presented: first, a strategy that uses a historical and contrastive perspective to problematize current notions of consumption; second, an interest in the materialities of consumption and the ways in which all senses are involved in consumer activities, from do-it-yourself (DIY) projects to the ways people experiment with their wardrobe in front of the mirror; and finally, an interest in detailed ethnographies of aspects of consumer life that may at first sight seem too trivial or mundane to merit attention, like everyday skills and routines.

Consumer Life Histories As European ethnologists and folklorists set out to document a vanishing peasant culture, they developed folk life archives all over Europe, in university departments and museums, collections of answers to questionnaires, interviews, oral histories, and field reports. Many of these archives still collect material but now often with a focus on everyday life in contemporary society. Thus, they often contain rich materials on different aspects of consumption. Today, the collections

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on preindustrial patterns of consumption and householding present interesting resources for comparative analysis, but this entry deals with one special category, collections of life histories of consumption, that has proved a fruitful analytical tool. When people narrate their lives as consumers during the twentieth century, there is often a focus on processes of learning and de-learning. The interviews often start with the early memories of learning how to construct a list of Christmas wishes, becoming a collector of Barbie dolls or Smurf figures, or negotiating pocket money. These childhood memories often have a certain freshness; they are memories of the first confrontations with novel styles and scenes of consumption. They often express the exhilarating feeling of entering a world of abundance and desire. For older generations with a rural background, these memories may deal with the first trip to the market or the advent of the mail-order catalogue. Many recollect the ways in which catalogue reading at the kitchen table became a family ritual but also how it turned into a favorite pastime for children. For later generations of consumers, new entrances to the world of goods developed. Here, the early memories may deal with the first visit to a department store or a real supermarket. Consumption as a laboratory for experimentation and identity formation comes out even more strongly when people talk about their teenage years. There are memories of the endless hours spent in front of the mirror, trying out styles, clothes, and poses to find forms of self-expression. Teenage memories also emphasize the degree to which the battle with parents and the attempts to secure adult freedom are enacted within the field of consumption. Another dominating theme in teenage consumer life has to do with learning the fine social distinctions, questions of gender and class become visible here. During later stages of life, homemaking is a central metaphor for narrating consumer life, and there is an important generational change here. The idea of home improvement as a family project, uniting wife, husband, and children, became important for the working class during the postwar boom years in manners that would have been unthinkable in 1900 or 1930. Home became a place where one actively tried out different sides of the self, an important site of cultural production. A new space for creativity and anesthetization emerged, an opportunity to develop talents and

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interests among people who had previously lacked the time, money, and energy to invest in their own home. The life histories illustrate how this family project called the home is never finished. People are busy redecorating, fixing, planning, daydreaming, producing new sofa cushions, putting in new floors, ripping out old ones, changing wallpaper, driving to the hardware store, leafing through furniture catalogues, moving things around, and moving the family on. What are the lessons of this material? The focus on learning gives us a chance to understand how consumer competences are developed. Narratives of one’s life as a home builder, car owner, or teenage consumer highlight the ways people have over the years acquired skills that later have often been naturalized into habits, reflexes, and routines and thus become hard to notice. The slow naturalization of these skills comes out, for example, in the material on life with media technologies, from the telephone to the television. Pioneer radio listening or television viewing was surrounded by an almost sacred aura. People remember the solemn atmosphere and the intense concentration in early radio listening, or the ways in which you dressed up for television evenings, hushing both grandma and the kids. Both the radio and the television set were given a prominent position in the best room, rather like home altars. Gradually, the media became routine, people learned how to listen with half an ear to the radio or how to have the television on as a background screen for conversation, zapping between channels. Typical of this gradual mastery of new home technologies is also the capacity to do several things at the same time: read a paper while listening to the radio, have a meal while watching the television news, and so on. There is a long history of multitasking here. Another element concerns the moral dimension of consumption. The material often underlines the ways in which most discussions about consumption tend to have a moral element. Narrating one’s life can take the form of an argument about a “now” versus a “then.” For some, it becomes important to stress how one learned how to make do with little, and this is often meant as an indirect critique of the youngsters of today “who get everything for nothing” and who never learn to forsake desires or think twice about consumption. Such moral lessons can also be condensed into situations or objects, which also may take on rather stable narrative forms, turning into genres of nostalgia or dystopia.

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A third lesson is how a personal history of consumption is organized around watershed ideas or turning points in life. A new consumer habit or commodity comes to symbolize an important change. The first bathroom with running hot water, the first ride in the family car, and the first family holiday stand out as utopias that suddenly have come within reach. There are striking gender differences here. In life histories of many women of earlier generations, it is the memories of the move to the first modern apartment that stand out. In many cases, the expression used is “it was like a dream” or “just like paradise.” It is remembered as taking a step into the future, being a modern family on the move.

Materializing Consumption Narratives like these offer an antidote to much of the cultural analysis of consumption of the 1980s and 1990s, which had a focus on semiotics, meanings, symbols—commodities as “texts,” focusing much less on the everyday blood, sweat, and tears of consumption. For European ethnology with an old interest in the materialities and practicalities of everyday life, consumer studies have had more of a hands-on perspective. The interest in looking at all the senses at work—not just the visual dimension—means following people using and fixing objects, growing tired of them, discarding them, or rediscovering them. This focus has also meant a growing interest in the analysis of consumer routines and habits. Open the door to any home, and what will you be stumbling over? Furniture and personal belongings, of course, but you will also get entangled in all the routines organizing domestic consumption inside. The home is above all a web of rules, routines, and rhythms, of silent agreements and ingrained reflexes about “the ways we do things here.” One learns how to survive a stressful morning, store the food in the fridge, sort the laundry, and much, much more. This kind of construction work goes on everywhere but in different forms. There are studies of how families organize their homes, creating patterns of division of labor and running into conflict about consumer priorities. It is in the trivial everyday consumer routines that homes are made, challenged, transformed, or broken. The same perspectives have been brought fruitfully to the studies of migration and transnational mobility. Maja Povrzanovic has argued that rather than getting

trapped in discourses about ethnicity, it is fruitful to look at the ways different kinds of migrants come to share common experiences, through consumer practices and life with objects. How does one handle two worlds of consumption, moving between nations? This theme is also elaborated in a special issue of Ethnologia Europaea (2007) on double homes and double lives. Questions of identification, of course, also surface in the consumer habits of migrants. What once were just everyday practices in terms of food, clothing, or socializing take on a new and symbolic charge in exile from the home country. Hilje van der Horst has looked at the ways in which seemingly mundane phenomena, the different uses and attitudes to lace in home decoration, mirrors identity conflicts among different generations of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands.

Worlds of Shopping The ethnological combination of an eye for materiality, historical contrasts, and detailed ethnographies can be illustrated by studies on the making of the modern shopper. In her studies of the shopping experience in Berlin around 1900, German ethnologist Gudrun König follows the ways in which new ideas about the aesthetics and display of consumer goods in department stores and exhibitions are confronted with the moral landscape of taste and ideas about gender, class, and good and bad consumers. Here we get a detailed view of the landscapes of commerce and new politics of shopping. This is a thick description of a special era that sets out to problematize later conceptions of consumer patterns. Today’s discourses about the experience economy—shopping as a skill, taste as a battleground—were also there in Berlin of the early twentieth century, although in different forms. Swedish ethnologist Cecilia Fredriksson deals with a later period, the development of discount department stores from the 1930s to the 1960s. She shows how this consumer space also became a free zone. Women could walk along the counters and seem busy with shopping, when they actually just wanted a moment of daydreaming in private. This was a safe public space where no one questioned another’s right to be there but also a place where new consumer skills were learned. One was allowed to handle goods and feel modernity materializing in

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commodity assemblages, smells, textures, and sounds, from the exciting ride with an escalator to the first taste of soft ice cream. The department store thus organized new ways of exposing the world of goods and new styles of shopping that still are with us. In a study of shopping behavior in malls and department stores, Swedish ethnologist Erik Ottoson has explored how this dreamlike condition of drifting between counters and special offers, vaguely searching for something, still is working. He follows people in their wanderings, watching them handle stuff, try on clothes, or compare colors. His contrastive, analytical approach consists of comparing shoppers in a mall, dumpster divers on their nightly raids, and visitors to flea markets. What kinds of different moods and modes of interaction with commodities are developed here? These three researchers share an eye for the detail, anchoring general arguments about desire, discipline, or market relations in concrete ethnographic situations—the movement of bodies, the flow of daydreams, the workings of all the senses.

Consuming Experiences With the new focus on consumer life in what came to be called the experience economy in the 1990s, the ethnological contributions to this field first of all focused on a comparative critical comparison of contemporary experience economies and those of earlier eras, like the three researchers previously discussed, but also a more detailed ethnographic approach to what selling, packaging, or having an experience really meant. Norwegian ethnologist Kirsti Hjemdahl has explored how children experience a theme park, and Olav Christensen has studied how snowboarders create a community of excitement. A number of studies discuss what happens when traditional industries reinvent themselves in terms of producing experiences. Håkan Jönsson has looked at dairy producers trying to repackage milk products as “a unique experience,” Tom O’Dell has explored how a dying spa world of the twentieth century became a new global industry in the twentyfirst, while Robert Willim has studied the recycling of old factory buildings into “Industrial cool,” turning them into events (see their case studies in Löfgren and Willim 2005). Other ethnologists have been interested in the ways in which life-cycle rituals like baptisms, weddings, and burials have been

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commercialized in new ways within the framework of “the experience market.”

Conclusion A research tradition using history as a contrastive perspective, with an interest in detailed ethnographies and the sensualities of the material world of consumption, is what European ethnology brings to the multidisciplinary fields of consumer studies. A longer historical perspective helps to show how patterns and forms of consumption develop, are learned and unlearned, are transformed, or disappear. Many kinds of everyday consumption have become so natural that people do not even think of them in terms of consumption any longer. In the same way, moving back to periods when today’s well-established ideas about consumption, fashions, or desires were novel and fresh will help us to understand these processes of institutionalization and habituation. When new patterns of consumption emerge, there is an openness surrounding them: How should one behave in a department store? What happens during a fashion show? What can a telephone be used for? Sooner or later, this newness is transformed into something self-evident. Unlike anthropologists who went out to search for more exotic worlds, where the problem was getting into new and strange cultures, European ethnologists have often been faced with the task of getting out of their all-too-familiar cultural settings, and this task has produced a number of distancing strategies and tactics of cultural analysis that help to problematize seemingly trivial worlds of consumption. Orvar Löfgren See also Anthropology; Craft Consumer; Cultural Studies; Domestic Technologies; Ethnography; Material Culture; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Shopping

Further Readings Brembeck, Helene, Karin M. Ekström, and Magnus Mörck, eds. Little Monsters: (De)coupling Assemblages of Consumption. Berlin: LitVerlag, 2007. Christensen, Olav. “The Playing Collective: Snowboarding, Youth Culture and the Desire for Excitement.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 29 (1999): 106–119. Craith, Máiréad Nic, Ullrich Kockel, and Reinhard Johler, eds. Everyday Culture in Europe: Approaches and Methodologies. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008.

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Fredriksson, Cecilia. “The Making of a Swedish Department Store Culture.” In The Shopping Experience, edited by Colin Campbell and Paasi Falk, 111–135. London: Sage, 1998. Hjemdahl Mathiesen, Kirsti. “When Theme Parks Happen.” In Being There: New Perspectives on Phenomenology and the Analysis of Culture, edited by Jonas Frykman and Nils Gilje, 149–168. Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 2003. Horst, Hilje van der. “Turkish Lace: Constructing Modernities and Authenticities.” Ethnologia Europaea 36, no. 1 (2007): 32–44. Löfgren, Orvar. “Excessive Living.” Culture and Organization 13, no. 2 (June 2007): 131–144. Löfgren, Orvar, and Richard Wilk, eds. Off the Edge: Experiments in Cultural Analysis. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006. Published as special issue of Ethnologia Europaea 35, no. 1–2 (2007). Löfgren, Orvar, and Robert Willim, eds. Magic, Culture and the New Economy, Oxford: Berg, 2005. O’Dell, Tom, and Peter Billing. Experiencescapes: Tourism, Culture and Economy. Copenhagen, Denmark: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2003. Otto, Lene, and Lykke Pedersen. “Life Stories and Objects of Memories.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 28 (1998): 77–92. Provrzanovic, Maja. “Beyond Culture and Identity. Places, Practices, Experiences.” Ethnologia Europaea 38, no. 1 (2008): 13–22. Rogan, Bjarne. “Things with a History—and Other Possessions: Some Notes on Public and Private Aspects of Possession among Elderly People.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 28 (1998): 93–107.

EUROPEAN UNION The European Union has become the foremost transnational organization in terms of binding rights and shared obligations. Starting with the European Community of Coal and Steel in 1952 as a means of preventing France and Germany from ever going to a war with each other again, and the Roman Treaty of 1958 with six founding states, it eventually expanded to include twenty-seven member states. And its expansion is not over. A remarkable set of rights has been consigned to the community along this development. The European Union is much more than a coordinator of the actions of its member states; it is an actor in its own right. Its powers are greatest in the economic sphere as it can enforce the

working of the Single European Market. The continuing dismantling of all sorts of trade barriers has significant impact on the development of European consumption and culture. In addition, the European Union has accrued power in other consumption relevant policy fields, for instance, in consumer protection and, to lesser extent, in culture and tourism. This entry discusses the direct relevance of the European Union and the European Union as a geographic-societal configuration for consumer culture. First, though, it considers the European approximation to mass consumption. This entry is confined to behavioral patterns of leisure and consumption. Aspects like consumption as an attempt to create a meaningful life or the aestheticization and branding of commodities are discussed elsewhere in this encyclopedia. Consumption and leisure patterns differ in many respects between women and men, between age groups, and between classes and status groups. These differences are also covered in other entries of this encyclopedia.

Europeanization and Americanization The global emergence of consumer culture is often premised on Americanization. Yet Europe has its own distinctive, even if somewhat belated, patterns and processes related to consumption. It was not until the late 1950s that consumption became widespread among the general population in Europe. Critique of destructive effects of consumer capitalism had started long before World War II, however. Often, the United States served as a proxy of admiration and contempt. While conservatives complained that European ways of life would be swamped by American culture, the political left feared consumerism as a distraction to class consciousness. Later, German intellectuals— for instance, of the Frankfurt School—who had fled Hitler warmly welcomed the safety granted by their American host country but nevertheless warned of totalitarian aspects of the American mass consumption and culture. In the 1960s, French structuralists like Pierre Bourdieu or Jean Baudrillard emphasized the emptiness consumption is predicated on and its dubious role in the constructing or articulating of identity. In the British context, there was a debate on the intensification of moral regulation and the commercialization of working-class leisure. This rough sketch of the theorizing about consumption only serves to illustrate that critique of

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mass consumption used to be a more regular feature of the European than the American intellectual debate. This time-honored transatlantic difference has been replaced by a common focus on the history of consumption. Hartmut Kaelble, for instance, makes the case that European consumption patterns are still distinctive. He mentions a certain European style of goods, European preferences for longer holidays, or a larger amount spent for food and clothes as examples of these peculiarities. Consumer icons like the automobile had been invented in Europe, and the standardization of consumer products, department stores, fast-food restaurants, or packaged foods had been developed equally in Europe and North America. Two world wars derailed Europe on its way to becoming a consumer society earlier, however. Victoria de Grazia presents a different story according to which the “American Market Empire” triumphantly and peacefully swept away Europe’s bourgeois commercial civilization. Reminiscent of Werner Sombart’s thesis about the absence of socialism in the United States, de Grazia maintains that there was no consumerism in Europe before twentieth-century American consumer culture pressed up against the old continent’s diversity in norms of consumption. American inventions, from the chain store and supermarket to Hollywood cinema, successfully operate on the double register of regulation and freedom, of disenchanting the world with procedures and re-enchanting it with small pleasures. Only as Europe became as much a consumer society as the United States is the “Market Empire” losing its lure and impetus. This debate, as to what extent European consumption is or should be Americanized, has repercussions in the debate on the future of Europe. It is about the proper role of the European Union in maintaining and solidifying a specific European pattern. The issue of Europe’s culture already came up during negotiations at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade between 1986 and 1993. The European Union, under the leadership of France, insisted on audiovisual products to be treated as cultural exceptions from open market rules. Yet both the Commission (the executive body of the European Union) and the member states are split on the issue of international service trade liberalization, and, as a consequence, the protection of culture in the face of homogenizing markets fails to propel European differentiation and identity. Transatlantic disputes also emerged on the heels of different consumer perceptions of food safety as

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well. European consumers, less so in the north than in the south, are more wary of the use of hormones in livestock production, chlorine bath treatment of poultry, or genetically modified organisms than their American counterparts. Defying the EU’s own approval, EU environment ministers allowed Austria, France, Hungary, and Greece to keep their bans on genetically modified maize produced by U.S. agrochemical giant Monsanto. In its recent adjudication ruling of March 2008, the World Trade Organization found fault with the EU ban on the import of hormone beef and permitted the United States and Canada to maintain sanctions worth tens of millions of dollars a year on European products from Roquefort cheese to mustard. These trans-Atlantic rows are likely to continue.

Prerogatives of European Union The effects of Europeanization on consumption are particularly visible in the fields of deregulating transportation services and utilities. Initiatives of this kind stimulated the emergence of new institutions, like companies acting single-market-wide and interest representatives in the lobbying of the European Union, including a few consumer organizations, but also of change in the patterns of consumer behavior. Thus, as Stefan Immerfall and Barbara Wasner conclude, the initiative for the information society not only had technical consequences like the diffusion of access to broadband networks but also changed the information seeking, entertainment, and leisure-time spending patterns of Europeans. In telecommunication services, prices dropped and a wider choice has been established. Consumers are faced with decisions of which service plan and which company to choose where once a state monopoly was. Electronic communication markets were fully opened by the European Union in 1998. Since then, the consumption of these services by European households and individuals has considerably evolved. Practically all Europeans have access to a telephone now, be it a mobile phone, a fixed-line phone, or both. This has changed the lives of young people in particular. According to a recent survey in Germany, younger respondents find mobile phone and Internet access to be more important than owning a car. In other fields, like railway transportation and the provision of electricity and gas, better consumer conditions could not be achieved until now

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because monitoring fair network access to all suppliers turned out to be more difficult. The European Union holds a more direct relevance for consumer culture as well. The European Union runs its own consumer policy and handles multinational trade negotiations during which consumer issues regularly crop up as contentious cultural issues. In the beginning of the European integration, consumer protection did not play a major part. It found consideration only in the common agricultural policy in the Treaty of Rome. Things started to change in the 1980s and 1990s as the promotion of market integration began to affect consumers. The goal was to iron out different technical standards, contradictory administrative procedures for the shipment of goods, variations in the national rates of excise duties and taxes, and the bias of national governments in favor of local firms, especially when awarding public contracts. With the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, consumer protection was firmly established as a formal European Commission legislative competence. The Euro currency, introduced in 2001 and used by seventeen of the twenty-seven members of the European Union, was also intended to drive consumer prices down. Despite the Lisbon Strategy launched in 2000, aimed at making Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world,” there still are enormous differences in the availability of computers and Internet services in European households: 83 percent of the households in Denmark and the Netherlands have at least one computer, twice to four times the numbers in Greece (36%), Hungary (36%), Romania (29%), and Bulgaria (20%). Things are more even with regard to television: 92 percent of European households have at least one standard television (cf. Eurobarometer 274, 2007: 99f). The MEDIA 2007 program is designed to ensure that the latest developments on the information and communication technology markets are introduced and taken up by the players of the European audiovisual sector such as digital distribution and video on demand. The Commission has adopted antitrust decisions about joint selling of football broadcasting rights, involving the UEFA Champions League, the German Bundesliga, and the Football Association Premier League. The subsidizing of public media is also a bone of contention between the Commission and national governments. In leisure activities, sports is one field where the European Commission comes into action. At present,

the European Union has no explicit prerogative in the area of sports. Its sports-related activities are based on the interaction between sports and other competences, such as competition and the internal market. This is a recurring strategy taken by the Commission to enlarge its competencies. In 2007, the European Commission published a White Paper emphasizing sports as a means to enhance public health through physical activity. The strengthening of cooperation between health, education, and sports sectors aims at defining and implementing coherent strategies to reduce obesity and other health risks and is also meant to promote volunteering and active citizenship. Another important part of the societal role of sports is the fight against doping. The commission recommends trade in illicit doping substances to be treated in the same manner as trade in illicit drugs throughout the European Union. Another field of EU activities is culture. In 1993, the enactment of the Treaty of Maastricht gave rise to a new article in which cultural cooperation became a recognized aim of EU action, with an accompanying legal basis. As a result, an initial range of pilot programs and subsequent sectoral programs was launched. Three full cultural programs followed up the pilot programs: “Kaleidoscope” (encourage artistic and cultural creation and cooperation), “Ariane” (support books and reading), and “Raphael” (cultural heritage). In 1999, “Culture 2000” was established for seven years. It differed from earlier financial instruments in that it provided grants to cultural cooperation projects in all artistic and cultural fields. The objective was to promote cultural diversity and, at the same time, shared cultural heritage. In 2007, the European Commission added another strategy aiming to promote cross-border mobility of those working in the cultural sector to encourage the transnational circulation of cultural and artistic output and to foster intercultural dialogue. As the European Union moves away from direct regulation and operates more and more with the method of open coordination, product politics also turns away from standardization. This method of open coordination is applied in the fields of—among others—information society, research and development, and tourism. So in terms of consumer culture, the European Union gives way again for regional traditions and regional products find more consideration. Starting in 1993, regional products can be protected by labels like “protected designation of

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origin (PDO),” “protected geographical indication (PGI),” or “traditional speciality guaranteed (TSG).” Each logo varies in the strictness of specifications that products must meet, but, according to European Commission Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, all share the common goal of furthering authenticity and sustainability. These measures are branded as “EU quality systems in a global context.” Paradoxically, according to Michaela DeSoucey, the delineation of particular foods as nationally owned may encourage cultural politics that demarcate national at the expense of European boundaries and identities.

Consumption Patterns Across Europe Besides having a direct impact on consumer conditions, the European Union as an area of almost 500 million citizens is also a context of consumer behavior. This concerns questions and developments regarding geographical and social patterns of leisure and leisure-related consumption in Europe and the ongoing diversity of consumer cultures. In their 2010 comprehensive overview of leisure and consumption patterns in Europe, Jukka Gronow and Dale Southerton present a mixed picture. On the one hand, they find evidence that practices of leisure and consumption are converging across national borders, most notably in the diminishing share of expenditure on food and clothing, in the opposite tendency of increasing shares of expenditure spent on transportation and housing and in the expansion of time allocated to leisure activities. More free time seems to be accompanied by increasing time pressure and a pushed pace of life, at least among the full-time employees. In this respect, EU societies are moving closer to the U.S. time regime, notes Manfred Garhammer. Furthermore, according to Robert Putnam, it looks as if there is also a general tendency of less time spent on many forms of socializing. On the other hand, different models of consumption and leisure in Europe seem to persist, such as a relatively high spending on recreation and culture in northwestern and northern Europe, whereas the opposite is true for eastern and southern Europe. For example, household expenditure (as a percentage of totals) for food and beverages is highest in Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Latvia. This is less the result of high prices than small incomes. In these countries, household expenditure for housing, water, electricity,

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and so on, is comparatively high, too. So there is only a little amount of household income left for the consumption of other goods and services. But socioeconomic conditions cannot fully account for these differences because, independent of the general standards of living, people in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece, as well as in the United Kingdom and Ireland, use a lot more of their money on eating and drinking out. In terms of consumption of popular culture in Europe, national specificities also prevail, for instance, in music preferences or in the second most popular sport (football, also known as soccer in the United States, being number one all over Europe). If there are unifying features, they are in the form of popular international cultural products, mostly from the United States. Usually more than half of all the movies attended in the European Union come from the United States (Fligstein 2008). Not all homogenizing trends are simply market driven, though. With regard to American comedy series, Giselinde Kuipers demonstrated that they are imported in large numbers not because they are more popular than homegrown ones but because of the self-styled cosmopolitan ethos of the television professionals in charge. A similar economic bias applies to the European integration process at large, which seems to carry on relentlessly notwithstanding a considerable split between elites and citizens.

The Future of Consumer Culture in Europe The cornerstone of the European Union is bringing down barriers between the member states. Internal borders have ceased, at least within the Schengen area (of which Ireland and the United Kingdom are not a part). As e-commerce is becoming more and more important, the Commission is set to bring forward new regulations concerning the legal certainty of Internet transactions. In the course of this development, people’s willingness and opportunity to buy in other member states have multiplied. The European Consumer—in contrast to the European citizen—has become a real actor. The most “Europeanized” consumers in this sense live in Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and Finland. In these countries, the level of cross-border and distance shopping is higher than anywhere else in the European Union. Protected Geographical Indications and Designations of Origin (introduced by EU) turned out to be a highly efficient marketing

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tool. The future of consumer culture in Europe is characterized by a high variety of goods and services, whereby regional goods stand a good chance to succeed in the internal market. In all likelihood, Europe will never become a homogenous block akin to the United States with regard to consumer behavior. Its compromise between global and local trends tends to foster regional types of consumer cultures. National and regional peculiarities will remain, but, at the same time, processes of convergence continue. Europe is following a distinct philosophy of more leisure time and of spreading work among more people, argue Alberto Alesina, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch. Yet economic stagnation, deteriorating public finances, and competition from low-wage countries in the enlarged European Union and in Asia has increased convergence between European countries and the United States. The European Union is designed to improve the living conditions of European citizens. The raison d’être is to reach a positive economic development in the whole European Union and especially in the poorer countries. Historic experiences showed, however, that EU programs do not always bring the intended outcomes. In Spain or Ireland, the EU membership sparked rapid economic development, whereas the Greek economy did not develop that dynamically. But even the poster children of economic liberalization are now in the clutches of financial turmoil. At a time when the American attractiveness as a harbinger of consumerism wanes, the European Union is not in a place to offer a plausible alternative. Stefan Immerfall and Barbara Wasner See also Americanization; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Policy (European Union); Consumer Regulation; Global Institutions; Globalization; Leisure; National Cultures

Fligstein, Neil. Euroclash: The EU, European Identity, and the Future of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Garhammer, Manfred. Wie Europäer ihre Zeit nutzen. Zeitstrukturen und Zeitkulturen im Zeichen der Globalisierung [How Europeans spend their time: Time structures and time cultures in a globalizing world]. Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1999. Gronow, Jukka, and Dale Southerton. “Leisure and Consumption in Europe.” In Handbook of European Societies, edited by Stefan Immerfall and Göran Therborn, 355–384. New York: Springer, 2010. Immerfall, Stefan, Klaus Boehnke, and Dirk Baier. “Identity.” In Handbook of European Societies, edited by Stefan Immerfall and Göran Therborn, 325–353. New York: Springer, 2010. Immerfall, Stefan, and Barbara Wasner. Freizeit [Free time]. Stuttgart, Germany: UTB, 2011. Kaelble, Harmut. Sozialgeschichte Europas. 1945 bis zur Gegenwart [Social history of Europe: 1945 to the present]. München, Germany: C. H. Beck, 2007. Kjeldgaard, Dannie, and Jacob Ostberg. “Coffee Grounds and the Global Cup: Glocal Consumer Culture in Scandinavia.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 10, no. 2 (2007): 175–187. Kuipers, Giselinde. “Cultural Globalization as the Emergence of a Transnational Cultural Field: Transnational Television and National Media Landscapes in Four European Countries.” American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 5 (2011). McGovern, Charles, and Matthias Judt, eds. Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Putnam, Robert D., ed. Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ward, David, ed. The European Union and the Culture Industries: Regulation and the Public Interest. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008.

Further Readings Alesina, Alberto, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch. “Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?” Journal of Public Economies 88, nos. 9–10 (2004): 2009–2042. de Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005. DeSoucey, Michaela. “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union.” American Sociological Review 75, no. 3 (2010): 432–455.

Data Sources Eurobarometer 213. (2004). The Citizens of the European Union and Sport. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/ archives/ebs/ebs_213_summ_en.pdf. Eurobarometer 246/Wave 64.3. (2006). Health and Food. http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_publication/eb_food_en .pdf. Eurobarometer 274. (2007). E-communications Household Survey. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ ebs_249_en.pdf.

Experimental Economics Eurobarometer 298. (2008). Consumer Protection in the Internal Market. http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/strategy/ docs/durobar_298_report_en.pdf. European Commission. (2007). Competition—Sports. http://ec.europa.eu/omm/competition/sectors/sports/ overview_en.html (last updated August 21, 2007). European Commission. (2007). European Agenda for Culture in a Globalizing World (COM 242 final). European Commission. (2007). European Policy for Quality Agricultural Products (Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development Fact Sheet). http:// ec.europa.eu/agriculture/publi/fact/quality/2007_en.pdf. European Commission. (2008). Air Transport Portal of the European Commission. http://ec.europa.eu/transport/ air_portal/internal_market/competition_en.html (last updated November 4, 2008). European Commission. (2008). Culture—at a Glance. http://ec.europa.eu/culture/glance/glance557_en.htm (last updated September 3, 2008). Eurostat. (2007). Cultural Statistics. Eurostat Pocketbooks. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. http://beheer.ecceonline.eu/I_ API/downloadAttachment.aspx?strTicket=9c8d2db3af8 729f5a304acce4aaf922b; 15.01.2009. Eurostat. (2008). Living Conditions in Europe. Luxemburg: Office for the Official Publications of the European Communities.

EXPERIMENTAL ECONOMICS Experimental economics refers to the method of controlled experimentation applied to the investigation of economic phenomena. It is used to investigate (1) individual decision making, (2) the coordination of economic actors via market mechanisms, and (3) cooperation of economic agents in nonmarket environments. Experiments have helped in the study of consumption phenomena by shedding light on consumer preference structure, for instance, regarding time preferences, endowment effects, and contributions to public goods. For long, it was accepted that economists cannot test their theories in laboratories. This has changed with contributions in game and decision theory that brought their hypotheses into the laboratory for testing. The first contribution in experimental economics was made by Edward Chamberlin in 1948. In 2002, Vernon Smith received the Nobel Prize “for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of

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alternative market mechanisms.” Equally recognized was Daniel Kahneman “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decisionmaking under uncertainty.” Hypotheses tested in economic experiments are often derived from game and decision science or in the cooperation between economists and psychologists. Results coming from economic experiments have been integrated into game theory, decision science, and behavioral economics. A good overview of the method is given in Douglas Davis and Charles Holt’s Experimental Economics. The experimental method uses controlled environments for the investigation. Economic experiments tend to simplify the decision-making context and ways of interaction of economic agents to a large degree to identify structure-giving elements and causal relationships. Most often, economic experiments are conducted in computer labs. In experiments with interaction among experimental subjects, actors are anonymized. Individual decisions are transferred to the group, for instance, in form of individual bids they are willing to pay or for which they are willing to offer a good, and in experiments with feedback between several rounds, results are communicated to subjects, for instance, in form of resulting market prices. Economic experiments have brought many insights that have been included in the advancement of economic theory. Important areas include the following: (1) role and efficiency of alternative market mechanism (Smith 1982); (2) altruistic behavior, human reciprocity, and inequity aversion as analyzed, for instance, in ultimatum and dictator games (Guth, Schmittberger, and Schwarze 1982) that analyze the level of cooperation between economic agents; (3) the rationality of economic decision making under uncertainty and the influence of loss aversion and endowment effects (Tversky and Kahneman 1991); (4) the rationality of economic decision making regarding intertemporal choice (Loewenstein and Prelec 1992); and (5) evaluation of goods and services in auction experiments measuring willingness to pay (Bohm 1972). The experimental setup requires the definition of hypotheses to be tested, along with experimental subjects (students, consumers, business persons, etc.) and variations in the experimental conditions. Economic experiments work by posing economic (monetary) incentives in the decisions to be made.

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By defining these incentives, the experimenter can generate and test hypotheses on economic behavior. The framework of an experiment can be described in terms of the environment (initial commodity endowment, information, and knowledge), the institution (form of interaction, bids or offers, and rules for exchange) and behavior. Elements of the environment and institutions are control variables, and the observed behavior is hence interpreted as a function of the environment and the institution. Rewards for experimental subjects are explicitly linked to their decisions during the experiments. For the internal validity of an experiment, allowing the establishment of causal relationships, it is necessary that the reward schedule cannot be influenced by subjective costs or benefits regarding the participation in the experiment. In experimental analysis of the role of economic institutions, for instance, a market or auction setup, uncontrolled heterogeneity among economic subjects is reduced by using induced values determining the individual payoffs for the experiment. For instance, in an auction, the rewards that an experimental subject receives results as the difference between a value function provided by the experimenter and the price that the subject has to pay. Such a design allows economists to test the theoretic price predictions for different auction formats (first price, second price, etc.). On the other hand, the true preference revealing property of the second price auction and variants thereof can be employed in economic experiments to measure willingness to pay values. These experiments try to measure subjects’ homegrown values to evaluate, for instance, differences in willingness to pay and willingness to accept values, valuations of new products or technology, measurement of the value of information, and so on. In these applications, the experimental method complements survey methods in willingness to pay and employ notably variants of the nth-price auctions or the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method. Experimental economics has established its own journals, such as the Experimental Economics (published by Springer), but contributions to experimental economics can be found in many journals. These are mostly concerned with the economic field to which the experimental method has been applied. Across different types of economic experiments, the level of control exerted by the experimenter can vary a lot. The literature distinguishes between

laboratory, field, and natural experiments. The laboratory experiment provides the maximum level of control to the environment and institution. In field experiments, the experimental setup is brought into an environment in which decisions usually take place. For instance, experiments with sports cards are set up in a sports-card-trading environment. Field experiments are designed to assess the external validity of experiments, and results seem to suggest that the competitive environment matters more in the field than in the lab. Natural experiments are those that result from different policies in natural social settings. An example would be a smoking ban introduced in some states and not in others. Such a policy hence provides a natural division into treatment and control groups. Natural experiments are generally not counted within the method of experimental economics because the experimenter cannot control their design. Jutta Roosen See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Sovereignty; Economic Psychology; Economics; Goal-Directed Consumption; Markets and Marketing; Psychology; Smith, Adam

Further Readings Bohm, Peter. “Estimating Demand for Public Goods: An Experiment.” European Economic Review 3 (1972): 111–130. Chamberlin, Edward H. “An Experimental Imperfect Market.” Journal of Political Economy 56 (1948): 95–108. Davis, Douglas D., and Charles A. Holt. Experimental Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Guth, Werner, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze. “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation 3, no. 4 (1982): 367–388. Loewenstein, George, and Drazen Prelec. “Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice: Evidence and an Interpretation.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (1992): 573–597. Smith, Vernon L. “Microeconomic Systems as an Experimental Science.” American Economic Review 72, no. 5 (1982): 923–955. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 106, no. 4 (1991): 1039–1061.

Externalities

EXTERNALITIES The concept of externalities is instructive for the study of consumption and consumers insofar as it considers the public consequences of private consumption. Conventional microeconomic theory suggests that in a freely operating market, prices are a reflection of costs and benefits and so they act as signals for economic decision makers—be they individuals, firms, or nation-states. Consequently, the market will ensure an efficient allocation of resources insofar as the appropriate quantities of goods and services will be produced (and consumed) in terms of overall costs and benefits to society. Externalities represent a market failure through which the actions of one economic agent affect the welfare of another and for which no price or opportunity for compensation exists. The result of this market failure is that either too much or too little of a particular good or service is produced and consumed. Essentially, externalities can be understood in terms of a divergence between the private and social costs of an economic action. To illustrate, an individual who chooses to smoke a cigarette around a nonsmoking partner uses up a scarce resource—clean air. The price of the cigarette reflects private cost to the smoker and does not take into account the clean air used up and the effects on the nonsmoker who does not want to breathe in the dirty air. Since there is no market for clean air, there is no price, and so the private cost of the cigarette is less than the social cost. When judged against the criteria of maximizing the welfare of society as a whole, the cigarettes in this example can be seen to be overproduced and overconsumed by virtue of an artificially low price that fails to take the externalities into account. While externalities can arise in any economic activity, they are particularly useful for studying consumption insofar as they provide a way of thinking about the public impacts of private consumption. Externalities are most commonly thought of in terms of negative spillovers. Popular examples revolve around the air and water pollution brought about by industrial production; for example, a factory that pollutes a nearby river kills the fishes in it and so damages the livelihood of a local fisherman. From the point of view of consumption, negative externalities are often thought about in terms of environmental impacts. For example, when purchasing a vacation that involves a long-distance flight or filling one’s car up with gasoline, the price

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does not reflect the true cost of the activity in terms of the carbon emitted and environmental damage done in terms of contribution to climate change. More generally, it could be argued that global consumer culture is characterized by overconsumption insofar as the prices of consumer goods are too low on the grounds that they do not reflect environmental externalities (such as pollution, waste, resource depletion, and carbon emissions) as well as social externalities (such as the exploitation of workers in less-developed countries and the artificially low wages that keep prices down). Of course, not all consumption externalities are environmental. Many examples can be found in everyday life, such as playing one’s personal stereo at excessive volumes in public spaces and so bringing about discomfort and annoyance to others. By contrast, externalities can be positive. For example, if an individual decides to keep a nice front lawn and an attractive-looking house, this will most likely be of benefit not only to them but also to others living in the area who might stop to enjoy the flowers that have been planted. It might even bring about a rise in property prices, benefiting those trying to sell their house. Similarly, if a member of a household purchases a DVD that she wishes to watch and it just so happens that her housemates also want to watch it, they can reap the benefit of her consumption without having to pay for it themselves. In this case, the person who purchased the DVD could be said to have paid too much for it. There are also network externalities in which an individual’s consumption can benefit others to whom they are linked in social and technical networks. For example, an individual who purchases a cell phone may well bring about a positive spillover insofar as his or her friends and family members will suddenly find another use for their cell phones. Positive externalities can be said to contribute to the public good insofar as other people reap benefits that they do not pay for, while consumption by the individual does not detract from the ability of others to consume and enjoy the resource. In terms of finding solutions to externalities, especially negative ones, it has been suggested that a system of taxes and subsidies should be introduced to redress the balance such that private costs and benefits are equal to social costs and benefits. For example, in the case of environmental externalities, it would be suggested that the price of air travel be increased to reflect the “true” cost of emitting high levels of carbon, which in turn would cause a reduction in air travel

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and carbon emission. Similarly, it has been suggested that—to avoid government intervention—the parties concerned simply compensate each other financially for the externalities incurred. Looking at the examples used here, this would involve the factory paying money to the fisherman and the girl’s housemates paying for a share of the DVD. There are many problems with these suggestions. First, externalities are hard to quantify in monetary terms, and it would be nearly impossible to identify who the winners and losers are when trying to set up a system of compensation—not to mention the transaction costs. Finally, there is no escaping the possibility that economic action, especially consumption, cannot be understood simply in terms of individual consumers rationally calculating the costs and benefits of a given course of action. David Evans

See also Bounded Rationality; Consumer Sovereignty; Economics; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Luxury Taxes; Markets and Marketing; Price and Price Mechanisms; Public Goods; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Further Readings Cornes, Richard, and Todd Sandler. The Theory of Externalities: Public Goods and Club Goods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Katz, Michael, and Carl Shapiro. “Network Externalities, Competition, and Compatibility.” American Economic Review 75, no. 3 (1985): 424–440. Pigou, Arthur Cecil. The Economics of Welfare. London: Macmillan, 1920. Schor, Juliet. “Prices and Quantities: Unsustainable Consumption and the Global Economy.” Ecological Economics 55 (2005): 309–320.

Editorial Board Editor Dale Southerton University of Manchester

Advisory Board Diana Crane University of Pennsylvania

Frank Trentmann Birkbeck College

Karin Ekström University of Borås

Alan Warde University of Manchester

Peter Jackson University of Sheffield

Rick Wilk Indiana University

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Encyclopedia of consumer culture / edited by Dale Southerton.

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1. Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects—Encyclopedias. 2. Consumers—Encyclopedias. I. Southerton, Dale.

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11 12 13 14 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Volume 2 List of Entries vii Entries F G H I J

567 623 695 753 821

K L M N O

827 833 883 1023 1049

List of Entries Acculturation Actor-Network Theory Addiction Adornment Adorno, Theodor Advertising Aestheticization of Everyday Life Aesthetics Affluent Society Age and Aging Air and Rail Travel Alienation Alternative Consumption Alternative Medicine Althusser, Louis American Dream Americanization Anomie Anorexia Anthropology Antiques. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Material Culture; Nostalgia; Object Biographies; Reuse/ Recycling Appropriation Architecture Art and Cultural Worlds Asceticism Attitude Surveys Attitude Theory Audience Research Authenticity Autoethnography Automobiles

Baudrillard, Jean Beauty Myth Belonging Benjamin, Walter Bicycles Binge and Excess Body, The Body Shop, The Bollywood Bounded Rationality Bourdieu, Pierre Branding Braudel, Fernand Bricolage British Empire Broadcast Media Buzz Marketing. See Markets and Marketing Capitalism Car Cultures Carbon Trading Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets Caribbean and the Slave Trade Carnivals Celebrity Channels of Desire Charity Shops. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Reuse/ Recycling; Voluntary Associations Childhood Christianity Christmas Cinema Circuits of Culture/Consumption Citizenship Civil Society Civilizing Processes Clothing Consumption Clubbing

Bakhtin, Mikhail Barbie Dolls Barthes, Roland Bataille, Georges vii

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List of Entries

Coca-Cola Coffee Coffee Shops Cognitive Structures Cold War Collecting and Collectibles Collective Consumption Collective Identity Colonialism Comics Commercialization Commodification Commodities Commodity Fetishism. See Body Shop, The; Commodification; Commodities; Marxist Theories; Obsession; Philosophy; Reification; Simulacrum Communication Studies Companies as Consumers Comparing Consumer Cultures Confectionery Conspicuous Consumption Consumer Anxiety Consumer Apathy Consumer Behavior Consumer (Freedom of) Choice Consumer Co-Operatives Consumer Culture in Africa Consumer Culture in East Asia Consumer Culture in Latin America Consumer Culture in the USSR Consumer Demand Consumer Dissatisfaction Consumer Durables Consumer Education Consumer Expenditure Surveys Consumer Illnesses and Maladies Consumer Interviews Consumer Moods Consumer Nationalism Consumer Policy (China) Consumer Policy (European Union) Consumer Policy (Japan) Consumer Policy (United States) Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization) Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism Consumer Protest: Environment Consumer Protest: Water Consumer Regulation

Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain Consumer Rights and the Law Consumer Socialization Consumer Society Consumer Sovereignty Consumer Testing and Protection Agencies Consuming Nature. See Consuming the Environment; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption Consuming the Environment Consumption and Time Use Consumption in Postsocialist China Consumption in Postsocialist Societies: Eastern Europe Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War Consumption Patterns and Trends Content Analysis Convenience Convention Theory Conversation Analysis Cool Hunters Cosmetic Surgery Cosmetics Cosmopolitanism Counterfeited Goods Craft Consumer Craft Production Credit Cultural Capital Cultural Flows Cultural Fragmentation Cultural Intermediaries Cultural Omnivores Cultural Studies Cultural Turn Culture Industries Culture Jamming Culture-Ideology of Consumerism Cyborgs Cycles of Production and Consumption Dandyism Databases and Consumers de Certeau, Michel Debt Decommodification Delocalization Dematerialization Department Stores

List of Entries

Design Desire De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling Diaspora Diderot Effect Dieting Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down Dining Out Discount Stores Discourse Discourse Analysis Disney Disorganized Capitalism Disposal of Goods. See Reuse/Recycling; Waste Division of Labor Do-It-Yourself Domestic Division of Labor Domestic Services Domestic Technologies Douglas, Mary Downshifting Durkheim, Émile Eating Disorders. See Addiction; Anorexia; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies Eco-Labeling E-Commerce Econometrics Economic Indicators Economic Psychology Economic Sociology Economics Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) Electronic Video Gaming Elias, Norbert Elites Embodiment Emotional Labor Emotions Energy Consumption Engel’s Law Enlightenment Entrepreneurs Environmental Footprinting Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption Ethnicity/Race Ethnography Ethnology/Folklore Studies European Union

Experimental Economics Externalities Fair Trade False Consciousness/False Needs Families Family Meal Famine Fans Fascism. See Consumer Nationalism; Italian Fascism and Fashion Fashion Fashion Forecasters Fashion Industry Femininity Feminism and Women's Magazines Feminist Movement Financial Services. See Credit; Debt; Network Society Fine Arts Flaneur/euse Focus Groups Food Consumption Food Scares Franchising Freud, Sigmund Friendship Galbraith, John Kenneth Gambling Gardening Gender Gender Advertising Gender and the Media Gendering of Public and Private Space Generation Geography Ghettos Gifts and Reciprocity Glastonbury/Woodstock Global Cities Global Institutions Globalization Glocalization Goal-Directed Consumption Goffman, Erving Governmentality Gramsci, Antonio Grand Tour Great Depression (U.S.)

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x

List of Entries

Habits. See Habitus; Rituals; Routines and Habits; Theories of Practice Habitus Hair Care/Hairdressing Happiness Harried Leisure Class Health and Fitness. See Alternative Consumption; Body, The; Health Care; Leisure; Obesity; Recreation; Tamed Hedonism; Well-Being Health Care Hedonism Hegemony Hierarchy of Needs Higher Education Hinduism Hire-Purchase and Rental Goods Historical Analysis History History of Food Hobbyists and Amateurs Hollywood Home. See Appropriation; Architecture; Do-It-Yourself; Ethnology/Folklore Studies; Gardening; Gender; Gendering of Public and Private Space; Households; Souvenirs Home Computer Homogenization Versus Hybridization. See Americanization; Delocalization; Diaspora; Globalization; Glocalization; Japan as a Consumer Culture; Multiculturalism; Tourism Studies Homosexuality. See Pink Pounds/Dollars; Queer Theory; Sexuality Horkheimer, Max Household Budgets Households Hyperreality Identity Imaginative Hedonism Implicit Attitudes. See Attitude Surveys; Psychology Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions Income Individualization Industrial Society Inequalities Informal Economy Informalization Information Society

Information Technology Informational Capital Infrastructures and Utilities Inheritance Innovation Studies Internet Interpellation Inventing Tradition Islam Italian Fascism and Fashion Japan as a Consumer Culture Jeans Kant, Immanuel Keynes, John Maynard Keynesian Demand Management Kyrk, Hazel Labor Markets Lasch, Christopher Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix Lefebvre, Henri Leisure Leisure Studies Lévi-Strauss, Claude Licensing of Clothing Brands Life Course Life(style) Politics Lifestyle Lifestyle Typologies Likert Scales Liminality Linder, Staffan Burenstam Locality Longitudinal Studies Luxury and Luxuries Luxury Taxes Lyotard, Jean-François Mandeville, Bernard Marcuse, Herbert Marketing Diversity. See Markets and Marketing Marketing Social Change. See Markets and Marketing Markets and Marketing Marshall, Alfred Marx, Karl Marxist Theories Masculinity

List of Entries

Maslow, Abraham Mass Culture (Frankfurt School) Mass Observation Mass Production and Consumption Mass Tourism Material Culture Materialism and Postmaterialism Mauss, Marcel McDonaldization McLuhan, Marshall Mead, George Herbert Measuring Satisfaction Measuring Standards of Living Measuring the Environmental Impact of Consumption Media Convergence and Monopoly Medieval Consumption Memorials Memory Men’s Magazines Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture Methods of Market Research Metropole Metrosexual Migration Mimesis Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age Mobile Phones Modernization Theory Money Moral Economy Moral Geography Moralities Mortgages. See Credit; Debt; Economics Motivation Research Multiculturalism Multiple Correspondence Analysis Multisited Ethnography Multivariate Analysis Museums. See Collecting and Collectibles Narcissism National Cultures Needs and Wants Neo-Tribes Network Society Neuromarketing New Right Nostalgia Novelty

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Obesity Object Biographies Obsession Opinion Leaders Opinion Polls Opium Trade Ordinary Consumption Organ and Blood Donations Organic Food Orientalism Othering Outsourcing Packaging Participant Observation. See Anthropology; Autoethnography; Ethnography; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Methods of Market Research; Multisited Ethnography Patten, Simon Nelson Performing Arts/Performance Arts Personals/Personal Ads Philanthropy Philosophy Photography and Video Pink Pounds/Dollars Planned Obsolescence Pleasure. See Dining Out; Emotions; Happiness; Quality of Life; Seaside Resorts; Tamed Hedonism Political and Ethical Consumption Political Economy Political Science Popular Culture. See Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Popular Music Popular Music Porcelain Positional Goods Possession. See Appropriation; Collecting and Collectibles; Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions; Material Culture; Positional Goods Postcolonial Theory Post-Fordism Postindustrial Society Postmodernism Post-Structuralism Potlatch Poverty Preference Formation

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List of Entries

Price and Price Mechanisms Print Media Product Loss Leaders Product Placements Production of Culture Promotional Culture Prosumption Protestant Ethic Psychoanalysis Psychology Public Goods Public Sphere Pubs and Wine Bars Quality of Life Queer Theory Radio Rationalization Rationing Reality TV Reception Theory Recreation Reification Religion. See Christianity; Desire; Hinduism; Islam; Protestant Ethic; Sacred and Profane Renewable Resources Resistance Responsible Consumption Retirement Retro Reuse/Recycling Risk Society Rituals Romantic Love Rostow, Walt Whitman Routines and Habits Sacred and Profane Satiation Scarcity Science and Technology Studies. See ActorNetwork Theory; Electronic Video Gaming; Information Technology; Innovation Studies; Mobile Media Gadgets of the Analog Age; Network Society; Social Shaping of Technology; Sociotechnical Systems Sears, Roebuck and Company Seaside Resorts Second Life

Secondhand Goods. See Car-Boot Sales and Flea Markets; Collecting and Collectibles; Material Culture; Reuse/Recycling; State Provisioning Seduced and Repressed Self-Interest Self-Presentation Self-Provisioning. See De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling; Do-It-Yourself; Outsourcing; Self-Service Economy; Systems of Provision Self-Reflexivity Self-Service Economy Semiotics Senses Service Industry Sex Sex Tourism Sexuality Shopping Silverstone, Roger Simmel, Georg Simulacrum Single-Person Households Slow Food Movement Smith, Adam Smuggling and Black Markets Sneakers/Trainers Soap Operas and Telenovelas Sociability Social and Economic Development Social Capital. See Civil Society; Informational Capital; Network Society; Sociability; Social Movements; Social Networks; Sociology Social Class Social Distinction Social Exclusion Social Mobility. See Social Class; Status Social Movements Social Network Analysis Social Networks Social Norms. See Acculturation; Anthropology; Sociology Social Shaping of Technology Socialism and Consumption Sociality. See Sociability Sociodemographic Trends. See Age and Aging; Consumption Patterns and Trends; SinglePerson Households Sociology Sociotechnical Systems Sombart, Werner

List of Entries

Souvenirs Spaces and Places Spaces of Shopping Spas Spatial Analysis Spectacles Spices Sports State Provisioning Status Store Loyalty Cards Structuralism Style Subaltern Subculture Suburbia Subversion Sugar Sumptuary Laws Supermarkets Supermodels Surplus Value Surrealism Surveys Symbolic Capital Symbolic Value Symbolic Violence Systems of Provision Taboo Tamed Hedonism Taste Tea Techniques of Persuasion. See Advertising; Channels of Desire; Desire; Markets and Marketing Teenage Magazines Telephones Television Temporalities. See Consumption and Time Use; Convenience; Harried Leisure Class; Linder, Staffan Burenstam; Time-Use Diaries; Work-and-Spend Cycle Textiles Textual Poachers Theories of Practice Theory of Planned Behavior Thrift Time-Use Diaries

Tobacco Totemism Tourism Studies Tourist Gaze Toys Trade Standards Trademarks Transaction Data. See Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS); Store Loyalty Cards Transgression. See Carnivals; Liminality; Obsession; Queer Theory; Resistance; Sexuality; Subversion Transnational Capitalism Trust T-Shirts Tupperware Typologies of Shoppers Urban Cultures Urbanization Value: Exchange and Use Value Veblen, Thorstein Bunde Vegetarianism. See Consumer Protest: Animal Welfare; Food Consumption; Organic Food Virtual Communities Visual Culture Voluntary Associations Voting Behaviors Walkmans and iPods Walmart Waste Weber, Max Weddings Welfare State. See Collective Consumption; Consumer Regulation; State Provisioning; Systems of Provision; Well-Being Well-Being Wine Women’s Magazines Work-and-Spend Cycle World Exhibitions World-Systems Analysis Youth Culture Zoos and Wildlife Parks

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F understanding of an independently certified product is usually dated to 1988. In that year, the Max Havelaar Foundation certified the first Fair Trade coffee in the Netherlands. CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Traidcraft, and the World Development Movement formed the Fairtrade Foundation (FTF) in the United Kingdom, and the North American equivalent TransFair was set up in 1998. The development of fair trade in other affluent consumer cultures, such as France, Belgium, and Italy, followed. The Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) was set up in 1997 as the primary international body. It sets both minimum standards that draw inspiration from the International Labour Organization and improvement aims for producers. However, fairly traded products that do not bear the cost of certification and alternative approaches to fair trade (see Nicholls and Opel 2005) are available on the market. Other independent certifiers include Rainforest Alliance and various industry initiatives that have subsequently been formed. In relation to the United Kingdom, Alex Nicholls and Charlotte Opel identify three phases of development: (1) from the early 1970s, a focus on the process of developing a sustainable fair trading model to connect producers in the Global South with affluent consumers; (2) from the late 1990s, a focus on developing and marketing products to make them attractive to a wider range of consumers; and (3) from the early twenty-first century, focusing on the place. In this most recent phase, the aims have been to develop strong localized support through recognized “Fair Trade Towns” and through educational

FAIR TRADE Fair Trade is the most widely recognized “ethical” product certification developed from the alternative trading initiatives of the 1970s. These initiatives can be seen as one of the responses to the globalization of markets and, particularly, the inequalities between nations that developed during the colonial histories of trade. The initial aims of fair trade organizations were to give stability and development possibility to small farmers in the Global South during volatile market fluctuations. These organizations also hoped their intervention would raise the profile of trade and poverty issues in relatively affluent consumer cultures. Fair trade organizations currently have two prime tools through which they intervene in the free market. They place a floor on the commodity price they pay to small farmers to ensure these producers are not denied a living income from their crop if the commodity price declines to an unsustainable low in the market. Second, they pay an additional “social premium” to allow the producers to develop their community by, for example, building a school or clinic. To democratically allocate this additional income, fair trade organizations generally require producers to form a local commercial cooperative. To be certified as Fair Trade producers, the cooperative has to comply with these requirements and pay for certification. While the practice of fair trade might have a long history in development, particularly through alternative trading organizations (ATO), the contemporary 567

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and other organizations. In brief, “Fair Trade Town” status can be gained by a town when a range of fair trade products are readily available in the locality including workplaces and community organizations, the local council passes a resolution supporting fair trade, and there is a local steering group that seeks to develop and raise awareness of fair trade through media coverage and other events. By contrast, Terrence Witkowski sees the U.S. fair trade market as less well developed than those in Europe. Although the principles of fair trade are established through the FLO, standards are periodically reviewed and revised; thus, in a dynamic global market economy where activist, consumer, and producer concepts of what constitutes an ethical approach to trade are developing, it might be unwise to think of the concept as static. For example, according to Nicholls and Opel, early fair trade was dominated by activist organizations in affluent countries. More recent initiatives, such as the Day Chocolate Company, have worked through partnership and inclusion of producer cooperatives in governance. It has been argued that this process needs to be taken further to achieve equitable trade not least by relocating manufacturing capacity to the country of origin. Fair trade is acknowledged as a fast-growing segment of the market, but it still represents a small percentage of the market. The FLO reports that in 2007, more than 2.3 billion euros were spent worldwide on Fair Trade–certified products. The FLO identified fifteen product categories including coffee, chocolate, and bananas, as well as sports balls, wine, and flowers. One might consider the importance of fair trade through the number of products on the market: 1,300 in 2005, up from 150 products two years earlier. Whereas supporters of fair trade see this growth as evidence of the new market possibilities, Mark Sidwell argues that diversification is evidence of its inability to penetrate the market. Alternatively, it might be argued that the most significant measure of success would be the debate about “free,” “fair,” and “unfair” trade that the movement has instigated. Ethical debates about consumption, such as fair trade, can be formulated in many different ways: philosophically (Nicholls and Opel 2005; Harrison, Newholm, and Shaw 2005), in economic theory (Sidwell 2008), and in practice by consumers (Harrison, Newholm, and Shaw 2005). While fair

trade has often been accepted as an unquestioned good, it can also be critiqued. For example, fair trade addresses trade between the developing Global South and the postindustrial Global North at a time when environmental concerns might be seen as eclipsing labor and trade issues. For most fair trade products, this means high environmental transport costs versus the prosocial value of helping developing farmers, although the relatively low footprint of the poor producers can be argued to offset the environmental costs of travel. Tensions therefore emerge between ethical concerns about the environment and global inequality. A second debate centers on the fair trade aim of bringing together producers and consumers in a citizens’ movement for change. Research suggests that ethical consumers refer to vaguely expressed ideas of being part of a collective group and that fair trade provides a vehicle for mobilization with broader political debates. In such cases, whether individual choice in consumption as guided by the principles of fair trade consumption can generate a citizenship culture remains an open question. From a political perspective, the fair trade movement has been criticized for high spending on brand promotion (Sidwell 2008) linked to campaigning. However, Nicholls and Opel argue that product development and marketing are necessary to expand a brand market beyond its core constituency. In this case, one might question the legitimacy of such action. Traditionally in political theory, pressuregroup legitimacy has rested on the level of support its cause attracts and the distribution of power such pluralism implies. However, in the case of the FLO, questions of legitimacy become acute as fair trade enters mainstream commercial markets alongside the FLO’s campaign and civil regulatory roles. The final major criticism presented here comes from free-market advocates who suggest fair trade to be a price-fixing regime. However, because proponents of fair trade might be seen as moving toward equitrade and its critics are also disposed toward this approach (Sidwell 2008), there may not be as much ground between the two as their respective rhetoric suggests. Whereas fair trade has sought to source raw materials ethically, equitrade aims to locate the manufacturing of products in the country of origin of the raw materials. Unlike fair trade, equitrade provides for the bulk of a product’s profit to remain in

False Consciousness/False Needs

the relatively poor economy of its origins, without further market intervention. Fair trade has grown sufficiently and, as a result, its future has become the subject of debate. A number of writers who have considered how it might be expanded (e.g., Nicholls and Opel) are also considering what position it might occupy in global markets. Some argue that fair trade initiatives will be necessary even if their social clauses in their present form become part of all global trading agreements. This might be the case because the fair trade movement exhibits dual goals: development and propaganda. The “propaganda” encompasses both raising issues within the developing global market, the importance of which fair trade critics have often ignored, and advocacy of an alternative trading system. This raises the hypothetical question of where an expanding alternative market is headed. If the primary constraint of fair trade to contribute to development is the number of consumers willing to pay a premium, its possibilities as an alternative to the free trade market are limited. To expand sales arguably requires partnerships with large corporations against which fair trade was meant to represent an alternative. This issue within the growth of fair trade is referred to as mainstreaming by Nicholls and Opel. The evolving engagement with corporate entities and the multifaceted relationships this engenders is likely to form the core of future debate. Terry Newholm See also Alternative Consumption; Colonialism; Consumer Sovereignty; Eco-Labeling; Globalization; Markets and Marketing; Political and Ethical Consumption; Postcolonial Theory

Further Readings Harrison, Rob, Terry Newholm, and Deirdre Shaw. The Ethical Consumer. London: Sage, 2005. Low, William, and Eileen Devenport. “Mainstreaming Fair Trade: Adoption, Assimilation, Appropriation.” Journal of Strategic Marketing 14, no. 4 (2006): 315–327. Nicholls, Alex, and Charlotte Opel. Fair Trade: Market Driven Ethical Consumption. Los Angeles: Sage, 2005. Sidwell, Mark. Unfair Trade. London: Adam Smith Institute, 2008. Witkowski, Terrence H. “Fair Trade Marketing: An Alternative System for Globalization and Development.” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 13 (Fall 2005): 22–33.

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Website Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International. http:// www.fairtrade.net.

FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS/FALSE NEEDS False consciousness is a concept that developed in Marxist theory, in conjunction with ideology, to denote working-class people’s inability to understand the economic and social conditions of their exploitation, especially insofar as they have been deceived by the forces of religion and nationalism. The concept of false needs emerged in the mid-twentieth century among scholars associated with the Frankfurt School in response to the consumer culture’s use of advertising and marketing to manufacture desire and demand. The common thread linking both is the idea that oppressed peoples have been distracted by cultural and ideological processes that prevent them from understanding the sources of their oppression and from organizing to effect a social revolution. Both concepts have frequently been criticized by cultural theorists, including neo-Marxists, on account of their assumptions about what constitutes true consciousness and true needs. The phrase false consciousness was never used by Karl Marx himself. It was Friedrich Engels who first used it in a letter to Franz Mehring, written in 1893, in which he declared, “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all” (quoted in Eagleton 1991, 89). False consciousness was thus related to a notion of ideology that Marx and Engels developed in The German Ideology, in which distortions of thought are produced by material conditions and social contradictions. Insofar as ideologies appear to be independent of material reality and disguise the contradictions in society, they serve to reproduce and legitimate the interests of the ruling class. Marxists gave more consideration to questions of consciousness and ideology in the period between the two world wars, in large part as a consequence of the failure of revolutionary working-class movements

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and the rise of fascism. Georg Lukács theorized the phenomenon of reification in relation to class consciousness, explaining how capitalist society could appear to have a life of its own such that its conditions seem to be natural, eternal, and inevitable. Reified consciousness is “false” not simply because one believes in mistaken ideas or erroneous illusions, but also because it fails to grasp the totality of social relations, the processes of historical change, and the potential for revolutionary agency. Reification is thus characterized by fragmentation or, more precisely, by a mixture of specialization, mechanization, and quantification that Lukács illuminated by linking Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism with Max Weber’s account of rationalization. Lukács wrote that “the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and it is neither arbitrary, subjective or psychological” (1971, 54). As bourgeois thought is certain to be limited by reification, Lukács theorized that only the proletariat, in a situation of revolutionary praxis, would be equipped to comprehend the whole of social relationships and the historical process of dialectical movement through class struggle. During the interwar period, other Marxists offered complementary theoretical concepts to explain the distortions and limitations of consciousness under capitalism, such as Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Henri Lefebvre’s critique of mystification. In the postwar years, critical theorists turned their focus to the consumer culture and its manufacture of false needs. In their famous essay on the culture industry, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that radio, film, and other media of entertainment had colonized leisure time with the same capitalist logic of exchange value that defines labor time. Horkheimer and Adorno recognized that workers, because of their experiences of alienation and boredom at work, do in some sense “need” distraction and fantasy in their leisure time. However, they maintained that the culture industry never delivers on its promises but instead cheats its audience out of pleasure and only produces the same kind of standardized conformity and monotonous uniformity that characterizes the workplace. Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School who took refuge in the United States, presented a critique of “false needs” at the

beginning of One-Dimensional Man, his influential book that found an audience within the New Left during the 1960s. Marcuse defined false needs as “those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice” (1964, 5). The satisfaction of these false needs can be immediately gratifying to individuals, but they perpetuate a process of social and psychological repression that ultimately encloses both affluent consumers and those who toil to satisfy them. No matter how deeply people may feel their needs or be gratified by their satisfaction, Marcuse maintained that needs are subject to external social forces whose dominant interests demand repression, including repression that misrepresents itself as comfort, tolerance, and even liberation. Marcuse took aim at the consumer culture in writing, “Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs” (5). The concepts of false consciousness and false needs have since fallen out of intellectual fashion and are rarely invoked anymore because of the assumptions they carry about the critic’s authority to define true consciousness or true needs. Marcuse, for instance, believed that needs could be studied objectively and historically to determine universally applicable standards. Given the ways that post-structuralist and postmodern theory have opposed the notions of objectivity, universality, and intellectual authority, it is hardly surprising that such ideas have fallen out of favor. Ryan Moore See also Alienation; Cultural Studies; Culture Industries; Culture-Ideology of Consumerism; Hegemony; Marxist Theories; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Social Class

Further Readings Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. New York: Routledge, 1991. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 1991. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964.

Families Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1972. First published 1932.

FAMILIES Family is one of the central organizing units of consumption. Within the context of the family, we make collective and individual choices, express social and emotional bonds, draw from and resist the pressures of consumer culture, and learn how to be consumers through fundamental socialization processes. However, questions on what family means and on how to define family are increasingly relevant in contemporary society and continually challenge existing theories of consumption. Demographic and sociocultural shifts around the world have made traditional definitions of family a distant memory. Recent U.S. Census numbers indicate that single persons constitute over 30 percent of the households in the United States. Though divorce rates are low in most Latin American (predominantly Catholic) countries and in Muslim countries, they have grown rapidly in general, especially when compared to the rapidly declining marriage rates. In Europe, more than in the United States, marriage is seen as increasingly unnecessary, and the incidence of children being born outside of marriage has reached over 50 percent in countries such as Iceland and Sweden and is projected to reach that level in France, Denmark, and the United Kingdom in the near future (Petre 2006). Family units are steadily shrinking in size, and singleparent and single-person households are growing at far more rapid rates than the traditional parentswith-children households. As often noted in U.S. and European contexts, the “deterioration” of family has emerged as a regular focus of increasingly anxious public debate. The debate centers on the meaning and nature of family. This entry examines various ways of defining family, including cross-cultural differences reflected in public policies; identifies and critiques the treatment of family in consumer research; outlines methodological issues in family studies; and presents future research directions.

Alternative Views on Family Among the various ways to define family, three dimensions have been suggested that aid in characterizing

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family: structural, psychosocial, and transactional. Structural definitions of family are based on the presence or absence of certain family members, whether it is an intact nuclear family, three or four generations under one roof, a same-sex couple, a single parent with children, a step-family, or a single person with a network of relationships. Psychosocial definitions relate to the accomplishment of certain tasks, such as maintaining a household. Finally, transactional definitions are based on behaviors that generate emotional ties and a sense of identity through interaction. For example, households, particularly African American households, often include individuals informally adopted as a “family” member (i.e., “fictive kin”). Another way to characterize families is using a temporal dimension. We tend to distinguish between members who make up our current families—formed either through procreation or voluntary selection— and members who are a part of our families of origin. Family transitions such as deaths, marriages, births, christenings, medical emergencies, divorce, and family reunions may see a short-term reconstitution of ties in the extended family. While many of these reunions may be short-lived, they also may cue the extended family, reminding us of our lineage and a larger relational body with shared values. Thus, blood ties, as often represented by the family of origin, may yield a longer-lasting—though not necessarily proximal—set of relationships. Family may also be defined based on agents of socialization. Whether one subscribes to nature or nurture perspectives, there is some agreement that parental interactions during youth provide individuals with sets of purchasing heuristics (“Want not, waste not,” “You get what you pay for,” “Penny wise, dollar foolish,” etc.). Even if we are currently isolated from our families of origin, a phenomenon becoming more common in the developed world, we are affected by our backgrounds in terms of life expectations. Clearly, countries differ in their definitions of family in the sense that they include wider (i.e., ancestors) or narrower circles of people and, therefore, vary with regard to the role expectations of family members. Assuming public policy is designed to reflect generalized cultural values, family public policies have implications for the social recognition given to the notion of family as defined by the individuals who comprise a given society. Table 1 offers a comparison of family public policies in six

Table 1

Cross-Country Comparison of Family Public Policies

Country

Marriage/Divorce

Child Support

United States

Divorce is easily accessible; cohabitation increasingly common; common-law marriage accepted; marriage restricted to heterosexual couples (with some state-level exceptions)

Usually required from nonresident spouse; enforcement is state by state

No comprehensive program for paternal leave; employers are responsible for their own policies

Generally not familyfriendly, excluding recent legislation (Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004)

Family viewed as sacred; lack of interference from the government in private matters whenever possible (Kennedy 2000)

United Kingdom

Divorce is easily accessible; cohabitation increasingly common; marriage restricted to heterosexual couples

Payment scheme structured on residence, number of children, and weekly income; nonresident stepchildren receive support

26 weeks paid maternity leave; 2 weeks paid paternity leave (Budd and Mumford 2004)

Family-friendly tax policies (i.e., independent taxation) (Stephens and WardBatts 2004)

Family viewed as sacred; lack of interference from the government in private matters whenever possible

Sweden

High frequency of Strong child support cohabitation (2003 enforcement Cohabitation Act); (Economist 1995) registration of same-sex couples; divorce is easily accessible

Most family-friendly Large tax burdens policies (Vogt and Zwingel 2003); strong incentives for paternity leave; flexible work policies for both parents; 450 days parental leave paid by social security

Germany

Divorce is legal but less Active pursuit of child common than in other support payments (Gottschall and Bird countries 2003)

Parental leave offered for both parents (Federal Child Care Benefit Act of 1986), but few fathers take advantage of the option (Vogt and Zwingel 2003)

Parental Leave

Tax

Favor two-parent households with a single earner (incomesplitting policies) (Trzcinski 2000)

Sanctity of the Family

Family structure has changed greatly in last half century, due in part to family law

Law has tended to support traditional family roles (Gottschall and Bird 2003)

China

Encourages late marriage and childbirth (UNESCAP 2004); divorce rates are beginning to increase with more relaxed requirements and procedures (FlorCruz 2010)

Noncustodial parents 90 days paid maternity Income tax policies are partly responsible leave paid by the consider family for educational and employer composition living expenses for the child; amounts and duration are negotiated between the parties (Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, amended April 28, 2001)

India

Policies vary greatly by Many women (40%) region; divorce rates take children to work; are typically low 40% of Indian children drop out of primary school (National Family Health Survey 1995)

Standard maternity leave policy is 12 weeks leave paid by social security (UNESCAP 2004)

Less than 3% of the population pays income taxes (rate is a function of income) (BBC 2005)

One-child policy is the ultimate intrusion; otherwise there is little family intrusion

Sanctity is ensured by traditions more than by law

Sources: Compiled from BBC. “Taxing Text Warns Diwali Shoppers.” October 28, 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4385028.stm; Budd, John W., and Karen Mumford. “Trade Unions and Family-Friendly Policies in Britain.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 57, no. 2 (2004): 204–223; The Economist. “The Family: Home Sweet Home.” September 7, 1995: 25–26, 29; FlorCruz, Jaime. “Divorce Rate Rises in China.” CNN World, June 18, 2010. http://articles.cnn.com/2010-06-18/world/china.divorces_1_divorce-rate-marriage-law-couples?_s=PM:WORLD; Gottschall, Karin, and Katherine Bird. “Family Leave Policies and Labor Market Segmentation in Germany: Reinventing or Reform of the Male Breadwinner Model?” Review of Policy Research 20, no. 1 (2003): 115–135; Kennedy, Jane. “Family Law in 2000 and Beyond.” Second European Congress on Family Law, 2000: www.dca.gov .uk/speeches/2000/jk240500.htm; Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, November 14, 2003. http://www.nyconsulate.prchina.org/eng/lsqz/laws/ t42222.htm; National Family Health Survey, India (1995). MCH and Family Planning, India 1992–1993. Mumbai: International Institute for Population Sciences; Petre, Jonathan. “Majority of Births Will Soon Be Out of Wedlock.” Telegraph, February 21, 2006. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1511038/Majority-of-births-will-soon-be-out-of-wedlock.html; Stephens, Melvin Jr., and Jennifer Ward-Batts. “The Impact of Separate Taxation of the Intra-Household Allocations of Assets: Evidence from the UK.” Journal of Public Economics 88, no. 9–10 (2004): 1989–2008; Trzcinski, Eileen. “Family Policy in Germany: A Feminist Dilemma?” Feminist Economics 6, no. 1 (2000): 21–45; United Nations Economic and Social Commission on Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). Data on “Asia-Pacific in Figures, 2004.” http://www.unescap.org/stat/data/apif/index.asp, accessed May 2009; Vogt, Andrea, and Susanne Zwingel. “Asking Fathers and Employers to Volunteer: A (De)Tour of Reconciliation Policy in Germany?” Review of Policy Research 20, no. 3 (2003): 459–479.

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countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, India, and China. These general comparisons are drawn from a collection of publicly available articles, census data, and legislation related to family. At this point in history, the United States seems to be fixated on defining family in a relatively noninclusive manner, which seems to suggest that some individuals’ perceptions of sense of family are not always taken into consideration in policy definitions. Most legal definitions are similar in substance to that of the U.S. Census Bureau: “A family is a group of two or more people (not necessarily including a householder) residing together, and related by birth, marriage, or adoption.” Westlaw cites court cases yielding broader perspectives. In a case involving Texas homestead law, “family includes individuals related by consanguinity [blood] or affinity” (2004, 429). A Missouri case defines family as “a collective body of persons . . . who have reciprocal, natural, or moral duties to support and care for one another” (446). As the preceding discussion highlights, the “family” construct may not lend itself to concrete conceptual or operational definitions. Despite this, how researchers define family has substantial implications for consumer research, not only with regard to thinking beyond household boundaries and traditional blood or legal ties to investigate family consumption, but also in moving the field out of a narrow focus on structural relationships (e.g., family life cycle models) that fail to capture the dynamic arrangements of contemporary families. Kathleen M. Galvin, Carma L. Bylund, and Bernard J. Brommel define family rather abstractly as networks of people who share their lives over long periods of time bound by ties of marriage, blood, or commitment, legal or otherwise, who consider themselves as family and who share a significant history and anticipated future of functioning in a family relationship. (2004, 6)

This definition recognizes that the family is socially constructed and culturally contingent and acknowledges the perspective that consumers do and perhaps should define their own notion of “family.” This is especially important when collecting family data, as researchers’ applying their own conceptions of how family is defined may be limiting for participants. At the same time, the Galvin, Bylund, and

Brommel definition acknowledges the extended temporal horizon, a perspective some consumers might not acknowledge due to past dysfunctions.

Family in Consumer Research Much family consumer research focuses on how families make decisions. Specifically, these studies emphasize how individuals influence other family members, allocate resources within a family, represent family members as aspects of their extended selves, or change their individual decision-making practices when considering other family members. Despite “family” being a collective construct, previous research on family decision making overwhelmingly has focused on individual attempts to influence decision outcomes, as evidenced already. However, the practices and discourses that typify families’ daily experiences often reflect “we” aspirations that emerge in contextualized investigations of family activity, according to Jennifer Chang Coupland. Recent consumer research on family identity draws more directly on the intimate practices of family life (e.g., Epp and Price 2008). This work highlights the contextualized practices of “being a family”—such as narratives, rituals, social dramas, everyday interactions, and intergenerational exchanges—that enlist symbolic marketplace resources. For example, the performance of family mealtime rituals granted agency to an object though its storied biography (Epp and Price 2010), facilitated the social reproduction of family identity across generations (Moisio, Arnould, and Price 2005), and accommodated disabled family members’ special needs to maintain collective identity (Mason and Pavia 2006). Studies of intimate family life have tended to focus on these rituals, but examination of interactions among family members has illuminated prototypes of gift giving, commodity exchange, and sharing (Belk 2010). To illustrate, the transfer of wealth across generations both solidifies and challenges family meanings through indexical accounts that support relational goals (Bradford 2009). Other family consumer research has focused on the changing roles of both parents and their children amid sociocultural shifts. Children, essentially invisible in theories of consumer culture according to Daniel T. Cook, are encountering decision making at an earlier age and taking on greater roles in family purchases, as responsibilities of family members become more complex. For example, in single-parent

Families

households, children are uniquely positioned to be equal participants in family decisions. Parental gender roles are also in a state of flux, with men redefining fatherhood ideals as a result of increased household-management responsibilities. For example, Gokcen Coskuner-Balli and Craig Thompson’s 2009 study of stay-at-home dads uncovered the scarcity of appropriate marketplace resources that stems from maternally oriented discourses of parenthood, prompting fathers to engage in collective consumption strategies that help them to legitimize unconventional gender identities.

Methodological Challenges and Breakthroughs The dominant method for studying family consumption behavior has been survey research. However, researchers have employed other methods such as participant observation, depth interviews, longitudinal case studies, and netnographies. These alternative methods offer greater access to families’ intimate lives to move past the sometimes isolated and decontextualized nature of survey data. Across disciplines, analysis of collective constructs rarely moves beyond dyads, despite calls for group-level data in family research. Collecting and analyzing data from multiple family members, not to mention the family as a whole, remains a challenge in family consumption research as well. The lack of research that moves beyond the dyadic level is alarming, given the importance of the family as a collectivity and the need to understand diverse perspectives of family members. Further, to study collective phenomena (i.e., co-constructed goals, decisions, and practices), it is essential that data are obtained from multiple family members. One potential new method for studying family consumption behavior is using collective narratives. Collective narrative methods can be supplemented using follow-up interviews with smaller groupings of family members or with prompting from journals, diaries, photographs, memory boxes, or other social artifacts. Unlike other methods for studying collective constructs, such as relying on family members as key informants or grouping together individual perspectives from data generated separately, the collective narrative approach produces interactional data. Thus, this method allows researchers direct access to co-construction processes, in situ.

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Future Research Directions Much work remains in consumer research on the role possessions play in the formation, preservation, and reconstitution of family. Special objects such as family china and recipe books help the family members develop their collective narrative, create a shared sense of family identity, and preserve identity across generations. Inevitably, the family unit is disrupted by uncontrollable events (natural disasters, burglary) or family changes (death, divorce). During these times, consumer decision making is impaired, and some possessions serve as painful reminders while others serve to move the family from a state of vulnerability (powerlessness) to a newly reconstituted unit. Possessions may facilitate or constrain the movement of family identity over time, as shown by Amber M. Epp and Linda L. Price (2010), and the processes and conditions for that movement present exciting opportunities for research. Also, Marjorie L. DeVault notes that researchers may think of children as elements in a family structure and struggle to recognize a balance between their independent agency and their important connections with parents. These tensions are especially evident as we consider that collective time together as a family often is displaced by demands of individual family members and the pulls of everyday life. Pressures from the 2008–2009 economic downturn in the United States and elsewhere make tradeoffs between agency and connectedness especially salient, as dual-earner families with escalating work hours strive to keep their families afloat. Certainly, some, such as Arlie Russell Hochschild, argue that the proliferation of consumer culture directly contributes to families’ feelings of being time poor. The wealth of options both enables and constrains families, affording them agency to consume in new ways while amplifying the pressure to participate. Questions such as how children and parents “learn” to consume from each other in changing consumer cultural climates remain unanswered. Further, investigations of consumer socialization processes should not occur without a consideration of changing cultural norms, gender roles, family forms, and parental consumption orientations. Many trends have led to increases in the separation of family members in time and space. Rising divorce rates across cultures separate parents and children, and advances in technology, communication, and

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Family Meal

transportation have facilitated the movement of people across borders to seek better economic opportunities. Separation and migration further weaken intergenerational ties amid societal pressures for tie maintenance. Zlatko Skrbis notes that transnational families are like “a rubber band, which can be stretched and not broken, always pulling back to its original form, drawing members back into the fold of the geographically dispersed family” (2008, 242). Unfortunately, the rubber ages quickly, every stretch putting stress on its structure and eventually causing it to break. There may be a ray of hope for these families with the emergence of social networking technologies that reduce the cost and difficulty of connecting over long distances. The devices that facilitate these connections take on critical meanings for separated but intact families, and family consumption researchers could be at the forefront of investigating this phenomenon. However, we still have much to learn about when and how family practices can be maintained across distances. Amber M. Epp, James W. Gentry, Robert L. Harrison, and Stacey Menzel Baker See also Childhood; Consumer Socialization; Emotions; Family Meal; Identity; Life Course; Markets and Marketing; Postmodernism; Rituals

Further Readings Belk, Russell. “Sharing.” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (February 2010): 715–734. Bradford, Tonya Williams. “Intergenerationally Gifted Asset Dispositions.” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (June 2009): 93–111. Cook, Daniel T. “The Missing Child in Consumption Theory.” Journal of Consumer Culture 8, no. 2 (2008): 219–242. Coskuner-Balli, Gokcen, and Craig Thompson. “Legitimatizing an Emergent Social Identity through Marketplace Performances.” Advances in Consumer Research 36 (2009): 135–138. Coupland, Jennifer Chang. “Invisible Brands: An Ethnography of Households and the Brands in Their Kitchen Pantries.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (June 2005): 106–118. DeVault, Marjorie L. “Families and Children: Together, Apart.” American Behavioral Scientist 46, no. 10 (2003): 1296–1305. Epp, Amber M. “Yours, Mine, and Ours: How Families Manage Collective, Relational, and Individual Identity Goals in Consumption.” PhD diss., University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2008. Available http:// digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3297655.

Epp, Amber M., and Linda L. Price. “Family Identity: A Framework of Identity Interplay in Consumption Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (June 2008): 50–70. Epp, Amber M., and Linda L. Price. “The Storied Life of Singularized Objects: Forces of Agency and Network Transformation.” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (February 2010): 820–837. Galvin, Kathleen M., Carma L. Bylund, and Bernard J. Brommel. Family Communication: Cohesion and Change. 6th ed. New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2004. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. “On the Edge of the Time Bind: Time and Market Culture.” Social Research 72 (Summer 2005): 339–354. Mason, Marlys, and T. L. Pavia. "When the Family System Includes Disability: Adaptation in the Marketplace, Roles and Identity." Journal of Marketing Management 22 (2006): 1009–1030. Moisio, Risto, Eric J. Arnould, and Linda L. Price. “Between Mothers and Markets.” Journal of Consumer Culture 4, no. 3 (2005): 361–384. Petre, J. “Majority of Births Will Soon Be out of Wedlock.” The Telegraph, February 21, 2006. http://www.telegraph .co.uk/news/uknews/1511038/Majority-of-births-willsoon-be-out-of-wedlock.html. Skrbis, Zlatko. “Transnational Families: Theorising Migration, Emotions and Belonging.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 3 (2008): 231–246. U.S. Census Board. “America’s Families and Living Arrangements: Detailed Tables.” 2006 Statistical Abstracts. U.S. Census Information: Families: Definitions. http://www.census.gov/population/www/ socdemo/hh-fam.html (accessed November 18, 2008). Westlaw. Words and Phrases: Permanent Edition (Updated by Cumulative Annual Pocket Parts), 427–478. Thomson Reuters, 2004.

FAMILY MEAL “The family meal” conjures an image readily recognizable in the West of a man, a woman, and two or three children seated around a table to eat. It is an image kept alive by steady coverage in the mass media over the second half of the twentieth century. It is also an image of propriety: an orderly family keeping life in order, a virtue endorsed in both mass media coverage and research reporting that, by and large, people aspire to domestic arrangements whereby the family members regularly forgather to share whatever in their social milieu counts as a meal.

Family Meal

“The family meal” is an expression with wide currency in English. Without primary research, however, dating its origin is not straightforward. It is not listed in either Webster’s Dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary. Jane Austen, did, though, have Mrs. Bennett in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice talk of “family dinners.” These dinners consisted of a single course (though it would have comprised many more dishes than the modern reader would expect) as distinct from meals comprising two or more and to which guests were also invited. All the same, perhaps as if anticipating his marrying into the family, Mrs. Bennett reminds Mr. Bingley that he had “promised to take a family dinner” with them. Usage through much of the twentieth century appears extensive, seeming to need no explanation by social commentators, pundits, or journalists. An early reference appeared in the New York Times on January 6, 1921, and by the end of the century, the expression could be widely found on the Internet and in newspapers as far apart as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. A theme of such public coverage is that family meals are disappearing, replaced by people eating alone, taking frequent snacks rather than regular meals, at a desk or on a sofa instead of at the table. Sometimes part of a broader discussion of changes in modern life—in 1950s America with the advent of TV and TV dinners, in the “death of the British Sunday” in the 1990s when new legislation allowed shops to open seven days a week—family meals are said to be on the wane. As significantly, this trend is presented not as reason for celebration—such themes as liberation from a chore, old-fashioned habit, or outdated formality tend to be muted, ignored, or simply absent—but as cause for concern, disapproval, and anxiety. Added to pundits’ urging the intrinsic virtues of a slower pace, or chefs’ reminders to appreciate both the food and the activity of eating together, are media reports of investigations revealing associations between infrequent family meals and health or social problems (e.g., poorer nutritional intake, higher likelihood of childhood obesity, eating disorders, and illegal drug use and alcohol abuse among the young). The associated anxiety about the quality of daily life is exemplified by a July 30, 2006, headline of the UK’s Independent on Sunday, “Families drift apart if they don’t eat together.” The theme is also echoed across western Europe, in Belgium as much as in Norway. The expression family meal is not, however, always readily translatable.

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For example, the only direct equivalent in Finnish is said to be obsolete, while a subtle distinction can be made in French between le repas en famille, a meal with, or in, the family, and le repas de famille, an abstract notion with more formal connotations conveying a sense of obligation on members to attend. All the same, in both Finland and France, the idea of a family meal and the type of domestic arrangement associated with it is both recognized and valued. Influential social scientists—including Claude Fischler in France, Sidney Mintz in the United States, and Pasi Falk in Finland—have also assumed that the family meal is in decline. Whether they too regard this trend with similar disfavor is not always so clear. It is notable, however, that the claim that family meals are disappearing has received minimal investigation until recently. For a social phenomenon that is not only so widely talked about but also so loudly lamented, it seems to have been comparatively sparsely studied. What is there about the idea of the family meal that leads commentators—and, more strikingly, academic social scientists—to accept unsupported assertions apparently without question?

Research Approaches Various strands of enquiry can be identified. Some have been pursued, but much remains to be developed. A prime task has to be testing the allegation that the family meal has declined. But following up mass media reports to identify the evidence on which their claims are based often points in the direction of commercial market research conducted for companies such as those manufacturing indigestion remedies or ready-made meals. Commonly, these studies’ designs are cross-sectional—a single “snapshot” rather than comparisons between different periods. Three such studies of the mid-1990s reported that approximately half the respondents ate with their family daily or almost daily (Murcott 1997). Comparison with academic research for the Nordic countries in 1997 records a slightly higher average frequency (Kjaernes 2001). A survey in three British cities undertaken only two years earlier recorded that on the previous day, 75 percent of respondents had eaten an evening meal at home at which all household members were present (Warde and Martens 2000). Understanding such variations is problem enough. Technical differences between studies—in particular, the operational definition of family meal itself—have to be accommodated in order that

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intelligible comparisons can be made. As great a difficulty is determining how to assess whatever rate is reported: does it mean the family meal is waxing or waning? Without time-trend data, interpretations are doomed to remain inconclusive. Relevant data sets have been hard to locate—if they exist. Studies of considerable ingenuity—and technical complexity—have analyzed time-diary data that, despite their limitations, are better than nothing. Suggesting that meal patterns and domestic arrangements remain resilient in the face of other social changes, neither Shu-Li Cheng and colleagues’ work in Britain nor Inge Mestdag’s in Belgium finds unequivocal overall support for the demise of the family meal. As ingenious is the adoption of a historical approach as an alternative to finding timetrend data. Peter Jackson and colleagues reanalyzed British oral history material, a data set comprising four hundred life-history interviews that were conducted in the 1970s, covering memories of childhood, schooling, and the daily round during the first decade of the twentieth century. Here too is found little clear-cut evidence for the decline of the family meal. Instead, the study reveals a similarity with many, much more recent qualitative studies that record people’s treating “eating as a family” as an ideal that has to be tempered by realistic acknowledgment of competing employment and leisure timetables. A quite separate research genre is that which assumes the relevance of family meals as a variable when investigating the correlates of social and health problems. An internationally well-publicized instance is work based at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, University of Columbia, New York, which from the mid-1990s has run repeated surveys reporting an inverse correlation between the frequency of family meals and teenagers’ risk of tobacco, alcohol abuse, or illegal drug use. A similar correlation with disordered eating has also been found (e.g., Neumark-Sztainer 2004). However, this approach raises methodological questions, including the extent to which measures of family meal frequency are proxy for more fundamental characteristics such as family cohesion or socioeconomic disadvantage. A final issue for future work concerns the longevity of concern at the demise of the family meal. Sociologists heard it in Muncie, Indiana, during the

1920s (Lynd and Lynd 1929). This leads to a different conceptual perspective for research. Coupling this persistence with an apparent disregard for empirical evidence supports the suggestion that alarm at the decline of the family meal represents no more than a necessary myth of past social orderliness to help make collective sense of current social changes. Indeed, for Jackson, Olive, and Smith, the use of questionable historical evidence associated with the longevity of this concern amounts to a contemporary moral panic. This, finally, returns to the as yet unanswered question, why would such a panic fasten onto the family meal? Anne Murcott See also Anorexia; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Convenience; Dieting; Families; Food Consumption; Food Scares; Sociability

Further Readings Cheng, Shu-Li, Wendy Olsen, Dale Southerton, and Alan Warde. “The Changing Practice of Eating: Evidence from UK Time Diaries, 1975 and 2000.” The British Journal of Sociology 58, no. 1 (2007): 39–61. Falk, Pasi. The Consuming Body. London: Sage, 1994. Fischler, Claude. “Gastro-nomie et gastro-anomie.” Communications 31 (1979): 189–210. Jackson, Peter, Sarah Olive, and Graham Smith. “Myths of the Family Meal: Re-reading Edwardian Life Histories.” In Changing Families, Changing Food, edited by Peter Jackson, 131–145. Basingstoke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan, 2009. Kjaernes, Unni, ed. Eating Patterns: A Day in the Lives of Nordic Peoples. Lysaker, Norway: National Institute for Consumer Research, 2001. Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. Middletown. London: Constable, 1929. Mestdag, Inge. “Destructuration of the Belgian Meal Pattern?” PhD diss., Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2007. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power. New York: Viking, 1985. Murcott, Anne. “Family Meals—a Thing of the Past?” In Food Health and Identity, edited by Pat Caplain, 32–49. London: Routledge, 1997. Neumark-Sztainer, Dianne. “Are Family Meal Patterns Associated with Disordered Eating Behaviors among Adolescents?” Journal of Adolescent Health 35 (2004): 350–359. Warde, Alan, and Lydia Martens. Eating Out. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Famine

FAMINE Famine can be described as the extensive and protracted scarcity of food, resulting in severe undernourishment and mass starvation. The twentieth century saw more people die as a result of famine than at any other time in recorded history. Despite the fact that the current era looks unlikely to surpass this milestone, it is expected to have the objectionable distinction that the majority of its famines will be man-made. Equally, however, many argue that in no preceding century has famine been more avertable. As a result, various observers assert that it is now social, not technological or natural, obstacles that impede famine prevention.

The Historical and Geographical Parameters Famine has been recorded as far back as the third millennium BCE. Past famines are often known and remembered by particular names, some of which offer unique insights into the catastrophes: the French la famine de l’avenement (the Famine of the Accession of Louis XIV) in 1662; Ireland’s bliain an áir (“the year of the slaughter”) in 1740– 1741; the South African Madhlatule (“eat what you can and say nothing”) famine of the 1800s; and the 1930s’ Holodomor (“death by hunger”) in the Ukraine are some of the more indelible examples (O Gráda 2009). The historical and geographical legacy of famine is diverse. Yet, when thinking of famine, developing countries—particularly in sub-Saharan Africa—are invariably the first to come to mind. Records, however, provide a more balanced impression. Europe, for instance, has a long history of famine, so much so that some historians argue that mass hunger defined Europe in the Middle Ages. The Great European Famine of 1315–1317, attributed to unremitting rains, driving winds, and subsequent crop failures, is argued to have caused the deaths of up to 30 percent of the continent’s population. Likewise, the Irish Potato Famine of 1841–1852, attributed to the Phytophthora infestans oomycete fungus and perhaps northern Europe’s most notorious example of chronic undernourishment, ruined crops and reduced the population of Ireland by almost 3 million—a third died of starvation and associated

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illnesses; the rest fled. Of particular infamy is the aforesaid “terror-famine” (Holodomor) of 1932–1933 in which prohibitively high grain quotas were set for the Ukrainian peasantry by the Russian leader Joseph Stalin. The goals of this program were to rebuild the Soviet state through undermining the social fabric of Ukrainian national resistance and resulted in the loss of an estimated minimum of 12 million people.

Famine and Poverty Like pre-twentieth-century famines in Europe, widespread food shortages in Africa, Asia, and South America were typically driven by climate and natural disasters and exacerbated by underdevelopment and a high dependence on subsistence farming. European colonialism significantly altered the trajectories of many low-income countries and with it the circumstance of famine. Colonial power often rested on ownership and access to land. Frequently, when patterns of land ownership changed following the arrival of colonial powers, majority groups within rural communities were marginalized for the benefit of a minority ruling elite. Consequently, it was repeatedly low- or no-income smallholder communities or landless laborers that became the worst affected in times of food shortage. For the most part, former colonial states have done little to readdress property inequalities. A national elite habitually assumed power on independence and thus created little change in the configuration of land ownership. Equally, however, Ethiopia, a nation with a history relatively free of colonial interference, has witnessed some of the most devastating and memorable famines in living memory. Attributed to drought, civil war, and poverty, and worsened by pervasive land confiscation by the social and political elite under the government of Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian famine of 1984–1985 played a large role in cementing the country’s association with starvation in the minds of the Westerners.

Famine and Markets The prices, supply, and demand of food have commanded unsurprisingly sizable consideration from observers seeking accurate early warning systems for famine prevention. Consequently, the analysis of the role of markets in the food and agriculture system plays an increasing role.

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In an efficient market, traders must respond swiftly and accurately to changing consumer demand signals, and writers identify two ways in which traders can significantly shape the likelihood of famine: the first is through hindering the accrual of food by certain low-income consumer groups because of their lack of capital—known as effective demand failure; the second, commonly labeled market failure, is where a market is unable to match the demand for food. Indeed, reliance on markets creates a vulnerability to price shifts, and theorists such as critical geographer Stephen Devereux (1993) assert that while assets and income can have a considerable effect on a person’s exposure to famine, it is the value of resources on the market that dictates the severity of a situation. As a commercialized commodity, food is largely mediated by those seeking to maximize returns. As such, the needs of the hungry are frequently marginalized. Nonetheless, in an era of increasingly converging markets, price differentials are becoming smaller, and incentives for producers and traders to stockpile food are argued to be simultaneously lessened.

Famine in Theory Arguably the most notable theorist to write on famine was Anglican clergyman Thomas Malthus who, in his Essay on the Principle of Population, calculated that unhindered population expansion would increase geometrically (i.e., 2, 4, 8, 16, 32) while natural resources could only increase arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10). That is to say, Malthus predicted that the unconstrained growth of a population would ultimately exceed its ability to support itself, and nature (in the form of famine) would inevitably intervene to normalize the supply and demand of food. While Malthus’s theories remain popular with scholars, there have been several strong critiques of his work in recent years. The fact that Malthus was writing before the rapid urbanization of the post– Industrial Revolution years—when many susceptible communities moved away from increasingly precarious rural occupation—is often cited, as well as the massive developments in infrastructure and scientific advances in crop breeding that the demographer failed to foresee. Nobel Prize–winner Amartya Sen revolutionized the theorizing of famine in his book Poverty

and Famines (1981). Here, Sen asserted that one’s entitlement to food derived from four sources: labor, production, trade, and gifts. He argued that famine was not caused by the availability of food in a particular place or time, but by the accessibility of those resources. However, entitlement failure, as he put it, only occurs in particular groups, even in times of natural food scarcity, and wealthier communities or city dwellers are infrequently affected. Sen’s approach can be seen to echo those that highlight market failures and poverty as causes of famine and draw attention to those without purchasing power—the poor—as the first casualties of such disasters.

The Methodological Issues One of the more problematical aspects of exploring famines of the past is that it is often the case that the more abortive the economy (and therefore more prone to catastrophe), the less likely it is to record documentary evidence. Consequently, there is a temptation for researchers to speculate on the rate of recurrence and prevalence of famines in particular regions and eras from the relatively few records available. Naturally, the limitations of such research are many. The quality of the data employed to map presentday famines, however, is no less open to broad conjecture. For example, the embellishment or reduction of the incidence and severity of hunger by different interest groups may be guided by ulterior motives. Because acute starvation must be identified as such before institutional responses are triggered, to categorize a situation as “famine” is likely to result in the provision of international aid—which may come as welcome relief for local governments—and has considerable implications for national policy. Conversely, the extent of undernourishment reported in particular minority groups or states can be politically motivated by governments that are conscious of their domestic reputation in the international arena and have something to gain by denying the degree of malnutrition.

The Future of Famine Writers have tried, and failed, to predict the future of famine. Whether hopeful, such as Wallace Aykroyd, author of The Conquest of Famine (1974), or pessimistic, such as Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s or David Arnold in the 1980s, observers seem powerless to

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calculate the course of mass hunger. There are, however, some trends that can be foreseen for the immediate future: modern famines are infinitely more complex than those of past centuries; causes range from global environmental change to externally administered structural adjustment policies, and all contribute to the disruption of food production. Today, the severity, scope, and mortality rate of famines are significantly less than in previous decades. This, in some measure, can be attributed to scientific agricultural advances, early warning systems, and the development of international humanitarian assistance. Conversely, this is also the reason that many theorists agree that in essence, all presentday famines are social constructs. Paul H. Johnson See also Consumer Demand; Consuming the Environment; Food Consumption; History of Food; Inequalities; Poverty; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings Curtis, Donald, Michael Hubbard, and Andrew Shepherd. Preventing Famine: Policies and Prospects for Africa. New York: Routledge, 1988. De Waal, Alexander. Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Devereux, Stephen. Theories of Famine. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Devereux, Stephen. “Famine.” In The Companion to Development Studies, edited by Vandana Desai and Robert B. Potter, 176–180. London: Hodder Education, 2008. O Gráda, Cormac. Famine: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Russell, Sharman A. Hunger: An Unnatural History. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Young, Elizabeth M. World Hunger. New York: Routledge, 1997.

FANS Defining and understanding fans and fan culture offers important insight into contemporary consumer patterns. Fan studies has provided extensive analysis of particular patterns of audience consumption and production, and has examined the relationship

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between these. Moreover, it is argued that given increasing media and consumption differentiation and narrowcasting, mainstream consumer patterns are becoming increasingly “fan-like.” However, defining what is meant by the term fan can prove quite difficult. Most people have a general, and largely shared, understanding of what a fan is, notes Matt Hills. A fan is generally seen as someone with a strong interest in, maybe even loyalty to, a particular sport, team, celebrity, television show, band, and so on. However, even this simple definition raises more questions than it answers. For instance, what makes someone a fan? Does this involve a minimum level of interest, dedication, or loyalty? And if so, what are these? Also, what is the relationship between fans, audiences, and consumers? Are they the same, and if not, what are the distinctions and lines of differentiation here? These kinds of questions, and more, have perplexed scholars for many years. Hence, beyond everyday or generic definitions, defining what is meant by the term fan, in a way that can be operationalized and that sets a subject area for study, proves quite problematic. As Hills suggests, “Fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically” (2002, xi). Being a fan is not just a label or category; it is also tied into individual and group identities and social performances, which are rarely set or coherent. Hence, the problem of defining what a fan is has led many writers on fans, such as Garry Crawford, to avoid defining precisely what they mean by this term. The foundations of fan studies can probably be found in the work of academics at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS, or the Birmingham School), such as Dick Hebdige, who associated music, fashion, and cultural styles with certain youth subcultures, such as mods, punks, and teddy boys. Though writers such as Hebdige did not specifically identify these as fan groups, it is evident that most (if not all) of these groups had some shared music and cultural tastes, such as mods, who shared a passion for specific genres of ska, beat, and soulinfluenced music. However, what was significant in forming and defining these groups for Hebdige and his colleagues was not simply music or other cultural tastes, but rather class position. This theory sees subcultures as the direct result of working-class young (usually) men’s failure in, and disconnection with, wider society, which sees them develop their own counterculture as a means of achieving in-group

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acceptance and status. Hence, for Hebdige and other similar writers on subculture, the distinction between these groups and wider society can clearly be seen along social class divides. Another important feature of subcultures is how they use popular culture as a form of social resistance. In particular, Hebdige suggests that members of subcultures engage in a process of bricolage, whereby they draw on consumer goods but redefine and combine these to develop a distinct style that marks them out from the general public and identifies them as members of a subversive and potentially troublesome group. Similar distinctions can be seen in the work of certain writers in the 1980s and early 1990s on fan culture, most notably the work of John Fiske and Henry Jenkins. Though the theoretical inspiration for both Fiske and Jenkins is the work of Michel de Certeau, and not the neo-Marxist theory that formed the basis for CCCS scholars, they likewise emphasize creativity and social resistance as a clear indicator of how fans are distinct from more general audiences. For instance, Jenkins (1992) argues that while general audiences are happy to simply consume popular culture texts, such as television shows, fans will engage with them in a more active and creative way, such as “poaching” from media texts. The idea of “textual poaching” is drawn from de Certeau, but here Jenkins specifically uses this concept to describe the ways fans will often take characters, scenarios, or narratives from existing texts (such as a television show or film) and use them to produce their own texts, such as fan art, poetry, stories, performances, and so on. Similar, and clear, distinctions between fans and (other) consumers are evident in the writings of certain sports scholars, in particular the work of Anthony King and Richard Giulianotti, to name but two. For these writers, there is a clear divide between “traditional fans” (most often white working-class men) of sport and “new consumers” (usually middle class, often “family” based) of sport—a divide that can be illustrated in King’s 1998 discussion of the (working-class white male) “lads” and (the middle-class family-based) new consumer fans of the Manchester United football club. Though here social class is often employed to highlight distinctions between different types of audiences, the most commonly evoked divide again revolves around levels and types of fan activity—where traditional fans are seen to be participatory, such as actively creating the atmosphere

within sports stadiums by singing and chanting, while new consumers are seen as passive. However, Crawford argues that distinctions between traditional and new fans are often based on wholly subjective and romanticized ideas of authenticity and what it means to be a “real” fan, which frequently sees the celebration of one form of fan culture over another. As Lawrence Grossberg writes, “While we may all agree that there is a difference between the fan and the consumer, we are unlikely to understand the difference if we simply celebrate the former category and dismiss the latter one” (1992, 52). Hence, several authors, such as Crawford and Cornel Sandvoss, suggest that a useful way forward is to understand fans not as distinct from, but rather as a subgroup of, consumers. In particular, Sandvoss is one of the few scholars to offer a clear definition of what a fan is—it is defined by consumption and characterized by “the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (2005, 8). As Sandvoss clearly declares, “Fans are consumers” (17). Hence, what defines fans for Sandvoss is not necessarily their social class or levels of creativity but rather their regular consumption of a particular subject or text. In particular, Hills suggests that a consideration of fans’ consumption is particularly significant, as fans will frequently use consumer goods as resources in their social performances—what he terms performative consumption. This he relates to two different forms of fandom: “iconic” and “textual” fandom. Hills sees iconic fans as interested in particular individuals, such as music or film stars, while textual fans follow more multifaceted subjects, the obvious example being fans of football, or similar sports, clubs. Iconic fans recognize themselves as distinct from the icons they follow and use elements of the associated iconography (such as dressing like a pop star) to say something about themselves, as a “platform for their own personality” (2002: 165). In contrast, textual fans see themselves as part of the text they follow, such as the way football fans use “we” when referring to the team they support, claiming, for instance, “We won on Saturday.” Here, their consumption is about reinforcing belonging to a particular group, but again, they are using it in a way that demonstrates and performs something they want to say about themselves. However, Jenkins (2006) has argued that given the growth of niche, as opposed to mass, consumption, and the proliferation of media channels and

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outputs catering to increasingly “narrow” rather than “broad” caste markets—coupled with the rise of new, more participatory, technologies, such as the Internet—specific and participatory consumer and audience patterns become increasingly the norm, with the result that more and more of us become fanlike in our consumption. Garry Crawford See also Belonging; Bricolage; Cultural Studies; Identity; Popular Music; Sports; Subculture; Youth Culture

Further Readings Crawford, Garry. Consuming Sport: Sport, Fans and Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Giulianotti, Richard. “Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flaneurs: A Taxonomy of Spectator Identities in Football.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 26, no. 1 (2002): 25–46. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by L. A. Lewis, 50–68. London: Routledge, 1992. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers. London: Routledge, 1992. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006. King, Anthony. The End of the Terraces. Leicester, UK: Leicester University, 1998. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

FASCISM See Consumer Nationalism; Italian Fascism and Fashion

FASHION The term fashionable refers to behavior adopted generally and uniformly by groups of people in a certain period of time and in a particular field of action.

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Such behavior is characterized by its broad diffusion within the group, which is also explicitly aware of its transitory nature: what is in fashion is bound soon to go out of fashion. Fashion concerns not only the clothing of the body but also the consumption of objects (e.g., furniture) and ideas. The term is used to denote behaviors and preferences in different areas of action, thought, and moral belief, as well as in music, art, leisure, science, religion, or politics. In the majority of the European languages, the term used to refer to fashion (mode in French, Mode in German, moda in Italian, moda in Spanish) has a broader meaning that also includes similar phenomena like fads. From this perspective, a phenomenon that is in vogue has three main distinguishing characteristics. First, it is the most frequent behavior among those observable in a particular sphere of action (and it therefore corresponds to a specific statistical measure termed mode). But this is not enough: according to Rolf Meyersohn and Elihu Katz, only when there exists widespread awareness of the fashionability of a certain phenomenon, and when it is labeled “fashionable,” can one speak of fashion in the social sense. Hence, fashion is a conscious and reflexive form of behavior. Finally, a phenomenon possessing the two previous features is considered fashionable when it is perceived as new compared with previous phenomena similar to it and of predictably brief duration. More specifically, the term fashion is today normally used to refer to the modern custom of dressing in accordance with norms laid down by fashion designers and by clothes manufacturing firms and that are disseminated through a system of specialized media such as fashion shows and magazines. As Yuniya Kawamura argues in her book Fashionology (2005), fashion can be considered a particular social institution, with its own norms and organizations. This is the topic addressed here.

Fashion and the Modern World Some scholars maintain that fashion, as a form of regulation of collective behavior, is characteristic of all human cultures. Jennifer Craik in her book The Face of Fashion (1994), for example, argues that the fashion impulse exists in all cultures and embodies the achievement of distinctiveness in dress through clothing codes and symbols, whose aim is to express belonging to a group and at the same time the individual’s desire to assert his or her personality. The predominant view, however, is that there is a strict

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connection between fashion as we know it today and the modern world, and that fashion as an institution has been essentially Eurocentric and capitalist. Numerous researchers date the birth of the first fashionable behavior to the second half the fourteenth century, when it was concomitant with the rapid growth of trade and economic enterprises in many parts of Europe. That period, in fact, saw radical change in the relationship between the individual and society. There arose the idea that value doesn’t always reside in the immutability of social structures inherited from the past, because the individual personality—autonomous and responsible for its own choices—can have value in itself. To be appreciated, therefore, was the capacity to design and to direct one’s own life, that is, the capacity to differentiate oneself from others by making autonomous choices. The appearance of the first short-lived fashions in the princely courts of the fourteenth century expressed the need to represent this new value attributed to the individual’s autonomy through the manner in which the body was clothed. Thereafter, fashion developed as individuality became progressively valorized in the social structure, the more that society became flexible. In societies where the social structure was rigid and where individuals had almost no chance of changing their social position, there was neither the requirement nor the need to express one’s belonging and identity through dress. Today, however, now that the social structure has become flexible and individual mobility is high, belongings are always uncertain and modifiable, and identities are provisional and negotiable. The modifiability of dress can thus become an important instrument of social relations, notes Elizabeth Rouse. This happened in evident manner in Europe after the birth of modern society, when the radical social submovements generated by industrialization and mass urbanization disrupted the traditional conservatism of the ancien régime. It is customary to date the birth of fashion in the modern sense to the midnineteenth century, and 1857 is conventionally regarded as marking the beginning of a cycle—called the hundred years of fashion—that concluded after World War II. In 1857, in fact, Charles F. Worth opened in Paris an haute couture fashion house where clients could choose the style of their dresses from a book of models designed by the couturier. This signaled the tailor’s emancipation from skilled artisanship to acquire the status of a quasi-artist creating

fashions and styles that he imposed on his customers. Just one hundred years later, in the second half of the twentieth century, fashionable clothing was produced also by industrial clothing manufacture as ready-to-wear items. The hundred years of fashion therefore comprised forms of fashion production and consumption that spread through Western societies in concomitance with the most significant processes of modernization, with the development of industrial capitalism, and—at the level of social organization— with the consolidation, expansion, and proliferation of cities and metropolises. In the same period, “progress” was the dominant value and the engine driving the development of European and North American societies. At the end of nineteenth century, the first attempts were made to explain the phenomenon. Analysts considered fashion an exemplary source for understanding the changes engendered by the Industrial Revolution and by the urban organization of life. In particular, fashion was viewed as a means to demonstrate the social status possessed or achieved, and as an indicator particularly suited to a society characterized by high social mobility. In the societies then consolidating their capitalist industrial economies, in fact, social stratification increasingly depended on the roles that people performed in the world of work, and increasingly less on privileges deriving from land ownership and possessed by birth and family membership. The social status of people could therefore change substantially during their life courses, and this required signs that made such change outwardly visible. Two studies exerted the greatest influence on subsequent theories about fashion, and to a large extent they furnished the language usually employed when discussing fashion phenomena: those by the German Georg Simmel and by the American Thorstein Veblen. Simmel is often considered a precursor of the trickle-down theory, and Veblen the originator of the theory that consumption goods act as status symbols. Simmel defined fashion as the product of two deep-lying and coexisting tendencies in people’s behavior: the tendency to imitate others so as to become equal with them, and the tendency to differentiate oneself so as to become individually unique. Fashion is imitation of a given model, and in this way it satisfies the need to obtain social endorsement of one’s choices. It creates a universal form of which each person’s behavior is merely an example, an

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individual variant. At the same time, however, it also satisfies the need for uniqueness, for distinction, and through the search for differentiation, it produces social change. According to Simmel, in our society, fashions are always class fashions created by the upper classes and abandoned as soon as the lower classes begin to appropriate them. The lower classes, for their part, seek to elevate themselves by imitating the upper classes, and fashion is a sphere in which this external imitation is easily accomplished. The dynamics of imitation and distinction therefore produce a constant change of styles brought about by this eternal “pursuit” among the social classes. Considered from this point of view, Simmel’s theory anticipated trickle-down theories, an approach first expressly formulated by L. A. Fallers in 1954 to describe the fashion system in the United States after World War II. The haute couture system, it is argued, creates tendencies and styles that spread downward through the pyramid of social stratification owing to the industrial manufacture of cheap clothes imitating the style of the exclusive collections of the best-established fashion designers. However, Simmel considers the dynamic of imitation and distinction to be a social mechanism used by people in their everyday lives, even in societies without a hierarchically ordered stratification of classes. It therefore performs a broader function. It allows, according to Simmel, the identification and general recognition of the members of a particular social circle who have something in common and want to be considered a distinct group. However, in societies with low levels of change and mobility, fashions mark differences among people to a much more enduring and stable extent than in urban industrial societies because the lower classes have scant possibility to improve their positions by imitating the customs of the affluent classes. If we consider the dynamic tension between equality and differentiation as a general process typifying all social groups, then Simmel’s analysis anticipated the theories on fashion advanced in the second half of the twentieth century that emphasized its semiotic and communicative function. Such theories spread when the middle classes achieved full social legitimacy on the conclusion of the century of fashion. In that period, the social groups that sought to identify themselves internally, and to distinguish themselves from each other, began to construct themselves

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around variables—such as gender and age—other than class. For example, the youth fashions that spread through industrial societies from the 1950s onward were indicative of the desire by a new social category—young people—to assert its autonomy from adults. Although Simmel could not have foreseen this development, his analysis furnished a conceptual basis for subsequent theories on fashion that highlighted its communicative function. Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899. He described in this book the wearing of fashionable dress and accessories as a means whereby the members of modern society could demonstrate the honorable and respectable nature of the social positions that they occupy, or to which they aspire. Also Veblen identified two interconnected mechanisms at the basis of fashion: conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. The former is the practice of acquiring and then soon discarding costly goods with high aesthetic value, for purposes evidently different from the satisfaction of primary wants. The latter is a lifestyle that is comfortable, easy, without effort and stress, and with much free time. Both categories refer to freedom from want and (at least theoretical) endless supply. On this view, fashion breaks with the habitus of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Following fashion is not only to display one’s material wealth and freedom from want, something that has always been legitimate in aristocratic societies; it is also to waste things, a practice always considered intrinsically ugly in societies where scarcity predominated. In the past, people’s desire for ornamentation and social approval of their beautiful possessions was always accompanied by the rejection of waste. Beautiful and expensive things made of valuable materials were cherished and were kept in good condition even by those with an endless supply. By contrast, in the modern age, the possession of beautiful objects and a constant search for newer ones come together. This has happened because, since the advent of industrial society, the requirement and custom of exhibiting leisure consumption has spread to new bourgeois social strata obliged to demonstrate the legitimacy of their social privileges. In an attempt to emulate the upper classes, the newly affluent flaunt their leisure, seeking confirmation of their status with clothes from the latest fashion collections. The objects manifesting the most conspicuous leisure are therefore the newest ones, and they thus

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become status symbols. This, however, requires the periodic discarding of objects that have gone out of fashion. Consequently, according to Veblen, the distinctive feature of modern fashion is that it considers wastage necessary for the incessant acquisition of ever more beautiful and newer objects and clothes—which are thus endowed with greater aesthetic and social merit. As Erving Goffman pointed out in 1951, status symbols embody the social value attributed to the corresponding social positions and are used by people to indicate the position that they wish to occupy: members of a declining class rely more and more on symbols of their lost status, while members of rising groups adopt symbols that signal their expectations. Fashion is therefore a phenomenon typical of modernity, for only modern society produces the social conditions that make it possible: social mobility, relatively evenly distributed wealth, constant innovation. As Howard Blumer put it, “fashion is always modern” because, by definition, it seeks to keep abreast of the times.

Fashion and Urban Society Certain conditions are therefore necessary for the variability of attire to become an important element in the construction of social identity. First, the society must be internally stratified; that is, it must have geography sufficiently complex to force all of its members to constantly reconstruct it to find their standings. Second, the society must be flexible; that is, it must allow shifts of status, changes of position, and social mobility (both individual and collective). Finally, the society must be sufficiently broad and complex for everyday encounters to be largely with unknown others, that is, with people who at first sight do not occupy a definite position in the social geography. This only happens in manifest manner in the cities, where the physical separation of the social strata is constantly suppressed by spatial compression. In urban contexts, unlike rural ones, individuals constantly interact with other individuals whose origin, status, and expectations they do not know, and vice versa. It is therefore in an urban context that clothing performs a key function in the regulation of human interactions. Fashion in its turn is an intrinsically urban phenomenon in that it is produced and consumed in cities. In recent decades, certain metropolises in the world—primarily Paris—have been

called the capitals of fashion because they concentrate almost all the activities that give rise to innovation in clothing styles. Throughout the century of fashion, Paris was regarded as the world capital of fashion. At least four things have been meant by this expression over time, according to David Gilbert. First, Paris was the propeller center for a culture of design. It was there that the first couturiers started to create new models and styles in clothing, fabrics, and decorations. Fashion in the modern sense of the term was therefore born in Paris. Second, it was in Paris that arose the first modern network of fashion operators active in the various segments of the production chain (designers, small manufacturers, shopkeepers, consumers), each of which relied on the presence of the others to conduct its business efficiently. Furthermore, Paris was called the capital of fashion because of its sophisticated cultures of consumption. During the nineteenth century, in fact, there developed in Paris new spaces devoted to commerce: the galeries and arcades in which shop windows displayed goods to passersby. These were narrow streets connecting city blocks and usually covered with glass and iron, or they were galleries internal to buildings with an overall effect similar to that of contemporary shopping centers. As many scholars and writers have noted (see, e.g., Benjamin 2002), these urban spaces encouraged people to promenade and to linger, so that they experienced a new way to move around the city as they used its spaces to stroll, look, see, and be seen. Shopping, leisure, and meeting friends and acquaintances became activities that merged together, thus favoring the mass enactment on the urban stage of sociability—which naturally also required the wearing of fashionable dress in the city’s spaces. While in modern Europe such practices mainly involved bourgeois men, who discussed politics, art, and culture in clubs and cafés, with the creation of galleries, arcades, and department stores, women also began to lead more public lives. Cafés and department stores provided bourgeois women with nondomestic but protected places where they could meet their friends without forgoing decorum and discretion. Lower-class women became easily acquainted with new fashions and trends by their practice of window-shopping. Finally, Paris has always been regarded as a capital of fashion by the media. Specialized magazines, newspapers, television programs, and films have long represented Paris in this way, emphasizing the creativeness of French

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couturiers, the compactness of the French creative and productive system, and the distinctiveness of the French commercial system. By so doing, they have also contributed to making the label of fashion capital even stronger, until it is now a brand used to boost the sale of the products themselves. In the second half of the twentieth century, other cities began to assume leading roles in the global fashion system. London, New York, and Milan became fashion capitals by virtue of their specialization in particular sectors. In the 1960s, some English fashion designers, most notably Mary Quant, Barbara Hulanicki (Biba), and Vivienne Westwood, occupied the international stage by creating collections that were decidedly innovative with respect to the highly traditional English dress codes of the time. They decreed the success of a fashion that drew its inspiration from street styles. These were often firms born from small boutiques located in lower-class districts of London with large numbers of alternative businesses that attracted a new category of consumers consisting of young people. Since the 1960s, London has always distinguished itself as a showcase for avant-garde fashion targeted on a progressive market and supported by a training system that tends to interpret fashion as a form of art rather than as a business. In the 1970s, New York also became a capital of fashion, when sportswear—in which the American garment industry had specialized for decades—became embedded into the international prêt-à-porter system. The success of New York fashion has been due both to the solid industrial structure of its creative and productive process and to the location of the garment district in central Manhattan close to the city’s main streets of theaters, shops, museums, and nightclubs—all of which are activities that animate urban cultural life and furnish inspiration. The fourth capital of fashion in the last quarter of the twentieth century is considered to be Milan, where a closely integrated prêt-à-porter system developed during the 1970s. Northern Italy, in fact, had a solid system of textiles and clothing firms, while Milan already enjoyed a cultural climate boosted by the international success of Italian industrial design. Moreover, readily available in Milan were most of the services necessary for the production and marketing of a fashion collection: photographers, public relations firms, advertising agencies, and so on, as well as innovative sales outlets. Milan imposed itself on the international scene as the capital of prêt-à-porter,

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this being a specific form of fashion with high creative content but produced on an industrial scale for a bourgeois public with traditional tastes. With the beginning of the twenty-first century, new players came to the fore internationally. They organized fashion events and supported the creativeness of young talents with training systems, as well as with awards or incentives. Most of these countries had consolidated textiles industries, most notably Brazil and India. But also countries like China and Turkey—to which production had been relocated by European firms since the 1990s because of their lower labor costs—began to develop their own firms’ systems and to organize trade fairs, which attracted international attention. The typically urban dimension of fashion has therefore expanded over time, and it has changed with respect to the past. No longer do the European or North American cities alone occupy important roles in the world fashion system: South American and Asian cities also organize specialized events. In the twenty-first century, fashion is always more an urban phenomenon, increasingly globalized, and fashion capitals are more interconnected.

Fashion as Language As said, fashion long performed a prime function in class or generational dynamics, but its function in society rapidly changed during the last decades of the twentieth century. The slackening of class as a constraint on people’s lives also had consequences for their vestimentary behavior, according to Diana Crane. Class membership became less important for a person’s self-image. It was replaced by a lifestyle— that is, a coherent system of consumption manifesting a particular set of values, life choices, and social relations. This entailed that the consumption of cultural goods, such as fashionable clothing, became an essential factor in the construction of social identity. But lifestyles exhibit a variety and a changeability not comparable with those of social classes. Moreover, they are much more ephemeral forms of belonging, which can be abandoned with a certain rapidity and at low psychological and relational costs. The current cultural landscape is consequently highly fragmented and fluid, and it cannot be framed within stable categories or typologies. Previously unknown choices are available to the individual, and consumption has become—because of its intrinsically casual nature

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(what has been bought can also be thrown away)— the main vehicle of such choices. Overall, this concerns the democratization of fashion, a process that in only a few decades has enormously expanded the public of consumers interested in the style of the clothes that they wear and made them more aware and independent in their purchasing choices. The repercussion in the fashion sphere of these social transformations has been a more widespread awareness of the communicative function of dress. The use made of clothes, makeup, hairstyles, and accessories is increasingly less an adjustment to the styles of a particular social group and increasingly more a way to facilitate and govern interactions with others in everyday life—a life by now so varied and multifaceted that class membership can no longer guarantee success in the many situations that it presents. Numerous authors in the second half of the twentieth century spoke of the role played by clothing in people’s construction of their identities by enabling them to conjugate normative social pressure with individual expressive needs. The “uniforms” that distinguished fashionable and unfashionable dress until the 1980s have now been replaced by the free and diversified clothing choices whereby people, as they select among the innumerable offers on the market, construct the self-image that they deem best suited to the situation. Clothing thus serves as a linguistic code with which to facilitate and manage interactions with others. However, this should not induce too strict an analogy between clothing and verbal language. Of course, as a prosthesis of the body, clothing is necessarily a medium of communication. Roland Barthes already pointed this out when he proposed application to clothing of the distinction between langue and parole, between the socially institutionalized rules that govern the use of language and the individual speech acts through which language is deployed according to the circumstances. The act of clothing oneself is thus driven by a set of norms that allow certain choices and disallow others, and that bind choices to particular meanings (e.g., in Western culture, skirt means “woman,” tie means “man”). Barthes called this system of norms costume. But costume is only an abstract until individuals in flesh and blood decide to wear it, and by so doing interpret, so to speak, those dress norms, giving them constantly new and different concrete forms. This is what Barthes called clothing. Nevertheless, vestimentary

language can be considered such only by analogy. As Fred Davis has argued, there are three main features that distinguish the clothing-fashion code from traditional linguistic codes. First, the meaning of a certain choice of clothes may change markedly according the context: the occasion, the place, the people interacting, their moods. Second, it differs according to the social membership and the culture of the person making the choice (or observing it): white is indexical of weddings in Western culture, but it is a funereal color in Islamic culture. Third, the language of clothing, with the exception of uniforms, is characterized by undercoding: because no choice of dress is encoded unambiguously, it induces the interlocutor to make highly arbitrary interpretations. But, as well as these three features, which concern clothing as such, fashion introduces a further distinction with respect to formalized languages. It does so because of the constant change distinctive of it. The compulsion to change, in fact, makes it impossible to identify the stable signifier/signified pairs that constitute the basis of linguistic codes in the strict sense.

The Consumption of Fashion Since its origin in the nineteenth century, modern fashion has had a preponderant role in the development of the consumption society. This has mainly been due to the positional function that clothing already had performed at the beginnings of modern society, just after the end of the Middle Ages. It had been considered a visible indicator of a person’s social status, and in the course of history, it had often been subject to laws—so-called sumptuary laws—intended to regulate civic conducts concerning who could wear what under what circumstances. In the modern age, with the development of international trade, with geographical discoveries, and with the colonial expansion of the main European nations, new consumption goods were deemed valuable because they were rare, exotic, and expensive when they appeared on Europe’s markets. Among them were new fabrics and new dyes from the Far East, accompanied by knowledge and information about new shapes and styles of clothing. The advent of a new affluent class—that of merchants—had given dress codes an unsteadiness that was seen as a threat against the established social order and as the advance of a new culture and order founded on new consumption regimes. Nor were the lower

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classes extraneous to these changes. Historical studies document that French peasants at the end of the seventeenth century, or English laborers or house servants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were closely interested in clothes and fashion accessories and that their interest was satisfied by local tailors who kept abreast of the latest styles. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, Simmel and Veblen, among others, described the role of fashion in the birth of the new societies of industrial capitalism, they recognized that economic transition to the industrial capitalism was consolidating a tendency already distinctive of mercantile capitalism in certain European countries during previous centuries. However, at approximately the end of the nineteenth century, there arose the consumer society and its corresponding behavior termed consumerism— often negatively connoted because it was considered symptomatic of the alienation of people who are “identifying with products through the qualities they promote and buying goods in the hope of acquiring the social value ascribed to them” (Craik 2009, 147). In fact, of all consumption goods, clothes most enable people to fulfill two apparently contradictory desires: (1) incorporate and exhibit the social expectations corresponding to their socioeconomic status, gender, and age, and (2) manifest their personal preferences and aspirations, while also enacting the type of person that they want to be or become. For example, clothes serve to make one appear older or younger; have a more feminine or masculine, or indeed androgynous, appearance; resemble a busy professional or a lazy fop; display rejection of the dictates of mass culture; or exhibit the insignia of successful social integration. It is for this reason that the fashion industry is at the center of the controversy on the social effects of its products. The fashion industry, with its creations and brands, touts a wide range of identity models catering to the most diverse expressive desires. However, because this offer is made by an industrial—and therefore standardized—manufacturing system, it reaches the public via intense marketing campaigns intended to persuade consumers that one particular product is the best. It thus reduces consumers’ margins of autonomous expressiveness in their choices of which clothes to purchase and use. Consequently, the consumption of fashion can be read from two opposite points of view. On the one hand, it can be taken to be indicative of individual preferences. In this case, fashions are considered to be the expressions

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of different social strata hierarchically ordered in a pyramid. The base of this pyramid consists of the lower classes, which are more numerous, with low purchasing power, and whose consumption is geared to accessing increasingly broad categories of goods. On moving up the pyramid, one first finds the middle classes, followed by the upper class and the aristocracy. These classes are increasingly less numerous, with greater spending capacity, and with expectations of distinction more sophisticated than those of the lower classes. On the other hand, fashion consumption can be viewed as a response to the clothing supply by firms, which design their collections by combining particular levels of quality with particular levels of stylistic content. Brands are performing an important role in all this process. Fashion brands provide consumers with a sort of guarantee as to identity. Clothing can act as a mask that covers the self, or as an encoded external means to cope with uncertainties about who one is and to protect oneself against the judgments of others. Brands, in fact, furnish a normative template on the basis of which people can shape their image and behavior. People attribute reliability to brands and accept their power to influence their identities. There is, however, another type of relationship between consumers and brands. The increasing individualization of Western cultures induces some people to be suspicious of brands. This individualization is accompanied by the absence (or at least the weakness) of social evaluation standards (values, norms, priorities, etc.). In this situation, there are many who do not rely on the power of brands but instead, fearful of being reduced to mere brand wearers, prefer to exercise their personal critical thought and seek to find undercodified garments (the little black dress, denim, unbranded clothing) to deal with their lack of self-confidence and the uncertainty caused by others’ judgments.

The Fashion Consumer The end consumer is someone who buys his or her items of clothing exercising the power to choose and decide how to spend the money allocated to clothing in the spending basket. He or she is characterized by a mix of sociocultural features that makes him or her so demanding that companies can no longer count on being able to impose a predefined style on consumers, notes Mike Easey.

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However, companies develop (create and industrialize) their collections according to a representation of some sort of model consumer with his or her tastes, spending power, leisure activities, work, relational networks, and so on. In the contemporary fashion system, strategic planning departments shape the model consumer on the basis of accumulated selling and marketing experiences, as well as by means of sociocultural analysis and market research. They represent the consumer as seeking a product that comprises quality, price, and design. These three properties are today sought even by fast fashion collections, but consumers seek a suitable combination of all three of these properties even if they are big spenders. Today’s consumers have a highly differentiated conception of quality that covers not only material aspects, such as fabrics, tailoring, and duration, but also immaterial features of the shopping experience, such as the product’s image performance, salespeople’s attitudes, and post-sales assistance. They can decide how much they are willing to spend on each of these aspects, and this decision may vary from one occasion to the next. Independently of their spending capacity, consumers repeatedly change market level for their purchasing. Furthermore, as fashion designers draw their sketches, they have in mind an image of the model wearer of their creations. Often, the woman or man that they imagine is the model on the catwalk, a person whose body is quite different from those of normal people: collections for fashion shows are designed for 1.85-meter-tall girls, weighing 42 kilos (6 ft., 93 lbs.)—not exactly the average woman. Apart from the anthropological and ethical concerns raised by the exaggerated thinness of female models’ bodies, the gap between their bodies and those of real people introduces a specific dimension into the strategic modeling of the consumer in the fashion industry. That is the process in which consumers are involved when they compare the model’s image with their own body’s image, a process that companies try to anticipate. This is what fashion designers and marketing and advertising professionals call the dream aura of fashion items and brands: the creation of a desirable image to which consumers must be attracted, and which is different from their empirical bodies; according to Colin Campbell, it induces consumers to desire something new, to buy, use, dismiss, and desire again. To conclude, the modeling by most companies of a specific target of consumers, even if located in the middle and lowbrow levels of

the market, has produced a circle. Different strata of consumers become more and more demanding while firms compete fiercely to capture their preferences. They do that by giving products and brands an increasingly differentiated immaterial content that makes consumers even more well trained in the choosing process. Thus, the consumer has been portrayed since the end of the 1980s as somebody able to choose whatever he or she likes among fashion items. This is probably the accomplishment of the democratization of fashion, since it has become a mainstream form of agency for most social strata. Fashion houses have sought to respond to this situation by extending as far as possible the imaginary worlds offered to consumers. They have done so by multiplying the brands and lines located at every level of the consumption pyramid, from the level of mass market to that of luxury global brands. As a consequence, one witnesses today something like a semiotic saturation: each fashion brand tells its own story (through images, advertisements, words) to convince people of the novelty, beauty, youthfulness, and uniqueness of the world of meanings that it suggests. However, because of the enormous number of brands, the specificities and qualifying differences of most brands are not really perceivable by people, who are increasingly accustomed to selecting and mixing different fashion items to perform the image that they believe best suited to them. This phenomenon has two main consequences. The first is perceptual saturation. There are too many distinctions and too many resemblances among the brands and items displayed in shop windows, as well as in magazines, on web pages, and on advertisement hoardings. None of this facilitates the task of choosing among meanings and goods. The second consequence is that sophisticated consumers no longer believe in the claims and promises of the most important, globally supplied, and advertised brands. Sophisticated consumers include a fraction of demanding consumers: those with quite strong purchasing power and who possess an elaborated cultural capital and a complex accumulated shopping experience. They occupy the highest levels of the social distinction ladder and seek to find new fields of distinction. Emanuela Mora See also Branding; Clothing Consumption; Conspicuous Consumption; Department Stores; Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Identity; Moralities; Taste

Fashion Forecasters

Further Readings Barnes, Liz, and Gaynor Lea-Greenwood. “Fast Fashion.” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 10, no. 3 (2006): 329–344. Barthes, Roland. “Histoire et sociologie du vêtement. Quelques observations méthodologiques.” Les Annales 3 (1957): 430–441. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Blumer, Howard. “Fashion.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 5, edited by D. L. Sills, 341–345. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries. Vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. London: Collins, 1981. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1987. Craik, Jennifer. Fashion: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Easey, Mike. Fashion Marketing. Oxford: Blackwell Science, 2002. Fallers, Lloyd A. “A Note on the ‘Trickle Effect.’” The Public Opinion Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1954): 314–321. Flügel, John Carl. The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogart Press, 1930. Gilbert, David. “From Paris to Shanghai. The Changing Geography of Fashion’s World Cities.” In Fashion’s World Cities, edited by C. Breward and D. Gilbert, 3–32. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Goffman, Erving. “Symbols of Class Status.” The British Journal of Sociology 2, no. 4 (1951): 294–304. Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Meyersohn, Rolf, and Elihu Katz. “Notes on a Natural History of Fads.” The American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 594–601. Rouse, Elizabeth. Understanding Fashion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 541–558. First published 1904. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899. Wilson Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003.

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FASHION FORECASTERS Fashion forecasters are professionals who predict colors, fabrics, silhouettes, and design details that are relevant to the zeitgeist. Fashion refers to the prevailing style or custom. The term can be applied to many forms of expression (architecture, art, home furnishings) but is most commonly associated with mode of dress. By nature, fashion is dynamic; it reflects the ideas, events, and people in society that influence us. It responds to our behavior and reflects our mood. Forecasters help those in fashion identify emerging trends on their way up the fashion curve. They help to guide the element of change that makes fashion a big business in today’s global marketplace; newness induces people to buy. Fashion theory suggests that fashion trends may trickle down, trickle up, or trickle across. Trends that are derived from fashion runways, adopted in the luxury market, and then adapted for the mass market are said to trickle down. Trends that emanate from the streets and are imitated by designers, celebrities, and those in the higher socioeconomic segment are said to trickle up. (The popularity of denim and the youth movement in the late 1960s are examples.) The trickle-across theory suggests that the accelerating ability of the mass market to interpret fashion at any price point gives rise to fashions that are adopted simultaneously—in any given fashion season, consumers at any price point may select from a range of styles that satisfy their personal taste. Fast fashion purveyors, such as H&M and Zara, have perpetuated trickle-across fashion. Fashion forecasters track trends that trickle down, up, and across. They look for cultural elements that make certain colors, fabrics, silhouettes, or details relevant. The growth of Starbucks is credited with making brown a cool color. An interest in sustainability creates buzz about green. With a long-term interest in sustainability, green as a fashion color may morph into new shades of green, or blues and blue-greens that represent the water and the sky. A reference to a particular country or culture may be popularized through a native handicraft used as fabrication or trim (e.g., batik fabrics) or through a silhouette or detail from that culture’s native dress; references may be expressed in either a historic or traditional mode (e.g., Japanese kimono) or in a modern-day context. Forecasters can suggest applications for new textile

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technology that speeds up the commercialization process such as in adaptations of techno-fabrics used in the Olympics. Consumers of fashion may not consciously think about the symbolism of their fashion choices, but subliminally they understand their relevance and respond to a somewhat consistent message across the marketplace. To make these connections, forecasters must have keen powers of observation and the ability to connect the dots. One headline catches their attention; a casual conversation reinforces the message; a television show deals with a similar topic. A trend forecaster identifies the issues, people, and places that their customers are thinking about. This ability helps forecasters to make fashion relevant in a way that draws in consumers and motivates them to buy. The field of fashion forecasting emerged in the late 1960s. Today, fashion forecasters may be employed by large retail product developers that want to ensure that the trends projected throughout their stores convey a consistent message. Others are employed by service bureaus that sell their forecasts to fabric manufacturers, wholesale brand product developers, and private brand retail product developers. Fashion forecasting services may sell products that are comprehensive in scope or products that specialize in color, fabric, or silhouettes and details. Like fashion brands, each forecasting product is designed to appeal to a particular segment of the market. The product may be delivered in the form of glossy books with color and fabric samples as well as images of directional runway looks; as daily or weekly e-mails with images and observations from around the globe; or as an interactive, dynamic website. Fashion forecasters may work as much as two years in advance of the season if working with the textile sector or about nine months in advance if working primarily with the retail sector. Color projections are made the earliest, then fabric, and then silhouette and detail predictions—the same order in which design decisions are made. A forecaster’s approach is typically geared to the target market. Those that specialize in the young adult market are frequently web-based and may be nicknamed “cool hunters” or “buzz agents.” They focus their research on trickle-up and trickle-across trends using agents stationed globally, who take photographs of what they see on the streets. They pay attention to blogs and respond to pop culture.

More traditional fashion forecasters scour the fashion centers of New York, Paris, London, and Milan; they cover the designer runway shows and monitor what’s happening on the street. These services may have a web presence but often distribute hard-copy forecasts to their clients as well. In either case, they interpret the plethora of trend options, focusing on the ones that will resonate with specific groups of customers. Some observers believe that fashion forecasting services in the United States are somewhat more derivative—relying heavily on interpreting what they see in stores around the globe and on designer runways—whereas European fashion forecasters rely more on primary research and relate their predictions to what’s happening in the world around us rather than what’s happening on the runways. Sandra Keiser See also Branding; Clothing Consumption; Cool Hunters; Design; Desire; Fashion; Fashion Industry; Licensing of Clothing Brands

Further Readings Brannon, Evelyn L. Fashion Forecasting. New York: Fairchild Publications, 2005. Keiser, Sandra, and Myrna Garner. Beyond Design: The Synergy of Apparel Product Development. New York: Fairchild Publications, 2007. Seivewright, Simon. Research and Design. Lausanne, Switzerland: AVA Publishing, 2007. Waters, Robyn. The Trendmaster’s Guide: Get a Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next. New York: Penguin Group, 2005.

FASHION INDUSTRY Fashion has psychological, social, and cultural dimensions. It is an important link between individual and collective life. One can see the popular culture, political positions, intellectual ideas, and religious and cultural prescriptions expressed in the appearance of an individual. Georg Simmel suggests that fashion is synonymous with modernity, existing in sufficiently democratic societies where there is, through the possibility of class mobility, the danger of absorption and even the obliteration of established hierarchies. Fashion has its roots in the desire to imitate others

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and to follow socially established guidelines, and the need to differentiate oneself from others—to be an individual. Simmel argues that when these antagonistic principles are mediated by fashion, they exist in a dialectical relationship to one another. Though Simmel acknowledges that a counterinfluence can operate, in his model, the fashion cycle is driven largely by the elite who, when emulated by the lower classes, saw the need to innovate so as to maintain a distinctive appearance. Today these two fundamental principles are still in operation, but with fashion becoming a major global industry, the playing field has expanded to include all types of innovators: brands, designers, celebrities, youth culture, trendsetters drawn from all social realms (from the underclass to the elite), journalists, marketers, forecasters, and consumers themselves (who can be divided into market segments each with different preferences). Indeed, today individuals can use hypermodern fashion to express the multiple individual and collective identities that they switch on and off depending on the context.

History To give a short history of the fashion industry, one might say that the couturier came into existence out of the necessity to create signs of distinction for those who wanted to display their dominant status. As more people entered the middle class and as technology and industry advanced to allow clothing to be manufactured at lower prices, manufacturers provided fashionable clothing to a wider audience. By the early twentieth century, industrial clothing manufacture gave way to more fashionable mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing industry. As the twentieth century progressed, fashion became a major cultural force. While American fashion has to an extent followed its own more democratic trajectory, by the 1960s, Paris was no longer the only acknowledged arbiter of fashion, nor was the sole referent the upperclass woman for whom the couturier designed. In the past, creation was synonymous with luxury and with the vision of a couturier, and fashion was largely confined to the upper echelons of society. Industrial clothing intended for the masses lacked the aesthetic properties, and the immediacy, that would qualify it as fashion. One could argue that the fashion designer, as opposed to the more exclusive couturier, came into

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existence when enough people had the means to purchase markers of elite status, and as Jean Baudrillard says, signs began to become detached from their reference points, that is, a fundamental reality or a definite order. Whereas in the past fashion was principally a means of conveying one’s social status (authority, wealth, gender) and the social expectations around these statuses, as signs became commodified, individuals could more freely use these signs for their own purposes: to display real or imagined social status; to express ideals, an oppositional stance, sexual desirability, spirituality, and personality. These attributes can be split into many subcategories. Yves Saint Laurent expresses a different type of sexuality than Abercrombie and Fitch. These archetypes themselves change within firms, and over time, and certainly from one season to the next—or with the release of a new line of clothing. This happens just as the mythologies of a culture (let us say, on what constitutes sexual attractiveness) become less cohesive—unhinged as they are from a central logic or common morality. Consumers too are able to creatively construct an appearance, further diluting any message that a given designer may intend to convey. In the decades leading up to the turn of the twenty-first century, the structure of the fashion industry—the way styles are created and the processes by which they are produced, distributed, and marketed—experienced major change. As fashion in the 1970s became more synonymous with democracy—adding youth and rebellion to its essence, whereas before it was guided more so by norms of social status—it also became synonymous with business, setting the stage for branding and marketing. In the later 1970s, ready-to-wear fashion turned toward combining fashionably designed clothing— what became known as designer fashion—with the capabilities of a powerful and large manufacturing industry. This process began after World War II when competitive manufacturers began to outsource work to low-waged factories in Asia and Latin America. Complex global commodity chains requiring subcontractors in a variety of locations enabled industrial fashion to produce a large volume of clothing at reasonable prices and to thus allow firms themselves to allocate more attention to fashion design and marketing. Driven by economic interest and consumer demand, a division between design, marketing, and sales in developed countries

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and production and sourcing in less-developed areas of the world began in the 1980s.

Fashion in Contemporary Society The significance of fashion as a global force in contemporary society has increased to such an extent, encompassing—or one might say infiltrating—more and more domains in the popular culture and in culture and society more generally: entertainment, tourism, leisure, media, art, education, publishing, politics, technology, business, architecture, sports, advertising, and ecology. From couture fashion, limited runs, and the ability to customize items oneself, to fast fashion and knockoffs, and to fashion with a moral dimension—sweatshop free and eco-friendly— one can say that fashion has entered a new age, the age of hypermodernity. Hypermodernity is driven by a consumer-based logic of change and excess. It has the capacity to absorb the past and recycle it according to an individualistic dynamic and to embody the spirit of the present, notes Gilles Lipovetsky. Hypermodern fashion can be distinguished from all other fashion, namely, ready-to-wear before about the 1980s and traditional haute couture, based on several characteristics: 1. The absolute endpoints between luxury and mass-produced fashion have been abolished. 2. A multiplicity of styles and a subsequent lack of coherence replaces the ideal of allegiance to a single trend in the fashion system as a whole. 3. Hypermodern fashion signals a rapidity of change or shorter cycles. 4. There are more choices, and they are accessible at a variety of price points. 5. Fashion is responsive to the consumer in both design and presentation. 6. Brand extension and diversification.

With the advancement of mass production, its greater flexibility, and the democratization of desire vis-à-vis the adoption of a consumer capitalist ethos of continuous improvement of material and aesthetic conditions, there is no longer an absence of style. In hypermodern fashion, strict boundaries are dissolved and ideas are taken from the always-expanding fashion world at large. Collaborations exist between “high” and “low” fashion, and consumers

themselves are mixing the two. Mass culture and high culture in fashion also converge. Fashion makes itself more accessible through marketing and communication strategies aimed at reaching more people and providing customers with a unique experience of the brand. The couturiers are not imitated as they were in the past; rather the zeitgeist of fashion— styles and trends in the popular culture; celebrities, music, film, and designers like Karl Lagerfeld, Tom Ford, John Galliano, who themselves are stars and as such become part of the fashion zeitgeist—are a source of inspiration. It is the drive for newness than animates fashion, anchored in a society that takes this as its starting point. Dany Jacobs argues that innovation occurs in response to a particular sociocultural context in which people are made ready to accept certain kinds of changes. While couture continues to play an important role, and the model described previously is still operational, it is today one of many models. It has been compromised considerably and is no longer the primary force inspiring innovation in fashion. In the time of hypermodern fashion, couture fashion, as Amy Spindler (1996) puts it, is “only an engine to drive other business at couture houses: ready-towear apparel, perfumes and makeup licensees.” Yet it is not, as she explains, the only force. In fact, the “old names have been revived . . . not with couture, but with hip ready-to-wear, like Prada and Gucci, . . . houses that have made clear that publicity that comes from the huge attendance at the ready to wear shows is enough.” Diana Crane highlights how the mythology of fashion says otherwise: However, although luxury fashion designers are still presented in the media as setting fashion each season, there is often little consensus about the direction in which fashion is moving; instead designers produce a large number of “propositions”—a grab bag of ideas. Industrial fashion adopts some trends from luxury fashion but also conforms to the “bottom-up” model, coopting innovations from working class and other subcultures which it sells to more privileged groups. (2000, 161)

The cycle of change in fashion has accelerated with the ability to design, produce, and distribute goods quickly. Alongside an increase in the speed in production and distribution channels is a permanent renewal with regular creation of new models. Fast fashion firms, on average, offer new items

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every six to ten weeks. There has been a move from a twice-yearly seasonal model in haute couture to an expanded seasonal model in ready-to-wear that spans four or five seasons, and a variable model in hyperfashion. H&M can have lower-cost versions of clothing seen on the runway in as little as two weeks, notes Robert Murphy, as can Zara with its own factories. An American Apparel marketer explains, in an interview with Veronica Manlow, that the firm “may execute 40 campaigns in a season.” It is possible with the factories on the premises in Los Angeles, and running on a twenty-four-hour basis, to design something on a Friday and have it out in small quantities to stores on Monday morning. For overseas factories, the fast turnaround time, coupled with an unpredictable economy, can lower wages and make working conditions less favorable. Hyperfashion is not only fast but also accessible. As of late 2010, H&M has 2,000 stores in thirtyeight markets. One hears often of the well-known international “fast fast” retailers like H&M and Zara, but hyperfashion reaches every corner of the globe and every budget. The accessibility of actual fashion is shadowed by its all-encompassing presence not only in the form of paid advertising on television, radio, billboards, print ads, and in new media, in product placements, and at events, but also within the popular culture in all forms of media, both commercial and consumer initiated. Responsiveness to the consumer is an important feature of hyperfashion. Zara conceives of fashion as a process that reflects both the consumer and trends that are present in the fashion world. Meeting this demand is of course not possible without some form of copying. While fashion is changing at breakneck speed, it also involves a contradictory process coexisting within the fashion system where some fashion largely remains the same. Van den Bosch of H&M says that despite its ability to react quickly with new styles, speed is “not really so important.” It is more important, she says, to “understand the long-term trends. Silhouettes don’t change so fast.” Sales figures are analyzed “to know what’s right for our consumer” (Murphy 2008). Brands extend themselves in new areas (home, children’s, accessories), reproducing features of their own identity. The Ralph Lauren home collection embodies the “timeless, and truly American” style. This expansion process reaches far and wide, outside of the traditional boundaries of apparel, accessories,

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and fragrance. Ralph Lauren opens a restaurant in Chicago with antique furniture, fixtures, and memorabilia that evoke not only the aura of his brand but also that of his retail stores. Acquiring other brands is a way to keep a separate identity yet to expand and gain market share for the firm. Brands also diversify within themselves, spanning luxury to mass levels of fashion. H&M, like many firms, has a pyramid system with “ultrafashionable” looks at the top, moderate-level fashion in the middle, and basic looks at the bottom. The fast fashion at the top changes all the time and possesses an aura of luxury in that it is scarce and exclusive. Yet, as Murphy explains, basic sales drive volume. H&M makes most of its money at this level. Each fashion firm has four main tasks to accomplish: (1) creation of an image, (2) translation of an image into a product, (3) presentation of the product, and (4) selling of the product. The image must encapsulate social representations: attitudes and norms present in the culture that can resonate with a targeted audience. The image a brand creates and expresses through products must reflect the identity of the brand—what it stands for. Ideally, these products will be sold at various price points and will be positioned to appeal to a variety of markets. Stores today have become an important anchor of brand identity, expressing through their architecture, interior design, art, and location a desired image and experience. To accomplish these tasks, the fashion system relies on strategic management, complex commodity chains, and interplay between competing interests of designers, managers, consumers, investors, suppliers, retailers, and merchandisers. If mapped out, the hyperfashion system takes on a form akin to a complex network, with interconnected nodes. It is no longer the hierarchical structure, as one might argue, that it became during the reign of haute couture when to some extent the client lost initiative and the “free play of personal difference” that had previously characterized fashion (Lipovetsky 1994, 64, 75). Today this initiative has been returned to the individual, though it is linked to the economy and to technology and is animated considerably by new marketing and communication strategies. The yearning for a personal style and an engagement with the popular culture by a large public interested in fashion is bridged by designers and by the corporate concept of a lifestyle vis-à-vis the brand and its carefully manufactured image. Firms

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sell concepts around which people can identify themselves. What brands do to make sense of the situation where disorder prevails and order is elusive and at best temporary is to construct order. Brands create narratives or mythologies around which they define themselves. Stories allow one to establish linkages and to generate concepts that give coherence to the brand and provide a means by which its message and its messengers—the products—can be understood and made sensible. Amid this boundlessness of fashion, then, is its opposite: a move to rehabilitate and to create anew more direct, sometimes unequivocal, signifiers. The luxury brands become the new ambassadors of elite status, their products emblems of belonging in an otherwise inconclusive social order. When fashion achieves distinction, through links to status/prestige, it does so now through the heritage of the brands themselves—brands signifying themselves—or when it creates fantasy, desire, or, quite the opposite, a sort of practicality through a variety of modifications—so long as this prestige, fantasy, or practicality resonates with enough people—there exists an impetus for it to be copied. Arbiters of fashion copy one another in the hypermodern context where clothing designed by top brands is sometimes not structurally or aesthetically different from lower priced or more casual fashions. Fantasy takes on a new meaning in the absence of governing systems that demand clarity and conformity. Fantasy occurs around attributions of a certain lifestyle that a brand provides access to. Firms are purveyors of aspirational desires through the mythologies they create. When a certain measure of clarity is attained, for example, by Ralph Lauren, whose clothes connote elements of an upper-class New England lifestyle, many others—for instance, Tommy Hilfiger, J. Crew, or Nautica—will play off this aesthetic that has proven to have an appeal with consumers. Polo shirts will be copied, as will other elements of this lifestyle. These brands will make it their own by taking it in new and different directions: Hilfiger appealing to a younger audience and making the look more playful—indeed more democratic—abstracting, reappropriating, and inventing elements that resonate with their own vision and objectives. Each brand claims authenticity in the vision and the lifestyle it presents. That these mythologies are unreal—or, more accurately, hyperreal—makes them no less crucial. Such visions, whether deep or superficial, fact or fiction, are real and meaningful in their effect on the

collective representations in a culture, the economy, labor, and the environment. Veronica Manlow See also Branding; Cool Hunters; Culture Industries; Design; Fashion; Simmel, Georg; Style; Taste

Further Readings Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage Publications, 2000. Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Jacobs, Dany. Adding Values: The Cultural Side of Innovation. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Veenman Publishers, 2007. Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Translated by Katherine Porter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Lipovetsky, Gilles. Hypermodern Times. Translated by Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Manlow, Veronica. Designing Clothes: Culture and Organization of the Fashion Industry. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Murphy, Robert. “Fashion’s Faster Face: New Creative Director to Drive H&M’s Growth.” Women’s Wear Daily, March 25, 2008. http://www.highbeam.com/ doc/1G1-177190044.html (accessed February 1, 2009). Rubinstein, Ruth P. Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” International Quarterly 10, no. 1 (October 1904): 130–155. Reprinted in American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (May 1957): 541–558. Spindler, Amy. “Investing in Haute Couture’s Lower-Brow Future.” The New York Times, January 22, 1996. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E1D 61E39F931A15752C0A960958260 (accessed January 29, 2009).

FEMININITY Femininity refers to a set of attitudes, characteristics, and behaviors that are considered typical of or appropriate to the female sex in a given culture. These traits are generally labeled as opposite and complementary to others attributed to the male sex within broader dichotomic conceptualizations. Nonetheless, the meanings of femininity and masculinity vary greatly

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from one society to another, within any society over time, within each individual over time, and among different individuals in one group at one point in time. It is fair to say that in Western culture, femininity has been traditionally associated with qualities such as nurturing, understanding, submission, sensitivity, creativity, intuition, and passion, whereas aggressiveness, rationality, dominance, competitiveness, and objectivity have been conversely attributed to the typical or the appropriate way of being a man or a boy. This difference has been ascribed to both innate and sociocultural causes, although the importance attributed to the former has decreased over time: socialization and environmental conditioning are now considered to be the most significant triggers of different qualities, attitudes, and behaviors in women and men. More precisely, since the 1970s, social theorists have generally referred to sex when alluding to men and women’s biological attributes (thus making reference to biological femaleness and maleness) and to gender when describing their culturally defined characteristics or the social organization of their lives (thus making reference to femininity and masculinity). The main conceptual tool at the core of the relation between these two dimensions is the sex-role theory, which defines gender as a set of cultural roles transmitted to individuals according to their biological sex. It was initially supposed that sex roles were unconsciously absorbed by individuals during childhood, were reproduced in their interests and behaviors, and remained consistent throughout their life span. Femininity and masculinity were defined as two opposite poles, and any deviation from the path they delineated was considered inadequate psychosexual development. Research has investigated in more detail the way in which individuals are conditioned by gender stereotypes, revealing that individuals’ actual behavior in everyday life may differ greatly from the dominant gender standards. Anthropologists have questioned the universality of attributes of femininity and masculinity, and feminist scholars have shown to what extent qualities traditionally defined as ideally feminine have been devalued in comparison with masculine ones. Consumer-related research did not explicitly devote analyses on gender identity until the 1960s. But from the beginning of consumption studies, practices supposed to derive from typically feminine attitudes have played an important role

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in theorization and historical accounts. The development of capitalism during the second half of the eighteenth century and the growth in the availability and variety of commodities were understood by contemporary social theorists in a gendered perspective: the production/consumption divide was supposed to correspond to the organization of gender difference in the bourgeois family. On the one hand, production has been valued as a sober, rational, and useful activity, associated with masculinity (whose complementarity of, if not superiority over, femininity was therefore celebrated, albeit in a rather circuitous manner). On the other hand, consumption—shopping, refined taste, and display of luxury goods— came to stand for waste, extravagance, triviality, and insatiability, and was identified as a field for the accomplishment of femininity. The way Émile Zola describes women’s supposed triviality and frivolity in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883) is insightful. Recounting the development of modern department stores in Paris, he depicts women shoppers entering after the seasonal displays have been completed as a crowd driven by an irresistible desire to throw themselves into luxury and be lost. The same suggestions can be found in the first social theorizations about the leisured-class mode of consumption. Thorstein Veblen (1899) describes upper-middle-class women as a subsidiary leisured class, whose task was to perform vicarious leisure and consumption activities in the name of the household and its male head. In his account of the life of the wealthier classes, conspicuous waste was the sole economic function of the woman, since her expenditure and leisure would redound to the credit of her master rather than to her own credit. The more expensive and unproductive the women were, the more they made a show of leisure, the more effectively they contributed to the reputation of the male head of the household. Upper-class woman’s femininity was therefore constructed, according to Veblen, as the alienation from useful work: the lady’s sphere was within the household, which she should “beautify” and of which she should be the “chief ornament.” This was reflected even in “feminine” dress, which testified the wearer’s exemption from or incapacity of all productive employment. The association between femininity and fashion was also maintained by Georg Simmel, who suggested in Fashion (1904) that standardization and diversification performed by fashion enabled women

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to express themselves through a shared language and to promote their individual prominence, which was denied to them in other fields. Other historians and sociologists of consumption have gathered evidence of the role of female wages in the expansion of consumer culture but have concluded that women saw themselves first and foremost as consumers within a family and household. It has also been noted that during periods of war in the twentieth century, women gained a degree of autonomy when taking over men’s roles in paid employment; nonetheless, it has also been stressed that in the postwar period, they were turned into passive consumers and reimprisoned in the domestic sphere. Femininity has therefore been constructed around the notions of domesticity, motherhood, and consumption by both consumer culture and its critics for a long time. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) is one of the best-known assessments of the consequences of these assumptions. The “problem that has no name,” which opened her book, focused on the sense of dissatisfaction experienced by suburban housewives for the lack of career opportunities and the restrictions of the role she was forced to play. The female consumer was therefore depicted as passive, dependent, and naive: her sole function was to satisfy the false needs inspired by advertising. Feminist critics of beauty practices in the 1970s and 1980s similarly argued that it was necessary to fight the fashion system and femininity-marking consumption practices, sometimes in the name of a return to a “natural femaleness” or “true needs” preceding social and cultural elaboration. African American feminists have highlighted the ways in which fashion, consumption, and beauty practices made white feminine beauty the universal standard of femininity. Other feminist accounts have seen femininity as a form of interior colonization (e.g., Millett 1970) and argued that in “becoming feminine” (even through consumption), women were alienated from their body, infantilized, and left with no dignity or self-esteem. More recently, these accounts have been reassessed. It has been shown that they underestimated the complexity of the consumer culture, in depicting women as victims, rather than considering how they might have transformed and resisted the dominant notions of femininity. The portrait of the naive housewife, who fulfills her femininity in consumption, ignores the large number of married women who continued to occupy part-time and low-paid

jobs in the postwar period, as well as the fact that being a full-time housewife and mother was desirable though unattainable for many working-class women. More generally, everyday fashion and beauty practices have been studied as they construct, produce, or perform a feminine self through complex decisions, skills, creativity, pleasure, and pain. It has also been noted that the analysis that discriminated between rational and impulsive consumers reproduced gendered imaginaries. Similarly, those goods and those products of popular culture directed at women—from cosmetics to soap operas, romantic fiction, and magazines— which have been traditionally treated as ephemeral and trivial, are now being taken seriously. Since they are supposed to respond to women’s needs, they contribute to building a shared notion of what femininity is. This does not mean, however, that women themselves are not able to create their own image by appropriating them: the images of femininity that shape material culture are not automatically reproduced when objects are consumed. Recent research has explored gendered ways to consume goods and femininity-constructing practices of consumption. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough provide a wide-ranging collection of historical essays on the interrelations of modern consumption practices and changing gender roles in the United States and Europe. By focusing on the way sexualized metaphors applied to the advertising and the consumption of goods stand for elusive social relations, the authors highlight the myriad conflicts over power that are included in politics of consumption and illustrate the transformative powers of capitalist-driven consumption in constantly reshaping notions of authentic womanliness. Femininity is thus shown as the result of women’s appropriation of objects and negotiation with the symbolic imaginary around them. Adrian Forty similarly describes how differential product designs could communicate ideals of femininity and masculinity supposed to correspond to biological sex differences, whereas Emma Casey and Lydia Martens analyze domestic cultures as sites where socioeconomic relations are daily produced and reproduced, exploring the complex universe of meanings underpinning women’s consumption practices and their negotiations of parameters of normative femininity. This set of studies suggests, on the whole, that femininity is a social construction that shapes

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practices of consumption just as it is constructed by such practices in turn. Many contemporary researchers on consumer cultures and lifestyles have criticized the traditional, static, and one-dimensional conceptualization of the dichotomy of femininity/ masculinity, suggesting that there is a multiplicity of established ways to be “feminine” or “masculine” according to social class, age, culture, race, ethnic group, sexual orientation, and so on. Such researchers, like other social theorists, refer to “femininities” and “masculinities” in the plural and stress the diversity within both female and male behaviors and across them. Consumerism has provided opportunities for the expression of gender differences, but also for creating new meanings of social identities (as recent lesbian and gay studies on consumption have proved). Despite abstract, monolithic conceptualizations, empirical research has shown femininity to be a contested concept. Rossella Ghigi See also Beauty Myth; Cosmetics; Feminism and Women’s Magazines; Feminist Movement; Gender; Masculinity; Simmel, Georg; Women’s Magazines

Further Readings Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination. London: Routledge, 1990. Brownmiller, Susan. Femininity. London: Paladin, 1984. Casey, Emma, and Lydia Martens, eds. Gender and Consumption. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. de Grazia, Victoria, with Ellen Furlough, eds. The Sex of Things. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963. Hollows, Joanne. Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S MAGAZINES From their beginning more than three centuries ago, women’s magazines have provided a public arena for debates and discourses about women’s role in

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society. Their popularity is due not only to their offering a space for public discussion of women’s concerns, but also for providing their readership with suggestions for and guidelines on everyday life issues, such as improving private relationships, beautifying the body, managing the household, spending leisure time, and buying and using commodities in the proper way. Many historical and cultural accounts have emphasized this medium’s responsibility in contributing to the rise of women’s consciousness of their identity as women, and in exciting the feeling of belonging to a group with specific interests and needs. They have been defined as the only products of pop culture that take women’s concerns seriously, change with women’s reality, and are mostly written by women, for women, about women’s issues. Nevertheless, their female identity-marking topics have long been, and often still are, the target of a condemnation by feminist theorists and movement, accusing them of justifying patriarchal structures and beliefs. This kind of criticism has been mostly addressed toward mass-distributed women’s magazines in the industrial era. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the changing mode of production contributed to the modification of the roles of men and women in and out of the household. The public world became the domain of production and of men, while the private world of the house was gradually associated with domesticity, intimate affections, and women. At the same time, a sizable middle class who worked hard and increased their wealth was set apart from both the aristocracy and the new working class; therefore, new kinds of consumption and taste patterns were established. These changes strongly affected periodicals’ potential readership. Up to this point, such periodicals were addressed to upper-class women interested in fashion, literature, and leisure time; they also presented articles on public affairs and national and international news, which were gradually replaced by fashion and clothing. But a number of periodicals for women living in cities and confined to the domestic domain soon came to light and rapidly reached a mass distribution. What these magazines bolstered now was an ideal of femininity that fit with the new arrangement of gender roles: the model of respectable wife who did not work outside the home and was financially supported by a breadwinning husband was replaced by the middle-class woman occupied with supervising the running of the

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home and the education of her children. Women’s function became identified with being the retreat for the master of the household, and women’s magazines both reflected and reproduced this ideal by praising so-called feminine domestic virtues. Clothes and home decor became the sign of both a husband’s status and a woman’s own accomplishments. According to many feminist accounts, this ideology contributed to gender inequalities in and out of the domestic sphere, as it legitimated the organization of the family in capitalist societies and reproduced women’s economic dependence on men. One of the best-known criticisms of magazine’s ideology as reinforcing women’s oppression is Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In this classic text, Friedan examines women’s magazines from before and after World War II. She notes that, even if devoted to traditional concerns as beauty and love, women’s magazines in the 1930s presented an incipient feminism in stories featuring confident and independent heroines involved in careers, encouraging women as citizens to participate in local politics, and advocating social facilities. These topics were replaced in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s by the ideal of a woman whose only ambitions were marriage and motherhood. So the New Woman was substituted by the Happy Housewife Heroine and, in Friedan’s account, readers were socialized to see the world according to these new priorities. Magazines’ success is commonly recognized as their ability to convincingly present advice on all aspects of domestic life in an entertaining way, but if these magazines have the power to keep women within their home, Friedan says, they cannot prevent the good housekeepers from feeling nothingness and from asking the silent question, “Is that all there is?” Other feminist accounts claim that, by the early 1950s, increasing financing by beauty and fashion industries and advertising transformed the message of women’s magazines. Consumption gave a new form to an old ideology of femininity, based on a woman being defined as a chooser and a consumer; according to other authors, this shift in women’s magazines was the presage of feminism’s rupture with consumption. This trend was not effectively challenged until radical feminism reemerged in the 1960s and 1970s. In the escalation of ideas about gender equalities and sexual liberation, a number of new mass-distributed magazines began to suggest that femininity could

successfully combine independence and devotion, brain and beauty, and sex and love, and gave voice to political and social expectations. Some periodicals explicitly rejected puritan lifestyles or masculine attitudes at work; others advocated sexual and economic equality with men; others encouraged women to succeed in their careers for themselves and not through men. Their appeal was often based in their treating these topics with humor and irony, conveying more an optimistic joie de vivre than discontent or anger. According to feminist analysts, though, these commercial magazines did not seriously defy the gendered nature of social relations. Moreover, while some forms of feminism were generally tolerated and supported, the combination of feminism and socialism or political movements was less common in mass-distributed women’s periodicals. At the same time, many activist groups considered the periodical a useful medium for spreading feminist and political messages and created new magazines that were explicitly feminist. More specifically, magazines dedicated to improving women’s role in the public sphere and social condition already existed. In the United States, they date at least from the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights in 1848, and some mainstream periodicals had printed feminist texts even earlier. Some magazines, such as The Lily (1849–1856) or Woman’s Journal (1870–1917), advocated for women’s suffrage and dress reform, equity for working-class women, and divorce reform; others, dedicated to black women’s social conditions, had come into light at the end of the century. But the readership remained small. Only in the 1960s and 1970s did explicitly feminist magazines become popular and gain a relatively large following. Inspired by the second wave of feminist movements, they tried to undermine the taken-forgranted patriarchal assumptions about femininity and women’s lives (e.g., heterosexuality and emotional bonding, motherhood and sexualization of the female body, gender discrimination in the workplace and women’s passivity) and aimed at raising consciousness in their readership through women’s narratives. However, from the mid-1980s onward, the growing financial independence of middle-class women in their twenties and thirties led commercial women’s magazines to reshape the mainstream representations of successful women. A quite unrealistic model of superwoman perfectly performing in the private as

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well as the public domain invaded popular women’s magazines. Feminist cultural analysts recognized that magazines also promoted a new view of household management as a trade requiring skill and intelligence, helped women to develop these skills, and supported the sharing of duties within the family. But still, it was argued, they reinforced women’s domestic responsibility without opening other career paths for women, failing to define womanhood in less essentialist ways. As any other market-driven medium, women’s commercial magazines treated the reader essentially as consumer; therefore, they could not be radically or genuinely liberating. This feminist interpretation softened as it was influenced by studies on pop culture, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism. It was acknowledged that readers’ pleasure played an important role both in consuming and in perceiving these magazines, whose text was no less polysemic than other media. Readers’ role as producers of local and specific meanings rather than ideologically manipulated as cultural dupes of the magazines’ content was stressed. First feminist analyses, it was argued, were based on elitist and inaccurate stereotypes that assume that women readers are not capable of assessing the value of the text. Nonetheless, most research still considers women’s magazines as problematic from a feminist point of view. They are seen as cultural products contributing to the reinforcement of gender inequalities as they promote oppressive images of femininity consistent with dominant interests: women still are depicted in a few stereotyped models, fundamentally as bodies or as nurturers. Even the simple gaze between the woman pictured in the magazine and the woman reading it creates a feminine complicity as it has been historically defined by men, so that this relation among women passes effectively though the symbolic consent of absent men. In other words, it has been argued that the constant unspoken assumption between the magazine and its readership is that women are men’s women, even as they try to be their own. More recently, feminist researchers have found that magazine representations of thinness can be complicit in promoting body dissatisfaction and eating disorders, especially among girls. The magazines constantly remind them to keep their figure while often, at the same time, inviting them to consume sugary and fatty food. It has also been suggested that the vast majority of women’s magazine covers

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contain messages pertaining to physical appearance, which is not the case of magazines targeted to a male audience: instructing women to be a body for others, they suggest that a woman’s personal relationships are just a function of her physical appearance. In sum, feminist evaluation of women’s magazines has changed over time, and it is not possible to define a unique perspective of analysis today. When more involved in cultural studies, feminist research tends to consider magazines’ messages as positive and potentially empowering for young women; in most other cases, it still warns against magazines’ potentially alienating power, as they are able to counter women not only with one another, but also with themselves. Rossella Ghigi See also Audience Research; Childhood; Femininity; Feminist Movement; Gender and the Media; Gendering of Public and Private Space; Print Media; Women’s Magazines

Further Readings Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1963. McCracken, Ellen. Decoding Women’s Magazines. London: Macmillan, 1993. McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture. London: Macmillan, 1991. Tuchman, Gaye, Daniels Arlene Kaplan, and Benèt James, eds. Heart and Home. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Winship, Janice. Inside Women’s Magazines. London: Pandora Press, 1987.

FEMINIST MOVEMENT The feminist movement is a social movement that calls for equal rights and dignity between men and women. In the course of its history, it has given rise to several different forms in practice and theoretical thought, which is why the term feminisms, in the plural, is generally preferred: there are socialist, psychoanalytic, liberal, third-world, postcolonial, multiracial, theological, libertarian, antipornography, and other feminist currents. The feminist movement has radically changed both society and family and individual relationships, laying the foundations for equal opportunities in education and the workplace for millions of women together

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with social mobility, which had historically excluded women. It has changed women’s social, sentimental, sexual, and reproductive lives, stressing desire, the choice of self-determination, and the subjective awareness of their bodies and existence, combating male hetero-determination for them. If formal equality of rights has been attained by the feminist movement in the Western world, much needs to be done on the practical side: even today, one of the most common causes of death in women is violence by men.

Waves Three waves are normally distinguished in the course of feminist history. The first wave (1848–1918) coincides with the suffragette movement, a phenomenon seen to have three factions: the liberal-bourgeois, the conservative-religious, and the socialist wing inspired by Friedrich Engels’s study The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). The second wave (1960–1980) coincides with the civil rights movements and the criticism of the patriarchal, capitalist power structure. The third wave, of poststructuralist inspiration (from 1990), focalizes on the reaction to the backlash of the 1980s. Hubertine Auclair used the term feminism around 1882, although some women in Great Britain had previously referred to this concept. In France, women fought for new family rights during the Revolution: in the wake of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Olympe de Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, in which she pointed out the contradiction in the so-called universality of rights of the French Revolution. In England, in 1792, writer Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Woman; in 1837, utopian socialist Charles Fourier used the term féminisme, specifying how the woman’s role was an indication of the progress of every society. The first date of the feminist movement may be considered to be the Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. Another fundamental date is March 8, 1857, when hundreds of women textile workers in New York went on strike in protest against their own working conditions and those of minors, and were suppressed by the police. There are conflicting theories about the origins of March 8 as an important date within the feminist movement:

another version indicates March 8, 1911, as the date on which about a hundred women workers lost their lives in a factory fire. This date was proposed as International Women’s Day by Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin during the Women’s Conference of the International Socialist Women in Copenhagen (1910). It was also on this occasion that the universal right to vote was called for. March 8 was celebrated for the first time in the United States in 1909, the year in which the “Revolt of Twenty-Thousand” began, a strike that ended in 1910 when workers won the right to establish rules concerning working hours and wages. In 1869, philosopher John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, one of the milestones in feminist thought. His wife, Harriet Taylor, inspired his thought on emancipation and collaborated with him in the theory. In France, between 1872 and 1881, a movement for the universal right to divorce was born. In 1889, the International Socialist Congress in Paris accepted the principle of women’s right to work and equal pay. In 1903, the Women’s Trade Union League was born in the United States. The suffragette movement for the right to vote began in England at the same time; the English suffragettes were opposed to the American suffragettes, who represented a more moderate wing that arose in 1848. In 1917, there was a great women’s demonstration in St. Petersburg against war, an event that lay at the root of the October Revolution, whose provisional government was the first to concede the vote to women together with several other social rights. Women obtained the vote in the United States in 1920. The second wave of feminism originated in the United States in the 1960s and focused on the human body, bringing it to the fore on the political scene. This feminism, with techniques such as selfawareness and slogans like “personal is political,” challenged the exercise of power in Western society, which was based on hierarchy and gender discrimination. In 1953, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), which she wrote after a trip to the United States, was published; the book had an enormous influence on radical feminism in the United States, and on feminism in France in 1968. In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, in which she denounced the role of wife and mother to which women were relegated in U.S. culture (the reformist current). In 1966, Friedan

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founded the National Organization for Women with Aileen Hernandez and Pauli Murray. In 1969, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was published, an analysis that unveiled the relationships of power between the sexes in patriarchal culture, whereby even Marxism did not seem to be an adequate solution since the sex revolution was subordinated to that of the classes. The radical Women’s Liberation Movement and African American and minority women’s activism were operating during the 1960s. In 1970, both Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, which attributed the prevention of women’s full emancipation to society’s confining women to the primary role of reproduction, and Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful, which placed the emphasis on sisterhood as a political practice, were published; these texts expressed the requests of the movement in those years, which had been shown in documents like No More Miss America in 1968, Notes from the First Year in 1968, and Redstockings Manifesto in 1969. At the same time, feminist newspapers, such as the Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement or the magazine Ms., close to radical feminism, began to circulate in many cities. Chicano feminism (Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa) and African American feminism (Frances Beal and Angela Davis) presented a different outlook from white feminism and unmasked the latter’s “essentialist” inspiration (philosophically founded, that is, on an originary, static identity of womanhood that preexisted the social role). These nonwhite feminists aimed to obtain leadership roles, pointing out the restrictiveness of the concept of sisterhood with white and WASP feminists, and highlighting the multiple discrimination they themselves underwent, of sex, race, and class: these concepts would converge in the theory of womanism. Throughout the Western world from the 1960s to the 1980s, women struggled to obtain rights such as abortion, divorce, and equality in the family; the first antiviolence and advisory centers were founded; and many women practiced self-help. During this phase, the lesbian feminist component (Adrienne Rich) was strong, sharing the practices of the separatist struggle. The latter movement was closely linked to the student movements of 1968, to the activism of minority groups and to decolonialization, which were all battles against the oppressive imperialist-capitalist system. In 1975, the United Nations announced the

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International Women’s Year and convened the first World Women’s Conference in Mexico City.

Theories and Studies There are numerous theories and studies relating to feminism. Here only the main ones are discussed. In the 1970s, gender studies became detached from women’s studies. Born within the field of cultural studies, gender studies started out from the premises of the post-structuralist philosophical current, from French deconstructionism and from gay and lesbian studies, and are characterized by a multidisciplinary approach. For gender studies, there is a difference between sex and gender: while sex can be taken as an anatomical fact, gender is the outcome of a cultural superstructure and has to be analyzed as such. One of the first definitions of gender is to be found in the work of the anthropologist Gayle Rubin (The Traffic in Women, 1975). In opposition to this view, the concept of sexual difference developed in the 1980s in France, starting with works of Luce Irigaray (Speculum, 1975; Ethique de la différence sexuelle, 1984). Taking Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Martin Heidegger’s and Jacques Derrida’s philosophies as starting points, Irigaray reappraises the feminine as a positive, civilizing instance, not from the point of view of oppression and deprivation. In particular, the role of the mother is central in the line of transmitting knowledge defined as “matrilinear.” In the 1990s, the theory of gender gave rise in the United States to postmodern feminism and queer studies, which enquire into the identity of gender excluded from the acronym LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), focusing on a sexual orientation that is not normative. According to theorist Judith Butler, gender is too narrow a concept, and it is better to speak of its construction and deconstruction: gender is not a descriptive but a performative category (Gender Trouble, 1990). After the 1990s, on the level of social policies, there has been a backlash compared to many of the conquests that women took to be consolidated; this situation has led to the emergence of new cultural phenomena such as Raunch Culture, a lifestyle in which women voluntarily offer themselves as erotic objects to gain power and strength by adopting the patriarchal stereotypes of femininity. These

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phenomena are characterized as postfeminism, which assumes equality has already been attained and so proposes lifestyles that are apparently liberated yet commercialized. Such lifestyles are embodied through media products such as Sex and the City or Bridget Jones’s Diary: women whose economic independence permits them to buy consumer goods and whose sisterhood is expressed in the rites of shopping and sexual freedom experienced apparently as a form of transgression. However, this lifestyle, too, is a form of “consumption.” Furthermore, despite their apparent independence, these women capitulate to the myth of a Prince Charming at hand if needed to become a pater familias, the sole anchor capable of providing emotional stability to characters imprisoned by the merely aesthetic strength of a winning fictional image of themselves. The outcome is that this image becomes the symbol of flexibility and opportunity in today’s metropolis, but comes close to disintegrating before the mirror of imperfection and old age, a nightmare postponed by the overwhelming number of women resorting to plastic surgery. As of 2011, many states have still not signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which was adopted in 1980 even by many third-world states. To many, this means that the feminist movement, a long and pacific revolution, still has a long way to go. Chiara Cretella See also Femininity; Feminism and Women’s Magazines; Gender; Inequalities; Queer Theory; Sexuality; Social Exclusion; Social Movements

Further Readings Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1959. Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002. McElroy, Wendy. Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.

FINANCIAL SERVICES See Credit; Debt; Network Society

FINE ARTS Fine arts may be defined as activities, or results of activities, involved in a type of human expression in which the application of skill and creativity to the structuring of formal qualities (such as colors, shapes, movements, sounds, etc.) results in an aesthetic whole. Examples range from the Paleolithic Lascaux cave paintings to Michelangelo’s marble sculptures. Any definition of fine arts is likely to be subject to debate, given the difficulties involved in establishing a clear and objective category for this form of human behavior. Throughout history, scholars and philosophers have provided a wide variety of approaches to the topic, ranging from Aristotle’s view of art as imitation, to the Kantian emphasis on the genius of the artist and the disinterested pleasure of the viewer, to Leo Tolstoy’s view of art as communication, Clive Bell’s formalism, John Dewey’s account of art as experience, George Dickie’s institutional theory of art, and so on. Perhaps the usefulness of a definition of art depends on the context in which it is adopted. In the current consumerculture context, a consumer-focused perspective seems most appropriate. In other words, art is that which consumers characterize as such. Indeed, Henrik Hagtvedt and Vanessa M. Patrick (2008) argue that consumers possess a general schema for art, evolved through the millennia of human prehistory and reinforced through more recent cultural developments. Based on these notions, these authors define art as works embodying human expression, characterized primarily by the manner of their creation or execution, irrespective of the presence or absence of concepts, ideas, messages, or functions underlying them, conveyed by them, or achieved by them. Further, emphasis is placed on the creativity and skill applied to this manner in the effort to make something special (see also Dissanayake 1995). There are, of course, many items marketed as art that fall outside such a definition, especially as regards some contemporary art. Typically, consumers do not spontaneously recognize or categorize such works as art. Indeed, the consideration afforded to them usually depends on a context, such as placement in a museum or gallery. Further, a definition with roots in human evolution implies a global relevance, while other definitions tend to be more restricted in terms of historical, geographical, and cultural scope.

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Every known society, since the dawn of humankind, appears to have engaged in activities that consumers from various corners of the world could recognize as artistic behavior. With many contemporary works appearing in today’s highly developed marketplaces, it is often difficult to discern the extent to which their prominence is due to market forces rather than to a universal heritage of artistic behavior. The notion of fine arts as a distinct category of human behavior is itself relatively recent, and the distinction between art and craft was virtually nonexistent throughout much of history. Since the Middle Ages, however, several classification schemes have been put forward for the arts. For instance, in the mid-eighteenth century, Charles Batteux presented an influential classification of fine arts that included painting, sculpture, music, dance, and poetry. These disciplines were distinguished by having beauty, or aesthetic pleasure, rather than utility, as their goal. Indeed, they flowed from a common source, that is, the imitation of beauty in nature. In general, the inclusion of specific disciplines in a given classification scheme depends on the definition of fine arts on which it is based.

Fine Arts and Marketing: Implications for Consumers Today There are at least two areas in which fine arts and marketing intersect. The first of these pertains to the marketing of fine arts to consumers. Estimates of the global art market vary, depending on the parameters adopted. Today these estimates are often in the tens of billions of U.S. dollars per year. Major outlets for fine arts include museums, galleries, theaters, concert halls, and even the Internet. Authors commenting on the art market are often referring specifically to the market for visual arts such as painting and sculpture. Major sales channels for visual arts include galleries, auction houses, and art fairs. The latter two have grown in prominence in recent years. The visual art market is divided into primary and secondary markets. The primary market consists of artworks offered for sale for the first time. The secondary market consists of any subsequent sales of these works. Galleries have traditionally been the main sales channel for the primary market, but today auction houses, as well as art fairs, have also entered this market. Indeed, the highest prices are often reached at auction, accompanied by media

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attention. Some dealers voice concerns over the unpredictable and frequently sensational nature of art auctions and would prefer more control over the reputations and careers of individual artists. In general, one might argue that subjective opinions are characteristic of the art market, which has proven particularly difficult to accurately describe (Thompson 2008; Velthuis 2007). One reason for this might be that fine arts, and especially visual art, constitute an extreme example of conspicuous consumption. The items sold are typically rare, and often unique, in nature, and the prices obtained often have little to do with objective measures of quality or utility. There has also been some debate concerning the role of publicly funded museums in this market. For instance, there does not appear to be a clear consensus as to whether museums should purchase artworks based on some measure of quality or merely on the publicity that the work in question generates or the prices that the work itself or similar types of work have obtained elsewhere. This is an especially pertinent question given that a small handful of wealthy private collectors may make or break the careers of individual artists and effectively mold much of the art market according to their personal preferences. This is not only an interesting observation from a marketing and economic perspective, but it also has public policy and consumer welfare implications and underscores the importance of transparent and democratic procedures for the allocation of taxpayer money to public support of the arts. The second area in which fine arts and marketing intersect pertains to the use of art in the marketing of other products. Throughout history, art has been used for various purposes such as selling religion, promoting image and prestige, and enhancing positions of power. Today the use of art in such promotional endeavors is possibly more prevalent than ever. This is not only because art is affordable and available to a larger number of people now than it was in earlier times but also because the popular use of images is facilitated by modern media and channels of distribution. Notably, art is now often used in the marketing of ordinary consumer products. Research conducted by the authors has demonstrated the phenomenon of Art Infusion, in which the presence of visual art has a favorable influence on the evaluation of consumer products via a content-independent spillover of luxury perceptions (Hagtvedt and Patrick 2008). This in no way implies

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that luxury is the most important aspect of art, but that the production of artworks involves a quest for excellence, or an endeavor to make something special or extraordinary, and that these notions are related to, among other variables, the concept of luxury. In connection with consumer products, this concept tends to engender favorable evaluations. In related research, the authors have also demonstrated that when a brand is associated with art, this results in more favorable brand extension evaluations. Indeed, exposure to art even appears to stimulate increased cognitive flexibility. However, further research is needed to expand on these preliminary results.

Gaut, Berys, and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2007. Hagtvedt, Henrik, and Vanessa M. Patrick. “Art Infusion: The Influence of Visual Art on the Perception and Evaluation of Consumer Products.” Journal of Marketing Research 45 (June 2008): 379–389. Tansey, Richard G., and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner’s Art through the Ages. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1996. Thompson, Don. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Velthuis, Olav. Talking Prices. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Future Research Directions Little scientific research has been conducted to elucidate the role of fine arts in the context of consumer culture, and thus opportunities abound for future investigation in this domain. There are several subareas that such investigation may focus on. One such area pertains to general psychological responses to art. For instance, what are the characteristics of artworks that engender favorable consumer responses? What are the short-term and long-term emotional consequences of exposure to art? In what ways, if any, do the creation and appreciation of art increase consumer well-being? Another subarea of inquiry pertains to human universals versus intercultural differences. For instance, are there formal qualities in artworks that give rise to the same emotional, evaluative, or behavioral responses around the world? Are there others that differ between cultures? Yet another subarea pertains to the use of art for managerial purposes. How might artworks most effectively be associated with a brand? Which types of art give rise to the most favorable responses? Are there specific product types that benefit more than others from an association with art? These are but a few of the myriad questions that remain to be investigated about fine arts. Henrik Hagtvedt and Vanessa M. Patrick See also Aesthetics; Art and Cultural Worlds; Collecting and Collectibles; Culture Industries; Performing Arts/ Performance Arts; Production of Culture; Taste; Visual Culture

Further Readings Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.

FLANEUR/EUSE The flaneur is a key figure for understanding consumption, as he is linked with the experience of the phantasmagoria of the modern city and its commodities, leisure places, marketplaces, and shop displays. The French word flanerie denotes the activity of ambling and strolling through the city without a specific purpose, if not that of observing and experiencing the city itself, its people, and its events. The person (typically male) who engages in this idling activity, the flaneur (or flaneuse, if female), is a figure who derives delight and pleasure from the life of the city streets, moving among the urban crowd with the watchful and critic eye of the artist. He is typically a well-dressed man, strolling leisurely through the arcades of the nineteenth-century Paris—at least in his first conceptualization. He is a shopper with no intentions to buy, considering and treating the people who pass and the objects he sees as texts for his own pleasure. This ambiguous city stroller and observer has become the epitome of the individual living in the metropolis, and a referent for understanding the urban condition and modernity. The French poet Charles Baudelaire is the creator of this figure. For Baudelaire, the shock experience is at the center of the artistic work, and the city dweller, jostled by the city crowd, must remain ever vigilant. A plethora of stimuli bombard him, and the artist/ flaneur surrenders to this intoxication that is an “intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers” (Benjamin 1983, 55). Thus, Baudelaire is the figure who gives voice to the shock and intoxication of modernity; he is the “lyric poet

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of the metropolis” (Gilloch 1996, 134). According to David Harvey, Baudelaire would be torn the rest of his life between the stances of flâneur and dandy, disengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects with passion on the other. (2003, 14)

In Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire, flanerie stands for the production of meaning in modernity, in its typical observer-participant dialectic. Benjamin’s flaneur is the urban idler who not only “reads” the city but also produces metropolitan texts. He enters the urban environment in a manner both detached and personal, transforming the city’s exterior designs into an interior monologue, gazing on the entire scene and at the same time getting lost in the labyrinth. Much of Benjamin’s research into the flaneur was inspired by the work of Georg Simmel, who notes that the relationships between members of a large city are more deeply influenced by the activity of the eye than of the ear. Thus, the figure of the flaneur is close to that of the artist, the detective, and the sociologist. For Benjamin, flanerie and the flaneur express the commodity culture of the nineteenth century. The commodity is the modern embodiment of the allegorical. With its emphasis upon exchange- and exhibition-value, the commodity is devoid of substance. Its fate within the cycle of production and the contingencies of fashion is to become out of date, old-fashioned, obsolete. (Gilloch 1996, 136)

The allegoric figure of the flaneur is closely interwoven with the fetishization of the commodity, as the arcades themselves where the strolling activity of the flaneur takes place. The arcades were passageways through neighborhoods that had been covered with a glass roof and braced by marble panels so as to create a sort of interior/exterior for vending purposes. Within these arcades, the flaneur is capable of finding a remedy for the ever-threatening ennui. The flaneur is completely at home in this cross between interior/exterior worlds because his own personal interior/exterior boundaries are also ambiguous. The physical placement of the traditional flaneur in a setting that is an interior/exterior or an exterior/interior is essential to its significance in sociological analysis. The flaneur’s dual interior/exterior nature, his ability to be both

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active and intellectual, to be reading the past of the city while existing entirely in the present, and his manner of coloring the landscape with a bit of his own psyche places the flaneur at the center point of a whirlwind of contradictions. Nevertheless, if this metropolitan performance is a metaphor for understanding the affect that high capitalism and the era of modernity had on Parisians during the eighteenth century, it is to be understood as the desperate and useless attempt to fill the emptiness derived from the commodification of modern society. For Benjamin, the technological advancement from the gas lamp to the electric light, along with the introduction of other factors (such as the development of Parisian grand boulevards and department stores in the latter half of the nineteenth century), were part of the technological rationalizing process that caused the demise of the flaneur. The flaneur disappeared as the commercial world slowly deserted the interior/ exteriors of arcades for the carpeted, artificially lit department stores that were to replace them. The contemporary shopping malls are the result of this technological advancement: since the days of the Parisian arcades, the brightly lit and digitally surveilled panoptic malls of the postmodern era have continued to further sterilize the interior/exterior dialectic. The contemporary malls mark the continuing extraction of some of the key elements associated with flanerie: disguising, loitering, and gazing. The panoptic design of the global postmodern mall has continued to privatize these characteristic properties of flanerie for the security staff that safeguard the mall. The result is that the general public is stripped from these “privileges” in an attempt to create more secure, calculative, and efficient public space. According to Zygmunt Bauman, the contemporary flaneur wanders in the modern malls and in the various “Disneylands” of contemporary life in a way that may be considered “aimless,” even while unconsciously affirming the designs of consumer society, but other authors respond that postmodern flaneurs enact performances whose winking irony contains the possibility of agency, if not resistance (Woodward, Emmison, and Smith 2000). Andrew F. Wood compares the flaneur to the post-tourist, arguing that both adopt a stance that conveys recognition, even celebration, of the artificiality of the performance. Both also transform the totalizing spectacle of

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contemporary life into objects, snapshots, glances, and souvenirs, often in unintended ways— “dragging” new meanings upon established ones, superimposing personal meanings upon institutional ones. (2005, 322)

Setting the new scene of the flanerie from the nineteenth-century “true” Paris to the twenty-firstcentury “fake” Paris in Las Vegas, Wood argues that “the post-tourist flâneur does not condemn places that are artificial but rather revels in the performance of the inauthenticity” (326). Within a broader analysis of the commodified social space, the flaneur can be seen as an analytic form, a narrative device, an attitude towards knowledge and its social context. It is an image of movement through the social space of modernity. . . . The flâneur is a multilayered palimpsest that enables us to move from real products of modernity, like commodification and leisured patriarchy, through the practical organization of space and its negotiation by inhabitants of a city, to a critical appreciation of the state of modernity and its erosion into the post. . . . It is an alternative “vision,” though one more optimistic than that founded on “power-knowledge.” The wry and sardonic potential built reflexively into the flâneur enables resistance to the commodity form and also penetration into its mode of justification, precisely through its unerring scrutiny. (Jenks 1995, 148–149)

The interior/exterior dialectic of the flanerie is related with another issue, that is, the flaneur’s role within the structure of patriarchy. Feminist critics have read in the figure of the traditional flaneur a gendered archetype, as it defines modernity as an exclusively masculine experience. Janet Wolff, for example, has argued that there is no female counterpart of the flaneur, describing the impossibility of the flaneuse as the modern separation of the public sphere and the private sphere confined women to the private, allowing men to move in the city’s crowd. Other scholars have linked the flaneur to other marginal figures, such as the prostitute (Buck-Morss 1986) and the choraster (Wearing and Wearing 1996). Federico Boni See also Commodification; Feminist Movement; Postmodernism; Shopping; Spaces and Places; Spaces of Shopping; Tourist Gaze; Urban Cultures

Further Readings Bauman, Zygmunt. “Desert Spectacular.” In The Flâneur, edited by Keith Tester, 138–157. London: Routledge, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1983. First published 1969. Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140. Gilloch, Graeme. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge: Polity, 1996. Harvey, David. Paris: Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2003. Jenks, Chris. “Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur.” In Visual Culture, edited by Chris Jenks, 142–160. New York: Routledge, 1995. Wearing, Betsy, and Stephen Wearing. “Refocusing the Tourist Experience: The Flâneur and the Choraster.” Leisure Studies 15 (1996): 229–243. Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory Culture and Society 2 (1985): 37–46. Wood, Andrew F. “‘What Happens [in Vegas]’: Performing the Post-Tourist Flâneur in ‘New York’ and ‘Paris.’” Text and Performance Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2005): 315–333. Woodward, Ian, Michel Emmison, and Philip Smith. “Consumerism, Disorientation and Postmodern Space: A Modest Test of an Immodest Theory.” British Journal of Sociology 51 (2000): 339–354.

FOCUS GROUPS The focus group, or focused group interview, is a frequently used research method across the social sciences. One of many types of interview, the focus group contrasts with individual or dyadic interviews by involving a small group of interviewees—typically between four and eight people—among whom a focused discussion is generated and led by a trained moderator. Lasting from one to two hours, and often including specific prompts to discussion (objects, images, even group tasks), the purpose is to sustain an interaction among members of the group on the topic in focus, rather than to engage in a dyadic question-and-answer exchange between interviewer and interviewees. The focus group is particularly useful when researchers seek to discover the various

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ways in which people make sense of a social phenomenon through shared discussion. Focus groups are also widely employed by commercial consumer researchers for a variety of purposes, including product testing and development. The similarly widespread use of focus groups by political parties and government agencies to gauge public opinion has led to criticism of the method for superficiality and manipulability. However, academic interest in focus groups has been revived following the qualitative, reflexive turn in critical social science, the method being valued for generating a dynamic and complex social situation that, when sensitively interpreted, affords the creative exploration of the socially constructed and discursive nature of shared beliefs and understandings of the social world. Recently, both academic and commercial uses of the focus group method have developed an online or virtual counterpart, this offering some new advantages as disadvantages over traditional face-to-face methods. As a social science method, focus groups were originally adapted by Columbia University sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton as a source of new ideas and hypotheses and as a means of checking the validity of their interpretation of other kinds of data. For example, they used focus groups to interpret data gathered from people pressing buttons to indicate positive and negative emotional reactions to radio programs: after listening and responding to a program, the moderator led a discussion in which participants’ responses were reflected back to them so that they could give their reasons for their individual and collective responses—an early example of today’s emphasis on reflexive methods that seek to empower and respect respondents as participants in the research process. The social situation of the focused interview, while “artificial” in some ways, may be understood as simulating everyday situations (including sharing stories and examples and involving disputes or embarrassments) through which groups co-construct meaningful interpretations of the material in focus reflecting the way that public discourse develops through conversation and discussion. For example, Burgess, Harrison, and Maiteny used focus group discussions in their exploration of local responses to environmental threat “to replicate, insofar as is possible through a research design, the domestic and other social settings in which people live” (1991,

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502). Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone (1992) used focus groups to explore the ordinary significance of goods, shopping, credit, saving, and debt during the life course. As with other qualitative methods, focus groups can be used to explore new research possibilities, to generate hypotheses for subsequent quantitative examination, or to resolve puzzles emergent from other methods of data collection. Consequently, sometimes a small number of groups will be used to scope a new research domain or delineate key issues. Alternatively, a more structured approach to sampling may be adopted: for example, one may construct a design for twelve groups, keeping each group demographically homogenous and producing a fully crossed design by age (× 3—for example, 18–35 years, 35–55 years, 55+), gender (× 2—male and female) and social class (× 2—working, middle), thus permitting some tentative conclusions about variation in the key issues by categories of the population. In yet other studies, far more groups may be conducted so as to make claims from the sample to the population (e.g., Kitzinger 1993). However, the key value of focus groups is their mapping of the diversity of publicly generated discussion. One rule of thumb, therefore, is to conduct further groups until they begin to repeat each other, indicating that the main “stories” have been told. The focus group procedure is flexible and can be varied meaningfully. For example, group membership can vary in whether the group members are already acquainted or strangers, whether they are similar on some sociodemographic or experiential classification (e.g., all young women, all Star Wars fans) or deliberately dissimilar (thus encouraging a less collaborative, more debating or dilemmatic style of discussion). Other parameters include whether the moderator is strongly directive or “goes with the flow” (here a “funnel” approach is often taken, warming up with an open-ended discussion in which the researcher tries not to guide the discussion with prior conceptions and gradually introduces topics of concern to the researcher), where the meeting is held (typically, this is a friendly living room, with tea and cookies), whether it is audio or video recorded, how it is transcribed and analyzed, and so on. The role of the moderator requires considerable skill: since group discussions can be intense and fast paced, there is a tendency for individuals to agree with each other because of the public nature of the

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discussion (introducing social desirability biases), particular individuals may dominate the discussion, and participants may not be sufficiently attuned to the collective, dialogic purposes of the method. Transcripts are often difficult to interpret because of the free flow of conversation, varying volumes of voices, interruptions, and so on; in addition to the moderator, a note taker is useful to keep track of speakers. Ideally, focus groups generate material that includes both depth and detail, while also encompassing the range of meanings available. By contrast to quantitative methods, which are evaluated in terms of generalizability, reliability, and validity, qualitative researchers instead point to the criteria of credibility (researcher expertise, clear and appropriate use of methods), dependability (consistency and repeatability of findings), transferability (relevance beyond the sample/situation studied), confirmability (consistency with other findings, auditability by other experts), and member checking (i.e., checking of findings with respondents). Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt See also Audience Research; Consumer Interviews; Credit; Debt; Life Course; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

Further Readings Burgess, Jacquelin, Carolyn Harrison, and Paul Maiteny. “Contested Meanings: The Consumption of News about Nature Conservation.” Media, Culture & Society 13 (1991): 499–519. Guba, Egon G., and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989. Kitzinger, Jenny. “Understanding AIDS: Researching Audience Perceptions of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.” In Getting the Message: News, Truth and Power, edited by John Eldridge, 271–304. London: Routledge, 1993. Krueger, Richard A. Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research. London: Sage, 1988. Lunt, Peter K., and Sonia M. Livingstone. Mass Consumption and Personal Identity. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1992. Lunt, Peter K., and Sonia M. Livingstone. “Rethinking the Focus Group in Media and Communications Research.” Journal of Communication 46, no. 2 (1996): 79–98. Merton, Robert K. “The Focussed Interview and Focus Groups: Continuities and Discontinuities.” Public Opinion Quarterly 51 (1987): 550–566.

Morgan, David L. Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988. Morrison, David E. The Search for an Understanding: Administrative Communications Research and Focus Groups in Practice. Luton, UK: University of Luton Press, 2000. Stewart, David W., and Prem N. Shamdasani. Focus Groups: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2007.

FOOD CONSUMPTION What people eat, and the practices and rituals associated with eating, have been a source of fascination and serious intellectual inquiry for centuries. We know that societies, and groups within any society, developed different ways of feeding themselves and that the explanation for their variation is complex, found in a mixture of natural-environmental, developmental, economic, religious, social, and cultural factors. Food has to be acquired, incorporated, and appreciated. We can only eat what we have access to. We are only likely to incorporate what we find acceptable; that which is acceptable food is highly variable—rats, dogs, and insects are, for example, mostly avoided in Britain and the United States. And within the category of the acceptable, some items are more appealing than others; many children prefer chocolate to cabbage. How the mix of these considerations comes to form the basis of the dietary regimes of social groups in modern societies is traced by historical, sociological, and anthropological accounts of regional and national food habits that demonstrate the complexity, variability, and contextual dependence of consumption, both in content and cultural meaning.

Effects of Consumer Culture on Food Consumption Recognition of variation—within and between societies—raises some pertinent questions about the effects of consumer culture. Stepping over many thorny issues regarding the specification of the concept—like its coherence, its date of origin, and its causal powers—this entry proposes that consumer culture has intensified, propelled by globalization, commodification, and the stylization of everyday life. Globalization, commodification, and lifestyle segmentation are among the key processes that have

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changed the nature of food consumption and that have come to determine the specific character of eating in the twenty-first century in the richest societies. As Arjun Appadurai observed, globalization entailed increasingly rapid circulation of products, money, people, ideas, and images, tending thereby to spread cultural knowledge and options across a wider geographical canvass. Foodstuffs, chefs, and cuisines traverse continents. Commodification of food, partly cause and partly consequence of globalization, has promoted the circulation of commercial products and entrenched the idea that it is better to buy things than to make them at home. The march of the ideology of consumer sovereignty, and the associated glorification of consumer choice, has reinforced dispositions that Zygmunt Bauman referred to as “the consumer attitude.” Segmentation, the modern technique of the market research industry to target products at specific groups of people, exploits the potential of the aestheticization of everyday life, a prominent tendency of the later twentieth century, according to Celia Lury. Lifestyles, the symbolic aspects of social divisions around consumption, are highlighted. The consequences of these three processes are contentious. Does it, as is anticipated by some theories of globalization, presage convergence of eating habits across countries, or will it encourage eclectic diversity? Will it lead to uniformity of behavior within societies, to greater differentiation, or to anarchic individualism? Eating tells us a lot about social patterns, rhythms, and relations. It is worthy of study for many reasons, not least its current political visibility through food scares and the “crisis” of obesity, but also because it is a fine test bed for analytic consideration of social change. Eating more than once daily is normal, and indeed a prime practical objective, for almost all human beings. In many societies, its achievement has proved extremely difficult. The reasons why getting one’s next meal might be precarious vary enormously over human history, not just because the problems facing hunter-gatherer societies differed from those with settled agriculture. Seasonal availability and annual variation, with years of plenty and years of dearth, were always expected. Interruptions of supply through natural disasters, wars, profiteering, and ineffective political management have often resulted in populations, or sections of populations, having access to insufficient food. Such eventualities have

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strongly affected social relations—witness the impact of food riots, migration consequent on famine, and colonial expansion. In capitalist societies, obtaining enough food has often occupied most hours of a laborer’s day and a large proportion of a household’s financial resources. On the face of it, many of these problems have been eliminated in societies with highly developed capitalist economies and mature consumer cultures. In rich societies like the United Kingdom and the United States, where few starve, the proportion of the average household budget devoted to food is small (little more than 10 percent), and regional, seasonal, and annual variation in supply have long been minimized. Food supply has probably never been more secure than during the last fifty years in Europe and America. Yet food and eating remain sources of considerable popular and institutional anxiety. These anxieties differ from those of the past, and it is interesting to explore how much can be attributed to aspects of consumer culture.

Public Anxieties The social science of food and eating remains fragmented and is much stronger in its understanding of production than consumption. Recent developments in food studies have been driven less by the logic of theoretical inquiry than by a mission to respond to public anxieties. The anxieties are formulated by experts and pundits, circulate in the media, arouse controversy, and become part (though often a rather vague part) of popular understanding. These anxieties may be put into four categories— physical, social and moral, symbolic, and economic. The first concerns hazards associated with modern industrial foodstuffs, including their denatured properties. Fears about foodstuffs and raw materials attributed to the system of industrial manufacture of food—additives, chemical fertilizers, hygiene and safety, new breeding techniques, and the nutritional properties of partially or wholly pre-prepared items—fuel anxiety about what to avoid. The nature, perceptions, and evaluations of risk are widely investigated, and the malign effects of profit seeking in the industrial food chain are frequently invoked (e.g., Nestle 2006). Second, there are worries about the destructuring of meal arrangements. The meal, central to sociological accounts of eating, has been thought to be under assault since the 1960s from the

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individualizing potential of convenience foods and the informalization of manners and personal relationships. Symbolized by the—not new—panic about the decline of the family meal, the question is how to eat, raising practical and moral issues associated with the maintenance of valued social relationships. A third anxiety reflects uncertainty about the ideal structure and content of the diet. It envisages a crisis of meaning arising from escalating and potentially unmanageable choice among wide varieties of available foods. Once there is no compulsion to eat from a single, established, nationally validated or traditional menu, then the practical and aesthetic rationale for selection becomes, it is argued, highly troubling. The question arising is, “What should we eat?” Finally, and a version of the perennial economic issue, is the estimation of what food is worth. Popular anxieties probably focus less than in the past on fraud or malfeasance of commercial actors, and rather more on manipulation by means of sophisticated selling techniques, monopoly power, the ethics of fair trade, and the environmental consequences of global transportation of food, all of which make shopping a difficult, contentious, and quasi-political practice. How these four types of anxiety should be explained, and how seriously they should be taken, are subject to considerable scholarly controversy. What Not to Eat Social groups, and subsequently national populations, learned to avoid poisonous plants and creatures, and individuals rejected items to which they are allergic. But in addition, many edible foodstuffs have typically been avoided on cultural grounds, particularly in observance of religious doctrine. Religious prohibitions persist, excluding entirely from the diet some items, usually meats, but religious faiths also insist on regulating the slaughter of animals, food preparation, food combinations, and periodic fasting. Individual tastes also account for refusal, especially if a wide variety of products are available, with suspicion of novel foods and expressions of disgust commonplace. However, distinctive of the contemporary world is widespread concern with the properties of foodstuffs deriving from mass-production and manufacturing processes. Even where more traditional problems of intentional adulteration, unhygienic handling practices, and the selling of decomposing produce have been eliminated—and supermarket

chains mostly achieve this—many problems remain. Dramatic instances like the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)—perceived popularly as caused by feeding herbivores with reprocessed animal remains—are symptomatic of food scares associated with industrialized and denatured production. Concerns are multiple: genetic modification is treated with huge suspicion in Europe; chemicals added to products to lengthen shelf life and enhance flavor portend harm; and most ironic, modern foodstuffs considered particularly tasty contain excessive amounts of fat, sugar, and salt, which are strong contributory factors in coronary disease, obesity, and diabetes—the illnesses of affluence. Most people, if asked, express concern about most of these issues. Western Europeans have limited trust in the food they eat, and even less in the agents responsible for ensuring safety, health, and satisfaction, as Unni Kjaernes, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde note. Some hazards may be direct threats to the health of consumers, many of whom have been persuaded by government campaigns that they ought to take proper precautions to pursue nutritionally adequate dietary regimes, but in many instances, as with considerations of animal welfare and more general fears about environmental degradation, discomfort and dissatisfaction with the food supply system is great. That such considerations fail to result in significant changes to people’s diets is intriguing. How to Eat Eating is a profoundly social activity. Overwhelmingly, people prefer to eat with others; the opportunities that meals offer for sociability are recognized universally. How people eat together, and the rules regarding the sharing of food, is historically highly variable. Norbert Elias’s account, one of the most famous of all accounts, sees modern practices as a product of “the civilising process” in Europe dating from the fifteenth century; manners became more refined, forks were introduced, and so on. Eating has, however, always been both a highly ordered practice and an ordering process. Meals are forms of intricate social organization, and their rhythms and patterns shape most daily routines. The meal is central to the conventions surrounding eating, and meal patterns, meal formats, meal times, and meal etiquettes exhibit systematic similarities and differences. At various levels—society, class or

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ethnic group, and household—norms exist about eating regarding who should eat together, where, at what time of the day, what should be eaten and in what sequence, who should prepare and serve food, and how routines should vary to deal with special occasions. Some societies have more rigid rules than others, and the extent to which observance is uniform throughout a population also varies. Norms are not always observed in practice, and people therefore often feel uncomfortable because they break the rules. In the last few decades, a tendency has been discerned for meals to lose their structured characteristics. Anxiety is partly practical—meals make possible the monitoring of food intake and thus the nutritional balance of any individual’s diet—but is also moral. The decline of the family meal in the United States and parts of Europe has engendered moral panic. As Jean-Claude Kaufmann records, the family meal assumed importance in the nineteenth century. In France, an invention of bourgeois families, its diffusion was spurred by fears about the maintenance of social control over an apparently ill-disciplined urban working class. Rigid rules applied: formal table manners, three meals a day, restrictions on children talking, deference to the male head of household, and so on. Such practices taught personal and bodily discipline and symbolized patriarchal dominance within the nuclear family. Subsequently, the presence of household members at the table became a symbol of family integrity. In households without servants, the provision of family meals also cemented bonds between mothers, husbands, and children, being conceived as expressions of care and love. Tendencies for family meals to become more informal, to become more irregular because of clashes with other activities, to succumb to competition from other easily accessible commercial alternatives, and so on, have fueled moral panic about their decline. Social scientific research into meal “destructuration” has not dispelled controversy, but on balance it confirms significant change—but neither as radical nor as disruptive of social relationships as pessimists claim. What to Eat To eat a varied diet is, in historical perspective, a privilege associated with wealth and place of residence. Growth in the variety of foodstuffs accessible

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to the mass of Western populations is one of the most distinctive developments of recent decades. The integrated transnational regimes of the industrialized food corporations source fresh produce globally, much of which is counterseasonal, but much other of which not long ago would have been considered highly exotic. While the latter certainly has impact on domestic cookery, it is even more in evidence in convenient ready-made meals and in restaurants, cafés, and take-away shops. The growth in the habit of eating out, which Francois Ascher, for example, considers the epitome of postmodern consumer culture because it instantiates personal or individual choice at the heart of the meal, introduces people to a range of possibilities without precedent. One possible consequence is the creation of uncertainty about what is good to eat. Thus, Claude Fischler diagnosed the situation as one of collective anomie—of not knowing which norms to apply in food choice. Jean-Pierre Poulain, by contrast, interprets the situation more as an emergent pluralism, dispensing with the uniformity of diet and any singular authoritative view of the best way to eat. A third alternative may be enhancement of opportunities to adopt new practices or to cultivate more eclectic tastes. For centuries, it was left to gastronomy—a minority pursuit popularly condemned as pretentious—to apply aesthetic criteria to food and thereby determine what constituted excellent food. For a couple of centuries or more, France was the arbiter of gastronomic judgment, and French cuisine was synonymous in the West with gastronomic excellence: among restaurants, those serving French cuisine are generally still the most expensive. However, the vast majority of people, at least outside France, discriminated instead on the basis of the level of skill of women cooking for the family and of personal preferences for dishes included in a loosely framed national repertoire of recipes. As late as the 1960s, Britons, who were probably not untypical, demonstrated widely shared preferences for a comparatively narrow selection of foods that apparently were not much subjected to reflection or aesthetic standards, according to Panikos Panayi. Subsequently, symbolic aspects of food associated with national and regional provenance came under greater scrutiny: Panayi says that foods were given nationalities. This was partly the result of ever-increasing migration of populations, the effect of which was to import alternative

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ways of eating and, through small business ventures, diffuse foreign tastes (e.g., Gabaccia 1998). Eatingout establishments purveying unfamiliar cuisines were especially important. Then the taste for “foreign” cuisine became able to play a part in the dance of social distinction: professional and managerial classes favored different cuisines to the working class and tended to express a liking for a wider range of cuisines, in accordance with the predictions of the cultural omnivorousness thesis (Warde, Olsen, and Martens 1999). It also inspired greater reflection on the characteristics of the traditional local or native cuisine. In Britain, for example, the principal guide to fine dining, The Good Food Guide, set about defining modern British cooking (Warde 2009). Restaurant guides are just one of the literary sources that circulate ideas about what it is good to eat. Bauman argued that one feature of consumer culture was that it created much anxiety because what one consumed was taken by others to be meaningful and expressive of self-identity, such that making inappropriate choices would be a source of embarrassment and shame; simultaneously, it contained the means to alleviate that anxiety because of the presence of many institutions offering advice about good taste. What have come to be described as the institutions of cultural intermediation—advertising, marketing, periodicals, and television programs devoted to the fashioning of lifestyles—operate feverishly in the field of food. Restaurant guides, recipe books of celebrated chefs, and food, wine, and cooking programs on television offer many clues about what is good to eat. Typically, they do not offer authoritative instructions about what one ought or must do—as, for example, older etiquette books did—but offer commentary on the merits of different options, to leave decisions to the reader. Ideologically, choice is paramount; in practice, it is subtly engineered. How Much to Pay In consumer societies, almost all food is purchased; self-provisioning is minimal. The supply system is elaborate and complex, governed by multiple economic calculations—about what can be sold, at what profit, and, if not at a profit, with what subsidy. Shopping for food is a significant and regular activity for many. One principle of market exchange is caveat emptor—buyer beware! Shopping is thus an accomplishment; obtaining good food representing good

value—as shoppers see it—can be tricky. Partly, as noted previously, goodness is increasingly considered a matter of safety, nutrition, and health, particularly in northern Europe. In other places, taste, flavor, and quality are more esteemed; southern Europeans are most likely to say that the quality of food has declined recently. Many institutions exist to provide quality assurance, from state sanitary departments to labeling schemes like PDO (protected designation of origin). Markets are capable of delivering excellent, traditionally made products—at a premium price—alongside mass-manufactured items. In the same vein, the range of prices at which restaurants sell meals is vast; while the pleasures of eating out are denied to few, quality is price sensitive. Perhaps the key consequence of the diffusion of a culture of consumption is not that consumer goods and services are made available to, and are accessed by, the mass of the population, but that quality varies. Market segmentation techniques—which orchestrate the delivery of products of different qualities, whether within stores, as in British supermarkets, or between supplier enterprises like restaurants—are used to differentiate populations and match suitable people to products appropriate to them. Commodification services lifestyles. Everyone can eat beef nowadays, but some beef is purer, tastier, better sourced, and more expensive. Alan Warde See also Civilizing Processes; Commodification; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Family Meal; Food Scares; History of Food; Risk Society; Slow Food Movement; Social Distinction; Taste

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Ascher, Francois. Le Mangeur Hypermoderne: une figure de l’individu éclectique [The hypermodern eater: A figure of the eclectic individual]. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005. Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1988. Capatti Alberto, and Massimo Montanari. Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History. Translated by Áine O’Healy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Counihan, Carole. Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Food Scares Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. First published 1939. Fischler, Claude. “Food Habits, Social Change and the Nature/Culture Dilemma.” Social Science Information 19 (1980): 937–953. Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Kaufmann, Jean-Claude. Casseroles, Amour et Crises: Ce Que Cuisinier Veut Dire [Food preparation, love and crises: What cooking means]. Paris: Hachette, 2005. Kjaernes, Unni, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde. Trust in Food: An Institutional and Comparative Analysis. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan/Palgrave, 2007. Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 1996. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Nestle, Marion. What to Eat. New York: North Point Press, 2006. Panayi, Panikos. Spicing Up Britain: London: the Multicultural History of British Food. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Poulain, Jean-Pierre. Sociologies de l’Alimentation: les Mangeurs et l’Espace Social Alimentaire [Sociologies of food: Eaters and the social space of food]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Warde, Alan. “Imagining British Cuisine: Representations of Culinary Identity in the Good Food Guide.” Food, Culture and Society 12, no. 2 (2009): 149–171. Warde, Alan, Wendy Olsen, and Lydia Martens. “Consumption and the Problem of Variety: Cultural Omnivorousness, Social Distinction and Dining Out.” Sociology 33, no. 1 (1999): 105–127. Wilk, Richard. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

FOOD SCARES While there is no standard definition of the term, a food scare is generally said to occur when a confirmed outbreak of foodborne illness leads to a marked and relatively sudden fall in consumer demand for a given food product and pressure is placed on public or private authorities to solve the problem, to provide consumer advice in the short term, and to ensure that policy and control measures are in place to prevent future occurrences. The scale of such a scare is often, but not always, influenced by the seriousness

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of the health threat, the numbers potentially affected, and the likelihood that blame can be attributed to malpractice, mistakes, or omissions on the part of responsible parties. Each of these factors also contributes to the newsworthiness of media reports regarding events of this kind. An “outbreak” of foodborne illness is said to occur when more than one person develops severe symptoms, leading to hospitalization or death, calling for identification of the food source, and confirmation of the diagnosis. Examples of major scares are the outbreak of cholera that affected the fish industry in Peru in 1991, the confirmation in 1996 that variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is contracted by consuming beef products infected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease), and the 2006 outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in the United States, traced to bagged spinach. Social scientists examine food scares from a number of policy perspectives, including consumer, health, environmental, and food policies, with particular emphasis on the regulation and control of food safety.

Food Sources and Contaminants Historically, anxieties about food have focused on insufficient supply, inferior products, swindling, fraudulent weight, and adulteration by human agency, including the possible presence of poisons. Infectious foodborne diseases have only been recognized as such since the middle of the nineteenth century. John Snow, the founding father of epidemiology, traced outbreaks of cholera in London in the 1850s to one common source—a public water pump that had been contaminated by an underground cesspool. Although it had been known that disease flourishes under conditions of poor sanitation, Snow argued that this does not arise by a process of spontaneous generation. This view, known as the germ theory of disease, was confirmed by the experiments of Louis Pasteur, the founding father of microbiology. Pasteur’s work demonstrated the presence and effects of bacteria, viruses, and parasites in food and beverages. The process of boiling and cooling by which bacteria are removed from milk later became known as that of “pasteurization.” Laboratories responsible for testing food products for the presence of contaminants were first established in industrialized countries in the 1880s. Political recognition of food safety as a policy issue calling for regulation

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spread throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from contaminated water, raw milk products, and prepared foods containing multiple ingredients, such as salads, sandwiches, and pâtés, common sources of foodborne diseases are seafood, eggs, fruit, vegetables, soft drinks, beef, pork, and poultry. Some food contaminants are chemical toxins, including dioxins and heavy metals, as well as pesticides, residues of veterinary medicines, additives, and allergenic or carcinogenic substances that are prohibited by the regulations of a particular country or are found to be present in foods in prohibited quantities. Others are microbiological contaminants, transmitted to humans by means of bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, or, as in the case of vCJD, by prions.

The Incidence of Foodborne Disease More than 200 infectious or toxic human diseases are foodborne, and 80 percent of all outbreaks of these diseases are traced to foods produced outside of private households (Nestle 2003). Some foodborne diseases, such as cholera, more commonly occur in developing countries, while other bacterial infections—including varieties of Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Listeria—occur and recur in all parts of the globe. Most cases of illness arising from contaminated foods occur sporadically, yield mild symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea, and are never reported. It is estimated that up to 30 percent of the population in industrialized countries suffer some form of foodborne illness each year. An annual 76 million cases, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths due to food contamination are reported, for example, from the United States (WHO 2007). Despite increasing emphasis of food safety problems at national and international levels, it is estimated that both the severity and the incidence of foodborne threats to public health have been increasing since the 1990s (WHO 2007). Increased severity is attributed to the emergence of new strains of bacteria, which are resistant to antibiotic treatment. These are seen as a response to the widespread and increasing use of antibiotics in animal production to promote rapid growth, rather than for therapeutic reasons. The increasing incidence of outbreaks is attributed to a wider number of changes in food production, including the spread of factory farming methods, the increasing size and centralization of production units, and the rapid globalization of food

processing and trade. Outbreaks that were once contained within a local community are now more likely to take place on a national or international scale, giving rise to the increasing incidence of food scares.

Consequences and Conflicts of Interest Quite apart from consequences for individual consumers and their families, the incidence of foodborne illness places a heavy economic burden on societies as measured by medical costs and lost productivity. A food scare affects the interests of stakeholders in the food sector in different ways. Consumer rights to safe food are affected by any threat to public health involving the risk of illness or death due to contamination. The short-term economic interests of farmers, food manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and food-service businesses can be affected by falling demand, by measures designed to contain the problem—including the culling of sick herds, destruction of fresh produce, or product recalls from the market—and sometimes by legal consequences. Negative economic effects of a scare on a particular sector, such as the fishing or beef industries, can also lead to extensive unemployment within that sector. This occurs, for example, when attempts to limit the problem take the form of imposing trade bans on imports of a particular product from a given country or region. Other parties directly involved in a food scare are health professionals involved in diagnosis and treatment, scientists involved in the assessment of food risks, politicians and public authorities involved in risk management, and journalists and nongovernmental organizations involved in elucidating the character of given risks and disseminating information to the public. Political conflict at local, national, or international levels thus arises between the need to protect public health and consumer interests, on the one hand, and the need to protect productivity, trade, and the economic interests of producers, distributors, and employees within a particular sector, on the other. This is sometimes reflected in responses to a food scare on the part of politicians and regulators; poor management of the BSE scare in the United Kingdom is often cited as a case in point. The regulation and control of foodborne disease has changed focus in recent decades. The former emphasis on a productbased policy, based on testing and controlling end products, has increasingly given way to a risk-based policy, focused on the introduction of standards,

Franchising

quality assurance schemes, and the identification and control of hazards at all points in the food chain from primary production to consumption. The capital needed to comply with such standards may favor large companies at the expense of small businesses and global trade at the expense of local trade, thus helping to sustain rather than to counteract some of the causes of the rising incidence of foodborne diseases.

Some Areas of Consumer Research Among the issues recently and currently investigated by consumer scientists are the following: reasons why consumer assessments of food risks differ from those of experts, reasons why consumers respond relatively rapidly to food safety threats but not to dietary recommendations, the conditions under which market recovery does or does not take place following a food scare, the impacts of such scares on consumer trust in the mainstream food industry and in emerging food technologies, and ways in which consumer interests are affected by food safety regulations. It has been pointed out, for example, that consumers pose a much wider range of moral issues in their assessments of risk than those under consideration by experts (Hansen et al. 2003), that growing consumer interest in alternative systems of food provisioning may reflect growing distrust in the mainstream food industry (Murdoch and Miele 1999), and that foodsafety regulations tend to undermine biodiversity insofar as they favor the interests of large-scale producers (DeLind and Howard 2008). Katherine O’Doherty Jensen See also Consumer Anxiety; Consumer Regulation; Consuming the Environment; Dieting; Food Consumption; Political and Ethical Consumption; Risk Society; Trust

Further Readings Busch, Lawrence. “Grades and Standards in the Social Construction of Safe Food.” In The Politics of Food, edited by Marianne Elisabeth Lien and Brigitte Nerlich, 163–178. Oxford: Berg, 2004. DeLind, Laura B., and Philip H. Howard. “Safe at Any Scale? Food Scares, Food Regulation, and Scaled Alternatives.” Journal of Agriculture and Human Values 25 (2008): 301–317. Hansen, Janus, Lotte Holm, Lynn Frewer, Paul Robinson, and Peter Sandøe. “Beyond the Knowledge Deficit:

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Recent Research into Lay and Expert Attitudes to Food Risks.” Appetite 41 (2003): 111–121. Knowles, Tim, Richard Moody, and Morven G. McEachern. “European Food Scares and Their Impact on EU Food Policy.” British Food Journal 109, no. 1 (2007): 43–67. Lang, Tim, and Michael Heasman. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets. London: Earthscan, 2005. Miller, David, and Jacquie Reilly. “Making an Issue of Food Safety: The Media, Pressure Groups, and the Public Sphere.” In Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems, edited by Donna Maurer and Jeffery Sobal, 305–336. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995. Murdoch, Jonathan, and Mara Miele. “‘Back to Nature’: Changing Worlds of Production in the Food Sector.” Sociologia Ruralis 39, no. 4 (1999): 465–483. Nestle, Marion. Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology and Bioterrorism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Scholliers, Peter. “Defining Food Risks and Food Anxieties throughout History.” Appetite 51 (2008): 3–6. WHO (World Health Organization). “Food Safety and Foodborne Illness.” Fact Sheet No. 237 (March 2007). http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs237/en (accessed January 2010).

FRANCHISING Franchising, where independent businesses operate under a shared trademark using a common production process, is an organizational form used primarily by service businesses. Franchising carries a large and growing proportion of retail trade and services, particularly in the United States. Franchising is also commonly used as a method of international entrepreneurship; a recent survey identified over one million franchisees worldwide. To the consumer, franchising has transformed the service sector. Franchising has provided a method and methodology to create chains of service organizations, replacing independent businesses, and reproducing a consumption experience over time and space. In this entry, franchising as a business method is described, followed by its effects on consumers. The American experience is the primary focus.

Franchising as a Business Method Franchising as a business method works as follows. A franchise is a legal contract between the owner

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of a production process and a trademark (the franchisor, such as McDonald’s) and a local businessman (franchisee) to sell products or services under the franchisor’s trademark employing a production process developed by the franchisor. When a franchise contract is signed, the franchisee pays a lump sum, a franchise fee. After signing the contract, the franchisor gives the franchisee services needed to open the unit, including training and blueprints for the production process and, in some cases, support for site selection or construction management. The franchisee typically makes all necessary investments in land, building, and equipment to open the particular site. After opening, the franchisor provides periodic inspection of the franchise (to ensure that operating standards are being followed), access to trademarks, and marketing services (such as advertising and new product development). In return for these services, the franchisee pays a royalty on sales (typically ranging between 1 percent and 10 percent) and a royalty for marketing expenses (from 0 percent to 6 percent), commonly called the advertising fee. The franchisor is compensated for the trademark and its management; generally, franchisees do not sell products of the franchisor (although exceptions exist). The franchise chain is composed of units franchised to local operators and units owned by the franchisor. Both types operate the same production process and sell under the same trademark, but most franchise chains are primarily composed of franchised units. As an organizational form, franchising has a large and visible presence in consumer industries such as restaurants, lodging, auto repair, real estate, hair styling, and specialty retailing, where it has captured typically 30 percent to 40 percent of sales (Michael 1996). Business services where franchising is prominent include temporary employment, commercial cleaning, printing and copying, tax preparation, and accounting services. Recent areas of growth include home health care, business signage, and child development and education. Moreover, franchising’s share of sales ranges from 71 percent of the printing and copying market to 0.5 percent of the accounting market. But the wide range of shares indicates the importance of industry-specific factors in the choice of organizational form. Product differentiation in these service and trading businesses is large, grounded in the physical dispersion and localized monopolies of units and in the heterogeneity of customers’ tastes.

Effects on Consumers From the standpoint of consumers, franchising has provided a method and methodology to generate chains of retail service providers. Each point of service is deliberately designed to be identical to all others. Hence, in a practical sense, McDonald’s serves not the best hamburger but the same hamburger all around the United States and the world. The goal of identical service experiences at multiple geographies over time presents interesting questions for consumers and researchers. At the level of consumer behavior, how does the consumer combine consumption experiences over time and space into a brand preference? In practical terms, how does a good experience in one city translate into a choice on the next business trip? Such a question has not been examined in the context of franchising. The desire to eliminate risk by standardizing the consumption experience through franchising has transformed cities, towns, and highways. In the United States, each highway exit presents a familiar set of choices among gas stations, motels, and restaurants. Historically, these companies followed the expansion of the U.S. interstate highway system and the growth of suburbs. Using their initial position, the more successful expanded into cities and more and more rural areas to develop a network of service points. The result has been a transformation of the American roadside. Consumers seem to prefer a common experience united in time and space, united in multiple experiences over time and space, rather than adventurously eating at an independent restaurant. Or, in the words of a memorable Holiday Inn ad, “The best surprise is no surprise.” The rise of franchising has also permeated popular culture. The shared consumption experience represented by several franchise chains has seeped into the common experience of Americans. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts, early in its existence, decided to offer free coffee and donuts to policemen in uniform. Civic pride no doubt motivated the decision, but the policemen offered low-cost security as well. Second, the ubiquity of the fast-food hamburger and its advertising has entered popular culture; a Wendy’s hamburger commercial with the tagline “Where’s the beef?” became a line in a presidential debate. The franchise chain is uniquely American, and as such it has become a symbol of the emergence of one common consumption culture around the

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world (sometimes called McDonaldization). As one example, due to its targeted advertising to children, the McDonald’s character Ronald McDonald is routinely named as one of the most widely recognized characters in the world. And the cost of the signature sandwich of McDonald’s, the Big Mac, is used by Economist magazine to suggest the relative cost of living around the world. Research has suggested that franchising is more successful when cultural distance is high, thus confirming that franchise chains are viewed as an American consumption experience abroad. Many critics decry the effect of the standardization of consumer experiences. To such critics, the loss of roadside restaurants and independent businesses destroys variation and creates a bland uniformity. The effort to standardize also brings a manufacturing culture to service: specialized machinery to prepare food, marketing research to choose flavors and promotions, and mass processing of meat into frozen patties for shipment. On the other hand, rising incomes brings with it demands for a new and better quality of service that franchising provides. Continued growth in the services sector, the desire for independence and business ownership, and consumer demand for a shared consumption experience combine to suggest franchising will continue to shape consumers and culture in the twenty-first century. Steven C. Michael See also Branding; Coffee Shops; Department Stores; Markets and Marketing; McDonaldization; Service Industry; Spaces of Shopping; Trademarks

Further Readings Barber, Benjamin R. “Jihad vs. McWorld.” The Atlantic 269, no. 3 (1992): 53–59. Jakle, John A., Jefferson S. Rogers, and Keith A. Sculle. The Motel in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Jakle, John A., and Keith A. Sculle. The Gas Station in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Jakle, John A., and Keith A. Sculle. Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Love, John F. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Luxenberg, Stan. Roadside Empires: How the Chains Franchised America. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986.

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Michael, Steven C. “To Franchise or Not to Franchise: An Analysis of Decision Rights and Organizational Form Shares.” Journal of Business Venturing 11, no. 1 (1996): 57–71. Michael, Steven C. “Determinants of the Rate of Franchising among Nations.” Management International Review 43, no. 3 (2003): 267–290. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Perennial, 2002. Watson, James L. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

FREUD, SIGMUND (1856–1939) Sigmund Freud was an Austrian Jew who, forced into exile by the Nazis, ended his days in London. Recognized as a genius in his own time, his ideas were subsequently dismissed, although they are experiencing a revival today. The fascination with, and trouble brought by, consumption intertwine Freud’s life and work, from his early eulogy to the magical powers of cocaine, to his enduring addiction to tobacco that led to debilitating mouth cancer. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he illustrates the distorting power of the psyche by citing an apparently simple act of nonconsumption. A butcher’s wife describes a dream that appears to controvert Freud’s thesis that dreams are wish fulfillments. She reports dreaming that she cannot hold a dinner party because it is Sunday, the shops are shut, and she has no smoked salmon. In tracing the associations linked to the dream, Freud discovers that in real life, the dreamer has also denied herself caviar, which she likes very much and which her husband has offered to buy for her. He also learns that the dreamer’s female friend, whom her husband says he doesn’t fancy because she is too thin, likes smoked salmon. Freud presents two explanations. The first is that the failed dinner party realizes the butcher’s wife’s unconscious wish to prevent her friend (and rival) from eating the salmon, thus gaining weight and becoming more attractive to the dreamer’s husband. His second explanation is more provocative. In denying her own desire for caviar in real life, the butcher’s wife identifies with her female friend. The story of the failed dinner party highlights Freud’s concept of a restless mind that even today retains its provocative power to challenge the

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relatively narrow view of the consumer as developed by marketing science. His explanation describes a person who is subject to unconscious processes of condensation (identification of the butcher’s wife with her friend) and displacement (the manifest meaning of the dream implies that she is denying a wish rather than fulfilling one). It illustrates too the repression of desires that are troubling to consciousness and the consequent role of phantasy (spelled with a “ph” to differentiate it from conscious fantasy) in expressing itself in the dreamwork. Finally, it highlights the profoundly intersubjective nature of human identity construction. Although Freud was to rework his conception of the ego in his later works, this remains an entity based on the symbolic consumption of otherness by means of the identification, or ingestion of images of, the other; or consisting of little more than a composite of the residues of previous identifications. Freud reworked his central concepts while retaining the notion of tension around a central dichotomy: first, between the action of the ego and sexual instincts, and later, between eros and the death instinct. Reading Freud, one is drawn closer to the Socratic dialogues of the Symposium than to the method of modern science. It is thus unsurprising that he decided that psychoanalysis should not be viewed as a science. His legacy is perhaps more faithfully preserved in the work of Norbert Elias, Alfred Hitchcock, and J. G. Ballard than in that of Edward Bernays and Ernest Dichter, who out his ideas to work in the interest of government and business, respectively. John Desmond See also Collective Identity; Desire; Elias, Norbert; Identity; Othering; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Symbolic Value

Further Readings Freud, Sigmund. “Distortion in Dreams.” In The Interpretation of Dreams, edited by Angela Richards, 248–276. London: Penguin, 1977. First published 1900. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, edited by Angela Richards, 275–338. London: Penguin, 1991. First published 1920. Freud, Sigmund. “The Ego and the Id.” In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, edited by Albert Dickson, 351–379. London, Penguin, 1991. First published 1923.

Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, edited by Angela Richards, 58–99. London: Penguin, 1991. First published 1914. Freud, Sigmund. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” In On Sexuality, edited by Angela Richards, 33–155. London: Penguin, 1991. First published 1905.

FRIENDSHIP We are all to a greater or lesser degree influenced by the opinions of others. Apart, possibly, from hermits and those psychologically inhibited from any social contact, we all seek to belong to a group or groups of significant others. By accepting advice or information from key influentials, we are more likely to receive approval. Conformity is rewarding: by conforming to the norms of the group or of significant others, we are more likely to be valued as a friend or colleague. Such conformity and its implied meaningful association with others make friendships particularly important for understanding consumer cultures. Friendships influence what and how people consume in terms of communicating and moderating acceptable forms of consumer behavior. The classical studies that developed these ideas are Personal Influence by E. Katz and P. Lazarsfeld (1955) and Social Behaviour: Its Elementary Forms by G. C. Homans (1961). These books reviewed many primary small-group studies: the former emphasized the two-step flow of communication, whereby the impact of, say, TV advertising is mediated through opinion leaders who interpret the message for the individual consumer. In contemporary marketing circles, the notion of “word of mouth” is central: people are strongly influenced by what they hear from those around them. However, it is not always recognized that while consumer behavior is, indeed, crucially influenced in this way, some people’s suggestions are listened to more carefully than others. It is here that the importance of friendship becomes significant. Communication is more effective for an individual when it aids her in rising in the esteem of her friends. Individuals conform in their consumer behavior and thus gain acceptance and friendship in return. This leads us to a further fundamental sociological fact, namely, friendship homophily. Consumers are more comfortable with “people like us,” and

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personal influence in consumer behavior rarely crosses from one social stratum to another. The recognition of the significance of the two-step flow of communication, the unpacking of what constitutes rewarding behavior and the reality of friendship homophily, are all basic to an understanding of consumer behavior influenced by word of mouth. It also leads to the crucial importance of understanding the microsocial worlds in which all individuals are embedded. This clearly involves a range of people—family members, work mates, fellow members of clubs and associations, neighbors, and so on, as well as, crucially, the friends whose opinions and advice not only are attractive but also increase the esteem and acceptance of the individuals subscribing to them. Recent research unpacking these microsocial worlds throws light on a complex issue: Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl construct the personal communities of their respondents in response to a question seeking to discover who were the most important people in their lives at the present time. While it was certainly the case that many recognized the importance of their family and partners, it did not always follow that all family members held privileged positions. Some siblings, for example, could also be recognized as “best friends,” whereas others were of minimal significance, often based on bad feelings that had developed over the years. People were quite ready to nominate friends as being the most important and significant people in their lives. Unlike parents or children, friends are consciously chosen, and this choice carries with it a concern to work on the friendship to make it mutually satisfying and sustaining. Friends are more likely to be of broadly the same age and social situation so that their opinions and attitudes are likely to weigh more than those of a different generation or those who have not shared the same degree of social mobility. Given this, the more we understand about the nature of contemporary friendship, the better we can understand the wordof-mouth impact on consumer behavior. The word friend is an umbrella term covering a wide range of actual relationships with different functions and degrees of emotional involvement. The idea of a “best friend” might seem to be generally acceptable, being close to Aristotle’s notion encompassing a special kind of communication—another self. However, some reject the phrase as carrying connotations of schoolgirl crushes. Likewise, at the

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other extreme, some refer to quite shallow acquaintances as “friends” when the use of the label may not be reciprocated or when it is really being used as an index of popularity. Hence, even if it were possible to define a hierarchy of friendship salience, the labels for the different forms of friendship would be unlikely to acquire general acceptance. Furthermore, there may be distinct hierarchies along different dimensions. Thus, Aristotle’s “friends of utility”—who provide specific functions, such as sharing the school run—may not also serve as Aristotle’s third type as “friends of pleasure.” So-called fun friends are a distinct category often (but not, of course, always) kept separate from the other types. This range of different types of friends may be seen as composing a “friendship repertoire.” Obviously, there can be overlap between different types (see the detailed discussion of these distinctions in Spencer and Pahl’s Rethinking Friendship), and some types will be more significant than others; this remains an issue for further research. Despite what was said previously about the importance of friendship homophily, it is clear that spatial and social mobility encourages the development of sets of social relationships as people move through different microsocial worlds in their life course. One consequence of this is that some friends with different social trajectories will be living in different parts of the country and will have different styles of consumption—more lavish than the other friend could afford, or embarrassingly less affluent, “tasteful,” or whatever. Given these difficulties, most market research tends to assume that people sort and sift themselves into geographical areas in which styles of consumption are broadly similar and postcodes are taken as surrogate variables for the other, more complex, sociological ones. However, it does not follow that the consumption of a similar house or car implies similar domestic and recreational patterns in a variety of other areas. Friends with special interests may be more significant than neighbors or even best friends or soul mates. The person who helps one survive a divorce is not necessarily equally important in determining a distinctive style of consumption. We are thus faced with a dilemma: word of mouth is a crucial determinant of consumer behavior, and friends are more significant than strangers, but as stated previously, it is not clear which friends are the most salient. This issue cannot be resolved

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through the study of social networks, since we are concerned with qualitative, not quantitative, significances. Certainly, there have been studies of community influentials by political scientists, but it does not follow that such significant opinion formers are necessarily friends, or that those who influence local community decisions also influence consumption. If the effect of friendship on consumer culture is complex, so, too, is the reverse. A useful review is provided by Robert E. Lane. He argues that “a priority for friendship over commodities is a promising route to happiness, an effective protection against depression, and a step towards a more benign environment” (1994, 529). From this perspective, consumer culture may be seen as damaging to friendship. However, if people compartmentalize their behavior, market relationships need not contaminate friendships; however, if time spent in consumption takes away time spent with friends, consumer culture could become detrimental to an individual’s ultimate happiness. Time-budget studies do not appear to support this. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest that as pressure on time increases from other sources, those most short of time depend more on significant others to make their appropriate consumer choices. A further significant point is that much consumption by its nature is social—eating and drinking outside the home, attending sports and art activities, and so on. The consumption that draws people into the company of friends and acquaintances may thus be held to be “better” for happiness than goods and services consumed individually. This is an important point, since it suggests that consumer culture that is collectively focused is better for individuals and society than that which is focused primarily on the individual. Rather than seeing friendship and consumer culture to be, as it were, pulling against each other, it may be more appropriate to recognize how the encouragement of conviviality and the sharing of

collective experiences is a positive part of consumer culture. From this point of view, the worldwide financial and economic difficulties that began in 2008 could lead to a growth of happiness if people recognize the advantages of collective consumption. Centers providing cheap meals for the poor and elderly or the pooling or sharing of consumer goods could encourage greater solidarity and friendly relations. The implications for friendship of a changing culture of consumption at a time of recession are a promising and increasingly urgent topic for research. R. E. Pahl See also Belonging; Collective Identity; Economic Sociology; Food Consumption; Happiness; Social Networks; Sociology; Taste

Further Readings Antonucci, Toni C., and Hiroko Akiyama. “Convoys of Social Relations.” In Handbook of Aging and the Family, edited by Rosemary Blieszner and Victoria Hilkevitch Bedford, 355–371. New York: Greenwood Press, 1955. Burrows, Roger, and Nicholas Gane. “Geodemographics, Software and Class.” Sociology 40, no. 5 (2006): 793–812. Cooper, John M. “Aristotle on Friendship.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by Amelie Rorty, 301–339. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Lane, Robert E. “The Road Not Taken: Friendship, Consumerism and Happiness.” Critical Review 8, no. 4 (1994): 521–594. McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook. “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 415–444. Spencer, Liz, and Ray Pahl. Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

G being an important public intellectual, Galbraith was an academic celebrity. In his popular writings and public appearances, he was an unrelenting advocate of both liberal values and a critical version of economics. He wrote and narrated a thirteen-part television series on modern life and economic thought called The Age of Uncertainty. He also wrote a series of novels, which were broadly biographical (such as A Tenured Professor, 1990), and a book on Indian painting, which derived from his time as U.S. ambassador to India, and he was a contributor to newspapers and magazines as diverse as The New York Times and Playboy. Because of this diverse array of interests, Galbraith divided the opinions of those in his profession. Though he was elected president of the American Economic Association (1972) and was a professor of economics at Harvard University for nearly three decades, his interest in challenging economic orthodoxy and applying economic thinking to burning social and political questions often distanced him from some of the technical and mathematical czars of his discipline. Born in Ontario, Canada, Galbraith studied agriculture at the Ontario Agricultural College before moving to take up graduate studies in the field of agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932. After completion of his PhD, he took up an instructorship at Harvard University in 1936. At the start of World War II, he worked in the Office of Price Administration. From 1948, he became professor of economics at Harvard University, where he divided his time between his residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, during nonterm time, what he called his “unfarmed farm” near Newfane,

GALBRAITH, JOHN KENNETH (1908–2006) John Kenneth Galbraith was the most important public economist of the decades after World War II and up until the 1970s. He wrote over forty books, of which a number—perhaps most notably The Affluent Society (1958)—are regarded as being among the most widely read books ever written by modern economists. Galbraith’s most famous and accessible works have since become recognized as fostering changes in social values and being important precursors to current social attitudes toward the side effects of economic production and growth, consumerism, the power of corporations, and the influence of advertising. His most important works were characterized by a maverick style, clarity of thought and expression, and the capacity to generate memorable, incisive concepts that formed the basis of his reputation as a slayer of the myths of modern economic thought. Many have compared his incisive style of critique to the noted sociologist Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Galbraith himself admitted to being a fan of Veblen’s famous work. In an era of rapid social change and economic growth, Galbraith led an extraordinary life and was renowned for his wit, work ethic, and eloquence. He was a long-time and popular professor of economics at Harvard University, was an advisor to numerous U.S. presidents, served as U.S. ambassador to India, was an influential public intellectual in the United States, and also wrote a handful of novels. Along with 623

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Vermont. Retiring from Harvard in 1975, he continued to write many popular books, critical and liberal in tone, intellectually sound and easily understandable in style, which continued to endear him to the public and sections of the economics profession. In 2000, Galbraith received the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. His final book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud, was published in 2004 when he was aged ninety-five. His most important works sought to challenge the traditional principles of mainstream economic theory and also confronted many important aspects of what he called “the conventional wisdom” of capitalist societies. Alongside his economic works, Galbraith wrote many books that popularized and made accessible the history of economic theory and that reflected on contemporary social and political issues of industrial society such as overproduction, advertising, and corporate power. His book The Affluent Society (1958) remains one of the biggest-selling works in the history of modern economics and is widely known for introducing a slew of terms that entered the popular vocabulary, including the book’s title. In The Affluent Society, Galbraith highlights the rather perverse situation achieved by Western economies that had solved the “problem of production” but were beset by a deteriorating standard of public wealth. The irony of the affluent society was that increasing private wealth did not build up a stock of public affluence but only encouraged the expression of new consumer wants whose necessity was marginal to the public good. Among his other important books in economics were American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1956) and The Great Crash 1929 (1955), but perhaps his most ambitious and widely respected work was The New Industrial State (1967). In this work, Galbraith shows how corporations in modern capitalism attempt to control markets and strengthen their own position by types of planning, incorporation of technological structures of production, and vertical integration. His major charge was that this rendered classical models of economic competition unrealistic. Ian Woodward See also Advertising; Affluent Society; Capitalism; Commercialization; Externalities; Happiness; Needs and Wants; Public Goods; Satiation; Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

Further Readings Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great Crash 1929. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The New Industrial State. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Galbraith, John Kenneth. A Tenured Professor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Economics of Innocent Fraud. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

GAMBLING Since the late-twentieth century, commercial gambling has become increasingly popular as a mass form of leisure and consumption, albeit one that is often controversial and subject to criticism. In the past fifty years, gambling has undergone a profound transformation. For much of its history, it was regarded as economically marginal and politically corrupt and was criticized by organized religions as an immoral vice. Games of chance (with the occasional exception of lotteries) were viewed as wasteful and often deviant, and legislation was designed to strictly limit their consumption, particularly among lower socioeconomic groups. Despite this, gambling was nevertheless popular and was often carried out illegally. From around the mid-twentieth century, however, a gradual shift from prohibition to regulation saw a more pragmatic approach to gambling, which encouraged the development of gambling as a form of mass consumption. Since the 1980s, in particular, socioeconomic and cultural changes have meant that the gambling industry has undergone a period of dramatic liberalization and deregulation. Economic policies of neoliberalism have encouraged a reduction of state intervention in both public and private life and a reluctance on the part of policymakers to regulate markets or to impose high levels of taxation on populations. Such policies have encouraged alternative forms of revenue generation, of which taxing the profits of commercial gambling is an attractive option. At the same time, shifts in the fabric of social life, including increasing secularization, rising relative affluence, the availability of credit, and the spread of consumerism, began to undermine arguments about the “immorality” of gambling and created a cultural climate that was conducive to the proliferation of gambling as a mainstream leisure activity.

Gambling

A loosening of legal restrictions on promotion and expansion has resulted in the massive proliferation of commercial gambling as a global enterprise with a central place in Western economies. Governments around the world have legalized lotteries, casinos, and sports betting, as well as machine-based gambling such as slots and video lottery terminals (VLTs) as sources of vast profit for both state and commercial enterprise. At the same time, new technologies such as the Internet have launched gambling into cyberspace, breaking down national boundaries and posing complex regulatory challenges. Games of chance have also been increasingly incorporated into mass tourist and leisure industries. For the latter, casinos in particular are increasingly seen as part of the whole tourist experience, built into resorts and attached to leisure complexes along with cinemas, bars, and restaurants. In the case of Las Vegas, for example, gambling itself is the central focus and makes the city into a destination in its own right. These trends have led to the incorporation of gambling into the world economy and the movement of gamblers across fluid national boundaries. By the start of the twenty-first century, gambling has moved center stage to become a global player in the economies of North America, Europe, and Australasia. Today, the gambling industry runs as a billion-dollar enterprise, selling hope, excitement, and thrills to ever-larger numbers of consumers. The commercial strategies of market research, advertising, and branding have been used to develop a variety of products and opportunities to gamble, while frequent innovations ensure a regular supply of new and specialized gambling opportunities. Modern consumers have a variety of products and experiences to choose from: it is now possible to gamble on a wide range of occasions, from taking a day trip to a casino or a family vacation in Las Vegas, to passing a few hours on a slot machine or buying into the dream of a big win with a weekly lottery ticket. Today, games of chance are commodified as heterogeneous products, offering a diverse range of choices for ever-increasing numbers of consumers. The success of commercial gambling has resulted in the normalization of the activity and an increasing perception of the gambling industry as a mainstream, legitimate business selling a commodity—which in this case, just happens to be chance—as if it were any other. Likewise, gamblers appear now as regular consumers—as hedonists, escapists, or risk takers, no longer immoral, criminal degenerates.

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The recent shift in the status of commercial gambling has to be seen in the context of the general transformation of Western societies from industrial, production-based economies toward those organized around consumption and the provision of services. This trend, often described as “post” or “late” modern, is characterized by the elevation of consumption as an organizing feature of social life, with an elective affinity to neoliberal ideologies of freedom, choice, and consumer sovereignty. As Zygmunt Bauman puts it, we have moved from a “production ethic” to a “consumption ethic,” characterized by the values of self-fulfillment, hedonism, and desire. Here, consumption has a crucial role in the creation and realization of both individual and social identities, with consumers using the acquisition and display of commodities to mediate social relationships and to construct what Anthony Giddens calls a coherent “narrative of the self”: the ongoing story we use to make sense of who we are. In this climate, the expansion of gambling taps into a wider “consumerist” ethos within culture as a whole. Not only are games of chance a product of consumer culture but they also express some of its most fundamental characteristics, such as the values of risk taking, instant gratification, self-fulfillment, and conspicuous consumption. As such, gambling can be described as a leisure activity with a high degree of what Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural capital,” in that it embodies and expresses many of the dominant cultural values of the time. A variety of motivations for gambling exist, and these are as diverse as the types of games themselves. Winning money is a commonly cited theme, but there are other reasons, too, including the excitement and entertainment generated by this form of risk taking, the sociable aspects that emanate from spending time with family and friends in gambling venues, and the provision of an escape from daily roles and routines. In particular, gambling is an important form of consumption for the creation of identity. Games of chance allow the creation of alternative roles and personas—the opportunity to present an idealized version of the self to others. Through the display of skill and knowledge in games such as poker, gamblers can win respect and admiration from their peers. Risk taking in high-stakes games demonstrates character and status while facing up to opponents and taking on the system can be a way of “testing the self” in tense situations. Meanwhile,

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the elements of fantasy, dreaming, and imagination involved in games of chance such as lotteries allows for the projection of alternatives lives and identities: the transformation of the self through escapist fantasies of winning. Despite the proliferation and normalization of gambling, the activity continues to be controversial in public discourse. There is disagreement between those who argue that it is a legitimate commercial business that creates employment, wealth, and urban regeneration, and those who regard it as a harmful social activity that contributes to debt, poverty, and family breakdown. Much of the research into the issue has adopted a psychological-medical perspective and has tended to focus on pathological gamblers as individuals suffering from irrational cognitions, poor impulse control, and possibly neurophysiological dysfunction. A range of treatment interventions is designed to counsel and treat such players. And so, although gambling has increasingly come to be regarded as a legitimate form of consumption and mass leisure activity, criticism and controversy continue on psychological-medical grounds today. Gerda Reith See also Addiction; Consumer Illnesses and Maladies; Desire; Hedonism; Identity; Leisure; Moralities; Postmodernism

Further Readings Bauman, Zygmunt. Freedom. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1988. Dixon, David. From Prohibition to Regulation: Bookmaking, Anti-Gambling and the Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Goffman, Erving. Where the Action Is: Three Essays. London: Allen Lane, 1969. McMillen, Jan, ed. Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation. London: Routledge, 1996. Reith, Gerda. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Reith, Gerda, ed. Gambling: Who Wins? Who Loses? New York: Prometheus Books, 2002. Reith, Gerda. “Gambling and the Contradictions of Consumption: A Genealogy of the ‘Pathological Subject.’” American Behavioral Scientist 51, no. 1 (2007): 33–56.

GARDENING There have been many studies of gardens, but few have drawn on theories of consumer culture. Garden research has traditionally involved the archival examination of larger parks and gardens according to the various stylistic movements associated with them through time (e.g., Symes 2006). Here, historical accuracy has generally been prized over conceptual insight, and concepts of consumer culture have accordingly remained largely outside the frame. Recent work has come closer to the experience of modern domestic gardens by examining the various ways in which people enjoy being in them (e.g., Bhatti 2006). Here, an interest in cultures of pleasurable plant experience has shown how they provide an escape from wider pressures in a way that also necessarily downplays how gardens can also serve as expressions of consumer taste. Yet domestic gardens actually provide an interesting case regarding the extent to which certain notions of consumer culture are imposed upon the items housed within them, and broader theories of consumption can benefit from a trip into the garden. This entry substantiates this claim with particular reference to the contemporary United Kingdom, where there are still many domestic gardens and where the popular imagination still commonly portrays the inhabitants as a nation of keen gardeners. Some of the worries associated with the rise of certain consumer cultures relate to the ways in which they encourage people to buy more than they otherwise need and more than is sustainable for them to acquire. The underlying premise here, as described by Martyn Lee, is that processes of marketing and fashion have largely been successful in encouraging societies to covet changing arrays of goods where the implication is that consumers will then soon discard them in favor of more culturally attractive equivalents. This framework of thinking inadvertently helps sustain an idea of the good itself as relatively inert. Because cultural obsolescence was understood as taking place long before any physical equivalent, the agency of the purchased item in terms of what it might practically do was often left out in the conceptual cold. The assumption was the attribute of social desirability alighted only momentarily on items whose physicality was relatively unimportant. The aim was to understand how this desirability was manufactured in the media rather than to explore

Gardening

how publics handled the capabilities of the goods they bought after the moment of purchase. Within gardens, it instinctively feels difficult to make this assumption, and this is why gardens are instructive here. This is because the biological propensities of the plants often found in them mean that owners must often wait for the aesthetic attributes they desire and tend to their plants to ensure they arrive. As such, one of the most interesting challenges that gardens present to the expansion of consumer cultures relates to the relatively obvious fact that gardens often contain living things. The question that naturally follows is about the extent to which consumer cultures encouraging people to buy fashionable goods with little thought of how they must interact with them afterward have penetrated this environment. How easily are the things found in gardens transformed into the docile medium for the immediate forms of cultural communication through observed ownership often associated with the rise of consumer societies? In the United Kingdom, this question attracted some attention in the early 2000s when a certain television format was pushing its way outside. Previously, there had been an explosion of programs where designers showed people how to reorganize indoor rooms at home into arrangements deemed more immediately stylish or expressive of aesthetic tastes. These makeover shows then started to spread outdoors, and this led to some animated discussion about whether this instant gratification was appropriate in the garden. For some, it was anathema to the practiced appeal of growing plants over time, where the pleasure was all about gradually encouraging specimens to be successful. For others, they beneficially encouraged the public to think about how they could use these spaces better. For academics interested in consumption, they were instructive because they indicated a faltering expansion of particular consumer cultures. Were gardens becoming all about immediate expressions of aesthetic taste instead of an ongoing engagement with living creatures? The answer would reveal the changing degree to which particular ways of conceptualizing consumption adhered to this context. Yet we must tread carefully when examining consumer culture and gardening. This is because people often like to characterize themselves as “gardeners” who actively know about plants, instead of crude “consumers” who merely buy an attractive garden. In this way, gardens were as much about the process

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of producing as the quality of the product and a form of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984), not necessarily about the display of wealth. In surveys, people were claiming to be keen gardeners in surprisingly high numbers. Yet the amount of domestic space devoted to plants, along with the use and replacement of tools, was in decline. This was an interesting situation, and at the time, garden professionals were themselves struggling with theoretical ideas about whether the garden should be understood as housing reliable consumer goods. Within many commercial garden centers, for example, plants increasingly came accompanied by a guarantee. This phenomenon is interesting because it testifies to the spread of certain consumer frameworks. Surely, a plant is a living thing, and those who bought plants would understand their successful survival in the garden would depend on factors that could never all be anticipated by the salesman. Indeed, this pleasurable unpredictability is often deemed the essence of owning plants in terms of waiting and hoping for them to grow. Yet it seemed that trying to inculcate this kind of enjoyment was proving too risky for those who must shift units and increase sales. The assumption was that modern consumers had no desire to deal with plant unpredictability and therefore needed guarantees. Garden center managers personally preferred to think of gardens as places where people learned to love nurturing plants. Yet, because they felt their market was moving, they were responding in ways that impeded this possibility. Put differently, because they believed a certain consumption culture was on the rise, they inadvertently helped make this so. Dilemmas such as these deserve attention because gardens have been belatedly recognized as significant for a number of wider issues. Domestic gardens, and what happens in them, are important for agendas ranging from social well-being and wildlife preservation to water conservation and senses of community. The extent to which particular ideas about expected consumption and predictable goods have infiltrated these places is therefore of more than theoretical significance, and further studies might follow these processes elsewhere. Though the Japanese garden is clearly quite different from the American lawn, both are liable to be influenced by aspects of consumer culture, and the outcomes are of some consequence. The jury is out over whether future domestic gardens will be forcefully organized or lovingly grown. Whether

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we will continue to talk about “gardening” or just “gardens” is itself undecided. Ideas from consumption studies should be useful here because they help us understand the contextual dynamics involved. The case of the contemporary garden also has a wider point to make to scholars in this field. The difficulties associated with placing plants in categories of docile material culture tell us we should be careful not to ignore the physical properties of the goods that we buy. Ideas about communicating to each other with the aid of seemingly passive objects stem from a previous academic preoccupation with social representation. Yet doing so is only ever falteringly done in practice. What does the good physically do? How must we interact with it? Do we have the time or inclination to do so? These issues have often been conceptually downplayed. Yet they are important in fully understanding acquisition. The domestic garden therefore reminds us to refrain from buying too wholeheartedly into particular concepts of consumption before exploring how people handle the various goods they buy and how they plan to live with them once they all get home. Russell Hitchings See also Actor-Network Theory; Comparing Consumer Cultures; Consuming the Environment; Desire; Fashion; Happiness; Leisure; Taste

Further Readings Bhatti, Mark. “‘When I’m in My Garden I Can Create My Own Paradise’: Homes and Gardens in Later Life.” Sociological Review 54, no. 2 (2006): 318–341. Bhatti, Mark, and Andrew Church. “Cultivating Nature: Homes and Gardens in Late Modernity.” Sociology 35, no. 2 (2001): 365–383. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Hitchings, Russell. “Approaching Life in the London Garden Centre: Providing Products and Acquiring Entities.” Environment and Planning A 39, no. 2 (2007): 242–259. Hitchings, Russell. “How Awkward Encounters Could Influence the Future Form of Many Gardens.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, no. 3 (2008): 363–376. Lee, Martyn. Consumer Culture Reborn. London: Routledge, 1993. Shove, Elizabeth, and Dale Southerton. “Defrosting the Freezer: A Narrative of Normalisation.” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 3 (2000): 301–319.

Symes, Michael. A Glossary of Garden History. Oxford: Shire Books, 2006.

GENDER Gender emerged as a major area of interest in the social sciences in the 1970s. Not that differences between men and women had previously passed unnoticed; since the Enlightenment, this entailed an attention to the cultural and social conditions of women’s disadvantage. Yet the very genealogy of the notion of gender in the social sciences is linked to the consolidation of feminist thought and the increased awareness that the differences between men and women are sustained by social institutions, reinforced by cultural frames, and encrusted with power relations. The term gender not only corresponds to the need to stress the social construction of difference but also points to the fundamentally relational nature of social identities coded by gender difference: via the notion of gender, accent is placed on the fact that what is essential is not so much masculinity or femininity but their varied arrangements and relations. Masculinity and femininity are indeed reciprocally constituted by a system of relations of conflict and co-operation, force and consent, repulsion and desire. Gradually, social scientists have come to understand that gender is not yet another social dimension of difference to be added on top of other social boundaries (class, ethnicity, generation, etc.) but rather constitutes a deep-seated master identity in everyday life that intersects—sustains or contradicts—all other social identities and roles. While it certainly emerged from the desire to explore the differences between men and women, the notion of gender has in time problematized the very male/ female dichotomy. This has occurred by revealing the implicit and yet normatively sustained associations between gender, sex, and sexuality on which a rigid dichotomy is grounded. Thus gender scholars have pointed to the various dimensions of gender identities: their relations to sexuality, on the one hand, and to sex and sex categorization, on the other. Studies on sexual identities divergent from the heterosexual norm have helped problematize dichotomous frames and arrangements, with gay and lesbian studies as well as queer theory becoming increasingly visible. Finally, the notion of gender has helped open up the unity of the two terms in the dichotomy, pointing to the various “genderisms” (Goffman 1977) that make up the categories of “man” and “woman,” acknowledging

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how varied, multilayered, and contradictory ordinary gender identities are. While it has come to characterize a very lively, often interdisciplinary, area of study, the notion of gender has appeared far from given during its fairly short career in the social sciences. When feminist thought initially provided a systematic context for exploring gender, it endorsed a medically derived distinction between sex and gender. Gender was defined as those symbolic differences that are built on the biological dissimilarities apparent in the two sexes. Early socialist feminists were striving to redress the gender blindness of much classical sociology by conceptualizing the interdependence of capitalism and patriarchy, but in doing so, they tended to naturalize the male/female dichotomy at a biological level. Since the late 1980s, though, an important part of feminist theory has turned to a more radically constructivist approach, one wherein culture and everyday practices, including consumption, have become increasingly important. A turn to culture is partly a result of the influence of post-structuralism thought, identified with the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and others. Contemporary gender studies have developed a criticism of the earlier gender/sex division that inscribed sex in a dehistoricized biological difference. Together with a politics stressing the diversity among women, gender has become understood not as a cultural representation of a biological given but as the process that produces in the body the possibility of two distinct sexes.

Gender and the Emergence of Consumer Culture While some classic feminist works such as Gayle Rubin’s The Traffic in Women (1975) proposed to treat the “sex/gender system” as a whole, others such as Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971) tried to open up the system by identifying different underlying structural dimensions, such as production, reproduction, socialization, and sexuality. Contemporary gender theory, such as that proposed by Raewyn W. Connell (2002), tends to follow the latter, more analytical path. Connell identifies four dimensions: “power relations” as structured by patriarchy, “relations of production” as structured by gender division of labor, “emotional relations” including sexuality, and “symbolic relations” including the cultural associations that, for example, link gender codes to dress codes. To the scholar of consumption, this fourfold

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identification of gender relations is wanting, insofar as consumption appears downplayed. Here consumption is largely rendered through relations that are deemed symbolic or cultural rather than recognized as an institutionalized practice. Indeed, studies of consumption within the humanities and the social sciences have shown not only that gender is a crucial dimension of consumption, but also, conversely, that gender codes, rituals, and identities are realized through both consumer cultures and practices. The existing literature has documented the coextensiveness of gender and consumption in at least four dimensions: (1) places—with, for example, the historical emergence of the bourgeois home as a private site of comfort consumption and the department store and the shopping mall as public sites of leisured consumption; (2) media and mediation—with processes such as the gendered consumption of cultural products, on the one hand, and the representation of gender codes in advertising and popular culture, on the other hand; (3) bodies—with a gender-differentiated investment in commercially mediated products and services for the presentation, care, and transformation of the body having effects on how we perceive gendered bodies themselves; and (4) material culture—with the growing awareness that the gendering of goods along the circuit of the commodity greatly contributes to fixing or altering the gender order and operates from the cradle to the grave. While there are some studies on the particular gendering of consumption in non-Western countries, such as those of Timothy Burke and Laurel Kendall, the historical unfolding of Western consumer culture through gender inequality is well documented. The separation between consumption and production that has come to characterize capitalism went hand in hand with a new gendered configuration of the private/public divide. From early modernity, femininity has been associated with consumption conceived as a leisured, private activity even when conducted in public. Indeed, consumption has often been constructed—to reinforce the complementarities of the sexes—as a mirror of the sphere of production, a private rather than public space, feminine rather than masculine, hedonistic rather than ascetic, and, finally, frivolous rather than serious. As argued by Anthony Giddens in his book Modernity and Self Identity (1991), as modernity advanced, the changing gender order and the changing configuration of both the public sphere and the sphere of intimacy have been associated with the advance of commercialization.

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Matthew Hilton suggests that consumption has been viewed as a negative expression of the triumph of the modern market, which weakens men, turning them into useless citizens incapable of defending their own country or participating in politics, while making women superficial and idle, unfit as wives and mothers. Mica Nava demonstrated that the concerns generated by the growth of the female presence on the public scene at the turn of the nineteenth century have led to an assimilation between women and the “mob,” with women portrayed as an irrational, sexually aggressive, and voracious mass taking the public sphere of the department store by storm. Classic contributions to the early reflection on the development and nature of modern Western consumer culture, such as Werner Sombart’s, Thorstein Veblen’s, and Georg Simmel’s, considered the particular position of women. In his celebrated essay on fashion, Simmel casts the association between women and fashion in an historic-cultural perspective: the historical weakness of their social position oriented women toward “comparatively great uniformity,” and fashion was instrumental in enabling them to express themselves through a shared language, becoming the “valve” through their craving for “individual prominence” found a space which was denied them in other fields. Sombart takes a further step back in history. Using art and literature from medieval Europe and again the Italian Renaissance, he suggests that there was a link between the “secularisation of love”—its slow but progressive emancipation from religious institutions and rules—the uses of goods and riches that foresaw luxury, and a general hedonistic-aesthetic attitude to things. As love became gradually more justifiable in and of itself as an “earthly enjoyment” of beauty and the “emancipation of the flesh,” and so consequently (in a society still markedly male dominated) there developed a new “hedonistic-aesthetic conception of the woman and of love for a woman” (1967, 37), then the doors to all sensory pleasures and their tireless refinement had been opened. In this view, the development of consumer society was driven not only by men risking huge amounts of capital to arm the large commercial transoceanic trading vessels of the colonies, but also by a specific category of women: the “courtesans.” These women were not simply lovers but “intelligent and beautiful” ladies who incarnated a new femininity centered on the command of elegant entertainment and sensuous luxury and

reached the upper-bourgeois strata and from there gradually spread in society. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class is even more explicit in stressing power as a dimension of gender relations within the domain of consumption. Veblen was first to suggest that the production/consumption divide that characterizes the development of the modern economy corresponds to the harmonization by difference of the sexes in the bourgeois family: the sphere of consumption— conceived of as shops, luxury goods, refined tastes, display, and opulence—was reserved for women, confined to the role of consumer within the family and always subject to work as themselves a status symbol for their husband; the sphere of production, with its sobriety, was instead restricted to the male head of the family. Considering the urban industrialized U.S. communities of the late-nineteenth century, Veblen maintains that the display of riches that had previously manifested itself in employing vast numbers of servants was now transformed into a division of labor within the family. With the development of the bourgeois family, the duties of consumption were to be fulfilled by wives, whereas it fell upon men to bring home as much money as possible. Women of the upper-middle classes became a “subsidiary leisure class,” whose delicate office was the performance of “vicarious” leisure and consumption, in the name of the household and its male head.

The Home, Gender, and Consumption The home has typically been constructed as a private context where one doesn’t work but consumes. As documented by Adrian Forty, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the home came to be understood as a comfortable refuge from the pressures of work, a place where men could express themselves, comforted by a caring wife who had—above all else—a decorative function. Forty suggests that the house came to be seen as a place of nonwork because of the aesthetic qualities of the goods that were fast becoming a part of the domestic environment. In the design of objects, every reference to work and to instrumentality was abolished, even if an object was entirely functional. This is the case with the domestic sewing machines that spread widely between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that literally brought work into the home. To be widely accepted, sewing machines had to be designed in such a way as to remove any industrial connotation. This is why

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Singer, one of the most well-known brands, produced light domestic machines that were small, extremely refined, and “artistically” decorated to make them a beautiful ornament for the boudoir. Only in this way could they remain in tune with the homely atmosphere and seem appropriately feminine. Although difficult to pin down, housework practices are an integral part of the domestic environment and are deeply intertwined with domestic consumption, its routines and pleasures, and its gendered structure. In her work on gender, material culture, and the home in the United Kingdom and Spain, Sarah Pink provides a complex picture of how gender order is negotiated and reproduced. Strikingly different from Spanish kitchens, even the tiniest English kitchen is a “room to be lived in,” personalized with ornaments, photographs, and drawings. Also, while foods tend to be placed out of sight in Spain, in England, food and drink are used as “expressive objects.” Such different spatialities prefigure ways of organizing homework. In Pink’s study, English women rejected the idea of following a housewifely domestic routine, insisting that their own spur for doing housework was a more embodied, emotional need: when in the mood, they found cleaning “therapeutic.” Spanish women displayed a different attitude to routine, seeing structured routine as positive, bringing “natural balance” between different areas of their life. All in all, in this study, all women differed from men because they refused traditional housewife identities but saw housework as part of their alternative embodied femininity, whereas men tried hard to use traditional masculinity to reframe their housework practices as “hard work.” Despite men’s increasing involvement in housework, in today’s Western societies, much of what passes for consumption is still in fact mediated by the unpaid work of women and, increasingly, by their paid domestic services. In her seminal study on contemporary American families, the feminist Marjorie DeVault showed the amount of preparation work that women do as housewives, or as those who effectively fill that role even despite their professional careers, so that what was bought as a necessity for the family can effectively be consumed. She also showed the huge capacity for negotiation and conflict management that they frequently bring to bear so that the needs of all household members come to be accommodated in some way. Women’s role in servicing and facilitating home consumption

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is still evident today even in the smallest habits: an evening spent as a family watching television will often involve women, mothers, and wives getting up to replenish their younger and older spectators with something to drink or snack on; they will rush to the kitchen in a commercial break to finish washing the dishes, or they will watch distractedly while writing the shopping list for the weekly visit to supermarket, and so on. Likewise, a weekend at home will often entail some do-it-yourself, cleaning, or decorating— practices that continuously reframe the spatiality of the home. Housework distribution and framing is slowly changing, although there is a marked diversity and unevenness of change across professional groups and nations. In particular, especially among the uppermiddle and upper strata of the U.S. and European population, there seems to be a trend for the commercialization of care and home services. Clearly, there is a structural and global dimension to the gendered commercialization of care, as stressed by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Care (for children, the old, the sick) is not rewarded as much as market success, yet it is necessary and is being increasingly transformed into paid work, bringing commercialization into intimate life. Care jobs in the home are typically carried out by female immigrants, who are often portrayed as essentially more “caring” than Western women. Western professional women are thus portrayed as pressured for time, oriented toward their kids’ achievement, and incapable of being relaxed, patient, and joyful. While the global fluxes of care workers clearly have mixed effects (on adults and children, in both developed and third-world countries), these discourses testify to what extent the commercialization of domestic work, emotions, and intimate life is a contested issue. In particular, in spite of the fact that nannies are clearly paid to love and that, as a result, they may have acquired considerable expertise in doing so, their capacity for love is constructed as the natural outcome of some precommercial cultural endowment, opposed to commercial culture. As Viviana Zelizer points out, this may reinforce sharp dualities that are inadequate in describing rather more blurred social relations (within both the market and the family) and cultural traditions (both Western and non-Western), preserving an ideology of pure loving parenthood that has gone hand in hand with the transformation of the nuclear family into a key unit of consumption in contemporary Western culture.

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The Media and Gender The commercialization of feelings concurs with the spread of cultural goods putting emotions and bodily processes that had been privatized (such as eroticism, love, and intimacy) back onto the front stage. As mass culture and commodities, books and television have opened up a space for the public display of intimacy, sexuality, and gender relations and have brought it back, right inside the home. The home is increasingly described as a place of “cultural” consumption: the TV, stereo, computer, and DVD player/recorder sit alongside more traditional bookshelves, stamp collections, prints, photograph albums, and so on. The different domestic practices of cultural consumption are all, each in their own way, profoundly influenced by the gendered structure of the social institution of the family. For example, in the London families that David Morley interviewed, two distinct modes of watching TV presented themselves: a female and a male one. Domestic responsibilities and a women’s self-perception as the guardians of the well-being of the family meant that they rarely watched television in full concentration, including their favorite programs. The way television is consumed in the home thus reinforces the perception that for women, even for those who are in full-time paid employment, the home remains a place of work, whereas for men, it essentially remains a place of rest and detachment from the responsibilities of work. Indeed, other forms of typically female cultural consumption are to be seen against the background of the gender structure of household work. Joke Hermes, for example, shows that part of attractiveness of women’s magazines are not found in the meanings they convey but in the way in which they could be read: above all, they are “easy” to read, not only because they are simply written but also because they are in “bitesize” formats that can be easily abandoned and then taken up again during household chores. As consumers of popular literary genres, women have often been portrayed as weak subjects, passive, other-directed, and isolated. This portrayal has been challenged by a number of studies. For example, even the readers of pulp romances studied by Janice Radway are configured as interpretative communities linked to a particular bookshop that worked as a cultural catalyst and a meeting place. The women studied by Radway describe reading as a “special gift” that they allow themselves from time to time.

To understand their experience of consumption, Radway had to consider the gender asymmetry still characterizing Western families. While men are supported emotionally by women, women often have to find for themselves relaxation and reassurance: reading pulp romances is an important contribution to emotional reproduction for many of them, offering a respite from the demands made on them as loving wives and mothers. It is precisely in the difference from ordinary life that reading has its significance: finding time for oneself in a moment when the home is quiet, in a particular room, is not only a form of escape from everyday responsibility but also a space where one’s own personal needs are granted validity. Radway emphasizes how difficult it is to determine whether these pleasures are effectively instruments of liberation and social change or whether, instead, they reproduce the structures of gender inequality. Certainly, female reading practices, and reading groups in particular, have the potential to construct a space for public awareness inside the private space of the home and, conversely, provide a platform for allegedly private issues to find public resonance. This is part of what Elizabeth Long has noticed in her study of women’s reading groups in Houston, Texas. Historically, women’s reading groups catalyzed organizational, literary, and “sisterly” practices that gave them the confidence to reimagine themselves, transforming a literary movement into a movement for social reform, a development that they attributed directly to the influence of the books they studied as well as to the ways that self-organization acquainted them with the skills of the public sphere. While continuing a tradition of exclusivity along class and racial lines, contemporary reading groups in Houston also encourage members toward a critical appraisal of the social order: books became both the language through which women narrate their own experience and the catalyst for serious conversation, full of innovative understanding and personal insights, encouraging social relationships and social and political participation.

Gender and Shopping The ambivalence of consumption as to gender relations is highlighted by the history of the emergence of modern shopping. From early to late modernity, shopping places were the public counterpart to the bourgeois home in the gendered architecture of

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consumer culture: elegant shops, department stores, and finally malls have all been considered women’s cathedrals for consumption. Indeed, already in the eighteenth century, elegant shops were important places for the development of a modern culture of consumption heralding a new recreational attitude to purchasing (which is now taken for granted in the phrase “going shopping”). They also became a public space in which women were well accepted and over which they were said to “reign.” Recent literature on both England and France has shown that the development of elegant shopping places at the heart of urban environments favored the public visibility and personal autonomy of middle-class women, otherwise confined in the domestic sphere as mothers and wives. To go shopping became a new feminine form of sociability, and with this developed a sense of purchasing power as a political instrument. As Kate Davies reveals, as early as the late-eighteenth century, English women used their purchasing power to support abolitionism; other examples include the emergence of the National Consumer Leagues just before the turn of the twentieth century in the United States and the Progressive Movement. Such movements were broadly successful in inspiring real changes in legislation regarding work or price control, and they effectively offered women a possibility to speak out and act in the public sphere: in their capacity as “consumers,” women claimed the responsibility and right to intervene in masculine territories such as work, trade unionism, and local and national politics. The allure of shopping also has perverse effects, which appear direr for women: for instance, just like today’s compulsive shopping, so in the nineteenth century, kleptomania was construed as a social problem mostly concerning middle-class women. In today’s societies, shopping is an assorted activity, differently coded according to the specific retail site and the shopper’s social identity. While both men and women are involved in shopping, shopping takes on different meanings according to gender. Research has shown that men increasingly participate in leisure shopping and that a leisured involvement in fashion shopping indeed marks new forms. Colin Campbell’s Shopping, Pleasure and the Sex Wars (1997) has shown that shopping remains a gender battlefield for dominant masculinities and femininities. Indeed, in Campbell’s study, women were more enthusiastic about shopping, and men appeared

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more annoyed and distant. But these different expressions were sustained by different shopping practices (women in this study associated shopping more often with fashion and men with technology) and different definitions of efficiency and cost-benefit computation (women tended to consider the time spent wandering around shops as necessary and important, men instead aimed to minimize shopping time, giving their own time a higher value). Through these two different conflicting approaches to shopping, both gender relations and shopping were reciprocally defined: thus, as champions of dominant masculinity, men appeared to women as simply poor shoppers, while women were described by men as irrational shoppers. In particular, the dominant association between leisure and shopping emerged as contested and qualified by gender. Women described shopping using frames of meanings borrowed from discourses on leisure (sociability, fantasy). Men, on their part, more often resorted to frames borrowed from work (efficiency, rationality), to the point that they sometimes denied that their practices could actually be described as shopping.

Gender, Fashion, and Clothing The enduring relevance of gender dichotomies and their subversion is also a key theme of the studies about fashion and consumption. While early feminism had rejected women’s pursuit of fashion as a dominated activity, the ambivalence of fashion for women has been underscored by Elisabeth Wilson in her book Adorned in Dreams (1985). Wilson noticed that women have also used fashion to appropriate gender codes different from those traditionally associated to femininity and that dress can also be a source of rebellion and a catalyst for reformist groups, including feminists. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, women started to wear bloomers both to ride bicycles and to make a statement about their right to full citizenship. Much later, especially in the last three decades of the twentieth century, working women used male dress codes to appropriate those expressive qualities normally attributed to men and to become accepted as competent work colleagues. This has required a complex negotiation of male and female connotations: the selective adoption of male codes that convey authoritative images at work, so-called power dressing, has been a way in which women have eased their access

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to professional environments, maintaining some femininity but also restricting sexual connotations. The structured jacket in somber colors is thus combined with skirts and high heels, creating an unstable hybrid between masculine connotations (authority/detachedness) and feminine ones (sexuality/emotiveness) that women are sometimes able to work in their favor, but that force them to be constantly more self-aware than their male colleagues. Of course, this is open to different interpretations: Susan Bordo, in her book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (1993), prefers a different accent, maintaining that at work women mix male dress with female accessories to recall their decorative role and to appear as less dangerous in the career market. There is evidence, thus, that binary gender coding is still dominant. Even when we consider fairly casual, ordinary, and apparently unisex fashion items such as jeans, sexualization along dichotomous lines is very evident. Roberta Sassatelli shows that jeans are indeed a heavily sexualized item, especially for women. These dynamics are quite heavily gendered: jeans minimize defects and stress appreciated body parts, but men are more concerned with expressing bulk and strength, women with concealment and containment. Women’s concern with concealment is turned upside down once a woman feels her favorite jeans have helped her to achieve the appropriate curvy slenderness, and she willingly deploys them as a seduction device. In a move that grants women agency only within the terms of an eroticized male gaze, the successful deployment of seduction is the ultimate guarantee that an appropriately feminine figure in jeans has been achieved. Femininity itself is revealed as the ability to create a sexualized image that draws the gaze to one’s own body. Research and debate on fashion bring us closer to another dimension of the interlocking between consumption and gender that has to do with body practices and representation. As Jon Stratton points out, commodities and their commercial representations are deeply implicated in the construction of ideals of the desirable body. In his Gender Advertisements (1979), Erving Goffman showed that advertising images display gender identities providing a “hyper-ritualized” image of everyday male/female relationships as symbolized by body demeanor, gestures, glances, and so on. During the 1960s and early 1970s, men were still represented as taller, in dominant positions, with attitudes of aggression and

power; meanwhile, women were smaller, in positions of humility, with submissive attitudes. Even the relationship with objects appears unequal: women caress and lightly touch objects; men hold or grasp. In some cases, women simply look at an object being used by a man standing at their side. Clearly, in conveying information about commodities, images such as these also suggest the correct gender-specific way of desiring and using them. As such, they appear to stabilize hierarchical distinctions between men and women. On the other hand, advertising has always been host to subversive gender images, and Goffman’s study itself reports various examples of “subversion” of the standard gender codes. It is especially from the late 1970s onward that advertising rode on the back of the wave of progressive and protest movements such as feminism. While the display of gender dichotomies still holds, today advertising increasingly proposes innovative images: “new men” and “new lads,” on the one hand, and, on the other, new femininities—women who play sports, who keep up with men and overtake them; strong women deeply engaged with their work; sexually active women; aggressive women who fight between themselves; and so on. Female emancipation made it necessary for advertising people to package different and nontraditional visions of femininity and to construct women as independent and strong consumers. As Sean Nixon documents in his book Advertising Cultures (2003), during the 1990s, new gender cultures within advertising agencies themselves have contributed to the development of new visions of masculinity. The “new lad” and the “new man” portrayed by much recent British commercial advertising are respectively characterized by an openness to pleasures previously marked as taboo for men and by a partial loosening of the binary codes that regulate the relationships between the sexes as well as heterosexual and homosexual masculinities. All in all, alongside hegemonic masculinity and femininity, ads have thus conveyed nontraditional images of gender to the wider public, even if only to attract attention of a distracted spectator or to bestow the thrill of the forbidden onto a brand. These may be subversive, often marginal images, showing deviant masculinity and femininity, playing with sexual ambiguity, homosexuality, drag imagery, and camp culture. Despite these cultural trends, feminist research insists that the burden of the body is heavier on women: new forms of sexism are seen as bourgeoning

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when young women claim their commoditized, eroticized bodies as capital to gain the favors of otherwise powerful men. These attitudes may be seen as a populist, postfeminist reaction to what feminist scholar Sandra Bartky, in her book Femininity and Domination (1990), called the fashion-beauty complex, suggesting that production, marketing, retail, and information companies work together to regulate feminine identity. Thus, pressure to conform to gender ideals goes beyond just advertisements. Department stores, for example, are spatially segregated by gender, clearly defining for customers which items should be purchased for men and which for women. Genres in popular culture have been gendered, so that romantic stories aim at women while action plots aim at a primarily male audience. For Bartky, the fact that it’s women who suffer and spend more time, effort, and thought to conform to body ideals that are ever-more elusive suggests that they support the fashion-beauty complex and grant the financial success of the beauty industry.

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Taking a material culture angle, we may say that there are “masculine” and “feminine” objects, objects appropriated for one or the other sex according to the degree to which they convey femininity or masculinity. Indeed, the meaning of objects—from the most hidden and private to the more obviously technological—is shaped by gender, sexuality, the life course, and so on. Take, for example, Hillel Schwartz’s study of hearing aids. During the nineteenth century, hearing trumpets were used only by men even if deafness was also found among women; instead, during the twentieth century, hearing aids, which had become far less visible, were used by both men and women. However, the virtues of the two sexes and the defects that the hearing aids were seen to correct were gender specific. Through using these objects, advertisements maintained, women could once again become “good listeners,” whereas men would “be more able to interact”; women would be able to recuperate “closeness with their husband and family,” while men could confront their “lack of authority” or the trials and tribulations of “work.”

Gender and Material Culture Coming to the last dimension identified, there is enough evidence to maintain that material culture is also deeply gendered. Gender relations, like class, have important effects on preferences for different commodities. Men and women still consume different things. For example, Deborah Lupton’s Food, Body and the Self (1996) shows that meat is seen as a male food (associated with hunting, force, violence, wilderness, etc.) and is, at the same time, actively chosen, refused, or distributed within the family to signal gender reciprocal boundaries. Likewise, we know very well that toys are strongly gendered and that often, as in the case of Barbie dolls, they can be instruments of socialization of particular visions of gender relations, femininity, and masculinity. Not only do men and women consume things in intertwined but different ways; through the accomplishment of such differences, masculinity and femininity are continuously constructed, altered, and reproduced. This is illustrated by Alison Clark’s book Tupperware (1997), which showed that the diffusion of home appliances and plastic ware in postwar Italy, France, and Great Britain promoted a new vision of femininity defined by a search of autonomy and self-realization that contrasted with traditional visions of the housewife while anchoring women’s to traditionally female roles within the family.

Conclusion Many of the studies on gender and consumption have come to show that we cannot fully understand them without referring to the complex intersecting of gender with other dimensions of social identities. Intersectionality—and in particular the interplay between gender, class, and ethnicity—is becoming a feature of much recent literature on gender and consumption. Fashion choices of both men and women have been shown to be largely coded by their class belonging. Ethnicity greatly influences how boys and girls are socialized to shopping and consumption. Ideals of respectable comfort and refined practical gentility that stand at the root of modern homemaking are not only implicated in the construction of gender identities but are also important features of the emerging middle-class cultural identity. All in all, studies about gender and consumption have shown that gender is a social construction that shapes practices of consumption while being constructed by such practices. The study of gender as an underlying, master identity and an ongoing doing that is realized in consumption calls for a greater awareness of intersectionality and ambivalence. Today research on gender and consumption appears to move toward the opening of gender as an analytical category: looking into

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the details of practice and representation researchers could show that certain attributes of masculinity or femininity may be resisted at a level and endorsed at another, that new gender codes are developing along with the continuous relevance of old dichotomies, and that these codes are rendered differently across different practical domains, allowing for simultaneous change and stability in society’s gender order. Roberta Sassatelli See also Femininity; Feminist Movement; Gender Advertising; Gender and the Media; Gendering of Public and Private Space; Sexuality; Women’s Magazines

Further Readings Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Luxury Women: Commodification and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Connell, Raewyn W. Gender. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Davies, Kate. “A Moral Purchase: Femininity, Commerce, Abolition, 1788–1792.” In Women and the Public Sphere: Writing and Representation, 1660–1800, edited by E. Eger and C. Grant, 133–162. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. DeVault, Marjorie. Feeding the Family. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desires. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Goffman, Erving. “The Arrangement between the Sexes.” Theory and Society 4 (1977): 301–332. Hermes, Joke. Reading Women’s Magazines. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Hilton, Matthew. “The Female Consumer and the Politics of Consumption in Twentieth-Century Britain.” The Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002): 103–128. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Commercialization of Intimate Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Kendall, Laurel, ed. Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class and Consumption in the Republic of Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003. Morley, David. Television, Audience and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Nava, Mica. “Women, the City and the Department Store.” In The Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell, 56–91. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.

Pink, Sarah. Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. London: Verso, 1987. Sassatelli, Roberta. “Indigo Bodies: Fashion, Mirror Work and Sexual Identity in Milan.” In Global Denim, edited by Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, 127–144. Oxford: Berg, 2011. Schwartz, Hillel. “Hearing Aids: Sweet Nothing or an Ear for an Ear.” In The Gendered Object, edited by P. Kirkham, 43–59. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” In On Individuality and Social Forms, 294–323. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971. First published 1904. Sombart, Werner. Luxury and Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967. First published 1913. Stratton, Jon. The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Zelizer, Viviana. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

GENDER ADVERTISING Gender and advertising focuses on the way in which women, and more recently men, are represented in paid-for commercial messages designed to encourage consumers to purchase the product being promoted. In the Anglo-American world, the topic has been viewed as important in respect of morality since the end of the nineteenth century, when some advertisers were accused of using images of scantily clad women to sell unrelated products. From the 1960s, an additional concern was the way in which restricting the image of women in advertising to that of sex object or housewife limited the aspirations of women by presenting them with a limited range of roles with which to identify. More recently, concerns over the representation of women have been joined by concerns over the representation of men.

The Representation of Women The earliest forceful critique of the advertising industry as contributing in a major way to the oppression of women came from Betty Friedan, who in the early 1960s set out to investigate what she called “the problem that has no name,” the ennui pervading the lives of many American women in the wake of

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World War II. For Friedan, one of the main causes of this dissatisfaction was advertising, which, instead of showing women how new labor-saving devices (or even premade pie mix) could give them the free time to become astronomers or astronauts, offered them only the possibility of being better wives and mothers. This critique provided the backbone of feminist attacks on advertising throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when women were fighting for the right to access jobs that had been the traditional preserve of men and seeking equal pay for equal work. Two further influential critiques of the representation of women in advertising were published in the late 1970s. Erving Goffman used content analysis to demonstrate that the problem was not only sex-role stereotyping but also the way in which the composition of ads (for example, the relative size of male and female figures and their relationship to one another) presented women in terms of deference and subordination, and in a manner he described as “childlike.” Judith Williamson turned to semiotics (a technique used to decode the meaning of ads), allied to psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and Marxism, to uncover what she saw as the “root meaning” of a number of ads—concluding once again that ads presented women as limited to the roles of either sex object or domestic drudge. This work was considered important, as research—for example, that carried out in the United Kingdom in 1990 by the Advertising Standards Authority—indicated (as both Friedan and Williamson had argued) that advertising played an important role in establishing unrealistic views of the way women should look and behave. In recent years, the once-powerful second wave feminism critique has been replaced by a renewed focus on gender difference, popularized by John Gray in a series of books under the generic title Mars and Venus. This focus has been supplemented by a widely held belief that most (if not all) of the goals of feminism have been achieved and that women now live in a “postfeminist” era in which feminism (although rarely going by that name) and femininity are no longer incompatible. In terms of gender and advertising, this has disarmed the critique of advertising that uses highly sexualized images of women—alleging that such images are now produced with a knowing edge, with women exploiting their own sexual power rather than being exploited. Perhaps the best-known example of this type of advertising is the Wonderbra campaign that ran in the mid-1990s. The most famous of

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these showed the model Eva Herzigova in black lacy underwear looking down at her bra-enhanced cleavage alongside text that read, in huge capital letters, “HELLO BOYS!” Numerous critics have claimed that what made this ad (and others in the same series) different from what had gone before was the multiple ways in which the ad could be read by the viewer. In particular, they argued that the ads convey the possibility that it is up to women to choose to become sexually desirable, thus shifting the location of power from the bearer to the object of the look. Since the 1990s, the world of advertising has showcased a much broader range of roles for women. Rosalind Gill has argued that the traditional image of “wife-mother-housewife” is being replaced by images of sexually assertive, confident, and ambitious women who exert their “freedom” through consumption. Certainly, it is no longer unusual to see women represented in advertising as occupying a range of powerful roles in public life. Indeed, it could be argued that whereas, in the past, women’s role in public life was underplayed, the world of advertising now showcases a postfeminist utopia in which women have rather more power and influence (for example, in the boardroom) than can be supported by a consideration of the evidence.

The Representation of Men Toward the end of the twentieth century, the emergence of masculinity studies resulted in a focus on the changing representation of men in advertising. In 1985, a 1950s-themed ad for Levi Jeans, known as “Launderette,” featured Nick Kamen stripping down to his boxer shorts to the strains of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It through the Grapevine.” This ad is regarded widely as emblematic of a new focus on the male body as a site of erotic contemplation—men no longer just looked; they were also to be looked at. Advertising still used sex to sell—but there was growing gender equality in that men, as well as women, were now being presented as sex objects. Indeed, by the early 1990s, some critics were claiming that the new stereotype was that of “girls on top” and that men were now the target of advertising’s humor. One of the many ads cited as evidence of this trend was an ad for Coca-Cola known as “11 o’clock appointment,” which showed various female office workers and executives awaiting the appearance of the “body beautiful”—a handsome young laborer,

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without a shirt, drinking his can of Diet Coke. Yet other critics have given a more complex reading of this ad—noting that the class and power dynamics contained within the ad are not straightforward, with the man’s lack of awareness of being looked at, and the overall comic tone of the ad, undermining the possibility that this man is being portrayed as a sex object in the same way that women have been traditionally portrayed. Whatever reading is adopted, it is clear that the increased sexualization of the male body in advertising has not been at the expense of the objectification of women. The best that can be said is that both men and women are now equally subject to objectification.

Future Directions The belief that sexual objectification can be seen as a positive choice has disarmed much of the traditional critique surrounding gender and advertising. Yet there remains concern that the bodies being objectified are those of young, slim, toned (and predominantly white) individuals. As a counter to this, some brands have begun to focus on “real” bodies. Nike’s “Get Real” campaign and Dove’s “Real Women” have sought to appeal to women by using a broader range of models, but it remains to be seen whether this trend will continue. As the range of representations of women has grown, so too has the range of representations of men. Studies following on from the work of Goffman indicated that men were also subject to sexrole stereotyping. Today, it is not unusual to see men represented as caring partners and loving fathers as well—but it remains the case that men are rarely seen as responsible for tasks associated with day-to-day household maintenance such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping. If it is the case that gender representation in advertising contributes to expectations of appropriate gender behavior, then this should remain a cause of concern. Dee Amy-Chinn See also Advertising; Beauty Myth; Body, The; Domestic Division of Labor; Feminism and Women’s Magazines; Gender and the Media; Semiotics; Sexuality

Further Readings Advertising Standards Authority. Herself Reappraised: The Treatment of Women in Advertising. London: Author, 1990.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin, 1963. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. London: Macmillan Press, 1979. Nixon, Sean. Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption. London: University College London Press, 1996. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertisements. London: Marion Boyers, 1978.

GENDER

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The Industrial Revolution in Europe and later the United States resulted in the separation of home and work, splitting the production and consumption processes with production moving outside the home and consumption remaining primarily in the home. Industrialization resulted in the mass production of household goods, many of which were previously produced inside the home by women or by the family unit. The concomitant movement of work from farm to factory and residence from rural to urban also contributed to the shift in women’s primary role as producer of household goods to that of consumer decision maker for the family unit, creating separate spheres of influence for men and women. Particularly among the middle and upper classes, women’s role turned from that of producer of goods and services to consumption manager for the household.

Media and the Female Consumer Mass production requires mass consumption; mass consumption requires mass media to generate mass consumer demand for mass-produced goods. The history of mass media parallels the history of industrialization as innovations in technology made books, newspapers, magazines, and later radio and other media technologies widely available for purchase. Early media targeting women, including nineteenthcentury women’s magazines, played a significant role in the primary definition of women as consumers in the industrializing economies of Europe and the United States. For example, the origins of the Ladies’ Home Journal can be traced to a women’s column in Tribune and Farmer that reprinted articles from

Gender and the Media

other publications and offered housekeeping advice to the wives of its male subscribers. Publications such as the Ladies’ Home Journal assisted women with the transition from producer to consumer, guiding women to take seriously the immense responsibility of selecting goods for their families. Women needed to be taught how to shop, to make smart purchasing decisions, and to use these produced appropriately. Women’s role as consumption managers was well established by World War I. By the 1920s, estimates suggest that women purchased more than 80 percent of goods consumed within the household. As early advertising and consumer researchers learned that women were largely responsible for household purchasing, they developed more effective ways to reach female consumers, drawing on emerging psychological research on women. Roland Marchand describes advertisers’ view of “consumer citizens,” the “emotional, feminized mass” of consumers who could be most effectively reached at the emotional rather than rational level. Advertising and marketing campaigns emphasized women’s purchasing as their most important contribution to the family and household. Soap operas, sponsored by companies such as Procter and Gamble, targeted housewives with their story content and advertising, first on the radio and later television. As a target market for product advertising, women have been a driving force in determining a substantial amount of media content, from magazines and radio to television and the Internet. Throughout the twentieth century, the mass media has used a variety of symbols of femininity and femaleness that would appeal to women as mothers, housewives, citizens, and, most importantly, consumers. The newly enfranchised woman of the 1920s was used to sell women a variety of products, including cosmetics, clothing, and automobiles. The new woman was an educated, savvy consumer whose independence and freedom was symbolized in the media by the automobile rather than the voting booth, notes E. Michele Ramsey. Media during World War II defined women’s purchasing decisions as a significant contribution to the war effort, fighting on the “second front line” at home in their kitchens, according to Mei-ling Yang. The postwar world promised American housewives a consumer’s paradise for women filled with technologies to virtually eliminate the arduous nature of housework. The wartime glorification of women’s role as housewife praised women for their service

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to family and country, but postwar reality failed to liberate American women from their kitchens and laundry rooms. Postwar media messages portrayed housewives as “domestic managers” using new appliances and gadgets to increase the efficiency of, but not freeing women entirely from, housework. Media symbols of femininity and femaleness have centered on two themes defining women as consumers in the private sphere and within the public sphere: the mother/wife at home and the liberated woman in the public world of business and leisure. These themes are often intertwined, as with the “Super Mom” image of the 1980s, which portrayed women juggling both home and work responsibilities.

Hearth and Home First, media consistently ties women’s roles within the home to their roles as consumers. Images of women interacting with their husbands and children or engaged in housework dominate these appeals. A classic example is Donna Stone, the lead character in the 1950s sitcom The Donna Reed Show, whose daily life consisted of cooking, cleaning, and solving the emotional troubles of her husband, children, and friends. The emphasis media place on women’s family responsibilities continues today. Market fragmentation has resulted in an increase in niche advertising in recent decades, with uneven results, according to Maria Bailey and Bonnie Ulman. In their book, Trillion-Dollar Mom$, Bailey and Ulman criticize the niche focus, reminding industry professionals of the unending potential of the “Mom Market,” a $1.6 trillion spending demographic. To reach them, the authors endorse the use of the same themes dominant in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century appeals to the female consumer: body image, food, time and time saving, family enrichment, family health, and the needs of her children. The book’s message is reminiscent of Vance Packard’s advice in his 1957 The Hidden Persuaders for producing ad copy which targeted consumers’ “eight hidden needs.”

Commodity Feminism Women’s roles outside of the home, within the economic and political realm, are likewise connected to their roles as consumers. Women’s responsibilities as citizens were characterized by the media in terms of their consumption decades before enfranchisement. Women’s suffrage, World War II, and second wave

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feminism provided new imagery for advertisers and marketers already defining women’s political function primarily in terms of their purchasing power: selling political liberation and economic independence through the consumption of goods and services. Robert Goldman is credited with coining the term commodity feminism to refer to the use of feminist ideologies and images in commercial media to sell products. Goldman asserts that this phenomenon developed in the 1980s, but there is evidence that the connection between consumption and women’s empowerment has a much longer history. In the 1970s, for example, the Virginia Slims cigarette slogan “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” and its associated print ad campaign showed modern, professional women smoking adjacent to black-and-white images of women illustrating women’s oppressed past. Liberation was not just about the freedom to vote or a career opportunity; it was about the freedom to purchase and to consume. Women’s growing economic independence is still defined as a freedom to consume, where political empowerment is equated with consumer empowerment. Images of high-powered female executives sell clothing, cosmetics, perfume, and luxury items. Simultaneously, the “girl power” movement for teen and preteen girls has been appropriated in part to define empowerment through commodity consumption, notes Sarah Banet-Weiser. These images exist alongside more traditional messages for women regarding their primary responsibility to home and family. Women continue to be defined first and foremost as consumers by the media. Women are consumers when they are home with family, engaged in housework, driving their sport utility vehicles to soccer practice, making deals in the business world, caught in a romantic embrace, or spending a night on the town. Political and economic advances for women continue to be settings and props for selling products to women in advertising and commercial media. Tawnya Adkins Covert See also Advertising; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Domestic Division of Labor; Feminism and Women’s Magazines; Feminist Movement; Gender; Gender Advertising; Identity

Further Readings Bailey, Maria T., and Bonnie W. Ulman. Trillion-Dollar Mom$: Marketing to a New Generation of Mothers. Chicago: Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2005.

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. “Girls Rule! Gender, Feminism, and Nickelodeon.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 2 (2004): 119–139. Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Fox, Bonnie J. “Selling the Mechanized Household: 70 Years of Ads in Ladies Home Journal.” Gender and Society 4, no. 1 (1990): 25–40. Goldman, Robert. Reading Ads Socially. New York: Routledge, 1992. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: The David McKay Company, 1957. Ramsey, E. Michele. “Driven from the Public Sphere: The Conflation of Women’s Liberation and Driving in Advertising from 1910 to 1920.” Women’s Studies in Communication 29, no. 1 (2006): 88–112. Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. Waller, Mary E. Popular Women’s Magazines, 1890–1917. PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987. Yang, Mei-ling. “Creating the Kitchen Patriot: Media Promotion of Food Rationing and Nutrition Campaigns on the American Home Front during World War II.” American Journalism 22, no. 3 (2005): 55–75.

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Gendering of public and private spaces refers to the superimposition of gender meanings on the distinction between public and private space. The meanings of the public/private distinction have changed over time and within various cultures, and the very publicness and privateness of places are conditional and contingent. In Western political thought, especially in those societies that have inherited the philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment, institutions like the state, the market, workplaces, and, more generally, all spaces of discussion or implementation of government politics or of the principles of living together fall into the category of the public sphere; the household and the family, and more generally the realm of intimate relations, are considered as the private sphere. The two terms of this dichotomy have historically been identified with qualities attributed to men and women, respectively. The public domain

Gendering of Public and Private Space

is considered as the intrinsic domain for rationality, justice, objectivity, meritocracy, austerity, universalism, and competition, which have been traditionally considered as proper male qualities; the private domain has been identified as the site for irrationality, intimacy, emotions, sexuality, and particularistic attitudes, traditionally regarded as typically feminine. From another perspective, women have been socially constructed as naturally suited for the private sphere and unsuited for public activity, and men have been considered as public citizens par excellence: their role as fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers were not to be taken into public life. The public/private dichotomy has been the justification for creating separated social spaces for men and women. This division has been further fueled in industrial capitalism and liberal economies, as the scale of manufacturing increased during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. The industrial production and distribution of goods could no longer be organized around a family life based on the shared work of wives and husbands (in artisans’ shops, merchants’ businesses, or agriculture) and was taken out of the household, in a world of public affairs apart from the domain now identified as “domestic.” This reorganization of labor, and the social and economic stratification and specialization that followed, pushed men and women into a gendered segregation of roles: men in the role of unique breadwinner devoted to the paid work and the public life; women in the role of main homemakers devoted to the managing of the household and child caring. Therefore, each of them was assigned to a distinct space, both material and symbolic. The bourgeois public sphere that emerged across Europe in various locations, including coffeehouses, literary salons, and philanthropic and professional associations, where people could gather and discuss matters of common concern, as in Jürgen Habermas’s historical account, developed also through the exclusion of women (and lower strata of society) from both the public spaces and access to literacy. Economic production soon became formalized as a male-dominated labor market, and public institutions systematically excluded or oppressed women, often with legal interdictions. Access to economic and administrative institutions for women was mediated by male husbands, fathers, or brothers. Legal restrictions to public visibility or speaking, to suffrage, to autonomous commercial activities, and to property ownerships confirmed that public spaces were far from being inclusive. Spatial architectures themselves

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have served as expressions of women’s distance from a male public and limited mobility. The phenomenological experience of the flaneur is extremely gendered as it was an opportunity effectively limited to men: the lack of female public lavatories and resting places in the streets during much of the nineteenth century in the name of middle-class decorum and women’s static nature is evidence of the exclusive nature of modern public space. At the same time, the bourgeois ideal of womanhood was based on a specific model of domesticity that was in turn regarded as a private matter: the concerns that attended the domestic sphere were considered beyond political intervention and not worthy of public discussion. The family management was consequently dehistoricized, and women were assigned to their allegedly natural functions. Conversely, women themselves were seen as comparatively passive, dependent, emotional, nurturing, and therefore constructed as unsuited for any competition and rationality-driven dimension. The cult of domesticity thus became an intrinsic part of the ideal of both womanhood and bourgeois private life by the mid-nineteenth century. Farmers’ wives continued as active economic partners on their families’ holdings, and urban working-class wives were also expected to contribute to their households’ incomes. But European urban bourgeois women were assigned to the role of ladies and housewives without any role in income-producing activities, and this gradually became an ideal for middle-class culture in Europe and the United States. Women were to be devoted full-time to social engagements and childrearing, possibly with the help of servants, and segregated into their houses. They were assigned to the role of nurturer and household manager, whose main task was to transform home into the refuge for the male breadwinner coming home in the evening and the most harmonious and well-ordered place for the children to grow up. The creation and maintenance of class boundaries depended on the styles of household management and family life, and the role of women in transforming a private space in a classidentity marker became crucial. Specific aspects of housekeeping were assumed as indicators of respectability: spick-and-span floors and furniture, spotless and ironed clothes, clean tablecloths and household linen, strictly scheduled activities for the family members, and ornaments that could prove the housewife’s good taste became the sign of women’s being fit for the role of nurturers and caregivers. Also, the

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spotlessness and propriety of rooms such as the parlor and the kitchen were the occasion for the good bourgeois housewife to demonstrate her skills. At the same time, women’s unpaid work was to be occulted: the bourgeois house was not to display signs of their domestic work. The home was to be identified as a space where production was banned and consumption was flaunted. This was true also in the design and aesthetic qualities of goods placed in the domestic environment: manufacturers designed domesticity into their machines in the nineteenth century by eliminating references to mechanization and instrumentality, as in the case of sewing machines. More broadly, the private space was constructed as a sphere of consumption opposed to work, and the bourgeois housewife had the task to display this opposition. The distinction between production and consumption was used to reinforce the ideal of complementarity of genders in bourgeois family, as Thorstein Veblen noted, since production and consumption were assigned to separate, gendered social spaces. The lady was primarily responsible for the family’s good taste in consumption and use of goods. The overall presentation of the household through the women’s organization of the domestic space helped build the moral boundaries of bourgeois families, thus distinguishing them from both the aristocratic and the working class. The successful fulfillment of class imperatives relied on women’s ability to manage private spaces. Consequently, the cult of true domestic womanhood was both a consequence of the rise of bourgeoisie and a vital component in the reproduction of bourgeoisie collective identity. The process of gendering public and private spaces was therefore fed by both men’s power prerogatives in public roles and the cult of domestic life. It subsided in times of crisis and war, due to governments’ tendency to identify women as symbols of national unity and the necessity of women substituting for mobilized men in waged workplaces. But it reemerged in the United States and Europe during the interwar period and then in the 1950s, after the end of World War II, when women were asked to return into their homes to give jobs to returning soldiers. In this period, improvements in technology and increasing real incomes allowed working-class as well as middle-class women to share the cult of gendered domesticity. The media played a crucial role in reinforcing the idea of separate tasks in separate spaces, by cherishing the ideal of the female homemaker and

consumer and the male breadwinner and producer. The consequences of this ideology have been longlasting. Even if women’s participation in the labor market has increased, gender occupational segregation and concentration of women in social and care jobs is still considered by many authors more an extension of women’s private role than a transgression of the old public/private space distinction. Recently, a number of historical accounts have nonetheless reconsidered the extent of the effective process of gendering of public and private space in capitalist economy. It has been stated that the assumption that capitalist man “needed a hostage” in the home has been more useful as an analytical tool rather than empirical evidence: the idea that men’s and women’s agricultural work in precapitalist societies was interchangeable has not been sufficiently proved; bourgeois men often worked in or near their homes, while women’s duties brought often them into the public sphere; and practices in the private sphere have been the occasion for nurturing a sense of gendergroup solidarity. From this perspective, the gendering of spaces should be read essentially as a powerful ideology barring women from most occupations, protecting men from household work, and keeping private experiences out of the public and political debate, more than a detailed description of practices and events. The distinction between a public and a private sphere has been the target of many feminist movements, under the slogan “the personal is political.” Because of these pressures, the gendered boundaries between public and private spaces have been called into question. There have been political efforts, through legislation, cultural movements, and affirmative actions, to bridge the gender gap in the participation and positioning in the labor force, to promote women’s political participation, and to encourage men’s participation in child caring and domestic work. Rossella Ghigi See also Civil Society; Domestic Division of Labor; Flaneur/euse; Gender; Geography; Households; Identity; Spaces and Places

Further Readings Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes. London: Hutchinson, 1987. Landes, Joan. Feminism, the Public and the Private. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture. London: Sage, 2007.

Generation Vickery, Amanda. “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History.” The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414.

GENERATION Generation in social sciences is usually regarded as equivalent to birth cohort or age cohort, a group of individuals born in the same time period. A concept of generation is thus contextualized both within the historical time and within the company of coevals. It is nowadays widely accepted that a birth cohort comes to have social significance as a generation by creating a distinctive cultural or political identity. Therefore, a common way of explaining age differences in social and cultural contexts is to define age-related distinctive features as generational characteristics. For consumer cultures, generation is an important concept, because generational identities typically manifest themselves in attitudes and practices related to consumption. Particularly when comparing the attitudes and practices of young and elderly people, one usually refers to generational differences. However, there are some empirical problems in these interpretations. Maybe the most well-known theorist interested in social generations was Karl Mannheim. In his essay “The Problem of Generations,” Mannheim emphasized the social and political role of generations in historical change. According to Mannheim, each generation experiences certain social and cultural events from a distinct viewpoint. Generations are held together by their joint experiences of (traumatic) historical events, and collective identities of generations are formed by these experiences. Mannheim stressed the importance of the events that occurred in youth. The more dramatic and traumatic the events in the youth period were, the stronger and more persistent was the generational identity shaped by the events. Mannheim also argued that generations radicalize by traumatic experiences and thus get the strength to change society with new political and cultural visions. Following the ideas of Mannheim, warfare such as world wars, revolutions, dictatorships, and massacres should be especially important for the formation of generational consciousness. Also, nationalist movements are thought to have connections to social and political generations. Since historical periods

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and events vary significantly, all generations are not equally active and do not necessarily act strategically to bring about change. June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner see a certain pattern of activity among successive generations. An active generation (generation for itself) is likely to be followed by a passive one (generation in itself) that inherits changes produced by the predecessor. In Western societies, this succession is said to be particularly obvious for the postwar “babyboomer generation,” which is regarded as a “strategic” generation in many ways, and the succeeding “Generation X,” which is said to be less fortunate and more passive (Edmunds and Turner 2005, 562). Ronald Inglehart distinguishes successive generations according to their material values: materialistic and postmaterialistic. The degree of materialism depends on whether the generation has grown up fighting for scarce material resources or not. Inglehart, too, emphasizes the baby boomer generation in particular. The values of baby boomers are nonmaterialistic, whereas the parents of the baby boomers who experienced the war had more materialistic values. Pierre Bourdieu saw the contradictions between generations also important in cultural transformations. According to Bourdieu, intergenerational competition over social, economic, and cultural resources produces significant social change. Thus, according to many theorists, there is necessarily a “generation gap,” or at least there are very different values between the generations. One important question, however, is how generational activity should be defined, if it is assumed that the generational succession necessarily includes alteration of activity levels of the generations. Another question that also arises is whether a generation really needs collective consciousness and traumatic memories to become an active generation. Furthermore, can only politically active generations with contrasting values to the previous generation bring about social change? Consumer cultures and everyday practices of generations may result in significant changes in people’s lifestyles, too, with changes related to new technology as a recent example. The notion of generation gap is also problematic. Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone argue that the attitudes of older generations toward the behavior of younger generations are to a great extent a result of the “golden age” view of history, which tends to have a ring of nostalgia when talking about the past. The impression “in my day” usually refers to the person’s

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youth or young adulthood as the “good old days.” The shift from the golden age to the present results often in an apocalyptic vision of a loss of values and standards. However, generations have traditionally adopted the values of previous generations. This is particularly obvious in the transmission of political or religious values, according to Joseph DeMartini. This, however, is not necessarily in contrast with generational consciousness.

Generations, Values, and Consumer Cultures As described previously, generations are commonly thought to be carrying the sociohistorical world of their youth with them throughout their lives. Therefore, generations are usually named after the occasions that had impact on their generational consciousness when they were coming of age. Another naming strategy refers to the demographic, social, and political conditions of their birth. The names of the generations vary somewhat in different countries and in different contexts. The generation born before the 1920s is usually called the war and depression generation, since it experienced two world wars. The generation born between 1920 and 1940 is often called the great transformation generation, sometimes also war generation or postwar generation after their youth experiences. The values of the generations born before the 1940s are usually regarded as very traditional. Being young during periods of scarce economic resources, their attitudes toward consumption are thrifty but materialistic in the sense of the importance of financial security. The members of the war generations are also claimed to be more team oriented and patriotic than those of other generations, since they had to fight a common enemy (e.g., Schewe and Meredith 2005). In Western societies, the main focus of the research on generations has been on the baby boomer generation. The baby boomers were born after World War II, mostly between 1945 and 1955. The generation is also sometimes called the sixties generation, after the period of their youth. Mainly in the 1960s, the generation experienced many historical and social shifts, such as a worldwide economic boom, the rise of mass consumption, the creation of the welfare state, the rise of popular culture, sexual liberation, and increasing equality between gender and races, as well as nonmaterial values and political activism. The generation thus achieved a reputation as a radical,

liberal, and particularly “youthful” group of people. Moreover, the collective identity of the generation is regarded as very strong. Whether this is true or not, the baby boomer generation is still the most affluent and powerful age group in many Western societies, even at the edge of retirement age. As being the “first teenagers,” the baby boomers have also caused a collective rejuvenation of consumer cultures and lifestyles in most Western societies. As baby boomers entered middle age, they brought with them many of the values and tastes of their youth and reconstructed what it meant to be middle-aged in the process. Concepts such as cognitive or subjective age replaced the biological age in this rejuvenation process. Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth define subjective age as being determined by one’s individual physical feelings, appearance, and satisfaction with life. In empirical studies, baby boomers express subjective feelings of being younger than their years. They generally identify themselves with younger generations and distance themselves from the older ones. This is manifested in their consumption and leisure time, which conspicuously aim at youthfulness, note Simon Biggs and colleagues. The subjective rejuvenation of the baby boomers has often been interpreted as “capturing” youth from the next generation The next cohort, born mainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, was regarded as the incalculable, passive, and fragmented youth generation in the 1980s and early 1990s. As the period of 1980s was rather stable in Western countries, lacking great historical events until the collapse of Soviet Union, the 1980s generation was seen as lacking strong collective values. As a consequence, they were also seen as lacking generational identity as well as interest in politics and social changes. In the United States, the 1980s generation was named Generation X after Douglas Coupland’s novel. Generation X has received negative publicity more than other generations, representing the yuppies of the 1980s, but also having received a reputation of becoming culturally and socially trapped between the baby boomers and the younger age cohorts. The members of Generation X are also seen as the latchkey generation of distant parents, the neo-helpless children of welfare states, who more than previous generations value the quality of personal life and put it ahead of work life. The members of the generation are also regarded as individualistic rather than team players.

Generation

As consumers, the members of Generation X are seen as individualistic and skeptical and are also said to feel alienated by marketers, according to Charles Schewe and Geoffrey Meredith. In youth, Generation X was presupposed to grow up early, at least mentally, to meet the requirements of (post)modern society. Along with the collective rejuvenation of the baby boomers, the boundaries between the boomers and Generation X became blurred, notes Terhi-Anna Wilska. Edmunds and Turner report that following the footsteps of the baby boomers, the 1980s generation became specifically focused on health and lifestyle issues. The generation was the most concerned about HIV/AIDS and also started to promote vegetarianism and favor organic food. The development of new media created new opportunities for civic commitment as well as new ways of forming social communities. Generation X is capable of using the new information and communication technologies (ICT), but the generation did not grow up with ICT from early childhood as did those born in the late 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1990s, this young generation was called the Net generation, N Generation, or E-generation because the advent of the Internet is the defining event for them, and electronic media is the most natural way of communication for them, according to Don Tapscott. Sometimes the generation is also called Generation Y (succeeding Generation X), mainly by marketing researchers. The N Generation lives in the e-universe, including social communities such as chat rooms, social networks, and online games. E-commerce is everyday practice, as well as real consumption in virtual worlds. Schewe and Meredith report that as consumers, the members of the N Generation are described as expressive, brand conscious, and more aware of trends and fashion than previous generations. The N Generation is also regarded as the most consumption-oriented and materialistic generation in history. However, since the consumer culture and social world of the N (Y) Generation is more global than that of previous generations, the members of the generation are also more aware of global problems. The generation is usually regarded as more idealistic, socially networked, and social-cause oriented than Generation X. It is possible that social communities and cultures formed within new technology have created a wider social and cultural gap between N (Y) Generation and Generation X than the gap between Generation X and the baby boomers.

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Explaining Generation-Specific Consumption Patterns Generations have different consumer cultures. However, turning age differences in specific consumption patterns directly into generational differences contains conceptual and methodological problems. One cannot say straightforwardly whether certain distinctive features in consumption, lifestyles, or attitudes of certain age groups are likely to continue throughout life, even when it seems likely. Especially in respect of consumption, this question is problematic, since the consumption resources and attitudes toward consumption of different generations have undergone great transformation during the past decades. However, turning age differences in consumption into generational characteristics is very common, particularly in marketing research and market segmentation. This easily leads to fallacies. When explaining generational differences in consumption patterns, the first potential fallacy is generational fallacy: the properties of certain age groups are thought to be permanent, but instead they change with aging. For instance, the alleged nonmaterialistic values of the baby boomer generation may be a fallacy, because the current consumption and lifestyles of the cohort do not support this assumption. A researcher may also explain the behavior of different age groups simply by age or life-course stage, believing that attitudes, behavior, and ideas change when moving through successive life-course stages. If the behavior does not change, it is a generational feature, and there is an age-course fallacy in the interpretation, according to Wilska. For instance, vegetarianism is often seen as typical of young age. However, vegetarianism has remained particularly typical of Generations X and N (Y), and they even transfer the habit to their young children. It is possible to control generational and life-course fallacies by collecting panel data and analyzing a certain age group over years. The researcher can thereby explain whether the properties under examination change over a lifetime or not. Explaining generation-specific consumption empirically is not easy, as described previously. Although generations have distinct values and attitudes, and certain consumption patterns seem to be obviously generation related, there is not much clear empirical evidence of it. Among the few undoubtedly generation-specific preferences are aesthetic

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preferences and taste formation. For example, music tastes are formed in a certain sensitivity period of teenage and early adulthood and remain unchanged throughout life. To some extent, this applies to preferences for fashion and apparel as well, note Morris Holbrook and Robert Schindler. The use of mobile phones and ICT are proved to have clear generationrelated differences, too. The “digital divide” between older and younger generations is obvious, which means that younger generations can use ICT more effectively than older ones. Marketing researchers also regard brand loyalty and brand preferences as generational attributes. Generational effect is obvious also in the management of personal finances. Particularly attitudes toward personal finances, especially toward debt and credit, are found to be the most distinctive differences between consumers of different generations. Also, eating habits and consumption of food vary between generations, as found by Alan Warde. In addition to values shaped by collective experiences, each generation grows up in a different economic and market environment, which includes the supply of goods and services and legitimate everyday practices. Recently, the environments have become more global, and the changes in the environments are more rapid. Therefore, it will be probably even more difficult than before to explain consumption patterns as generational differences in the future.

Generations and Consumer Cultures in the Future Due to the globalization process, consumer cultures of the future will probably reflect more and more the values of societies outside the Western world. As historical events and their consequences vary in different countries, generations and their values also vary considerably in different cultures. In newly developed countries such as Russia, China, India, and Brazil, historical and political events have created very different generational identities from those of the Western world. Therefore, generational consumer cultures also have different dynamics in these countries. In Russia and China, for instance, young generations have much more spending power and distinctly different consumer cultures than previous generations. The importance of these countries as consumer societies will grow in the future. This will change the traditional hierarchies of consumer generations. Western

societies will become more multicultural, too, which is likely to make the national generational identities more fragmented in the future. New media makes generational experiences more global, despite fragmentation in local cultures. As Edmunds and Turner note, new media is able to transmit traumatic events globally in real time and thus provide a basis for the creation of new global generational consciousness. Therefore, generational identities that used to be local turn into global at least for some issues. However, since economic and cultural differences between countries persist, it is unlikely that generations will represent the same values and identities everywhere. What will happen, though, is that young generations’ values will be created with more knowledge and information. Young generations will probably distance themselves from previous generations even more than before. Thus, generational characteristics will remain significant factors when explaining the consumption cultures of different age groups also in the future. However, it is likely that the new generations will derive their collective consciousness from communication practices, lifestyles, and new social networks rather than from contrasting values or traumatic memories. Terhi-Anna Wilska See also Age and Aging; Collective Identity; Information Society; Leisure; Longitudinal Studies; Social Movements; Voting Behaviors; Youth Culture

Further Readings Biggs, Simon, Chris Phillipson, Rebecca Leach, and AnneMarie Money. “The Mature Imaginations and Consumption Strategies: Age and Generation in the Development of a United Kingdom Baby Boomer Identity.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 2, no. 2 (2007): 31–59. Bourdieu, Pierre. Sociology in Question. London: Sage, 1990. DeMartini, Joseph. “Generational Relationships and Social Participation.” Sociological Inquiry 62, no. 4 (1992): 450–463. Edmunds, June, and Bryan S. Turner. “Global Generations: Social Change in the Twentieth Century.” The British Journal of Sociology 56, no. 4 (2005): 559–577. Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. “Images of Ageing.” In Ageing in Society: An Introduction to Social Gerontology, edited by John Bond, Peter G. Coleman, and Sheila Peace, 304–332. London: Sage, 1993.

Geography Holbrook, Morris, and Robert Schindler. “Age, Taste and Attitude toward the Past as Predictor of Consumers’ Aesthetic Tastes for Cultural Products.” Journal of Marketing Research 31, no. 3 (1994): 412–422. Inglehart, Ronald. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Jones, Ian R., Martin Hyde, Christina R. Victor, Richard D. Wiggins, Chris Gilleard, and Paul Higgs. Ageing in a Consumer Society: From Passive to Active Consumption in Britain. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Lunt, Peter, and Sonia Livingstone. Mass Consumption and Personal Identity. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 2002. Mannheim, Karl. “The Problem of Generations.” In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, 276–320. London: Routledge & Keegan, Paul, 1952. Schewe, Charles D., and Geoffrey Meredith. “Segmenting Global Markets by Generational Cohorts: Determining Motivations by Age.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 4, no. 1 (2005): 51–63. Tapscott, Don. Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998. Warde, Alan. Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary Antinomies and Commodity Culture. London: Sage, 1997. Wilska, Terhi-Anna. Survival with Dignity? The Consumption of Young Adults during Economic Depression: A Comparative Study of Finland and Britain 1990–1994. Turku, Finland: Publications of the Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, Series A-3, 1999.

GEOGRAPHY Geographers have been concerned with understanding the spaces through which consumption is manifest, but also the ways in which spaces, social relationships, and things coalesce to make meaningful places. Thus, underpinning much geographical research on consumer culture is the belief that consumption is spatially constituted and expressed and that social relationships, geographical imaginations, and social spaces are also actively created through consumption.

Geographies of Consumption: Intellectual and Disciplinary Contours During the 1970s and 1980s, geographical consumption research involved description, mapping, and

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modeling of consumption behavior in areas such as food, energy, health care, public and private housing, and leisure and recreation. In the 1990s, geographies of consumption expanded rapidly. The intensification of many processes related to consumption in the latter half of the twentieth century, including the uneven effects of globalization and trade, the commodification of new spaces and practices in both urban and rural landscapes, the mediation of commercial culture and material, and disparities within and between firstand third-world nations, prompted greater attention to relationships between consumption, people, and place. Associated with this was the development of a range of post-positivist theoretical approaches that informed concerns about the politicization of commodity provision, differing access to goods and services, and questions about the role of consumption in the uneven development of place over time. Despite a long heritage of work on collective consumption (e.g., in areas of housing, health, education, transportation), attention now turned to the ways in which consumption was actively constructed through a variety of institutional agents such as firms, states, and industries and to the role and place of consumers and consumer practice in such analysis. Robert Sack’s Place, Modernity and the Consumer’s World and sociologist John Urry’s Consuming Places highlighted the ways in which individuals constructed much of their everyday experience in relation to consumer landscapes and how place, space, and scale made a difference to how consumption was expressed and experienced. Consumption research in geography developed alongside Neil Wrigley and Michelle Lowe’s “new retail geographies,” which were concerned with examining the power of retail capital and significance of changing retail practices in structuring consumption. Connecting retailing with political, economic, and cultural processes was also exemplified by Peter Jackson and colleagues’ work on commercial cultures, which sought to understand how the market and processes of commerce were embedded in a variety of cultural processes by tracing the connections between economies, practices, and spaces. In addition, Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer’s research on commodity chains and networks revealed how the connections between things, people, and places were formed through a range of regulatory regimes and institutional and individual practices such as agrocommodity production, manufacturing, marketing,

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distribution, and retailing. The significance of leisure and tourism activity in contemporary social change also led to Aitchison and colleagues’ volume of geographical work on leisure/tourism practices and spaces with insights for consumption. Geographers interested in rurality noted the way in which some rural spaces were being remade and reimaged through consumption practice, but significantly more attention was accorded to process of change in urban areas perhaps because, as Mark Jayne argues, it is in the morphology of cities that its expression of consumer culture is most explicit and has been most spectacularly mediated. Geographical research on consumption has continued to expand into the 2000s and now examines a huge diversity of spaces and relationships. A key emphasis is on how people and entities are caught up in transnational networks and how consumption is actively (but not always knowingly) assembled, reproduced, and expressed in and across different contexts. Geographers have sought to interrogate narratives of consumer culture and globalization associated with the theorized emergence of a postmodern condition linked to post-Fordism that assume increased homogeneity consumer practices and places, the erasure of social and spatial difference, and consumerism linked to narcissistic selfactualization and representation. While not denying the potential effects of such changes, geographers have revealed oppositional tendencies (such processes leading to heterogeneity across space) and have examined the tensions, ambiguities, and inconsistencies in contemporary consumer culture and its manifestation in place. Work has continued on how practices and objects of consumption and their meanings “travel,” occupying different social and spatial “moments” and being transformed over time and across place. Underpinning much of the emergent research has been the realization that the cultures and practices of everyday life and places matter not only to spatiality (the spatial patterning of human and physical environments and relations) but also to subjectivity and to sociality as it is shaped through relationships that may be both near and distant. Although the bulk of the research on geographies of consumption has been conducted within human geography, more recently, there has been increased attention to how consumption and environment are connected and to the interactions between human and physical processes. In the last two decades,

pressing concerns such as climate change, pollution, land degradation, erosion, waste disposal, and sustainable consumption have been researched. There have been calls for research that integrates knowledges from both human and physical geographies to redesign systems of production and consumption and promote social and ecological justice. Geographies of consumption did not develop in a vacuum, nor is the evolution of research as linear as the narrative presented here would suggest. Traditions of positivist quantitative scholarship continue to exist alongside post-positivist approaches and a wide range of theoretical perspectives emanating from both within and outside the discipline have been and continue to be employed. Geographies of consumption are a shifting and dynamic field with contributions from geographers whose expertise is in a wide range of specializations including leisure, tourism, urban geographies, historical geographies, retail geographies, development studies, rural studies, agricultural and economic geographies, cultural and social geographies, political geography, historical geography, technology, media, and health. Published academic research on consumption still tends to be dominated by work emanating from within AngloAmerican geography, though research from a variety of contexts outside this “core” is becoming more visible. Geographies of consumption have also been invigorated by research collaborations with scholars from other social science and humanities disciplines, particularly from those employing critical perspectives in sociology, history, and anthropology. The diversity of approaches, subjects, and interdisciplinary exchanges does nevertheless make any concept of consumption geography as a bounded, unified, and systematic disciplinary subdivision of human geography indefensible.

Political Economic Perspectives Geographers studying consumption have generally tended to eschew perspectives derived from conventional economics, which suggest that consumption is the premise of consumers making rational calculations based on the utility of a good. Accordingly, most do not see consumption as an autonomous and unproblematic set of practices that reflect relations of demand and supply in a marketplace. Although work on the spatial distribution and analysis of consumption was more prevalent in the second half

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of the twentieth century as geographers sought to “map” social and spatial behaviors and phenomena (such as leisure/tourism activities, firm and retailing forms, shopping practice), since the 1980s, much more emphasis has been given to understanding how consumption practices and places are formed and created. This research was and continues to be informed by more critical theoretical perspectives that seek to critique existing structures, practices, and geographies with the purpose of revealing, challenging, and transforming societal norms, discourses, and relationships that may produce forms of exploitation or oppression. Critical perspectives located in political-economic understandings influenced by Marxist theory illuminate the importance of economic power in the rise of the consumer society but tend to position consumption as an outcome of production. Consumer culture is consequently related to the process of alienation, whereby workers exchange their labor power for money to buy commodities but become disconnected from the products of their own labor. Political economic processes have been influential, enabling geographers to relate historical and contemporary shifts in production to changes in what, how, and where things are consumed and to the structures and mechanisms through which such processes are organized. Political economic perspectives informed by Marxian theory have provided a lens through which to interpret the spatial separation of production and consumption that accompanied industrialization in many nations. They have also informed understandings of how postwar processes of globalization connecting producers, transnational corporations, and consumers through increasingly complex commodity chains/networks. This has helped scholars interpret the spatial extent and form of new divisions of labor, uneven trade relations, and shifting governance of these relations by states and firms. Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism has been drawn on by geographers to reflect on the ways in which consumer culture is constructed both materially and symbolically in specific commodified spaces. Commodity fetishism involves changing the relationship between people through processes of market exchange such that commodities appear to be independent of the people who make them yet are imbued with human characteristics. A consequence of this is that not only are the commodities themselves presented as magical, emotive objects

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offering individuals multiple possibilities for creating symbolic and moral meaning, but places themselves also become consumable, imaginative, and moral landscapes. The concept of commodity fetishism has influenced geographical interpretations of spaces designed to enchant consumers and facilitate consumerism in both contemporary and historical setting landscapes such as world fairs, department stores, shopping malls, tourist sites, and theme parks. Analysis of these spaces has also been informed by the post-structuralist writings of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard and by semiotics, whereby consumer landscapes were viewed as texts through which the intended meanings of the creators and designers of these environments could be read. In emphasizing institutional power and governance and relationships between state and economy as they are expressed through a range of structures and mechanisms (such as policy documents, legislation, alliances, and contracts), political economy perspectives have also provided insights into the role of the state regulation in influencing consumption practices and patterns particularly with the transition from welfare states to neoliberal forms of governance. They have also been employed to theorize shifts from collective to individual forms of consumption, the differentiation of mass markets as part of niche production and consumption, and to understand the role of production, labor, and trade practices in the uneven development of place. Political economic approaches have highlighted the role of new technologies and the growth of media and advertising industries in exposing consumers to a greater range of commodities and more diverse opportunities for identity formation than was previously the case. More recently, such as in the work of Kersty Hobson, insights from political economic perspectives have been directed toward environmental concerns through the field of political ecology, with the aim of connecting consumers and institutional actions to more sustainable outcomes.

The Cultural Politics of Consumption and Interpretative Methodologies The implicit positioning of consumption as a consequence of economic relations of production in political economic approaches has been critiqued by a number of geographers who believe that this has resulted in an unhelpful separation between economy

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and culture and between consumption and production. The focus on the production and design of spectacular sites of consumerism (such as the mall, the department store, and the theme park) to the detriment of more mundane landscapes of consumption (including homes, main streets, sites of secondhand provision, and the Internet) was also seen as a consequence of a productionist emphasis. Furthermore, feminist geographers suggested that consumer behavior and practices were often uncritically “read” off these spectacular landscapes, arguing that such readings were masculinist, ignoring relations of gender and other dimensions of social and material difference (such as age, class, sexuality, and ethnicity) and the diversity of ways in which these spaces are made meaningful and constructed by consumers. Partly as a response to critiques of productionist theorizations of consumption, ethnographic and interpretative studies were being conducted by geographers keen to explore the cultural politics of consumption. This “ethnographic turn” involved examining how consumption was actively made through consumption practices and with the consumer actively (albeit not always in conditions or circumstances of one’s choosing) contributing to the production of consumer spaces and to differing social relations and subjectivities. This work gave greater significance to the geographies of everyday life, to the mundane, even banal practices that individuals engaged in (such as grocery shopping, eating and socializing, surfing the net), what they did with commodities (collecting, using, caring, storing, divesting), and to what initially were called alternative spaces of consumption—that is, flea markets, charity shops, and car trunk fairs. It was notable that in the case of the latter, that second and third cycles of production and consumption were of interest with a view to broadening work beyond middle-class consumers and sites of consumption. In paying attention to cultural politics, the ways in which relations of domination and subordination are constructed in everyday life—in families, friendships, and households—historically informed geographical research highlighted the ways in which consumption is morally inflected and constituted, revealing how the personal and the political intersect through a number of scales and times. Informed by feminist, poststructural, postcolonial, and queer perspectives, this research demonstrated how commodities and material culture have an important role in structuring the

everyday lives and spaces of people both individually and collectively and how creating meaning through consumption requires both material and identity work. Gender-based theories of performativity have shown how bodies themselves are more than just surfaces for the inscription and representation of particular identities (young, old, fat, male, etc.) but are themselves powerful sites for the repetition and performances of consumption that are gendered, aged, and raced.

Relational Approaches and the Rematerialization of Human Geography As mentioned previously, post-structuralist approaches associated with the cultural turn facilitated the development of new research techniques such as discourse and semiotic analysis that focused on textual readings and interpretations of more abstract spaces and processes. While not dismissing the important insights gained by these perspectives, a number of geographers working on consumption have also been cognizant of calls for a “rematerialization” of human geography, resulting in renewed emphasis on the way that “concrete” or “material” objects, bodies, and environments influence the construction of the places and practices of everyday life. Consequently, geographers have actively sought to engage with objects and place of material culture in their research, recognizing that commodities also create social life and place through noncommodified moments (as in gift giving, or in rituals of use and disposal). The application of other post-structuralist approaches such as actornetwork theory has reinvigorated work on the material dimensions of consumption by emphasizing the ways in which human and nonhuman things are connected through complex and shifting relations that are held together across space by a variety of actants. Similarly, theories of governmentality have provided insights into how everyday practices like shopping and using domestic appliances and home furnishing are subject to and productive of a politics of power through the organized processes, ideas, and techniques through which subjects are governed. The concept of governmentality has provided insight into the ways in which individuals are differentially shaped as consumer citizens, particularly with regard to the contestation or adherence to neoliberal prescriptions that position consumers as autonomous, rational, risk-minimizing individuals making decisions acting responsibly in the marketplace.

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Within human geography, Harald Bathelt and Johannes Gluckler’s notion of “relational geographies” has had greater currency in recent years prompting understandings of subjectivities, practices, and places as an expression of a myriad of social, economic, institutional, and political practices operating across a variety of scales and spaces. In emphasizing the active role of agents (rather than more abstract notions of space such as regions or nations), relational geographers suggest that places are grounded in relations that may be simultaneously local and global. For example, buying a branded name commodity produced by a corporation that markets and produces on a global scale may be both a local relationship (shopping locally, purchasing in a store, orienting to a peer group culture) and simultaneously part of the constitution of the making of global commercial culture (allegiance to symbolic power of a global brand, part of flows of capital globally through financial systems, and a connection to workers and others in distant places). These relationships may be formal (as in contracts, legislation, through recognized systems monetary exchange) or informal (such as alliances, cooperations, exchanges, or affiliations built on trust or belief) but can extend well beyond (or be distant from) the “place” in which agents “act.” Consequently, places (such as the mall or the home) are not viewed as containers for social action, or as homogeneous explanatory variables in themselves, but are seen as created through practice, shaped and made meaningful in multiple ways and in different locations in the context of interdependent relationships between other places. Relational approaches emphasize the complex relationships that bind people, things, and institutions together. For example, researchers, such as Nick Clarke and colleagues, have revealed the ways in which spaces and narratives of sustainability, ethical consumption, fair trade, and alternative consumption are not simply about the behaviors and orientations of individual consumers but are shaped through complex associations of people, sociotechnical relations, institutions, and groups across places, which are more fractured and diversely politicized than would first appear.

The Spatiality and Connectedness of Production and Consumption Geographies can be understood as the spatial expression of social and physical processes that together make the places we inhabit. Space is a more abstract

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concept than place, which is generally understood as more intimate (though not necessarily any more “real”). Geographers have also paid considerable attention to the concept of scale, which can be thought of as levels of spatiality that have been constructed to understand how consumption might be expressed differentially across space (e.g., body, region, and nation). A concern with space, and matters of spatiality in the production and expression of consumption, has meant that geographers have contributed substantially to the understanding of spatial expression of consumer culture. This contribution has involved studying not only commodified spaces but also commodity flows and disparities in consumption between and within nation-states. There has been detailed interpretive research on the numerous expressions of consumption in places as diverse as homes, streets, airports, workplaces, markets, cities, and nations with scholars concerned to reflect on the ways in which consumption processes are produced and manifest differentially and unevenly across space and time. Studying “unevenness” has not simply involved description of difference but also a concern with how geographical unevenness is connected and at times caused by such differences and connected to a politics of consumption that operates through and across places and scales. This has involved considering how, for example, material consumption in first-world contexts might be linked to poverty in others through the existence of particular forms of geopolitical relationships, trade relations, labor relations, and production, financial, and media systems. It has also involved work on home spaces and their wider connections. For example, studies of gentrification have shown that changes in inner-city living are not simply a matter of supply and demand or regulation of housing stock, but of the material qualities of houses, the desirability of forms of urban living and material lifestyles, and of the properties and possibilities of the material culture through which gentrification proceeds. An enduring theme in consumption geographies has been the interdependency of production and consumption processes. Work on commodity chains, networks, and to a lesser extent systems of provision has been instrumental in highlighting these connections. In commodity chain research, the metaphor of the “chain” involves linear connections with “links” representing discrete, but interrelated, activities involved in the design, production, and

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marketing of a product. Commodity chains emphasize organizational connections and the power of institutional agents such as manufacturers, buyers, and distributors to influence and maintain flows of materials, peoples, and knowledges across the chain. Early commodity chain research was particularly influential in making visible the politics of and the connections between transnational production in primarily third-world spaces and the consumption of goods by consumers in the “West.” Many social and environmental justice movements and organizations draw on the chain metaphor to reveal the “commodity fetish” emphasizing connections between producers and consumers to evoke consumer activism. Geographers’ interest in chains has been not only on the relationships between commodity processes and institutional actors linking production and consumption, but also on the spaces and environments in which commodities and their meanings are produced. However, this research has also been criticized because the consumption tends to be viewed as an outcome of production process with consumer practice an unproblematic starting point for an evaluation of commodity chain linkages. Rather than emphasizing institutional connections and governance of production, systems of provision approaches emphasize the material and symbolic transformations of commodities, highlighting how chains for different commodities are constituted and expressed very differently, a consequence of the composition of the “systems” of production, circulation distribution, and consumption in which they are located. However, the recognition that simple chain metaphors cannot easily encapsulate the social and spatial complexity of many production-consumption relationships in a globalizing world, and that the politics of consumption is multiply produced, has meant that the distinction between the global commodity chain and systems of provision approaches has become increasingly blurred. Both approaches have been and continue to be useful for understanding how commodities, people, and places form networks of relations that operate across a range of scales and for examining the political, social, and environmental expressions of chain formation in contemporary and historical contexts. The term commodity network appears to be more commonly used now, with the expression no longer informed just by political economic approaches but also by actor-network theorists who emphasize the way in which people,

things, and places are held together, sustained, and transformed through complex and shifting webs of interdependence. Literature on circuits of culture/consumption has also informed geographical research on consumption. As a nonlinear approach, commodity transformations and the social, spatial, and political practices through which they are shaped are seen as different moments that may be contingently rather than necessarily related. Nonlinear circuit approaches have been used, for example, to examine relationships surrounding magazine consumption and to look at second(hand) cycles of production and consumption, food and culinary narratives, and the shaping of “ethical consumption.” The concept of displacement has been a useful geographical metaphor for understanding how consumption transforms place and space, dislocating and shifting meanings of established places. The substantial amount of work on transnational cultures and geographies demonstrates the complex ways in which commodities and their meanings circulate and are transformed, that is, how they have both social and spatial lives. Much of this work has been directed toward understanding the material and symbolic shaping of food and clothing cultures and has highlighted the relational nature of commodity connections demonstrating how the global and local are mutually constituted and how commodity differences and meanings themselves are shaped, displaced, and expressed in different contexts. Work on transnationalism has demonstrated how consumers become enrolled in and a part of the performance of particular networks, communities, relationships, and lifestyles.

Sites and Spaces of Consumption Geographers have been and continue to be concerned with understanding the significance and expression of particular sites of consumption, and how these places and spaces themselves form part of consumer culture. As mentioned earlier, geographers have studied the commodified spaces (themed shopping malls, fast-food restaurants, department stores, chain stores, theme parks, casinos) that are most often cited as evidence of the growing visibility of consumerism in contemporary landscapes. Scholars have suggested the theming of environments as places of “elsewhereness,” and the inclusion of visual/aural forms of activity in such spaces (such as video, live entertainment, leisure activities) not only facilitates

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consumption but also provides a point of difference for consumers, a means of re-enchanting and enlivening relatively homogenous spaces, and promoting consumption and a point of difference for consumers. Attention has also been directed to the ways in which consumer practice is part of the production of these sites with consumers acceding to, and at times contesting, the dominant representations contained within them. Work on “the mall” and other spectacular commodified spaces has demonstrated how consumer identities and practices are actively shaped through the operation of surveillance and through the regulation and representation of appropriate ways of consuming. Privately owned shopping malls, for example, frequently masquerade as “public spaces” yet are often policed, and controlled spaces may be sites of social exclusion. However, spaces of spectacular or themed consumption have continued to evolve alongside other forms of consumption, many of which may be more mundane (outdoor/indoor markets, discount warehouses, car trunk fairs, grocery stores, discount stores, supermarkets, auctions, fairs, and secondhand shops). Geographers studying these sites have also sought to highlight the ways in which consumption is a social, moral, material, emotive, and bodily experience—recognizing the theatricality, performance, unpredictability, skill, thrift, pleasure, and challenges of engaging in consumption and drawing further attention to the ways in which places may be representative of and perpetuate structural social inequalities. Much of this work emphasizes the practice rather than the representation of consumption, reinforcing the necessity of understanding consumers’ spaces with reference to those who occupy and produce these spaces. Attention to the practices of consumers demonstrated the multiplicity of roles that could be held by people (as buyers, voyeurs, and entrepreneurs), blurring distinctions between consumers and producers and the relationships between firsthand and secondhand spaces and practices of consumption. Similarly, studies of the Internet as a site of consumption have also contributed to a more relational understanding of how production and consumption connects with the realization that the distinction between real and virtual space is difficult to sustain. Inherent in many contemporary geographical approaches to the study of consumption is the notion that space is not a container in which consumption practices occur but is itself produced. As well as

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examining how people acquire, use, and divest themselves of material things in places, geographers have shown how the materiality and spatiality of places in turn influences the sorts of accommodations people make—how they live, feel, and identify with each other, and the sorts of relationships they engage in as a consequence of this. Much of this work has centered on household practices such as eating, using new technologies, home furnishing, renovation, and decoration. These studies have illustrated the role of material things in configuring social and spatial relationships, and how relationships between people and things can both contribute to and be a reflection of wider public discourses and moral imaginings of such things as family, sexuality, gender, home, community, citizenship, nation, and identity.

Consumer Practice, Embodiment, and Material Culture Geographical attention to a wide range of consumption practices has extended knowledge of consumers beyond their behaviors to reflect on how consumption practices are related to the shaping identity and sociality. Studies of consumption practice have tended to refute notions of consumer culture as self-focused and hedonistic while still acknowledging the possibilities for and the ways in which people create multiple narratives of their self through engaging in consumption. Although they recognize that a wide range of commodities are available to people, which have a role in both creating and expressing one’s identities, geographers have focused more on how consumption is made meaningful through processes of embodiment and performance and the ways in which consumption practice is spatialized. Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe’s research on charity shops as part of their study of Second-Hand Cultures, for example, revealed the ways in which geographies of the body are mapped, with people less willing to buy or sell used shoes or underwear because of their personal and intimate associations with bodily discourses. Research situated in everyday spaces (homes, shops, cafés, workplaces) and involving studies of consumption as practiced (eating, shopping, socializing, dressing, gardening, home renovating) has shown how commodity purchase, use, and disposal is not anxiety or identity ridden but involves the negotiation and maintenance of social relationships and the narration or contestation of morally inflected subject positions (e.g.,

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“good” parents, moral consumers, “caring” family members). This research has also demonstrated that thinking, feeling, and acting need not be constrained by discourse (e.g., emotions can be externalized onto material objects such as photos, bumper stickers, and household objects), and it has also problematized a traditional separation between production- (often conceived of in terms of identities based in relation to one’s work or job) and consumption-based identities. Detailed ethnographic studies have challenged the notion of “the universal and passive consumer,” noting the multiple ways in which people engage in consumption and by examining the “work,” skills, and performances by which they do so. Bypassing unhelpful debates about consumers as sovereign or duped, geographers have examined how consumption practices intersect with relations and discourses of gender, sexuality, age, race, and class. This has contributed to an understanding of how people are constructed as consuming subjects, for example, as citizen-consumers, green consumers, active retirees, and so on, and also contributed to knowledge about how people come to be caught up in complex social and spatial networks. Research on ethical consumption has shown, for example, how consumers’ choices and identities related to fair trade purchases are made possible by a diverse range of organizations involved in trading, marketing, campaigning, and educating. Attention to the bodies of individuals as they engage in consumption provides ways of recognizing how power relations emerge through bodily performances. Bodies are disciplined and objectified through consumption, and geographical work has contributed to understanding how people (and bodies) can become out of place (such as drug users in retail spaces, “fat” bodies in clothing stores). The emphasis on the role of bodily practices, movements, and tactile and aural practices (such as dance or play) that are not necessarily subject to discourse by which human beings meaningfully engage with and performance of consumption has also challenged the visual bias of discursive and representational understandings of consuming subjects. The “material turn” in social and cultural geography has seen much more attention accorded to the social lives of things and to how things are accommodated in and become active elements in the reproduction of everyday life. For example, Andrew Gorman-Murray notes how the maintenance of domestic materiality by gay men and lesbians provides a means of reconciling multiple dimensions of

the self. A recognition that consumption practice is much broader than the purchase of commodities has been reflected in work on shopping, browsing, rituals and practices of commodity consumption (e.g., eating, listening to music, dressing), use (assembling, mixing, storing, sorting, collecting, cleaning, repairing, sharing), and disposal (recycling, reuse, diverting to waste streams). In research on both places of employment and the home, scholars have shown how the changing material capacities of things and technologies imply particular distributions of competence transforming home spaces and the skills, knowledges, and imaginations of those involved. Attention to maintenance, to instances of disrepair, and to wasting, ridding, and disposal has provided insights into how individual practices are connected to wider politics and organization of society.

Contributions, Tensions, and Directions Geographers’ insights into the production of diverse spaces of consumption and into situated practices and consumer subjectivities have been and continue to be counterweight to generalized descriptions and universality implied in views of globalization as homogeneity. A primary contribution of geographers has been in endeavoring to overcome unhelpful binaries in consumption, to consider the ways in which economy and culture, symbolic and material aspects of consuming, production and consumption, micro and global scales, and the personal and the political intersect in and across particular time and place contexts. They have illustrated how spaces are not simply a context in which consumption occurs or consumer culture is shaped, but instead how space both materially and symbolically has a significant role in how consumption practices and power relations are manifest. Geographers have also provided critical insights into the social and spatial lives of commodities— how they move, are transformed, and are made meaningful in place, thereby reinforcing the necessity of a view of consumption as more than just an act of purchase. Geographical studies have also demonstrated the unevenness of consumption across place and time, and the moralities implicit in consumption practice with much recent work concerned with how ethical consumption is being shaped. However, there has been less attention given to the ways in which interpretations of politics and power might inform actions designed to alleviate or ameliorate undesirable

Geography

environmental or social consequences. While a range of consumers and consuming practices have been studied, the consumption practices of those who struggle to survive materially and the “super rich” have had relatively less emphasis. A recurring theme in the literature on geographies of consumption has been how best to understand the connections between production and consumption without reifying differences between these spheres or without privileging one over the other. While this remains a challenge, it seems the growing engagement with relational geographies has possibilities for understanding production and consumption relationships and for reconciling research emanating from economic and cultural geographies. In focusing on consumer culture as a social process, insights into consumption geographies have largely emerged from within human geographies, but greater attention to the role of the material and nonhuman in society and space also provides possibilities for thinking about how knowledge derived from research in physical geography might be integrated and how these knowledges might be applied. Nevertheless, geographical research continues to make a significant contribution to documenting, explaining, and interpreting the form, constitution, and imagining of consumption and consumer culture, and to examining flows and assemblages of people, things, and knowledges as they are situated across time and space. Juliana Mansvelt See also Circuits of Culture/Consumption; Commodities; Cultural Turn; Gendering of Public and Private Space; Globalization; Identity; Inequalities; Moral Geography; Spaces and Places

Further Readings Aitchison, Cara, Nicola E. MacLeod, and Stephen J. Shaw. Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies. London: Routledge, 2000. Bathelt, Harald, and Johannes Gluckler. “Toward a Relational Economic Geography.” Journal of Economic Geography 3, no. 2 (2003): 117–144. Clarke, David. B., Marcus A. Doel, and Kate M. L. Housinaux, eds. The Consumption Reader. London: Routledge, 2003. Clarke, Nick, Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, and Alice Malpass. “The Political Rationalities of Fair-Trade Consumption in the United Kingdom.” Politics & Society 35 (2007): 583. Fine, Ben. The World of Consumption: The Material and Cultural Revisited. London: Routledge, 2002.

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Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Reconciling Self: Gay Men and Lesbians Using Domestic Materiality for Identity Management.” Social and Cultural Geography 9, no. 3 (2008): 283–301. Goss, Jon. “Once-Upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 1 (1999): 45–75. Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance.” Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1–25. Gregson, Nicky. Living with Things. Ridding, Accommodation, Dwelling. Wantage, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2007. Gregson, Nicky, and Louise Crewe. Second-Hand Cultures: Materializing Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Hetherington, Kevin. “Secondhandedness: Consumption, Disposal and Absent Presence.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004): 157–173. Hobson, Kersty. “Researching ‘Sustainable Consumption’ in Asia-Pacific Cities.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 45, no. 2 (2004): 279–288. Hughes, Alex, and Suzanne Reimer, eds. Geographies of Commodity Chains. London: Routledge, 2004. Jackson, Peter. “Rematerializing Social and Cultural Geography.” Social and Cultural Geography 1, no. 1 (2000): 9–14. Jackson, Peter, and Claire Dwyer, eds. Transnational Spaces. London: Routledge, 2004. Jackson, Peter, Michelle Lowe, Daniel Miller, and Frank Mort, eds. Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Jayne, Mark. Cities and Consumption. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006. Mansvelt, Juliana. Geographies of Consumption. London: Sage, 2005. Sack, Robert David. Place, Modernity, and the Consumer’s World: A Relational Framework for Geographical Analysis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Slater, Don. “Cultures of Consumption.” In Handbook of Cultural Geography, edited by Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift, 147–163, London: Sage, 2003. Urry, John, ed. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995. Wolch, Jennifer. “Green Urban Worlds.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97, no. 2 (2007): 373–384. Wrigley, Neil, and Michelle Lowe, eds. Retailing, Consumption and Capital: Towards the New Retail Geography. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1996.

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Ghettos

GHETTOS The ghetto is a constrained area occupied almost exclusively by members of an ostracized group, generally black, and within which nearly all members of that group are constrained to live. Black ghettos are doubly exclusive: nearly all blacks are in it; nearly all in it are black. The process of ghetto formation has important implications for consumption in terms of unequal access to housing and other vital services such as education. In South Africa, under its apartheid regime, racial and ethnic segregation was rigorously legislated. Cities were zoned to separate each racial group. Black townships, such as Johannesburg’s Soweto, were established distant from the city in which the Africans worked to not blight white urban expansion in their direction. The term ghetto originated in medieval Venice, where it applied to the Jewish quarter to which Jews were obliged to return by nightfall. However, it became a generic name for such areas in medieval towns. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland, they were referred to as shtetls, though these were small Jewish market towns.

Difference Between Ghettos and Ethnic Enclaves There are major differences between ethnic enclaves and ghettos. The key examples are the differences between the African American ghetto and the European immigrant ethnic enclaves within U.S. cities. Robert Park, cofounder and influential leader of the Chicago School of Sociology, saw the black ghetto as just another example of the generic ethnic enclaves like Little Italy. However, Thomas Philpott demonstrated that for Chicago in the 1930s, the black ghetto differed in kind from Park’s ethnic “ghettos.” Black ghettos were homogeneously black; they were doubly concentrated: 93 percent of Chicago’s black population lived in the black ghetto, where they accounted for 82 percent of the population. Even in 2000, 71 percent of Chicago’s black population lived in tracts that were between 70 and 100 percent black. The ethnic enclaves, in contrast, were mixed and diluted. For example, only 2 percent of the Irish lived in the Irish enclave, and they accounted for only a third of the enclave’s population. Just under a

half of the Italians lived in Chicago’s Italian enclaves, where they formed less than half of the population. Thus, ghettos were enforced; enclaves were voluntary. Conventionally, ghettos are considered negative and threatening, enclaves as positive and touristic; the ghetto is viewed as a prison, the enclave a springboard. Therefore, ghettos persist, enclaves dissolve. In recent times, ghetto has misleadingly been applied to almost any area of ethnic concentration rather than to areas meeting the dual criteria mentioned previously.

Race or Poverty? Ghettos are associated with poverty, poor housing, crime, and dysfunctional social life. However, their key characteristic is race. Some sociologists have represented ghettos as concentrations of poor people who happen to be black. However, many studies demonstrate that race, not income, is the defining characteristic. One of the most important demonstrations was made by Karl Taeuber and Alma Taeuber. They calculated for Chicago in 1960 that black-white income differences “explained” only 12 percent of the very high level of black segregation. Work by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton shows that for thirty metropolitan areas in the United States between 1970 and 1980, wealth made no difference to the very high level of segregation between blacks and whites with high incomes, blacks and whites with medium incomes, and blacks and white with low incomes.

Ghettos and Consumer Culture In terms of consumer culture, ghettos tend to be areas of avoidance for nonblack groups. Attempts have been made to assert that ghettos are areas of preference for black groups. Many African Americans are reluctant to be the first black families moving to predominantly white areas, but the literature shows that to find better housing, they want to move from the ghetto; increasingly, there has been a move of African Americans to the suburbs. Since the 1968 Open Housing legislation, an increasing number of blacks have been able to move to the suburbs, but constraints still exist, and black ghettos have not dispersed. For example, actor impersonators (white actors representing realtors/ estate agents with matching socioeconomic profiles as genuine black home seekers) were offered far more properties and better mortgages than were the black clients. The latter often found that realtors steered

Gifts and Reciprocity

them to black areas or missed appointments or told them that the properties had already been sold, while telling the matched white actors that the properties were still for sale. “Redlining” is another technique found to be used by real estate agents. This involved agents marking on a map areas (generally black) within which neither mortgages nor home insurance was available. In the first half of the twentieth century, “block busting” was a technique used by unscrupulous agents to introduce blacks into all-white areas to panic whites into cheap sales of their homes, which the agents then sold to desperate blacks for a profit. Work by Ingrid Gould Ellen has shown that there has been a continuous increase in the number of mixed tracts in the United States since the 1980s and that examples of stable integrated tracts have been increasing. This is largely through the success of blacks being able to move out of the ghetto. There is little evidence of whites moving into or near the ghetto. Ceri Peach See also Ethnicity/Race; Geography; Inequalities; Poverty; Social Exclusion; Spaces and Places; Urban Cultures

Further Readings Ellen, Ingrid Gould. Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000 Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Park, Robert E. “The Urban Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order.” In The Urban Community, edited by Ernest W. Burgess, 3–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926. Philpott, Thomas. The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Taeuber, Karl E, and Alma F. Taueber. “The Negro as an Immigrant Group.” American Journal of Sociology 69, no. 4 (1964): 374–382.

GIFTS

AND

RECIPROCITY

Long before objects were bought and sold, they were given, circulated, and venerated. The intensely meaningful, demanding, and ambivalent nature of gift exchange has long been recognized. In giving a gift, it seems, we give a part of ourselves; something of our

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emotions, hopes, and fears is embodied or carried along in the giving of a gift. Further, the acceptance of a gift, a remarkably formal process even today, somehow indebts and obligates the receiver, binding him or her to reciprocate. Where giver and receiver are of similar standing or are relatively equal in power, gifts are received with polite words of thanks, while the giver will often “downplay” the act of giving with words like “It isn’t much but . . . .” Where power relations are deeply unequal, gifts are often given anonymously, as in charitable acts, so that the giving does not humble or obligate the receiver. In mythology, the generous giver is sometimes masked, hooded, or exceptionally elusive so as not to confront the receiver with obligations. For example, Robin Hood is an aristocrat who appears poor and so may give to the poor as their equal, while the figure of St. Nicholas/Santa Claus “gives” without actually giving, or even existing, and allows families to give generously but indirectly through an enchanted medium. The children who hope to receive presents from Santa Claus are obligated only by a vague, yet significant, request to “be good” in a small reciprocation of Santa’s goodness.

Complexity of Gift Exchange However, the force of reciprocity in gift giving is certainly not confined to mythical tales or what might be thought of as “sentimental” occasions, such as holidays and birthdays. The notion of give and take and the “special” relationships this can generate are central to the understanding of power, and of political and military alliances. In the field of new reproductive technologies, we speak of the giving or donation of sperm and eggs; but where the individuals, biotechnology companies, or nation-states concerned seem to be acting solely in economic terms, their activities are widely condemned and sometimes judged illegal. In the realms of everyday leisure and entertainment, the force of giving, sharing, and reciprocating is vitally important. What is given often cannot be measured, certainly not by the abstract system of money: when a friend cooks a meal for you, the “value” of this act cannot be calculated in terms of cost of ingredients, cost of heating and lighting, and cost of labor devoted to the production of the meal. In reciprocation, you may cook a meal for your friend, but you might do any number of other things, such as listen to their troubles or forgive them for their perceived role in a preceding event: persons,

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objects, and feelings seem to merge or travel together in gift exchange. The complexity and ambivalence of these reciprocal relations seem to persist even in the most high-tech forms of virtual social networking where photos, videos, and stories are exchanged with an expectation of reciprocation, though the sanctions protecting this expectation are largely eliminated by the distance afforded by the technological medium. To what extent new technologies might curtail, transform, or even enhance moral relations of reciprocity is a hotly contested issue that will motivate further research in the humanities and social sciences. In exchanging gifts, then, both parties seem to be drawn into a process that is not reducible to the economic. Indeed, where the economic value of the gift is low, negligible, or irrelevant, the emotional impact of gift exchange may be at its highest—such as in the giving of a kiss or the paying of a compliment. Most forms of gift exchange involve an expectation or even an obligation to “repay” the gift by reciprocation at some point in the future, but not immediately. For example, if you buy a friend a birthday present, you feel snubbed if he or she does not reciprocate at your birthday: the person who has not reciprocated may appear lesser, somehow drained of moral worth. Yet we would undoubtedly feel very uncomfortable if the birthday gift were reciprocated immediately; it would be as if your act of gift giving was cancelled out. The rule seems to be that if you receive, you must give, appropriately and in turn. There is, then, a moral or ethical dimension to gift exchange that is fundamentally irreducible to economic calculation, even as economic or financial value seems to dominate more and more aspects of modern life.

Approaches The social meanings and consequences of gift exchange have been studied by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida; by sociologists and social anthropologists, notably Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu; by economists, theologians, and literary critics; and by feminist scholars such as Luce Irigaray. Many of these thinkers approach gift giving in the broadest possible sense, covering not only the exchange of presents but also the gift of being itself: the gift of being alive, of the giving of life in birth, and the giving of death in sacrifice. For Nietzsche, gift giving is the “highest virtue,” and many thinkers

have explored the ethics of gift giving, arguing, in different ways, that the gift exchange process involves, implies, or points toward a form of ethical relatedness that is vital for the well-being of individuals and society but that is, perhaps, being erased, forgotten, or replaced by patriarchal, consumerist, and technological culture. Gift exchange, then, has been presented as a radical alternative to dominant liberal capitalist modes of economic exchange. Capitalist economic exchange is based on utilitarian and financial calculation that measures all values in terms of an abstract system of money—as general equivalent. The goal is the continual accumulation of capital, owned or invested privately. Gift exchange, by contrast, tends to generate social obligations of collective reciprocity, responsibility, and ethical relatedness. Moreover, these “values” cannot be measured or calculated in terms of monetary equivalence because their meaning cannot be separated from the acts of exchange themselves, which are often ambivalent and are bound to a temporality that is alien to financial calculation, as we observed in the case of birthday presents. The earliest instances of gift exchange are drawn from religion. The obligatory exchange of gifts, sometimes in the form of sacrifice to gods, spirits, or ancestors, was practiced widely in classical civilization and continued throughout Christian antiquity and into medieval societies. Gift exchange ceremonies also feature prominently in the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism and in ancient Chinese law. Though not always obligatory, the tradition of almsgiving, the donation of money, food, or other goods to the poor or needy on request, are important components of Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism. Gifts and sacrifices were, and still are, given to gods in the hope or expectation of protection, favor, or intervention. Further, gods give of themselves: they make sacrifices and perform deeds that, in turn, obligate and indebt worshippers, making demands on them in a reciprocal but radically unequal relationship. While many gifts are expensive, none is as costly as a sacrifice: an act of giving that gives life as a gift to the receiver and “gives” death to the giver. Sacrificial giving remains a vital component of many religions. Contemporary academic interest in notions of gift exchange can be traced to Mauss’s hugely influential Essai sur le don (1924, translated as The Gift, 1990). Mauss, following the work of Emile Durkheim (his uncle and the founder of modern sociology), understood collective rituals of gift exchange as ancient and

Gifts and Reciprocity

near-universal expressions of social “effervescence,” the very energy that binds society. Indeed, the social circulation of gifts and services has been understood as the foundation of human culture, as constitutive of the incest taboo and practice of exogamy through which women were circulated (as “gifts”) among neighboring tribes, forging alliances, deterring war, and preventing incest. For the influential French feminist Luce Irigaray, this circulation of women, as commodities rather than as gifts proper, she contends, constitutes the very foundation of patriarchy and the exploitation of women and nature by men. Gift exchange appears to forge social bonds by generating and maintaining relations of obligatory reciprocity between elements of the social system, both intersocial and intrasocial, but these social relations are not equal or symmetrical. Mauss studied the so-called totemic religions of aboriginal Australia, Pacific East Asia, and northwest America, arguing that gift exchange creates and sustains links throughout the “social totality,” not only between tribes and clans but also between ideas: between sacred and profane, living and dead, persons and things. For Mauss, gift exchange consists of three interlocking moments: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. The ambivalent nature of gift exchange, that it is both happy and festive yet also demanding and solemn, is traced by Mauss to the etymology of the word gift, which in Greek, Latin, and German connotes not only a present or offering but also poison. Mauss suggests that ceremonies such as the potlatch in North America and the Kula of the Trobriand Islands were “both practical and mystical” (1990, 73). Participation is both “self-interested” and obligatory (not freely chosen). Social hierarchy, honor, and prestige are at stake and are contested. These are definitely not societies of communistic equality, Mauss asserts; nor is there a notion of individual freedoms and rights that characterizes modern capitalist societies. Wealth is circulated such that the participants “did not emerge any richer than before” (9), and, Mauss claims, there is no economic advantage in the ceremonies even for the chiefs. The gift objects are living wealth; they generate social meaning and value, and this value actually increases through the act of exchanging. These festivals, for Mauss, demonstrate that the notion of credit and loan predate the emergence of barter and money, so the attempts of both liberal and Marxist thinkers to

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understand the development of economy from barter to money to credit are, for Mauss, quite simply wrong. As a result of these studies, Mauss proposed a new social democratic program of welfare and a general spirit of generosity distinct from either liberal capitalist or Marxist communist thinking. This was to be fostered by a reformed education system that Mauss hoped would heal modern societies damaged by war and egotistic individualism. However, as pointed out by Lévi-Strauss, Mauss did not elaborate on the power differences between members of the tribes, or on the existence of slavery in such societies, and has been much criticized for these omissions. Mauss focused particularly on the potlatch ceremony practiced traditionally by First Nation peoples of North America, such as the Tlingit and Haida. Recognizing the imprecision and colonial history of the term potlatch, Mauss proposes the term total services and counter services (prestations et contreprestations totales) to describe systems of social exchange that include the giving of presents but also loans, entertainments, and hospitality in the widest sense. The term potlatch Mauss reserved for “total services of an agonistic kind” with “very acute rivalry and the destruction of wealth;” such ceremonies are “rare but highly developed” (1990, 7). Among such tribes there is, according to Mauss, honor in destruction; consumption, he suggests, goes “beyond all bounds. . . . One must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back. It is a competition to see who is richest and also the most madly extravagant. Everything is based upon the principles of antagonism and rivalry” (37). The potlatch and its relationship to gift giving, reciprocal social relations, and the possibilities for a new or alternative ethics, have been explored by a number of influential thinkers. For Georges Bataille, dissident French Surrealist and influential theorist of “excess,” the potlatch was a form of “unproductive expenditure” (dépense). Potlatch ceremonies, Bataille declares, provoked intoxication, vertigo, and ecstasy; they had “no end beyond themselves” and fundamentally excluded bargaining and calculation in an open destruction of wealth (1985, 118). The destruction or consumption of wealth had a purpose, however—to defy, humiliate, and obligate a rival clan in a contest for honor or prestige. Honor itself is not a commodity, and the value it possesses cannot be bought or accumulated. In contrast, modern consumer capitalism, for Bataille, is an impoverished social system where “everything that was generous,

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orgiastic and excessive has disappeared” (124). For Bataille, the rapturous collective effusion of potlatch suggests an alternative ethical relation might be possible in modern Western societies. For Bataille, violence is an inevitable and constitutive feature of any society, and he hoped that violence might be dramatized and expressed in ritual form, rather than “accumulating” or festering into the hatred that promotes war. The very destructiveness of potlatch illustrates that there are values higher than commercial and rational calculation. In potlatch-like rituals, even the separateness of individual identities—for Bataille, the condition of narrow and calculative behavior— might be swept away in a convulsive moment. Like Mauss, Bataille supported increased welfare and aid spending such as the U.S. Marshall Plan as a form of gift giving vital for postwar reconstruction. The controversial work of Baudrillard offers one of the fullest explorations of gift and reciprocity in contemporary consumer societies. Baudrillard, deeply influenced by both Mauss and Bataille, argues that consumer societies can be understood in terms of a gift, or potlatch, given by society to individual consumers that cannot be reciprocated and thereby humbles and obligates. In consumer societies, Baudrillard argues, “the commodity becomes once again . . . by virtue of its very excess the image of the gift, and of the inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterises the feast” (1998, 33). For Baudrillard, like Bataille, consumer societies are societies of waste and violence. Examples related by Baudrillard include war and automobile crashes; even advertising and celebrity culture possess “the whiff of potlatch.” However, the essential difference is that, in our current system, this spectacular squandering no longer has the crucial symbolic and collective significance it could assume in primitive feasting and potlatch. This prestigious consummation . . . has been “personalised” and mass-mediated. Its function is to provide the economic stimulus for mass consumption. (46)

For Baudrillard, even the violence of 9/11 can be understood as a violent countergift, an attempt to pay back the West with interest for its ambivalent gifts of consumer goods, democracy, and sexual liberation— images, “signs,” or “simulations” of freedom. Derrida also engages in a reading of Mauss and gift exchange, focusing on the temporality of the gift: the interval or term between the moment of giving and the moment of reciprocation. Derrida argues

that the gift, at least as present or simple act of generosity, can never take place, precisely because of the ambivalence of the process: that giver and receiver are all too aware that a gift is given and that something is owed. The exchange of gifts is, strictly speaking, impossible because the notion of exchange undermines the possibility of a gift being a gift. However, this very impossibility suggests, for Derrida, a form of ethical relatedness that exceeds or escapes the ambivalent logic of gift exchange. As an exemplar, Derrida (1995) discusses the Old Testament story of Abraham, on whom God (Yahweh) has placed the terrible demand that he sacrifice his eldest son Isaac. Abraham must give what he values above all else; he must violate his instincts and social morality by making the ultimate sacrifice. Only in accepting God’s demand is he released from the demand, and for reasons he cannot fathom. In this story, Derrida finds a basis for an alternative ethics, one that reaches beyond reason and calculation. Following the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida writes of “the absolute other,” of a uniqueness and incomparable singularity beyond language, beyond definition, beyond calculation. For Lévinas, this absolute other is God. However, for Derrida, we are all, in our unique and fundamental singularity, absolute other to and for each other. We are all capable of absolute sacrifice in an uncalculating ethical response to the demands of the absolute other. According to Derrida, only the gift of death that is sacrifice, the sacrifices involved in giving birth, and the openness to absolute otherness are truly disinterested and suggest an ethics untainted by the calculation of a return or reward.

Final Thoughts Whether or not we accept that gift exchange embodies or suggests a radical difference from and alternative to the institutions, assumptions, and goals of capitalist market society, strong social and interpersonal bonds are forged by gift exchange, bonds that exceed legalistic notions of contract or of economic interdependence. Yet these bonds are ambivalent and intensely volatile; they offer no simple solution or panacea for modern, marketized, and technological societies that, for many, lack sufficiently strong ethical and social bonds. William Pawlett See also Christmas; Friendship; Money; Moralities; Potlatch; Rituals; Sacred and Profane; Value: Exchange and Use Value

Glastonbury/Woodstock

Further Readings Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” In Visions of Excess, edited by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr., 116–129. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage, 1998. Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. London: Verso, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: Counterfeit Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985 Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge, 1987. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge, 1990. First published 1924. Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Vol. 1, An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

GLASTONBURY/WOODSTOCK Glastonbury and Woodstock are open-air music festivals whose musical and ideological influence have shaped the last four decades of youth culture in the United Kingdom, the United States, and beyond. For many, Woodstock represents the archetype of the countercultural youth movements of the 1960s, a music festival that defined a generation. Similarly, Glastonbury is seen as the United Kingdom’s music festival par excellence, one that has defined the representation and reception of rock in the United Kingdom and further afield. While there is truth in both of these stereotypes, their iconic statuses mask their less straightforward origins and evolution. The festivals also subvert some of the earlier orthodoxies of the hegemony of a consumer society and the globalization of taste, both in their cultural content and in their ideals and close links to countercultural groups.

Brief Histories of the Festivals Running August 15–18, 1969, the Woodstock Aquarian Music and Art Fair was not the first festival to bring together diverse publics and the drug cultures of the 1960s around music. Earlier, more musically focused examples like the Newport Jazz

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and Folk festivals, which began in the 1950s, met a more psychedelic audience of 60,000 at the time of the first Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, the so-called Summer of Love. A new audience was clearly out there, but it was not until the summer of 1969 that the ideals with which Woodstock is associated—in particular, opposition to the Vietnam War—began to resonate throughout the United States. A mixture of good luck and bad planning helped the festival become the long weekend that defined a decade: beset by practical difficulties and local opposition, Woodstock moved from its original planned location near Wallkill, New York, to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel via the local intermediary of Elliot Tiber, whose role in the festival is explored in Ang Lee’s 2009 film Taking Woodstock. Tiber aided the festival’s organizers, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, who set up the festival with the financial backing of two young New York investors interested in novel opportunities. A financial disaster, the festival’s reputation and almost mythical status grew after the event not only through the documentary film made by Michael Wadleigh, a triple LP, but also because the homicide, accidental deaths, and negative atmosphere of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in California on December 6 of the same year represented Woodstock’s antithesis. The failure of the two subsequent twenty-fifth and thirtieth anniversary Woodstocks to repeat the original’s successes further mythologized the event. Glastonbury Festival was founded by Somerset farmer Michael Eavis, on his farm at Pilton, near Glastonbury, United Kingdom, in 1970. From that first edition, known as the Pilton Pop Festival, through the few 1970s editions when it was known as the Glastonbury Fayre, the festival drew increasing public interest as its artistic importance developed. Compared to events like the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, which attracted between 500,000 and 700,000, Glastonbury’s first 1970 audience of 1,500 was tiny. Though restricted by council licensing, up until 2002, official audience numbers were swelled each year by large numbers of people seeking free entry, many of whom belonged to Britain’s countercultural community who saw the festival as an essential fixture in their calendar, not least because of the festival’s timing around the summer solstice and its location in the mystical Vale of Avalon. Still modestly sized in 1981, when 18,000 attended what was known as the Glastonbury Festival, by 1990, when it took on the name of Glastonbury Festival for Contemporary

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Performing Arts, it was attracting around 70,000, and in 2008, it sold 140,000 tickets. Growing audience numbers, and occasional controversies—like the violence of 1990—meant that the organization of the festival became increasingly professional. Alongside innovative business practice, the festival has maintained its countercultural ethos and reputation through its altruism. With no shareholders, after Eavis has covered his running costs (£21.2 million in 2007), paid himself and others, the charities and causes the festival supports—from 1981 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and from 1992 Oxfam, Greenpeace, and others—currently receive between £1 and £2 million every year.

Glastonbury and Woodstock Today As large public events, or even “mega-events,” Glastonbury and Woodstock represent barometers of both popular culture and the ways in which the cultural industries have changed over the last forty years. Around 450,000 people attended the original Woodstock, but only 35,000 prepaid for their tickets, as numbers drove the organizers to allow a free festival. Though the twenty-fifth anniversary edition in August 1994 in Saugerties, New York, sold 190,000 tickets, in the spirit of the original festival, roughly 100,000 ticketless fans also managed to attend. In spite of the free entry, and like the Woodstock ’99 that was to follow, this event was clearly rather different from the original: one major difference being the sponsorship of the ’94 event by Polygram Diversified Entertainment (which coproduced the event) and Pepsi, and the numbers of people watching worldwide on pay-per-view television and satellite. Just these international television rights alone netted Polygram $12.5 million. The biographies of those involved in Woodstock also tell the stories of the sociopolitical issues of late 1960s America, not just opposition to U.S. aggression in Vietnam but also to a racist, misogynistic, and homophobic society. So, beyond the free love with which the original festival has become synonymous, the young Elliot Tiber also represented an engaged member of the gay rights movement that had—less than two months before—exploded onto the streets of New York with the Stonewall Riots of June 28. Meanwhile, one of the criticisms made of Woodstock has been the overwhelming whiteness of not only the audience but also most of the artists.

The performances of black musicians like Richie Havens, Sly & The Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix, in particular, were vital expressions of a shift from civil rights organizations to the greater militancy of Black Power. Both Glastonbury and Woodstock have played decisive roles in the careers of a number of artists, particularly rock musicians. The popular success of Woodstock boosted not only careers but also remuneration across the industry. Where Jimi Hendrix took $18,000 for his Woodstock appearance, he cost $72,000 for his next major concert, and this leap in artists’ remuneration has made such a roster of headlining artists difficult to repeat. Nevertheless, Glastonbury has managed to trade on its symbolic capital in the music world to counter this trend: the event has become so significant to artists that—anecdotally—headliners in 2009 accepted only £200,000 from Michael Eavis rather than the £2 million or so they would receive to play other major U.K. festivals. The symbolic weight that Woodstock and Glastonbury have accrued has had rather different ramifications: nostalgia surrounding Woodstock has meant that repeat events in 1994 and 1999 have been contested, artistically and ideologically, whereas Glastonbury—in spite of occasional problems—has managed over nearly four decades to fuel its reputation through nostalgia and a reputation for breaking boundaries. Debates over the future of Woodstock rage on Internet forums and discussion lists: the old hands desperately try to maintain the original’s spirit and ethos even in the face of the significant changes that have occurred in the staging of live music festivals over the last forty years, with the pendulum swinging from youthful idealism to highly planned professionalism. Unsurprisingly, given the industry of nostalgia surrounding the original, 2008 saw the opening of the Woodstock Museum at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts: the outdoor event has been brought indoors, institutionally tamed. In contrast, Glastonbury’s almost constant presence on the British music scene from its inception means that its legacy, and future, look rather different, not least because this continuity has guaranteed that generation after generation of festivalgoers have made it their own, and—as the debate over hip-hop artist Jay-Z headlining in 2008 made clear—Glastonbury has continued to experiment artistically, while maintaining an ideological commitment to the charities

Global Cities

and causes it has sponsored. With the collapse of the record industry’s old business model, live music is on the ascendancy, and the florescence of festival culture suggests that links might be being reforged between popular music, protest movements, and new political imaginaries. Jasper Chalcraft See also Culture Industries; Neo-Tribes; Popular Music; Social Movements; Spectacles; Subculture; Youth Culture

Further Readings Bennett, Andy, ed. Remembering Woodstock. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. McKay, George. Glastonbury: A Very English Fair. London: Gollancz, 2000. Perone, James E. Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Shearlaw, John, and Crispin Aubrey. Glastonbury: An Oral History of the Music, Mud and Magic. London: Edbury Press, 2005. Spitz, Robert S. Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969. New York: Viking Press, 1979. St. John, Graham. “Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present.” Social Movement Studies 7, no. 2 (2008): 167–190. Tiber, Elliott. Knock on Woodstock. New York: Festival Books, 1994.

GLOBAL CITIES The term global city has come to connote a unique urban habitat acting as a portal and stage for world connectivity. It bestows an image that is contemporary, international, multicultural, “wired,” cosmopolitan, congested, polarizing, and commanding geographically boundless (transterritorial) spheres of influence. Global cities are known for their inspiring built environments where art meets function and for their centrality in world affairs. As standard bearers of postmodern lifestyles and consumption, global cities contain the principal command centers for managing world commerce, the nexus of intercultural immersion, world-renowned research campuses, and world stages for art and entertainment. Most also are distinguished as global “gateways” harboring major airports and “load-center” seaports.

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As shown by Herman Boschken (2008), the term is anchored in a collective multidimensional vision that empirically describes and sets apart the global city as a complex system stemming from numerous post–World War II changes in world order (1960– present). This global reordering specifically resulted from a cumulative process involving a three-stage, partly overlapping sequence of economic, sociological, and political transformations. The first stage (starting about 1960) involved the separation of production and consumption on an immense international scale. Through a highly competitive system of remote multinational production sites controlled and coordinated by a new fiscal and logistical command structure, this economic stage originally appeared as a concentration of consumption on American soil offset by a global dispersion of supply (albeit skewed to the Pacific Rim). In addition, as noted by Herman Boschken (1988), it fostered a global maritime transportation infrastructure centered on a few predominately urban load-center seaports distributed worldwide. This economic stage eventually yielded some visibility to a second transformation (starting in the 1970s) sparked by a revolution in information and media technologies. It materialized as a symbols-driven cosmopolitan consumption, which concentrated on urban entertainment “scenes” and postmodern interest in cultural immersion. The “global lifestyle” had arrived and brought with it mushrooming demand for culturally significant goods from all over the world and a host of qualityof-life urban services, as well as the free movement of foreigners, information, and ethnic lifestyles across national borders. More recently, these two stages appear to have given ground to a third transformation (starting in the 1980s) involving a realignment of urban politics founded on a new political culture of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. Inherently urbane, cultural adherents became politically important constituencies in those cities where their collective aspirations for world-class status orchestrated a renaissance in urban development designed for high global connectivity. Viewed as caldrons of contemporary globalization, global cities today exhibit a developmental process now spanning fifty years and paralleling that of the three-stage transformations. That is, in a highly discriminating fashion, “globalization can

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be deconstructed in terms of the strategic sites where global processes materialize” (Sassen 1998, 392) and are grounded in what “geographically-situated people do” (Smith and Timberlake 2001, 1657). Global cities have emerged incrementally by brewing and incorporating numerous economic, social, and political forces of a globalizing world. They also emerged under American influence since the three-stage transformations followed a certain temporal and geographic ordering that, until recently, placed the United States at the center of contemporary globalization and of global-city design and imitation. Moreover, certain North American cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Philadelphia, and Miami) appeared to be more central and instrumental to globalization’s transformational stages than other North American cities. Today, global cities throughout the world (e.g., London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Singapore) appear as strategic platforms of world connectivity. Even though most cities have some global attributes and connectivity, “platform” cities typically contain a comprehensive set of dimensions that include (1) the scale of an urban area where size appears to provide a critical mass necessary for holistic global functioning. But the list also includes the global city as (2) an agglomerated command and control center for the global economy; (3) a world entertainment stage providing symbols, innovations, and standards for emulation globally; (4) a noncorporate world research crucible composed of an agglomeration of university, government, and tax-exempt organizations providing knowledge resources to a global village of policymakers; (5) a center of multiculturalism existing as a nexus for global social exchange; (6) a global gateway for international transportation including air passenger travel and maritime trade; and (7) an integrated and accessible built environment augmented by effective rail-based mobility systems. To more fully appreciate the potential synergy of these seven dimensions, one might conceive of them as holistically interacting in a way that simultaneously imprints the momentum and routine of the world stage onto an inhabitant’s daily consciousness, activity level, and consumption patterns. Global cities possess a multifaceted character that immerses urbanites in a different milieu than found in cities exhibiting fewer global-city dimensions. Moreover,

global cities are a magnet for lifestyles that engender exceptionally high activity and intra-urban mobility levels. These “on the go” lifestyles seem to coalesce around a highly visible presence of upper middle class (UMC)—a socioeconomic status made up of well-educated professionals and their cosmopolitan and urbane families. UMC breadwinners not only commute to their professional jobs but also are likely to have an agglomeration of business meetings with representatives of other organizations (public and private) outside the office. Certain intra-urban activity sites would be consistent with this characterization, such as restaurants, theater, golf, or even a trip to the airport for “fly-in” meetings. Since the UMC has proportionally higher dual-breadwinner families (often both professionally employed) than the median family, their postmodern commuting and consumption patterns may be magnified even further. Add to this the high-aspiring UMC family commuting with children to the best college-prep schools across town, meeting for a game of tennis at the club, after-school and weekend activities for the children, and evening events outside of work. Further, add myriad activities (jobs and commuting) of others induced by UMC consumption demands for residential maid/nanny services and landscapers, private social and recreational clubs, limo and retail pickup-and-delivery services, dental and cosmetic maintenance, and so on. Consequently, the UMC is more evident (and a greater proportion of the population) in global cities than elsewhere. There are three reasons for this concentration. First, the nature of a global city in providing a platform for globally connected organizations (i.e., corporations engaged in command-center functions, noncorporate global research institutions, world entertainment, and media firms) creates a unique agglomeration of postindustrial (knowledgeprocessing) employment opportunities, contacts, and exchanges for highly educated professionals in global business, academia, and entertainment and media (the latter of which includes artists, authors, playwrights, actors, electronic gurus, and entertainment managers). Furthermore, as a genre, the UMC imparts a “systemic power” over the activity scene by providing a standard of behavior that some of the remaining urban population may emulate as well. Second, global cities are gateways of travel and temporary stays for global business, research, and

Global Institutions

entertainment purposes and, therefore, attract a larger mix of foreign, highly educated professionals than other cities. Like their indigenous counterparts, these foreign UMC are inclined to engage in heightened levels of consumption and seek greater mobility throughout the city. This foreign contingent (often with families in tow) further magnifies cognition of a UMC presence in the global city. Third, the UMC are the principal bearers of the new political culture. Holding cosmopolitan aspirations of global status, UMC individuals are often a dominant constituency for economic development directed at increasing the city’s global centrality and connectivity. Evidence of this in physical terms is found in a global city’s comprehensive development of new multipurpose central districts, having generously landscaped promenades threading together artfully designed high-rise business towers with entertainment and residential centers, all made regionally accessible by stylish, technologically advanced rail transit. Being socially liberal, this same constituency also exhibits greater tolerance for and appreciation of foreign or ethnic cultures, diverse creativity, and variant lifestyles, notes Richard Florida. Herman L. Boschken See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Cosmopolitanism; Globalization; Information Society; Lifestyle; Multiculturalism; Postmodernism; Social Class; Urbanization

Further Readings Abu-Lugod, Janet L. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Boschken, Herman L. Strategic Design and Organizational Change: Pacific Coast Seaports in Transition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988. Boschken, Herman L. Social Class, Politics and Urban Markets: The Makings of Bias in Policy Outcomes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Boschken, Herman L. “Global Cities, Systemic Power and Upper-Middle-Class Influence.” Urban Affairs Review 38 (2003): 808–830. Boschken, Herman L. “A Multiple-Perspectives Construct of the American Global City.” Urban Studies 45 (2008): 3–28. Brint, Steven. “Professionals and the ‘Knowledge Economy’: Rethinking the Theory of Postindustrial Society.” Current Sociology 49, no. 4 (2001): 101–132.

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Clark, Terry Nichols, ed. The City as an Entertainment Machine (Research in Urban Policy 9). New York: JAI Press/Elsevier, 2004. Clark, Terry Nichols, and Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot. The New Political Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Erie, Steven. Globalizing L.A. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Friedmann, John. “The World City Hypothesis.” Development and Change 17 (1986): 69–83. Hall, Peter. The World Cities. London: Heinemann, 1966. Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: The New Press, 1998. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Smith, David A., and Michael F. Timberlake. “World City Networks and Hierarchies, 1977–1997.” American Behavioral Scientist 44 (2001): 1656–1678. Taylor, Peter J. World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis. London: Routledge, 2004.

GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS Global institutions are international organizations that are established to solve global problems that cannot be handled by individuals, national governments, or the market alone and need a global perspective.

What Global Institutions Are As Henri Reymond has argued, if the institutional innovation of the nineteenth century was the nationstate, the main innovation of the twentieth century has been the international organization. While such global institutions might appear remote to the people of affluent societies, they have more immediate presence for citizens in countries affected by war and conflict, or by problems of development like infant mortality or infectious diseases. A major reason behind the apparent remoteness of global institutions in affluent societies is their apparent absence from the everyday lives of contemporary consumers. Yet such institutions play a significant role in regulating consumption and mobilizing consumer responses to global “problems” such as climate change. These institutions increasingly adopt the tools of consumer culture (such as celebrity culture and marketing) for

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their own ends and have become sensitive to the ethical concerns of consumer groups (through consumer movements and lobby groups). International regime theory puts global institutions into context by explaining why individual nation-states would voluntarily cede their sovereignty to international institutions to solve problems that they could not themselves solve. The theory emerged when international relations scholars had to deal with something called a global commons, a space that is borderless and in which each individual could pursue his or her interest. The tragedy of the commons suggests that without some regulation, the consequences of human activity could be disastrous. In the latter half of the twentieth century, new regimes have begun to be created and with them global institutions. Some key institutions include the World Trade Organization, which seeks to remove artificial restrictions on trade and solve disputes without trade wars. The growth of transnational organized crime as well as trafficking in drugs and people has led to strong international treaties that are overseen by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. How to ensure that the Internet remains free and open, but not subject to abuse, is being addressed in the U.N. Internet Governance Forum, based on a new multistakeholder model. The U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was created to ensure coherence in humanitarian relief when significant man-made or natural disasters occur, such as the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 or the Asian tsunami in 2004. Climate change management is an important area where a new regime is being created since dealing with the increasing global temperature caused by human use of carbon-based energy, and the reduction in forests will require new global institutions as well as modification of existing ones. The problem affects everyone, regardless of where they live, and falls clearly within the tragedy of the commons since it requires behavioral changes at the individual and household level, with national policies and programs based on international norms and standards. However, developing the climate change management regime has been slow. A global institution, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was established in 1988 to provide a place where consensus could be achieved about the facts of climate change. The IPCC has performed four appraisals and is working on the fifth. To achieve agreement,

it has had to engage a large and complex epistemic community of climate scientists into the discussion and has largely done so successfully, although it has been contested by a group of climate change deniers, many of whom are funded by large corporate interests seeking to influence consumers. While the final institutional structure of the climate change institutions is still being negotiated, they will likely be tasked with managing financial transfers from developed to developing countries, verifying that states are acting in compliance with their obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and overseeing the acquisition, analysis, and publication of scientific data. Some of the institutions, like the IPCC, which is overseen by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Environment Programme, already exist. Others, like those to move funds, are still being developed. One is what is called the Clean Development Mechanism, an institution to provide investment funds to developing countries so that they can reduce emissions and then sell the resulting credits. Dealing with climate change means addressing how to provide energy from noncarbon sources. The International Energy Agency has estimated that this will require an investment of $24 trillion by 2030. As they put it, Households and businesses are largely responsible for making the required investments, but governments hold the key to changing the mix of energy investment. The policy and regulatory frameworks established at national and international levels will determine whether investment and consumption decisions are steered towards low-carbon options. (2009, 3)

In short, everyone will have to have a consumer’s interest in what the global institutions do.

How Global Institutions Work and Relate to Consumer Issues The range of global institutions is fairly broad, since they cover a wide set of issues for which international regimes have been created, but they are not easy for consumers to perceive. In part, this is because they are complex networks of different actors. They typically work indirectly to affect results including negotiating agreements on rules and regulations that states later apply to their citizens. Often these are in the form

Global Institutions

of multinational treaties that are negotiated in open forums in which nongovernmental groups participate. Governments are the main formal actors in global institutions, formally adopting agreements and acting as the main negotiators of content. However, governments in most cases are not unitary actors, and different parts of government interact with different organizations. For example, the main U.S. counterpart to the World Health Organization is not the State Department but rather the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Similarly, the main counterparts for the International Monetary Fund are central banks rather than foreign ministries. National lobbying groups often try to influence their governments’ positions in international negotiations, often through the national legislatures. In the lead-up to the Conference of Parties to the U.N. Climate Change Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that adopted the Kyoto Protocol, lobbying groups representing the coal industry in the United States were successful in obtaining a congressional resolution opposing the main elements of the Protocol (Pooley 2010), which was never ratified by the United States. Increasingly, voluntary and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to which individuals belong (as members or consumers) seek to influence international agreements. Environmental organizations, like Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Federation, are active in climate change negotiations. Human rights groups like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch are active in negotiations about new or revised human rights conventions or in compliance monitoring. Organizations sometimes seek to prevent negotiations from succeeding, as when the National Rifle Association of the United States obtained international status to lobby against a ban on illicit trade in small arms as part of a U.N. Convention on Organized Crime. NGOs try to direct and constrain governmental negotiators and often provide an incentive to reach agreements. For example, the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009 attracted over 40,000 participants either at the negotiation site or in parallel events. The Fourth U.N. Conference on Women in 1995 attracted 50,000 participants in the governmental and nongovernmental parts. The work of NGOs has been analyzed by Shamima Ahmed and David Potter. Some NGOs have become leaders in the adoption of international agreements. Various organizations

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of persons with disabilities such as the World Blind Union and Disabled Peoples’ International helped define the parameters of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including finding places on government delegations, mounting side events, and ensuring media coverage. Increasingly, NGOs have sought prestige (and members) by arguing that they can influence international decision making. A coalition of NGOs was instrumental in obtaining an international convention to ban antipersonnel landmines. The Internet has created a communications revolution, but its possible regulation can threaten its openness. NGOs representing consumers as well as the private sector have been active in working with governments to clarify the policy issues through an innovative and experimental institution called the Internet Governance Forum. To a degree not found in other areas, they have been successful in ensuring that consumer views are considered as debates take place over the future of the Internet (Mathiason 2008). While the international civil servants who manage the global institutions are often distant (or, more likely, invisible) in headquarters duty stations like New York, Geneva, Bonn, or Vienna, they are noticeable and approachable in field stations where the organizations deliver services directly, especially in developing countries. There, they become part of national events and can be seen in their vehicles or when they visit refugee camps, help coordinate disaster relief, or undertake inspections of factories to ensure than no child labor is being used.

How Global Institutions Relate to Consumers As consumers, individuals relate to these global institutions in different ways. If an individual receives an organization’s services—for example, by being a refugee, by being in a country with armed conflict where order is maintained by U.N. Peacekeepers, or by being affected by a natural disaster like the Haiti earthquake or the Asian tsunami—the individual is likely concerned about the quality and effectiveness of the services provided directly to him or her. An individual may also be affected because the standards agreed upon in global institutions improve or constrain his or her own consumption. If an individual buys clothing that is made in a developing country, the International Labour Organization in Geneva seeks to ensure that it is not made using

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child labor. If an individual flies on an airplane, the safety procedures and routing rules have been agreed upon at the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal. If an individual wants to use an insect spray with a propellant, it will not contain chlorofluorocarbons, which, because of their effect on the ozone layer, are prohibited under the Montreal Protocol monitored by the United Nations Environment Programme. If an individual’s electricity is generated from nuclear power plants, the design and management of these plants has to conform to safety standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency. There can be direct influences on individuals’ personal budgets as well. One of the approaches being debated in climate change is to make carbon emissions more expensive by charging a tax or setting up a market mechanism (called cap and trade) that charges for excess production of carbon. Since most households depend on carbon-based energy (for heating, running automobiles, producing steel and plastic), this can increase the amount that consumers will have to spend for basics. The negotiations take place in global institutions, and it will be these institutions that verify state compliance with agreed-upon international norms. Individuals may also relate to global institutions’ spokespersons. To humanize global institutions, many organizations appoint goodwill ambassadors for programs on the premise that they will be recognized and, additionally, will generate media attention. Examples include actress Mia Farrow as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF); Roger Federer, the tennis star, as an ambassador for the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; actress Angelina Jolie for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); designer Pierre Cardin for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; actress Nicole Kidman for the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM); and Brazilian football legend Ronaldo for the U.N. Development Programme. This is not unlike the marketing strategies followed by international NGOs engaged in advocacy that intend to work with (and influence) global institutions. Unlike international organizations, whose funds come predominately from governments, these organizations often reject government funds and raise revenue from the general public. They have sophisticated marketing strategies, often costing up to 25 percent to 30 percent of budgets, to raise funds.

Finally, individuals are paying for many global institutions through taxes. Global institutions are largely funded by the governments that are their formal members. Some funding is by assessed contributions (the obligatory dues that states pay to participate), while others are called extrabudgetary or voluntary contributions that states provide for programs and projects that they favor. No studies have been completed that have computed the total size of the budgets of all global institutions, but figures are available for those of the U.N. system. In 1996, the assessed budgets of the U.N. system totaled $5.05 billion. By 2009, the total had reached $7.81 billion. If extrabudgetary figures are included, the cash total for 2007 was $24.81 billion. This is larger than the budgets of most countries but, to put it in context, only slightly more than British Petroleum had to set aside for possible compensation in connection with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Individuals may also help global institutions finance their activities directly. Increasingly, to build up support and to raise funds, international organizations have begun to do direct fundraising with consumers. UNICEF has had campaigns to raise funds through the sale of greeting cards and such nationally specific efforts as “Trick or Treat for UNICEF” at Halloween in the United States. In 2008, private fundraising for UNICEF amounted to $813.2 million, of which $42 million was from the sale of UNICEF cards and gifts (UNICEF 2009). This was about one-third of UNICEF’s regular income for the year. The UNICEF experience, which dates to 1945, has begun to be mimicked by other organizations like the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), UNHCR, and UNIFEM, which has now been incorporated into the new U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. Because of the complexity of government budgets, which may obscure the amounts budgeted for global institutions, pressures for accountability by taxpayers are usually not strong. The exception is when there is a scandal involving finance that provokes legislative and media scrutiny. A recent example is “Oil for Food,” a program set up by the U.N. Security Council to provide humanitarian supplies to Iraq when it was under international sanctions after the first Gulf War in the 1990s. Allegations of corruption, including by U.N. officials, led to strong arguments for more intensive audit controls. These have been implemented in all international organizations,

Global Institutions

even though international organizations have been generally free of financial corruption. Governments, as well as NGOs that deal with the international public sector, have been concerned with accountability. There are two types: whether the funds given have been used appropriately and whether the funds provided have led to results in dealing with the problems for which they were given. Both require oversight. To a large extent, this has been a concern of governments, whose leaders have established audit review boards and independent evaluation units and have promoted resultsbased management. The audit function has been fairly successful, the results accountability less so, in part because neither governments nor NGOs have insisted on it.

Future of Global Institutions to Consumers The number, size, and scope of global institutions will likely grow during the twenty-first century, and some of the directions have already been noted. As they grow and become more connected with individuals, the organizations will have to reach out to acquire public support. This will be complex, since public information by international organizations has typically been restricted due to states’ fears that international organizations will mount propaganda campaigns and subvert national governments. Reaching out is easier in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth, because the Internet has made information by and about global institutions available to anyone with an Internet connection, a figure that will soon include a high percentage of the world population. Global institutions already post large amounts of information on their websites and broadcast public negotiating sessions. As important as reaching out is having a public that understands the international system and can influence it, directly or through national governments. As Anne Florini says, This is where hard thinking is needed about what constitutes “democracy” in the context of global governance. . . . Democracy requires two things: a system for providing people with a voice in the making of decisions that affect them and a mechanism for holding representatives accountable to those whom they represent. (2005, 15)

This implies a kind of world citizenship.

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A characteristic of citizenship is a sense of efficacy, that an individual can influence government decision making. It is the basis of citizen’s authority over government and is the basis of legitimacy for public institutions. As global institutions develop during the twenty-first century, they too will have to be perceived as legitimate, and this, in turn, will require that global publics feel that they can influence them. Learning what global institutions do and how they function should be a task of scholarship and education. The media needs to find a way of explaining events and their connection to individuals. And concerned citizens need to make being a world citizen one of their personal priorities. John Mathiason See also Citizenship; Consumer Policy (World Trade Organization); Consumer Regulation; European Union; Globalization; Governmentality; Social and Economic Development; World-Systems Analysis

Further Readings Ahmed, Shamima, and David Potter. NGOs in International Politics. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2006. Florini, Anne. The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248. Hasenclever, Andreas, Peter Mayer, and Volker Rittberger. Theories of International Regimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. International Energy Agency. World Energy Outlook: Executive Summary. Paris: Author, 2009. Karns, Margaret, and Karen A. Mingst. International Organizations: The Politics and Process of Global Governance. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010. Krasner, Stephen D., ed. International Regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen. “Institutional Perspective on Political Institutions.” Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration 9, no. 3 (July 1996): 247–264. Mathiason, John R. Invisible Governance: International Secretariats in Global Politics. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007. Mathiason, John R. Internet Governance: The New Frontier of Global Institutions. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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Pooley, Eric. The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth. New York: Hyperion, 2010. United Nations Children’s Fund. Private Fundraising: Financial Report and Statements for the Year Ended 31 December 2008, E/ICEF/2009/AB/L.2. July 20, 2009.

Yet it can be argued that there is something new to the present world, the world that began roughly with the end of the cold war in 1989–1990, and that goes a long way to explain the rise of public interest in globalization and transnational phenomena more generally. Three factors, roughly coinciding in time, may be mentioned.

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• The end of the cold war itself entailed a more encompassing global integration. The global twobloc system, which had lasted since the 1940s, had made it difficult to think of geopolitics, transnational communication, and international trade in terms not dictated by the opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. With the dissolution of this conflict, the world appeared to have become a single marketplace.

Globalization, a term that came into fashion around 1990, generally refers to processes leading to the increased density, speed, and reach of transnational connections, associated with the global spread of capitalism and new information and communication technologies. Globalization can be studied in its economic, political, ecological, or cultural aspects, and there is a rich scholarly literature, much of it interdisciplinary, dealing with the subject (see Eriksen 2007). Consumption is a central dimension of globalization, as noted by two leading scholars in the field: “Globalization clearly involves the worldwide proliferation of consumption goods, settings, practices and, most generally, consumer culture” (Ritzer and Slater 2001, 7). The period since World War II, and especially since around 1990, has been a period of strongly intensified global interconnectedness. In the first postwar decades, the number of transnational companies grew, as did the number of transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The United Nations rapidly became a conglomerate of suborganizations with offices in most countries. International travel became easier and more common. In the 1960s, the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term the global village to designate the new mass media situation, where especially television, in his view, would create shared frames of reference and mutual knowledge between people across the globe. In this period, global change—economic, environmental, political, cultural—became the subject of many new scholarly books. Some used the term development, intimating that the poor countries would eventually catch up with the rich ones. Others preferred terms such as imperialism, suggesting that the rich countries were actively exploiting the poor ones and preventing them from developing. Various parts of the world had been interconnected, and there was considerable awareness of this, long before the coinage of the term globalization.

• The Internet, which had existed in an embryonic form since the late 1960s, began to grow exponentially around 1990. Throughout the 1990s, media buzzwords were about bandwidths, websites, portals, “the new economy,” and its business opportunities. The World Wide Web was introduced in 1992–1993, around the same time as many academics and businesspeople became accustomed to using e-mail for their daily correspondence. Cell phones became ubiquitous in the rich countries and eventually in the poorer ones. The impact of this double delocalization—the physical letter replaced by e-mail, the fixed phone line replaced by the wireless mobile—on the everyday life of millions of people has been considerable. • Identity politics—nationalist, ethnic, religious, territorial—was at the forefront of the international agenda, both from above (states demanding homogeneity or engaging in ethnic cleansing) and from below (minorities demanding rights or secession). The Salman Rushdie affair, itself an excellent example of the globalization of ideas, began with the issuing of a fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini following the publication of Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. It soon became apparent that Rushdie could move freely nowhere in the world since the fatwa had global implications. Only two years later, Yugoslavia dissolved, with ensuing civil wars based on ethnic differences. In the same period, debates about immigration and multiculturalism came to dominate political

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discourse in several Western countries, while the Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in India. These three dimensions of globalization— increased trade and transnational economic activity, faster and denser communication networks, and increased tensions between (and within) cultural groups due to intensified mutual exposure—do not suggest that the world has been fundamentally transformed after the late 1980s but that the driving forces of economic, political, and cultural dynamics are transnational—and that this is now widely acknowledged. As Roland Robertson puts it, “Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness about the world as a whole” (1992, 8). Not everybody who writes about the contemporary world agrees that it has recently entered a distinctively “global” era. Some argue that the extent of global integration was just as comprehensive, and in some ways more encompassing, in the belle époque of 1890–1914 than it is today, and the origins of the full-fledged global capitalism of that era could moreover be traced back to the early modern world of European conquests, colonialism, and slavery. Others claim that the nation-state remains “the preeminent power container of our era” (e.g., Giddens 1985—he later revised his position). Yet others point out that a large number of people, and huge areas of social and cultural life, are relatively untouched by transnational processes.

Interconnectedness In spite of these arguments, it would be difficult to argue against the view that the world is more interconnected today than at any earlier historical period— through satellite TV, Internet and mobile telephony, migration and tourism, trade, and an intensified traffic in signs and meanings. The culinary capital of India may be London; that of China, San Francisco. To carry out anthropological fieldwork in a village in the Dominican Republic, one has to spend at least a few months in New York City, since half of the villagers are at any time working and living in the Big Apple. The little trolls, “Scream” T-shirts, and expensive knitted sweaters sold as Norwegian souvenirs to tourists visiting Oslo are made in Taiwan, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, respectively. The largest city in the English-speaking Caribbean is London. And if the

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classical patriarchal kinship system of the Taiwanese had been unable to withstand the pressure of individualism from modernization, several shop owners in Silicon Valley might still have been in business: the patriclan is an efficient economic unit where interestfree loans and free services are available, and when shops in California (and elsewhere) have to close down because their customers have lost their jobs, this is partly a result of competition from East Asia. Such is the extent of global interconnectedness, and one could go on to describe satellite television, the Internet, cheap flights, and cell phones. The implications for consumption patterns are evident but not predictable. In some realms of consumption, people remain unexpectedly resilient to change, while other areas change much faster than one might have expected. For example, when cable and satellite television became widespread in European countries in the 1980s, many predicted that the new situation would be detrimental to national cohesion since people could now watch television from any country in the world. Yet, domestic programming remains the most popular in every country, including the smallest ones, in spite of the huge selection of channels. Food habits, on the other hand, have changed faster than predicted in many parts of the world, especially the rich countries. In the United Kingdom, chicken tikka masala has been declared a national dish (indeed, the dish was probably first made in a Glasgow restaurant in the late 1960s). The boiled potato, a staple with virtually any hot meal in Norway in the 1970s, has become a rare sight in that country (outside the tourist circuit, where it remains popular). Coffee bars and fast-food restaurants, whether American or not, have similarly fast become a familiar sight in every European city. Differences between regions are not obliterated due to the increased interconnectedness. The global village is a community of communication and exchange, not of homogeneity. However, the cultural differences between regions, peoples, and nations are much less clear-cut in a globalized era than they were earlier, since similar goods and services are available worldwide, although they are articulated through local contexts that remain different.

Standardization A key dimension of globalization is standardization, that is, the implementation of shared criteria of measurement, exchange, and communication.

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Standardization enables comparability along a shared set of criteria, such as clock time, thermometer temperature, written language, or money. For globalized mass consumption to be possible, certain standards have to be implemented, and the monetary economy is arguably the most important one. In the kinds of traditional societies typically studied by anthropologists, both language and time concepts exist, but not writing and clocks. Similarly, moneylike instruments exist in many kinds of societies, but the presently near-universal kind of money, “general-purpose money,” is recent and historically culture bound. It does roughly the same thing to payment, value measurements, and exchange as clocks and writing do to time and language, respectively. They make the transaction abstract and impose a standardized grid onto a large area (ultimately the whole world). They place individual, mundane transactions under an invisible umbrella of abstraction. Shell money, gold coins, and other compact valuables are known from a wide range of traditional societies. They may, perhaps, be used as value standards to make different goods comparable—a bag of grain equals half a gold coin; a goat equals half a gold coin; thus, a sack of grain can be bartered with a goat. They may be used as means of exchange—I can buy two goats with a gold coin. They may even be used as means of payment—I have killed my neighbor and have to pay the widow and children three gold coins in compensation. However, modern money is a much more powerful technology than anything comparable that we know from traditional societies. Above all, it is universal in its field of applicability. One single kind of money functions as a universal means of payment and exchange, and as a value standard. West African cowries had no value outside a limited area, and even there, only certain commodities and services could be purchased with them. General-purpose money is legal tender in an entire state of millions of inhabitants and is usually convertible to render them valid anywhere. Regarded as information technology, money has truly contributed to the creation of one world, albeit a world into which only people of means are integrated. Money makes wages and purchasing power all over the world comparable, makes it possible to exchange a ton of taro from New Guinea with electronics from Taiwan, and it is a necessary medium for the world of globalized consumption to be possible at all. Whereas transaction and trade in many societies depended on trust and personal relationships

between seller and buyer, the abstract and universal money we are familiar with imply an externalization of economic transactions. As long as there is agreement over the economic value of the colored bits of paper, one need not know either one’s debtors or one’s creditors personally. With the recent move of money into cyberspace, which entails that the same plastic card can be used for economic transactions nearly anywhere in the world, it becomes even more abstract, notes Keith Hart. The transitions from kinship to national identity, from custom to legislation, from cowrie money or similar to general-purpose money, from local religions to written religions of conversion, from persondependent morality to universalistic morality, from memory to archives, from myths to history, and from event-driven time to clock time—all point in the same direction: from a small-scale society based on concrete social relations and practical knowledge to a largescale society based on an abstract legislative system and abstract knowledge founded in logic and science. In an important sense, globalization continues the work of nation building by creating shared standards, comparability, and “bridging principles” of translation between formerly discrete and sometimes incommensurable worlds. Anything from consumer tastes to measurements and values are now being standardized at a global level. This does not mean that everybody is equally affected, or that standardization is perfect and all encompassing. However, it is indisputable that the range of common denominators is widening in its scope and deepening in its impact. An example of standardization in the realm of consumption, which aptly illustrates this development, is McDonaldization (Ritzer 1993), a term that does not merely refer to the spread of fast-food restaurants but also to the spread of a logic of production whereby mass production of commodities and services is made simple, staff can be replaced easily because few skills are required, and the connection with the local community and its traditions is nonexistent. Developing a similar argument, Alan Bryman has coined the term Disneyization, defining it as “the process by which the principles of the Disney theme parks are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world” (2004, 1)—mass production of a certain kind of consumer dream where consumption is clean and sanitized, free of friction or unpleasantness, safe and easy. Bryman’s analysis shows that the principles of Disneyization are spread

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throughout the world, thereby creating standardized consumption patterns where the products in question are devoid of local content and unrelated to the context surrounding them.

Forms of Cultural Mixing Globalization is often associated with cultural hybridity or, simply, mixing. Perhaps especially visible in popular culture, new cultural forms emerge out of diverse materials in a situation of increased intercultural contact. Musical subgenres such as bhangra (with South Asian and British elements), literary forms such as Nigerian literature in English, culinary innovations such as salmon paté (North European and French), and mixed personal identities ranging from Black British to Ukrainian-Canadian emerge in the world of heightened mobility. Commonly seen as “Westernization,” processes of mutual cultural influence and mixing—the cultural dynamics of globalization—must in fact be understood as a multidirectional and truly complex process. Moreover, it must be kept in mind that there is no such thing as a “pure” culture. Mixing has always occurred, although its speed and intensity are higher than before. A number of terms are used to describe cultural mixing, and it is necessary to distinguish between the main forms. Cultural pluralism directs the attention toward the relative boundedness of the constituent groups or categories that make up a society. It is a close relative of multiculturalism. In the realm of consumption, pluralism would imply that different groups consume different kinds of goods systematically because of cultural differences. Hybridity directs attention toward individuals or cultural forms that are reflexively—self-consciously— mixed, that is, syntheses of cultural forms or fragments of diverse origins. It is thus distinctive from either pluralism or multiculturalism, where boundaries between groups remain intact. Hybrid consumption entails the creative mixing of products and services of diverse origins. Syncretism directs attention toward the amalgamation of formerly discrete world views, cultural meaning, and, in particular, religion. Diasporic identity directs attention toward an essentially social category consisting of people

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whose primary subjective belonging is in another country. Transnationalism directs attention, rather, to a social existence attaching individuals and groups not primarily to one particular place, but to several or none. Diffusion directs attention toward the flow of substances and meanings between societies, whether it is accompanied by actual social encounters or not. Creolization, finally, directs the attention toward cultural phenomena that result from displacement and the ensuing social encounter and mutual influence between two or several groups, creating an ongoing dynamic interchange of symbols and practices, eventually leading to new forms with varying degrees of stability.

Hybridity is the most general concept used here, and it may refer to any obviously mixed cultural form. World music, various forms of contemporary “crossover” cuisine, and urban youth cultures borrowing elements from a variety of sources including minority cultures and TV are typical examples of phenomena explored under the heading hybridity. Hybrid cultural forms are often counteracted by quests for purity and “authenticity,” which may be, but are not necessarily, politicized in situations of increased ethnic diversity due to immigration.

Homogenization and Heterogenization Does globalization lead to homogenization or to heterogenization—do we become more similar or more different owing to the increase in transnational mobility and communication? In one sense, people worldwide arguably become more similar. Individualism, which we here take to mean the belief that individuals have rights and responsibilities regardless of their place in wider social configurations, is a central feature of global modernity. It is also easy to argue that similarities in consumer preferences indicate a certain “flattening” or homogenization. Yet, at the same time, local adaptations of universal or nearly universal phenomena show that global modernities always have local expressions and that the assumed similarities may either conceal real differences in meaning or that they may be superficial with no deep bearing on people’s existential condition. The question is phrased too simplistically to have an unequivocal

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answer, but studies of consumption may shed light on it in several ways. George Ritzer (2004) contrasts what he sees as two pervasive tendencies in the contemporary world: the grobalization of nothing, and the glocalization of something. He defines glocalization as that which is “locally conceived and controlled and rich in distinctive substance” (8), while grobalization is defined as “generally centrally conceived, controlled, and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content” (3). In other words, standardized, mass-produced goods catering to an assumed common denominator of disembedded market tastes are the outcome of grobalization, while anything that couldn’t have been produced anywhere but in a particular location is defined as glocalization. Ritzer says that there “is a gulf between those who emphasize the increasing grobal influence of capitalistic, Americanized, and McDonaldized interests and those who see the world growing increasingly pluralistic and indeterminate” (2004: 80). He moreover distinguishes between the grobalizationglocalization of places, things, persons, and services. The more personalized, place bound, and unique something is, the more glocalized. For example, while a craft barn represents the glocalization of something, Disney World stands for the grobalization of nothing. A bar frequented because of its skillful bartender or because it is where one’s friends hang out is “something,” whereas hotel bars with new customers every evening and a standardized, transnational selection of cocktails is a “nothing.” The big and standardized stands for nothing, while the small and locally fashioned stands for something, in Ritzer’s account. Ritzer agrees that things are in fact more complicated. He admits that “grobalization can, at times, involve something (for example, art exhibits that move among art galleries throughout the world, Italian exports of food like Parmigiano Reggiano and Culatella ham)” (2004: 99), and conversely, that the glocal can also produce “nothing,” such as tourist trinkets. He even concedes that there are “people today, perhaps a majority, who prefer nothing to something and who have good reason for that preference” (16), thinking about those—hundreds of millions—who scarcely have the opportunity to participate in the consumption of nothing. People in poorer countries produce much of the richer world’s nothingness but can scarcely afford any of it for themselves.

Inspired by Marc Augé’s concept of nonplaces, but also by Max Weber’s classic theory of disenchantment and rationalization, Ritzer establishes a series of simple contrasts where everything mass produced, ready-made, and instant appears dehumanized, and where everything that is one of a kind (be it a product or an employee) is “enchanted” and authentic. Many writers on globalization would be inclined to see this analysis as simplistic. As pointed out by Jean-Loup Amselle, even in McDonald’s restaurants, “as one may discover by visiting its outlets throughout the world, [they] do not sell the same products everywhere” (2001, 22). In India, where the majority of the population does not eat beef, for example, the Big Mac is a lamb burger. In addition, apparently identical products and services are perceived in distinctly local ways. Coca-Cola, an everyday product in most of the Western world, is associated with weddings and other rituals among many peoples, not least in Africa. The Macintosh computer, according to Amselle, has become a symbol of identity among French intellectuals resisting the global dominance of Microsoft (in spite of it being an American product). In other words, against the grobalization of nothing, locals invest the “nothing” with something in discriminating, critical ways. And yet it remains a significant fact that the transnational standardization of commodities and services is one important dimension of globalization, even if the meaning of the products and services thus disseminated vary locally.

Transnational Consumption The globalization of consumption does not just refer to the spread of similar patterns of consumption or consumer preferences, of similar goods and services worldwide, or to complex forms of “mixed” consumption. Globalization, seen as transnational processes, also affects consumption as such, in the sense that interpersonal transnational connections influence consumption directly. It is a familiar fact that migrants in Western cities have their own shops with specially imported items of food and clothing, and that their tastes influence the majority to some extent. Less well known is the converse influence, from the migrants in the West to those who stay at home in the third world. Remittances from migrants make up a substantial part of the domestic economies in many parts of the third world. As shown by Nigel Harris and others,

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remittances are spent in a variety of ways, with considerable variation between countries. However, almost everywhere, a proportion is invested in land or small enterprises. It has been speculated that every dollar sent back to the Philippines leads to a further three dollars in local growth, either through investment or through boosting local demand. Remittances take place at the interpersonal level, creating strong ties of commitment, obligation, and economic transactions between millions of individuals located sometimes at opposite ends of the globe. Their effects on local consumption can be significant not only in filling local purses but also through influencing local consumer preferences. A stroll in the Pakistani town of Kharian indicates what this means: one will soon notice a not insignificant “Norwegianization” in the town. People carry plastic bags from Oslo shops, many speak Norwegian, and at least one barber has a faded, framed photo of the late King Olav V in his shop. Most of Norway’s Pakistani hail from the Kharian area, and many travel back and forth as often as time and money allow. Return migrants or migrants on holiday “back home” often have to save substantial sums to be able to present their relatives with lavish gifts and to flaunt the wealth expected of them. Justin-Daniel Gandoulou describes Congolese men returning from Paris displaying Armani sunglasses and Gucci shoes to people unaware of the fact that the same men have often worked double shifts and led materially poor lives for years to afford such conspicuous consumption.

Questions of Cultural Hegemony Globalization is often, particularly regarding consumption, associated with Americanization; the global dissemination of American films, popular music, fast food, and so on, is seen as a—if not the—main form of cultural globalization. However, the standardized American forms witnessed in the critiques of Disneyization and McDonaldization are not representative of the actual flow of commodities in the world. In fact, not even phenomena usually seen as typically American are necessary American. Fast-food restaurants are widespread worldwide, but rarely market dominant, and the largest fast-food corporation in the world is British, not American. 7-Eleven is owned by Japanese investors. Volkswagen sells more cars in China than any American carmaker, and Toyota is the third-largest-selling car made in the

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United States itself. Although American companies are market dominant in some areas, such as computers and the media and entertainment world, this does not hold true as a general statement. Daniel Miller describes a family scene from somewhere in the third world where the children are watching Pokémon on TV, their father has finally been able to afford a new Mercedes-Benz, and the adults celebrate with bottles of whisky. As a matter of fact, the car, the TV show, and the beverage have nothing to do with the United States. Although forms of consumption often described as Western symbolize modern success in much of the world, the actual origins of the goods and services consumed varies hugely. Tracing the itinerary of Hindi films around the world, Brian Larkin shows not only how popular these films are among youths in Indonesia, Senegal, Nigeria, and elsewhere, but also how local filmmakers in, for example, northern Nigeria “borrow plots and styles from Bombay cinema” (2003, 171). In fact, Hindi (Bollywood) films have been the most popular foreign films in northern Nigeria since the 1960s. Even commodities that do have an American origin do not necessarily lead to Americanization in the sense of obliterating the local. Anthropologists have written about the indigenization of modernity, arguing that foreign artifacts and practices are incorporated into preexisting worlds of meaning, modifying these life worlds somewhat, but not homogenizing them. Many of the dimensions of modernity seen as uniform worldwide, such as bureaucracies, markets, computer networks, and human rights discourses, always take on a distinctly local character, not to mention consumption: a trip to McDonald’s triggers an entirely different set of cultural connotations in Amsterdam from what it does in Chicago, not to mention Beijing. Or Moscow. As shown by Melissa Caldwell, McDonald’s restaurants became a familiar and popular fixture in the daily life of Russians with astonishing speed after the opening of the first outlet in 1990. Surprisingly, “Muscovites have incorporated McDonald’s into the more intimate and sentimental spaces of their personal lives: family celebrations, cuisine and discourses about what it means to be Russian today” (2004, 6). In her words, Russians have “domesticated” the archetypal symbol of Americanness and made it a Russian one. Examples of such appropriations of foreign goods and services are ubiquitous in the contemporary world. What may appear as dramatic cultural

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transformations may not be perceived as such. Amazonian peoples who may have been contacted by the outside world only a decade ago are perfectly at ease having swapped their body paint for Manchester United T-shirts and do not see it as Westernization or even change. To them, change would mean a transformation of their relationship to each other, such as being forced to disperse, engage in migrant labor, and so on. This would also be a valid perspective on the Pokémon-watching, whisky-drinking elite invoked previously: insofar as their new patterns of consumption do not interfere with the fundamental structure of their relationships to each other, they do not lead to radical cultural change. Similar points are made in Harold Wilhite’s 2008 study of consumption in contemporary Kerala, but Wilhite takes the argument one step further to show that the uneven distribution of modern consumer goods has created new divisions in Keralan society, and also in what ways consumption is a controversial theme in Indian public life, where many argue that ancient Hindu values of frugality and modesty are declining owing to the spread of mass consumption.

Reactions to Globalization Critical reactions against market- and technologydriven globalization are widespread. Many countries have state-sponsored campaigns urging consumers to buy domestically produced goods, and appeals to cultural, religious, or national identity are meant to stem the rising tide of globalized consumption. Some critics also take a structural, global view, arguing that the world economy brings prosperity to the few and poverty to the many. Resistance to globalization can be classified into three main varieties. First, the so-called antiglobalization movement, a loose coalition of farmers, students, and political idealists in the rich countries, have made strong protests and organized huge demonstrations against the instruments of global capitalism, particularly the World Trade Organization, arguing—among other things—that it is unfavorable to the needs of poor countries and that it leads to an unhealthy and demeaning standardization of production (notably agriculture) in the rich countries. It is to be noted here, and it has no bearing on the arguments put forward by the movement, that the antiglobalizers are themselves globalized: they share a transnational mindset inspired by ideological developments in the North Atlantic; they communicate

electronically and travel to demonstrations by jet. It is, in other words, globalization narrowly defined as global capitalism they rebel against. A less visible, and less overtly political, form of political resistance to globalization is offered by the transnational “slow” movements, notably slow food and slow cities. Favoring traditional alternatives to the transnational and standardized, these movements emphasize the value of locally produced food and not least local food traditions, slowness as a value superior to speed in lifestyle questions, and a politics that puts the quality of life before material standards of living. Typical Western middle-class phenomena, the slow movements first emerged in northern Italy, where they are associated both with the preservation of medieval towns and with local specialties such as Culatella ham, wine, and lardo di Colonnata. The third form of critique concentrates on the moral and cultural aspects of globalization, arguing that domestic products are more authentic and fulfilling than imports (even if the domestic products are also mass produced and sometimes exported). Exclusion is a major theme in research on globalization, and it affects many more than the people either participating in antiglobalization or the slow movements. For many of the millions of poor in the third world, who have only experienced the negative effects of globalization (such as loss of land, pauperization, loss of tradition and autonomy), being “standardized” to the extent of getting an education and a job at the local fast-food restaurant would in many cases be preferred to being neglected. Capitalism creates both wealth and poverty simultaneously in the lack of a state, or a transnational political body, serving the needs not only of the market but also of society. This gap—between a globally standardized and synchronized economic system, on the one hand, and weak transnational political instruments, on the other—can probably be described as the main contradiction, or source of conflict, in a globalized era. Some want the train of globalization to stop so that they can get off; others want it to stop so that they can get on. But both groups depend on a political power willing and able to create a space enabling as well as limiting transnational contact.

Dialectics of Globalization In spite of the phenomenal growth of global interconnectedness since World War II, not everything is in sync with everything else. First, as James

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Mittelman points out, “The [global] system affects its components in very different ways. Globalization is a partial, not a totalizing phenomenon. Countries and regions are tethered to some aspects of globalization, but sizeable pockets remain removed from it” (2001, 7). Although there is an “IT boom” in India, the country emerging as a major power in the production of information technology, more than half of the Indian population have never made a phone call. As many writers on globalization have noted, one particularly visible feature of it is the emergence of strong localist and traditionalist identities. The contrast between a borderless global network society, on the one hand, and fervent isolationism, on the other, is like flypaper for journalists and scholars, and book titles like The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Thomas Friedman) and Jihad vs. McWorld (Benjamin Barber) are irresistible when the browsing customer in an airport bookshop stumbles across them. There is a simple dialectic to be grasped here: the transnational network economy, and its cultural correlates, create opportunities for some and powerlessness for others. French filmmakers are unhappy with Hollywood’s global dominance; pious Muslims are unhappy with images from cable TV and from the London and Paris streets they walked as students; Scandinavians worry about the future of their welfare state in a situation of global economic competition; and indigenous leaders worldwide are concerned to retain a way of life and a culture that are at least semitraditional. Global capitalism, it is often said, produces both losers and winners, both poverty and wealth. It could be added that even in the cases where it provides increased (measurable) wealth, it can also produce poverty at the cultural or spiritual level. Countermovements against the limitless standardization and homogenization seemingly resulting from globalization can thus be founded in a variety of motivations, but all of them are to do with autonomy at the personal or community level. Globalization, even when met with little or no resistance, can usually be described as glocalization: the preexisting local is fused with global influence; the particular merges with the universal to create something true to the universal grammar of global modernity, but at the same time locally embedded.

Concluding Summary Truly global processes affect the conditions of people living in particular localities, creating new

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opportunities and new forms of vulnerability. Risks are globally shared in the era of the nuclear bomb, transnational terrorism, and potential ecological disasters. On the same note, the economic conditions in particular localities frequently (some would say always) depend on events taking place elsewhere in the global system. If there is an industrial boom in Taiwan, towns in the English Midlands will be affected. If oil prices rise, that means salvation for the oil-exporting Trinidadian economy and disaster for the oil-importing, neighboring Barbadian one. Patterns of consumption also seem to merge in certain respects; people nearly everywhere desire similar goods, from cell phones to ready-made garments. Now, a precondition for this to happen is the more or less successful implementation of certain institutional dimensions of modernity, notably that of a monetary economy—if not necessarily evenly distributed wage work and literacy. The ever-increasing transnational flow of commodities, be they material or immaterial, creates a set of common cultural denominators that appear to eradicate local distinctions. The hot dog (halal or not, as the case may be), the pizza, and the hamburger (or, in India, the lamb burger) are truly parts of world cuisine; identical pop songs are played in identical discotheques in Costa Rica and Thailand; the same Coca-Cola commercials are shown with minimal local variations at cinemas all over the world; Dan Brown volumes are ubiquitous wherever books are sold; and so on. Investment capital, military power, and world literature are being disembedded from the constraints of space; they no longer belong to a particular locality. With the development of the jet plane, the satellite dish, and, more recently, the Internet, distance no longer seems a limiting factor for the flow of influence, investments, and cultural meaning. Millions of people—indeed hundreds of millions— will never have access to the wealth because they are simply ignored and squeezed into increasingly marginal areas, like hunter-gatherers encountering armed, well-organized agriculturalists in an earlier period. The suffering of slumdwellers, dispossessed peasants, unemployed men and women in cities, victims of war and of economic exploitation, and their occasionally well-orchestrated rebellions or alternative projects seeking autonomy from globalized capitalism—these are the trueborn children of globalization, just as the cell phone and the Internet, the proliferation of international NGOs, the cheap tropical holiday, and the growth of transnational soccer fandom are results of

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globalization. The global village is not a place devoid of tensions or diversity, but a site, or a network of networks if one prefers, where people are brought into intensified contact with each other, leading to confrontations and frictions, enrichment and opportunities, in the world of consumption as elsewhere. The ambiguities and paradoxes of globalization are here to stay. Thomas Hylland Eriksen See also Americanization; Diaspora; Glocalization; Information Society; McDonaldization; Money; Social and Economic Development; Transnational Capitalism

Further Readings Amselle, Jean-Loup. Branchements. Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures [Connections: Anthropology of the universality of cultures]. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bryman, Alan. The Disneyization of Society. London: Sage, 2004. Caldwell, Melissa. “Domesticating the French Fry: McDonald’s and Consumerism in Moscow.” Journal of Consumer Culture 4, no. 1 (2004): 5–26. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. Globalization: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Gandoulou, Justin-Daniel. Dandies à Bacongo: Le culte de l’élégance dans la société congolaise contemporaine [Dandies in Bacongo: The Cult of Elegance in Contemporary Congolese Society]. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989. Giddens, Anthony. The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity, 1985. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections. London: Routledge, 1996. Harris, Nigel. Thinking the Unthinkable: The Immigrant Myth Exposed. London: I. B. Tauris, 2002. Hart, Keith. The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World. London: Profile, 2000. Larkin, Brian. “Itineraries of Indian Cinema: African Videos, Bollywood and Global Media.” In Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism and Transnational Media, edited by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, 170–192. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1994. First published 1964. Miller, Daniel. “The Poverty of Morality.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1, no. 2 (2001): 225–243. Mittelman, James. “Globalization: Captors and Captives.” In Capturing Globalization, edited by J. H. Mittelman and N. Othman, 1–17. London: Routledge, 2001.

Ritzer, George. The Mcdonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993. Ritzer, George. The Globalization of Nothing. London: Sage, 2004. Ritzer, George, and Don Slater. “Editorial.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1, no. 1 (2001): 5–8. Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Sahlins, Marshall D. “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History.” In Assessing Cultural Anthropology, edited by Robert Borofsky, 377–394. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. Wilhite, Harold. Consumption and the Transformation of Everyday Life: A View from South India. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Wilk, Richard. “Consumer Goods as Dialogue about Development: Colonial Time and Television Time in Belize.” In Consumption and Identity, edited by Jonathan Friedman, 97–118. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1995.

GLOCALIZATION Glocalization is a rather awkward neologism of indeterminate origin, coined to describe the interaction between global and local forces in the modern world. The term is most often used to describe how the process of (economic) globalization is subject to the countervailing tendencies of (cultural) localization, with an emphasis on social agency and indeterminacy. The precise origins of the word are uncertain. Some, such as sociologist Roland Robertson (1994), have suggested that the term was conceived in Japan in the 1980s, translated from the word dochakuka, referring to specific forms of business practice whereby globalized production systems were adapted to suit particular local conditions. Others suggest that the term was first used at a Global Change Exhibition in Bonn in 1990, becoming a marketing buzzword and entering the Oxford Dictionary of New Words in 1991. One of the first academics to refer to glocalization was Robertson (1992), who used the term to counter the assumption that the global expansion of capitalism led inevitably to the commodification of local culture and the homogenization of difference. Rather than seeing globalization as working in opposition to the forces of localization, Robertson referred to glocalization to describe the linking of

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locales across the globe through the process of timespace compression. Whatever the term’s origins, the debate about glocalization is central to the argument that globalization is an incomplete and contested process, countering the charge that local differences are being subsumed within a more uniform global culture. Debating various terms, Roberston (1994) presents glocalization as a refinement of the concept of globalization, designed to highlight the heterogenizing aspects of globalization as well as its homogenizing tendencies and emphasizing its spatial as much as its temporal aspects. Robertson’s emphasis on the spatial has appealed to geographers like Erik Swyngedouw, who has also debated the relative merits of the terms globalization and glocalization. Specifically, Swyngedouw suggests that glocalization refers to a situation in which economic activities and interfirm networks are becoming simultaneously more transnational and in which institutional and regulatory arrangements switch from the national scale both upward to supranational or global scales and downward to the scale of the individual body or to local, urban, or regional configurations. Here, too, adoption of the term glocalization is used to challenge the tendency within studies of globalization to obscure, marginalize, and silence the intense and ongoing sociospatial struggles that have accompanied globalization, demonstrating how the geographical rescaling of economic activity has important ramifications in terms of sociospatial asymmetries of power. Doreen Massey has also argued against the inevitability of globalization, claiming instead that it is a specific political project associated with the growth of neoliberal capitalism. Massey argues that places all have their own particular histories and trajectories that cannot be understood simply in terms of an anonymous process of globalization, emanating from somewhere else. Instead, she insists that globalizations are always locally produced (whether they originate from London or New York or Tokyo, for example). Massey also makes an important distinction between space and place, resisting the tendency to contrast (global) space and (local) place, the former seen as active and the latter as passive. Instead of seeing the local as a product of the global and local places as the inevitable victim of globalization, Massey argues for a more relational view of space and place involving the mutual constitution of the global and the local. So, for example, she sees places as the moments through which the global is constituted,

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invested, coordinated, and produced, with different places occupying distinct positions within the wider power geometries of the global. Even the most global phenomena such as the international financial system are grounded in specific places (including the City of London, Wall Street, and various offshore tax havens), and the forces of globalization are experienced differently in different places because of their particular histories and accumulated layers of meaning. If globalization can be grounded and located in this way, then the future no longer appears inevitable or incontestable, as recent anticapitalist protest movements have sought to demonstrate.

Grounding Globalization While globalization was once thought to lead to a flattening out of the world and a homogenization of cultural difference, anthropologists and geographers were quick to counter such a unilinear view. Instead, they have documented the hybridization of culture in a series of distinctively glocalized places, often resulting from the transnational migration of people and products, capital and commodities, information and ideas, where new social forms constantly develop, blending influences from different places. From this perspective, glocalization can be seen as an attempt to produce a more grounded and better-specified understanding of globalization. It also involves an attempt to trace the specific contours of global change as they are experienced in different places. There have, for example, been many arguments about the hybridization or creolization of global culture as social forces, and cultural artifacts that originate elsewhere in the world are subject to local forces of appropriation and reinterpretation. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai refers to this as a process of “indigenisation,” claiming that “as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies, they tend to become indigenised in one way or another” (1996, 32). His ideas have inspired research on various forms of public culture in India including Bollywood cinema, television, drama, and advertising. Similarly, the Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz argues that the contemporary world is characterized by “an intense, continuous, comprehensive interplay between the indigenous and the imported” (1996, 5). His case studies include Nigerian Kung Fu, Manhattan fatwa, and a Polish pope among the Maya. These examples all cast doubt on notions of pure, untainted, and authentic local cultures suddenly undermined by the anonymous

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forces of globalization, originating from elsewhere. As British anthropologist Daniel Miller argues, this may be seen as evidence of growing equality and as a triumph of cultural relativism: Central Africans in suits, Indonesian soap operas, and South Asian brands are no longer [to be seen as] inauthentic copies by people who have lost their culture after being swamped by things that only North Americans and Europeans “should” possess. Rather there is the equality of genuine relativism that makes none of us a model of real consumption and all of us creative variants of social processes based around the possession and use of commodities. (1995, 144)

One might then be inclined to agree with those who argue that, despite the forces of displacement and deterritorialization that have accompanied globalization, subaltern strategies of resistance are still possible, resulting in the relocalization of place. From this perspective, globalization does not lead to the inexorable erosion of place but can contribute to its revitalization.

Globalization and Commodity Culture The close link between globalization as a general social, economic, and political process and the globalization of specific commodities is readily demonstrated. Indeed, globalization is sometimes rendered in popular and academic discourse as McDonaldization or coca-colonization. George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis is well known and widely debated. But even in the case of McDonald’s, the globalization thesis needs to be tempered by evidence of the localization of global consumer culture. There have, for example, been ethnographic studies of the expansion of McDonald’s in East Asia and of the cultural specificity of eating a Big Mac in France or Moscow. The conclusion of these diverse studies is that the consumption of global products like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola is inflected differently in different (national, ethnic, and religious) contexts. Marie Gillespie’s ethnography of Punjabi Sikh teenagers in West London is a particularly rich example, showing how eating a Big Mac or drinking a Coke can be interpreted as a specific form of resistance by young people to their parents’ religious strictures about what to eat and drink rather than as a more generalized example of the globalization or

Americanization of local culture. The specific dynamics of ethnicity, generation, and place are, in this case, more important to understanding these specific consumption practices than some generalized account of globalization. Similarly, Helene Brembeck’s ethnography of family meals at McDonald’s in Sweden shows how this foreign food, often associated with the demise of “proper” family meals, can be appropriated within local contexts of consumption. According to Brembeck’s work, the special time that families used to spent together at home, on Friday nights or on weekends, can be relocated to commercial venues like McDonald’s without significantly undermining its social significance as “family time.” Rather, she suggests, McDonald’s is reappropriated as an alternative venue for family interaction, (re-)creating “family” and “home” in novel ways. Again, what might be interpreted as “globalization” needs to be rethought through the lens of specific local circumstances. Miller’s 1998 work on local cultures of consumption in Trinidad provides further telling evidence of the process of glocalization. Miller shows how the local franchising and bottling of Coca-Cola reduces its “Americanness” and how specific forms of consumption, where Coke is drunk in conjunction with locally produced rum, reduce the significance of particular brands, so that Coca-Cola becomes little more than a “black sweet drink from Trinidad.” In his earlier work, Miller applied a similar argument to the Trinidadian consumption of American mass media such as the U.S.-based soap opera The Young and the Restless. The soap opera was a massive hit in Trinidad, the subject of gleeful satire in calypsos, seen as an epitome of Trinidadian bacchanal. Far from being evidence of the Americanization of Caribbean culture, Miller argues, the program’s American origins and content were less significant than the way that the program was appropriated as a vehicle for “local” debate about family issues, sexual relations, and domestic morality in Trinidad.

Appropriation and Adaptation As the preceding examples suggest, a process of glocalization can be observed in the way that global brands are adapted for local demand. Indeed, the history of global advertising is littered with examples that demonstrate the cultural limits of globalization where the expansion of overseas markets is insensitive to place-based social differences (Jackson 2004).

Glocalization

Case studies of successful glocalization strategies are, by contrast, comparatively rare. An exception is L. J. Wood and S. Grosvenor’s study of the British confectionery firm Cadbury’s expansion into China, where their standard brand of chocolate had to be adapted to local taste and modes of consumption. Working through its Australian subsidiary, Cadbury was obliged to make significant changes to its way of doing business to accommodate guo qing (the “special situation” in China). According to Wood and Grosvenor, Cadbury had to adapt to Chinese businesses practices, described as heavily personal and based on guanxi (literally, connections) and zinyong (one’s reputation for being reliable and trustworthy). Rather than simply rolling out its existing merchandise and marketing strategies, Cadbury gave its products local names and changed recipes to reduce the sugar content and increase the volume of cocoa solids. Marketing and distribution also faced challenges in a situation where self-service and impulse buying were relatively unknown. Similar acts of “translation” need to be made when products flow in other directions, as in the case of craft goods traveling from the Global South (in Central America) to the Global North (in the United States). Carol Hendrickson provides a case study of this process in her account of the sale of Guatemalan artifacts to U.S. consumers via mailorder catalogues. In this case, the products may be specified as “Mayan” or generalized as “Indian” or simply described as “traditional.” Their authenticity is averred by references to them being “handmade” or “crafted.” Claims are made concerning their specific geographical origin “high above the Guatemalan rainforests,” or they may be simply described as “unique” or “one of a kind.” Similar processes are documented in the case of British-Asian fashion goods, particularly when sold to a white British audience with little or no direct connection to the Indian subcontinent. In this case, clothing may be coded specifically as “Indian” or more generally as “Eastern” or “Oriental.” Notions of authenticity are inscribed in craft processes of embroidery and stitching or specific practices of hand weaving or fabric dying but also in more elusive notions of cut and color, style, and fit. Provenance may be generalized as “Eastern” or “exotic” or specified as “Indian” or “Rajasthani.” In marketing these fashion goods to white British consumers, even greater liberties can be taken, with advertisements set in North Africa,

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models from Brazil, and the names of specific garments taken from all over the world (Dwyer and Jackson 2003). The study of transnational commodity culture demonstrates the inadequacy of approaching globalization as a process that only operates in one direction or in a unilinear pattern. There are many examples where the flow of transnational migrants from one place to another has been accompanied by the flow of goods and services in both directions, for the process of migration does not impact only on those who define themselves as transnational. It can also have a transformative effect on the “receiving” society. Examples include the popularity of Tex-Mex food in the United States following Mexican migration to el norte, where a version of Mexican food is consumed by many people with little or no connection to Mexico, or the British adoption of curry as the “national dish” following several generations of immigration from the Indian subcontinent. A subtler example, perhaps, is the gradual “Dominicanization” of New York, following the migration of people and goods from the Dominican Republic to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In her analysis of advertisements for Dominican rum, Nyberg Sørensen refers to the representation of Americans’ alleged inability to understand merengue or to talk Spanish (“Ay americano, no sabe nada”). While the author restricts her interpretation to the advertisement’s gleeful reception among Dominicans in New York (who apparently enjoy the way their American “hosts” are satirized), there are more complex processes at work here across the whole transnational field. Understanding exactly who gets the joke and at whose expense requires detailed audience research, carefully attuned to the complex politics of irony. The glocalization of consumer products and of commodity culture in general emerges as a rich terrain for future research. The debate about glocalization (whether or not this particular term is used) encompasses a wide field. It engages with the economic forces through which transnational companies seek to expand their global reach and the migration of money, goods, people, and information that accompanies this process. But it also emphasizes the fact that globalization is never a one-way street. Just as “globalization” always comes from somewhere and is enacted by specific, socially and geographically located actors, so too are “global” processes subject to specific forms of localization, the precise form of which is shaped by the

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previous histories of different places. Glocalization invokes a politics of the global and the local not simply in terms of different geographical scales but through an understanding of the complex ways that they are relationally connected. Global forces produce the local (in the sense that they have a specific local impact). But the local also produces the global in the sense that global forces always originate from somewhere specific (however much their specific geographies may be hidden or disguised). The invocation to “think global, act local” is just one response to these apparently abstract and universal forces. But a radical response to globalization, as implied in the language of glocalization, requires us to disentangle (and not to conflate) the local and the global, space and place, abstract and concrete. These are important theoretical challenges for the future with high political stakes in terms of policy and practice. Peter Jackson See also Americanization; Appropriation; Capitalism; Cultural Flows; Globalization; McDonaldization; Spaces and Places; Subaltern

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Brembeck, Helene. “Home to McDonald’s: Upholding the Family Dinner with the Help of McDonald’s.” Food, Culture and Society 8 (2005): 215–226. Dwyer, Claire, and Jackson, Peter. “Commodifying Difference: Selling Eastern Fashion.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 (2003): 269–291. Gillespie, Marie. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. London: Routledge, 1995. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge, 1996. Hendrickson, Carol. “Selling Guatemala: Maya Export Products in US Mail-Order Catalogues.” In CrossCultural Consumption, edited by David Howes, 106–121. London: Routledge, 1996. Jackson, Peter. “Local Consumption Cultures in a Globalizing World.” Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 29 (2004): 165–178. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Miller, Daniel. “Consumption and Commodities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 141–161. Miller, Daniel. “Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad.” In Material Cultures, edited by Daniel Miller, 169–187. London: University College London Press, 1998.

Ritzer, George. The McDonaldisation Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. London: Sage, 1998. Robertson, Roland. Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Robertson, Roland. “Globalisation or Glocalisation?” Journal of International Communication 1 (1994): 33–52. Swyngedouw, Erik. “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’? Networks, Territories and Rescaling.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17 (2004): 25–48. Wood, L. J., and S. Grosvenor. “Chocolate in China: The Cadbury Experience.” Australian Geographer 28 (1997): 173–184.

GOAL-DIRECTED CONSUMPTION The process of consumption can be goal directed or experiential, according to Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novack. Goal-directed consumption is motivated by extrinsic concerns such as the utilitarian value of an object or the need to fulfill a specific extrinsic goal. Goal-directed consumption is typically planned and directed. Overall, goal-directed consumption is slow, conscious, effortful, highly modifiable, and largely effect free. Experiential consumption, in contrast, is motivated by intrinsic concerns such as the immediate hedonic benefit or the need to complete a ritualized behavior. Overall, experiential consumption is fast, automatic, effortless, more difficult to modify, and intimately bound up with emotional processing. It remains uncertain which system is more important in deciding consumer behavior and how the two systems might relate and interact. Clearly, people can and do make deliberative, reasoned choices. Large purchase decisions, such as the purchase of a new television, usually involve actively weighing the pros and cons of each television and pitting them side by side until a winner emerges. At the same time, however, people can and do judge experientially; one television may simply feel more right, while a seemingly good television can be rejected because it feels wrong. It is obviously difficult to decide if any single judgment is “correct”; large purchases are made infrequently, and there is rarely the opportunity to try out alternatives under replicable conditions. Over the past forty years, there has been an increasing emphasis on experiential factors predicting economic decisions. Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, for example, set up a stall in a busy shopping

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center with four identical pairs of socks placed in a row. Shoppers were asked to examine the socks and state which they thought was the best quality. They discovered a strong position effect such that the socks placed to the right were proclaimed as the best four times as often as the socks placed to the left. But all the socks were identical. When asked to explain their choice, the shoppers pointed to the better feel and quality of the socks on the right or announced a preference for the color. Nobody mentioned position as having an influence. When making choices, consumers may not deliberate and balance all the available information. Sometimes they may not even “see” the information that is available and will make an intuitive decision based on information they are not even aware of. None of this is perhaps that surprising. Much of what human beings do is hidden from direct introspection. Tossing a ball up into the air and catching it, for example, involves performing multiple differential equations that you will never be aware of. Reaching out to grab a glass involves accelerating your hand, opening your hand sufficiently to grab the glass, decelerating your hand (so you don’t knock the glass over), gripping the glass (sufficiently to hold it firmly without shattering it), accelerating the glass from its resting place toward your mouth, and then decelerating it so that you may drink from it (and not spill it down your front). Although you will do all that to drink, you will barely be aware of any of it, and that is a good thing. If every action were driven by conscious agency, then we would be overwhelmed by the effort of trying to control all the relevant parameters with the requisite precision. Automaticity is necessary to allow coherent, goal-directed behavior and coherent percepts. In the preceding examples, the goal is to catch a ball or to take a drink, and too much thinking makes those things slow or impossible, as can be easily observed when watching infants try to perform the same actions. Getting things done involves a balance of thinking and acting, and consumer behavior similarly involves a mix of hedonic and utilitarian components. Purchases that are made regularly, for example, can become ritualistic or habitual, made without thought. Repeat purchases provide frequently co-occurring representations of perceptual features, valence, and behavioral responses that form associative clusters to drive future shopping behaviors such that the original necessary effort is no longer required. Such “impulse” buying might be

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experiential, but it also fulfills the goal of getting the shopping done quickly and effortlessly. Even when shopping for less mundane items, impulsive purchases can meet the goal of having fun, whereas goaldirected shopping, with its high cognitive workload, cannot. The idea that human beings are driven both by experiential and goal-directed concerns has been around for a long time. In the Vatican is a sixteenthcentury fresco by Raphael called “The School of Athens.” Depicted in the center are Plato and Aristotle. Plato is pointing up to the sky, expressing his experiential commitment, and he is flanked by the intuitionist philosophers, including Xenophon and Socrates. Aristotle holds out a steady hand of reason and is flanked by the empirical thinkers, including Euclid and Plotinus. The fresco beautifully captures the balance between impulse and reflection. Living a life driven only by impulse and emotion would lead to disaster with rash decisions eventually taking their toll. But living a life driven only by reason and conscious reflection would be paralyzing because each decision would take an intolerable amount of time. We need to think but we also need to shop. Stuart Derbyshire See also Cognitive Structures; Consumer Behavior; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Psychology; Rituals; Routines and Habits; Self-Reflexivity; Theory of Planned Behavior

Further Readings Frith, Chris. Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Hoffman, Donna, and Thomas Novak. “Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations.” Journal of Marketing 60 (2006): 50–68. Nisbett, Richard, and Timothy Wilson. “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” Psychological Review 84 (1977): 231–259. Rafal, Robert, Shai Danziger, Giordana Grossi, Liana Machado, and Robert Ward. “Visual Detection Is Gated by Attending for Action: Evidence from Hemispatial Neglect.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (2002): 16371–16375. Tallis, Ray. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

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Goffman, Erving

GOFFMAN, ERVING (1922–1982) Erving Goffman was born in 1922 in Alberta, Canada, to parents of Jewish-Ukrainian descent. In 1945, he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in 1953. After graduating from Chicago, Goffman accepted a position at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968, he left Berkeley to accept a distinguished chair in sociology and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Goffman remained at Pennsylvania until he died as a result of stomach cancer in 1982. At the time of his death, he was the president of the American Sociological Association, and he crafted his last published work, “The Interaction Order,” as his presidential address. Goffman was one of the most original and provocative sociologists of the twentieth century. He used his extraordinary analytic skills to establish a new field of sociology—the study of face-to-face interaction. In doing so, he demonstrated how and why “the interaction order” was a relatively autonomous realm of social life, influenced but not determined by culture and social structure. In crafting his groundbreaking analyses, Goffman drew on the insights of a diverse array of scholars, including Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, and Everett Hughes. Goffman also extended the ideas of these thinkers in notable ways, applying them to unexplored aspects of social life and blending them with his own distinctive insights and concepts. Goffman’s special genius laid in his ability to use remarkably incisive metaphors and observations to reveal the intricacies of face-to-face interaction. Goffman became best known for developing the dramaturgical theory of interaction. According to this theory, social life mirrors theater, and people are like actors on a stage. To realize desired selves, individuals must be “good actors” who can adeptly manipulate props, masks, moods, and settings to manage the impressions of others. Selves, then, are dramatic effects—they become established through convincing performances and depend on the responses of others. Selves are thus thoroughly social in nature. Rather than being private possessions or personal capacities, selves are something others temporarily grant to individuals based on their situated performances. Goffman acknowledged that as people negotiate selves and construct social meanings, they draw

on codes rooted in the framework of culture. These codes get expressed through an elaborate assortment of role performances, dramaturgical displays, and interaction rituals. Yet Goffman emphasized that interaction does not simply serve as a vehicle through which culture gets enacted and reproduced. Instead, the interaction order has its own distinctive logic and dynamics. While culture informs this order, it only sets broad parameters for action. That is, culture offers social actors “rough drafts” for behavior, thereby leaving them room to improvise as they perform roles, present selves, and define situations. In 1974, Goffman developed an approach called frame analysis to examine how people organize their experiences and define situations. In many respects, frame analysis offered semiotics of contemporary culture. According to Goffman, frames refer to interpretive schemes that enable people to make sense of activity occurring around them. In analyzing frames and their implications, Goffman demonstrated how they can be reworked into “keys” and thus take on meanings that are patterned on but different from their original meaning. For example, the frame of “a debate” could be keyed as a “mock debate” or as a “debate practice.” As Goffman highlighted, the process of keying complicates interactions by undermining frames and making people uncertain about what is happening. Most crucially, Goffman delineated the basic keys and frames that individuals use to organize their experiences. In the process, he revealed how these interpretive schemes serve as a kind of glue that holds culture, structure, and interaction together, albeit somewhat tenuously. Drawing on frame analysis, Goffman offered his most direct contribution to the study of consumer culture in Gender Advertisements (1979), a book that provided a detailed examination of magazine ads and the rituals and bodily displays that portray the “arrangement of the sexes.” Through his analyses, Goffman demonstrated how ads offer a revealing window into culture, power, and identity in Western societies, particularly in the realm of gender relationships. Goffman illustrated how ads serve not only as frames that shape our conceptions of femininity and masculinity, but also as institutional practices through which seemingly natural gender differences are socially constructed. Finally, in his analyses of gender advertisements, Goffman highlighted themes that permeated his entire body of work, including the fabricated quality of social reality, the dramaturgical

Governmentality

elements of self-production, and the profoundly social roots of allegedly natural arrangements. In elaborating these themes, Goffman laid the groundwork for postmodern theories of consumer culture and their emphases on simulation, hyperreality, signification, performativity, and decentered selfhood. Kent Sandstrom See also Autoethnography; Cultural Studies; Embodiment; Femininity; Gender Advertising; Hyperreality; Identity; Postmodernism; SelfPresentation; Simmel, Georg

Further Readings Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Goffman, Erving. Exploring the Interaction Order. Edited by Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.

GOVERNMENTALITY The term governmentality emerges from the later writings of the philosopher Michel Foucault, when his attention turned to “the problem of population.” This interest in population stems from Foucault’s already established interest in “biopolitics,” by which he means the networks and strategies of power in the science and maintenance of the self. In bringing issues of population to biopolitics, government alerts us to the articulation of legitimate conduct with ideas of productive citizenship and personal worth. Furthermore, a productive and expanding body of research has set out to examine the extent to which practices of consumption and orderly consumerist behavior have become integrated with the activities and displays of productive citizenship.

The Turn to “Government” The focus of government is an important development on Foucault’s earlier work on the exercise of power. In a series of studies up to Discipline and

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Punish, Foucault looks at how various regimes of practice are designed to produce appropriately behaved and compliant subjects. In Discipline and Punish, he argues that the organization of the prison is calculated to tailor the self-image and conduct of the inmates toward the needs of orderliness and reform, and in The Birth of the Clinic, he suggests that the procedures and subjectivities of medical examination produce the sensibility of the compliant patient. What unites these studies is the prominence of institutional convention and organization in the exercise of power. An implication of this is that, to a large extent, the effectiveness of these regimes remains contingent upon their site specificity. In other words, whether the context is the prison wing, the clinician’s office, or the schoolroom, discursive regimes produce the power relations necessary for discipline and orderliness in a particular setting. However, such regimes of control do not transfer readily to the democratic state, in which strategies of power are obligated to a systemic requirement for personal autonomy and subtler networks of judgment and control. The response is a shift in the ends of governmental power, from the pursuit and maintenance of sovereign rule to a duty of care over the population. The systematic discharge of this care is made possible by the development of a “science of population,” producing necessary statistical analysis of such phenomena as contagious disease, living conditions, and economic productivity. The oppressive state becomes the nurturing state, intent on developing measures to enable a healthy population to thrive as workers and consumers. At least in terms of its rhetoric, government moves from the retention and implementation of sovereign control toward the exercise of benign surveillance, responsibility, and care. Successful government requires that projects of development be internalized within the population, and Foucault uses the example of the family to illustrate how this occurs. Prior to the emergence of population as a productive economic category, Foucault argues, the family was the self-regulating unit for the control of morality and hygiene. Drawing on forms of knowledge made possible through the application of statistics and expressible in universal statements of policy, government is able to extend its rule of care over the family. In matters ranging from the regulation of sexual behavior to the submission of children to schooling and vaccination, the family occupies dual roles as subject of state judgment and concern,

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and as implementer of policies aimed at population improvement. In this way, the family moves from an internally determining source of control to an instrument of the will to govern. In summary, government is the craft of developing an idealized population through approved practices of free expression and conduct within a framework of welfare and responsibility, conceived at policy level and implemented from within the population itself. This can be illustrated through how advertising post–World War II targeted the competent purchaser, particularly the mother whose laundry could only be deemed suitably clean and white through the purchase of a specific soap powder (Myers 1994).

Government and the Good Consumer Foucault emphasizes the importance of government to the well-being of the controlling regime, arguing that governmentality should be understood as “nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security” (2007, 48). However, every bit as important is the safety of the economic underpinnings of the bureaucratic state, in organizing mass production and fostering cultures of consumption. Crucial to Foucault’s idea of government, therefore, are the practices and judgments associated with commerce. Not only did the extension of government coincide with the extension of capitalist exchange, but the activities of governing also follow the grammar of the marketplace, “a site of verificationfalsification for government practice” (2008, 32). The population is thereby governed through an internalized network of judgment based on accountability to commodity value. One of the ways in which consumerism is directed inward is in manifestation of “taste” as an indicator of refined citizenship, and there exists a hierarchy of ever-more informed consumption practices providing ways of demonstrating this. Appropriate spending demonstrates control over one’s passions and finances and betrays refinement. The practices of distinguishing oneself in the selection and appropriate use of consumer products extends beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of social class to the core of the relationship with the social body. As Bourdieu points out, the selection of consumer goods provides a means of establishing a place in the social order, but this is a performance of citizenship that can be surveyed, judged, and improved. By way of illustration, Gareth Palmer highlights the expansion of television’s

relationship with consumer goods from the provision of status-bringing commodities as prizes to the genre of “makeover” television. Here, individuals presented as deficient or reluctant consumers are subject to an expert-driven transformation to a consumer who is confident, orderly, and accomplished. In this, there are echoes of Foucault’s discussion of classical Greece and the well-maintained self as an object of aesthetic pleasure, but Laurie Ouellette and James Hay suggest that what has changed is that “self-mastery over style becomes reliant on the ability to choose from a vast display of consumer goods” (2008, 109). This is joined, Ouellette and Hay note, by a drive in such programming toward enterprising self-improvement and, in programs such as The Apprentice, the pursuit of productive economic success. That is, a healthy, tasteful, and orderly relationship with material culture emerges hand-in-hand with the accumulation of disposable income. Foucault himself expresses this relationship as that between governing practices and “political economy,” producing “method[s] of government that can procure the nation’s prosperity” (2008, 13). The modes of subjectivity that are fostered to achieve this include relations of individual material exchange—that is, the individualization of a market mentality—and a personal commitment to the hierarchies of international trade. But at the level of the everyday, too, the accoutrements of earned wealth and evidence of appropriate spending practices provide signifiers of good citizenship. On the one hand, self-worth is established and can be learned through refined consumption choices. What is perhaps more important, however, is that dynamic citizenship demands the production of wealth as well as healthy spending practices.

Conclusion Governmentality offers a means of understanding how consumer culture links with issues of subjectivity and attitudes to regulation of the self, and how these are connected to the wider cultural and political environment. In particular, this aspect of Foucault’s work introduces the related practices of economy, welfare, and regulation into discussion of the place of consumerism in the democratic state, as well as the responsibility to produce wealth and be seen to spend in an approved manner. It is certainly the case that strategic forms of consumption can be deployed to distinguish and empower subcultural networks, but Foucault reminds us of the extent to

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which reflexive consumption of any form contributes to broader practices of governance and orderliness. Michael Higgins See also Citizenship; Consumer Regulation; Consumer Sovereignty; Families; Gender and the Media; Moralities; Political Economy; Social Distinction

Further Readings Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage, 1973. Foucault. Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchill, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Myers, Greg. Words in Ads. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Ouellette, Laurie, and James Hay. Better Living through Reality TV. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Palmer, Gareth. Discipline and Liberty: Television and Governance. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. Ransom, John S. Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

GRAMSCI, ANTONIO (1891–1937) Antonio Gramsci has been one of the most influential Italian intellectuals and one of the most innovative Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. Uncomfortable with the “vulgar” interpretation of Karl Marx’s thought strictly based on economism and later dogmatized by Soviet Communism, Gramsci cofounded the Italian Communist Party in 1921, splitting it by the Socialist Party. He was later arrested by the Fascists. In prison, before dying at the age of forty-six, he wrote the posthumously published Prison Notebooks, where he articulated a number of critical concepts that have proved very fertile over the years, especially in the fields of cultural studies, history and anthropology, and social theory. Gramsci, however, did not explicitly consider himself a sociologist. Born in the small rural town

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of Ales, in Sardinia, to small-bourgeois parents, he soon realized that his delicate constitution was arguably counterbalanced by his intellectual curiosity and will to learn. Humpbacked since the age of four, he won a scholarship at the University of Turin, where he focused on linguistics. Immediately involved in politics, he dropped out of the university to pursue a career as a literary critic and, above all, political columnist and agitator. Between 1917 and 1920, he firmly supported the Russian Revolution, conceiving it as a movement aimed at focusing on, emphasizing, and defending the cognitive and material interests of the working classes, whose mass actions could eventually give them the power to change the existing social order. The concrete effects of his thoughts in that historical period were exemplified in his collaboration with Palmiro Togliatti and other Italian neoMarxists who aimed to mobilize and give voice to, in particular, factory workers in northern Italy. After the foundation of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci went to work at the Communist International in Moscow and returned to Italy only in 1924 to be in charge of the party and to found the Italian newspaper L’Unità (The Unity), which is still in circulation today. With the drastic advent of Fascism, Gramsci and other party leaders were incarcerated in 1928. In prison, he started studying and articulating his critical thoughts by collecting fragmentary notes on a daily basis since 1929, and when he died for prisonexacerbated fragile physical conditions and increased illnesses, he had twenty-nine notebooks, which were posthumously published by Einaudi (Turin) in 1949 and later translated into many languages worldwide. Notwithstanding the unquestionable lack of an organic conceptual synthesis, these notebooks have represented a highly influential intellectual source for a variety of scholars in the social sciences and cultural studies. Much of their success is related to the concept of hegemony, through which Gramsci aimed to explain the economic underdevelopment of southern Italy and the failure of the project of a working-class revolution in Italy. Gramsci identified in the moral and civic—that is, exquisitely cultural, not merely economic—dominance of the industrial and rural bourgeoisie the conformism (and lack of revolutionary impulses) of the subaltern class. By offering an insightful explanatory model of the power-making dynamics of the dominant class and by articulating in great details the crucial political role of intellectuals in unveiling them and therefore to “speak for” the(ir) lower classes, Gramsci unconsciously opened up a

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whole stream of research and critical thought on the relationships between society and culture. His theoretical reflections turned out to be particularly fitting and fertile in the analyses of the modern societies, where the institutions of the state and civil society are highly structured and complexly interweaved, where the consensus of the popular masses is crucially necessary to rule, and where any wide social reform requires a process of both symbolic and material struggle. Over the years, Gramsci’s intellectual influence, particularly but not exclusively related to his elaboration of the concept of cultural hegemony, has arguably been mostly evident in the field of British (sometimes explicitly called “Gramscian”) cultural studies (as explicitly recognized by Stuart Hall) and, more recently, of (Indian) subaltern studies. Marco Solaroli See also Anthropology; Cultural Studies; CultureIdeology of Consumerism; Hegemony; History; Marxist Theories; Subaltern

Further Readings Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni dal carcere [Prison notebooks]. Torino, Italy: Einaudi, 1949. Gramsci, Antonio. Selection from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Guha, Ranahit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media, Culture & Society 2 (1980): 57–72.

GRAND TOUR In all but name, the grand tour came into being during the sixteenth century as a secular alternative to the ancient but increasingly discredited custom of pilgrimage, the instinct to travel proving too powerful to be suppressed by a mere alteration in religion. This primarily educational phenomenon, involving study of the foreign, including the acquisition of a language or two, rather than the aspiration to reduce one’s time in purgatory, thus emerged most noticeably among those northern European nations that rejected Roman Catholicism (though as Petrarch and the Wife of Bath had testified, there was always a secular ingredient in pilgrimage).

Because of renewed emphasis on the commandment against graven images, however, the visual arts in most of these Reformed countries remained in a condition inferior to those of the more religiously conservative Mediterranean region. With the ongoing patronage of both the church and its competing city-states, Italy in particular continued to flourish as the producer of exemplary works of fine and decorative art long after most other aspects of its economy had declined. The longevity of this phenomenon was indeed in large part due to the grand tour phenomenon, northern tourists providing an alternative and expanding market for the widest range of found, improved, or manufactured goods, from the tawdriest souvenir, fake or otherwise, to the masterpieces that still grace Britain’s country houses. Where medieval pilgrims of all classes had acquired artifacts ranging from lead tokens to jewel-encrusted gold and crystal reliquaries, the elite travelers of the eighteenth century established rules of taste according to which it was the art and artist, almost regardless of religious significance, that prevailed. Eventually, via an ever-more dominant middle class, this phenomenon filtered down to the secular equivalent of the humbly born medieval pilgrim who emerged with mass tourism. With grand tour taste increasingly dominated by classical antiquity and its Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment reinterpretations, the gap between the competencies of England and Italy, where visual culture was concerned, set the tone for most of the ca. 1550–1850 period. Classical learning underpinned English appreciation of the antique, but it was not until the French Revolution cut Britain off from the still largely Catholic continent that its contemporary artistic production begin to rival Italy’s. After the defeat of Napoleon, the grand tour revived, but its conventions were soon to be replaced by “the grand circular tours” of Europe evolved by Thomas Cook, involving travel by steam ship and train along with new forms of industrial consumption, massproduced “souvenirs” replacing the pilgrim badges and cheap relics of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, the acquisitive role of the elite was increasingly assumed by the state, masterpieces being gathered together in national museums. Directors of the new institutions, such as Charles Eastlake of the National Gallery, were often transitional between the two traditions, having to mediate between the tastes of the privileged and hoi polloi. Even in the later nineteenth century, a degree of anxiety regarding works of art persisted, in part the legacy of the patriotic

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Protestantism of the early modern period. In 1878, a full-scale, wooden mock-up of an Egyptian obelisk, already known as “Cleopatra’s Needle,” was placed outside the Houses of Parliament, but this proposed location was vetoed as symbolically inappropriate, and the original was erected more discretely on the embankment. Few could have known that a quarter of a millennium earlier, the great collector Earl of Arundel had hoped to erect an ancient obelisk in his riverside garden a few hundred yards downstream. Arundel’s uninhibited enthusiasm for acquiring a wide variety of works of art may in part have been thanks to his religious background: he was born and raised a Roman Catholic and died one in exile in Italy during the Civil Wars. Though his great art collection, like that of Charles I, was dispersed, his example, not least in allowing interested parties access to his house and gardens, was crucial in the establishment of the British Museum in the following century. The Arundel Society, named after the collector Earl, was created in 1849 at a meeting in Eastlake’s house to promote greater knowledge of medieval and Renaissance art and make chromolithographs of the best pictures available to a wider public. Arundel paid a deposit for the Obelisk of Domitian through his art agent William Petty in late 1636. Then still lying broken in four pieces in the center of the Circus of Maxentius just off the Appian Way, its export was vetoed by Pope Urban VIII. Enhanced interest in the obelisk, encouraged by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, culminated in Pope Innocent X commissioning Bernini to repair and re-erect it in Piazza Navona on his magnificent Fountain of the Four Rivers. Describing the Circus of Maxentius in his pioneering grand tour guidebook, The Voyage of Italy (published posthumously in 1670), Richard Lassels recalled, In the midst of it stood that Guglia which now stands in the midst of Piazza Navona. I saw it lye here broken in three peeces, and neglected quite till the Earle of Arundel our late Lord Mareshal, offering to buy it & having already depositated threescore crownes in earnest for it, made the Romans begin to think it a fine thing, and to stop the transporting of it into England.

It may have been the attention Arundel paid the obelisk that prompted John Bargrave, former fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, to chip a bit off its base not long before it was repaired and relocated to the center of Rome. He not only succeeded in bringing

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back this souvenir but it survives to this day, along with the rest of his cabinet of curiosities, in Canterbury Cathedral Library. Bargrave’s collection illustrates the lower end of the scale of which the highest end was epitomized by Arundel’s all-encompassing Kunstkammer. For although Arundel failed on this occasion to export a work of art, from the time of his grand tour of 1613–1614, when he was accompanied by his wife, children, and Inigo Jones, until his death in 1646, he was otherwise extremely successful in acquiring works of art from as far away as Greece and even Egypt (including a mummy), influencing others, including the Duke of Buckingham and Charles I, to follow suit. It was as a result of this that during the 1630s, despite having hitherto lagged far behind in such matters, London briefly became one of the artistic capitals of the world. The Civil Wars and the execution of the king set back the country drastically in this respect, as did to some extent even the so-called Glorious Revolution, inasmuch as it was a late manifestation of the Protestant Reformation that took the second commandment sufficiently seriously to revive hostility to the visual arts. Unlike the Dutch, who evolved genres such as landscape, still life, domestic interiors, and portraiture as alternatives to religious iconography, English Protestants only really accepted portraits as compatible with their newly individualized religion. Given the lack of encouragement of painting as a profession, therefore, when portraits were required, it proved necessary to import artists, from Holbein and Hans Eworth in the sixteenth century to Mytens, Van Dyck, Lely, and Kneller in the seventeenth. Even when Britain finally produced more or less major, homegrown artists in the second half of the eighteenth century, these were primarily portraitists, most famously, Gainsborough and Reynolds. Only in the early nineteenth century when, after the climax of portraiture in the hands of Sir Thomas Lawrence, landscape painting finally achieved an equivalent prestige, did Britain finally produce two artists, Turner and Constable, who could rival their French or Italian equivalents (though Thomas Jones, Alexander Cozens, and his son J. R. had been a match for any). In the meantime, the grand tour—the expression coined by Lassels in his guidebook—had evolved into a dominant feature in British civilization. Merchants had always traveled, but the spiritual journeys undertaken since pagan times were both more venerable

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and relevant to the evolution of what became travel for pleasure and education. By the sixteenth century, the custom of traveling to sacred places, including Rome, was too firmly established to be killed off by the Reformers so the more progressive among them adapted the phenomenon to new purposes. As pilgrimage and the collecting of relics were discredited, so secularized travel and art collecting were evolved in their place, justifications for visiting the Mediterranean countries in particular emerging from the same humanist sources that had prompted ecclesiastical reform in the first place. In the mid-sixteenth century, moderate Protestants, Thomas Hoby and his brother Sir Philip, justified European travel in terms of the need to acquire modern languages and manners, or familiarity with the politics, fortifications, or exemplary hospitals of Renaissance cities, which would qualify one for a career in the diplomatic service. Partly through his use of Leandro Alberti’s Descrittione di tutta l’Italia (as the source for his travel journal), Thomas Hoby was able to translate Castiglione’s Cortegiano into English. William Thomas, author of The Historie of Italie of 1549, paraphrased Machiavelli for Edward VI. Sir Philip Sidney had his portrait painted in Venice. William Harvey graduated in medicine at Padua. Despite a late start and faltering follow up, the British eventually became the most avid students and collectors of art, focusing obsessively on the antique and its post-Renaissance reinterpretations and arranging their acquisitions in those newly created shrines to art that were their rebuilt country houses, their London palaces, and eventually centralized museums, where paintings and sculpture came to be worshipped in place of those richly encased relics that had been adored in their chapels, churches, and cathedrals. The absurd prices paid for works by early twenty-first-century artists are the consequence of the extraordinary momentum built up during this period. The ambitious youth was now encouraged to travel like Odysseus to study other peoples and climes; in the words of Richard Lassels, “Ulysses is set forth by Homer as the wiseth of all the Grecians, because he had traveled much, and had seen . . . the Cittyes and customes of many men.” Lassels warned, however, against young men traveling for “a whole month together, to Venice, for a night’s lodging with an impudent woman. And thus by a false ayming at breeding abroad, they returne with those diseases which hinder them from breeding at home.”

By the time the Napoleonic Wars rendered travel to Italy even more difficult than it had been during the Elizabethan war with Spain, the grand tour had become de rigueur, not just as a finishing school for young aristocrats, but for the would-be artist or architect searching for clients or patrons, who were now as likely to be found in Venice, Florence, or Rome as in London. Prior to the defeat of Napoleon, when appreciation of early Renaissance and Gothic reemerged, the aesthetic ideal had been a classical one, whose connoisseurial credentials assumed disparagement of the Gothic, which was associated with the barbarians who had brought about the destruction of the Roman Empire that the British were now aspiring to outdo. The classical training received at grammar school, most of it in Latin, followed by a couple of years at Oxford, Cambridge, or the Inns of Court, meant that the cultural memory of Mediterranean civilization was as familiar to young Englishmen (and many women) as their own. By completing their education with a tour of southern Europe, not only the aristocrat but also the mere gentleman could become a good and useful citizen, with a decorous sense of how to balance utilitas with voluptas or pleasure. Lassels writes that he would have his youth “to be not onely a Vertuous man but a Virtuoso too.” By the early eighteenth century, the grand touring moral philosopher, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who would return to Italy to die in Naples, provided the ultimate justification for travel: by studying the arts and sciences in a European context, one could become not merely a “virtuoso” (in the sense that Henry Peacham and Lassels had popularized) but virtuous in the modern sense of the word also. This became an accepted cliché that would only be problematized in the twentieth century by the image of a cultured concentration camp Kommandant playing classical music while his prisoners were being gassed. The tourists commemorated their historic journeys with portraits of themselves, ideally in an Italian setting. We do not know what Veronese’s portrait of Philip Sidney looked like. In the background of Domenico Tintoretto’s 1611 portrait of John Finet, the future Master of Ceremonies to Charles I, then in Venice as traveling tutor to Salisbury’s son, Viscount Cranborne, we get a glimpse of the grand canal. Perhaps Venice was similarly specified three years later in the background of the group portrait of the Earl and Countess of Arundel with their children

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by the same Tintoretto (recorded by his biographer Carlo Ridolfi), but this is now lost. If the more accomplished successors of this not terribly talented son of the more famous Jacopo Tintoretto—Carlo Maratti, Francesco Trevisani, Pompeo Batoni, and Johan Zoffany—produced more striking memorials of the grand tour, such images reflected a deeper reality. Firsthand acquaintance with Italy (and later, Greece and Egypt) not only confirmed firsthand acquaintance with classical civilization, already conceptually imbibed in school and university; it encouraged the reproduction of a visual culture to complement this literary and philosophical one. Much influenced by the printmaker and architect, Giambattista Piranesi, Robert Adam adapted what he found in Hadrian’s Villa to town and country houses throughout Great Britain, whence the style traveled on to North America (though the likes of former grand tourist, George Berkeley, had already encouraged the classical style in his house in Rhode Island). Wedgwood and Chippendale meanwhile produced a huge range of complementary items with which to furnish the interiors of these and increasingly more modest houses. The successors of Arundel’s agent William Petty—Thomas Jenkins, for example—eventually based themselves permanently abroad, supplying visiting and returned collectors such as Arundel’s descendant Charles Townley and fellow Catholic Henry Blundell with often heavily restored marbles for considerable sums. The muchtraveled Thomas Hope combined all these grand tour ingredients in a comprehensive, neoclassical interior decoration that eventually encompassed Greek and Egyptian style and commodities. Returning grand tourists such as architects William Chambers and John Soane, or patrons and collectors such as the Earl of Bristol or the even wealthier William Beckford, had an even more profound influence on English taste, eventually enlarging their range of artistic reference beyond Italian sources as far as the Ottoman Empire and China. Since Christianity was still, for most, a given, combined now with the assumption of virtue founded in Greek democracy, Pax Romana, and Renaissance retrospection, the Industrial Revolution funded an empire even more extensive than the Romans had managed, indeed the largest in the history of world. The evolution of the grand tour complemented the evolution of Britain’s cultural progress toward the attainment of this status. The fact that this empire,

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though vast, failed to last as long as the Roman version, let alone the Egyptian, reminds one of the radical nature of the religious and political disruptions that characterized the immediately preceding centuries. Where at least the visual arts were concerned, though intensive, the planting of an essentially Mediterranean civilization in British soil seems to have produced roots that were insufficiently robust to survive as long as the Roman, let alone the more profoundly conservative cultural hegemony of the Egyptians, which to a large extent underpinned the entire phenomenon. Edward Chaney See also British Empire; Fine Arts; History; Souvenirs; Tourism Studies; Tourist Gaze; Visual Culture

Further Readings Adam Matthew Digital. The Grand Tour. Marlborough, UK: Adam Matthew, 2009. http://www.amdigital.co.uk/ Collections/Grand-Tour.aspx. Bignamini, Ilaria, and Clare Hornsby. Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth Century Rome. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1992. Chaney, Edward. The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion. Geneva: C.I.R.V.I., 1985. Chaney, Edward. The Evolution of the Grand Tour, rev. ed. London: Routledge, 2000. Chaney, Edward. The Evolution of English Collecting. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Chaney, Edward. Inigo Jones’s “Roman Sketchbook.” 2 vols. London: Roxburghe Club, 2006. Chaney, Edward. “Roma Britannica and the Cultural Memory of Egypt.” In Roma Britiannica, edited by David Marshall, Susan Russell, and Karin Wolfe, 147–170. Rome: British School at Rome, 2010. Dolan, Brian. Ladies of the Grand Tour. London: Harper Collins, 2001. Hale, John. England and the Italian Renaissance. 4th ed. Edited by E. Chaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Hibbert, Christopher. The Grand Tour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974. Ingammels, John. A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Lassels, Richard. The Voyage of Italy. Paris and London: John Starkey, 1670. Moore, Andrew. Norfolk and the Grand Tour: EighteenthCentury Travellers and Their Souvenirs. Norwich, UK: Norfolk Museums Service, 1985.

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Scott, Jonathan. The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Spence, Joseph. Letters from the Grand Tour. Edited by Slava Klima. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975. Stoye, John. English Travellers Abroad 1604–1667. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Wilton, Andrew, and Ilaria Bignamini, eds. Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century. London: Tate Gallery, 1996.

GREAT DEPRESSION (U.S.) The economic crisis of the 1930s prompted a major reassessment of the relationship between the state and the economy in the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933–1941) expanded welfare provision, orchestrated a massive program of public works, introduced a swath of new regulatory agencies, and significantly empowered organized labor. This, then, was a period of significant political and ideological adjustment, but it was an adjustment characterized by paradox, ambivalence, and uncertainty, particularly in relation to the politics of consumption. The collapse of the U.S. economy following the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 was sudden and shocking. By mid-1930, the economy was at a virtual standstill. As David Kennedy explains, when Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in March 1933, the gross national product had dropped to half its 1929 level. A quarter of the workforce, meanwhile, was unemployed. And yet, paradoxically, during the Great Depression, the idea that consumption—and consumers—held the key to national recovery gained rather than lost currency. For example, the main pillar of early New Deal industrial policy, the ill-fated National Recovery Administration (NRA), was predicated precisely on the notion that economic revival required the effective harnessing of mass purchasing power. Despite this, the New Deal was never able to tackle the problem of underconsumption in decisive fashion. At the root of the Roosevelt administration’s incoherent response was its failure to reconcile the competing economic visions of planners, who wanted to embrace large-scale solutions, with those of more producer-oriented critics of monopoly, who believed that economic bigness endangered American

democracy. According to Ellis Hawley, ambivalence over how to manage the economy bedeviled public policy throughout the Depression decade. It was the shock of war that ultimately brought this era of economic ambivalence to an end. Alan Brinkley reports that by the mid-1940s, the New Deal state, having largely retreated from the more radical proposals to restructure the U.S. economy it had countenanced in the early 1930s, was committed to a consumer-oriented approach. This strategy involved combining modest use of Keynesian fiscal management with a commitment—albeit limited in comparison to those of Scandinavian and some western European nations—to the welfare state. Thereafter, doubts about the capacity of the market and of large-scale capitalist institutions to deliver prosperity—which had been significant during the early New Deal—did not resurface for a generation, with the onset of malaise and stagflation in the 1970s. The Great Depression was an age of fear and insecurity. Innovations in consumer credit and the rise of the chain store meant that in the 1920s, more Americans than ever before had experienced the benefits of mass production and consumption. Between 1920 and 1930, the number of American households with a washing machine tripled from 8 percent to 24 percent. Similarly, the automobile completed its journey from luxury to necessity: only a quarter of households had a car in 1920; by 1930, the figure was as high as 60 percent (Zunz 1998, 84). When it came, then, the Great Depression delivered a particularly hard blow to middle-class Americans who, encouraged by social engineers and by the burgeoning marketing and advertising industries, were increasingly defining themselves in terms of their ability to consume. Rather than rebelling, however, the dominant response to the collapse of the consumer culture of the 1920s was a mixture of self-blame, escapism, and conformity, notes Robert McElvaine. The popular films of the era were light comedies and romances, and the decade’s best-selling book was Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which encouraged readers to adapt themselves to cultural norms rather than to question them. What is remarkable about the 1930s, in fact, is the degree to which patterns of consumption established in the 1920s were consolidated rather than rejected. Instead of entirely rethinking their spending patterns, Americans merely modified

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them in order to live in much the same way as before. According to Daniel Horowitz, this trend was reflected in New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration, for example, by incorporating in its budget guidelines scope for spending on commercialized leisure. Not all Americans happily endorsed the drift from a producer- to consumer-oriented order during the Great Depression, however. Small-town merchants, for instance, fought ferociously to resist the rise of the chain store, particularly in the rural South, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. Employing a political language that drew on rich populist and antimonopoly traditions, between 1931 and 1937, they persuaded twenty-six state legislatures to pass punitive antichain store tax laws. In some ways, this remarkable movement prefigured the campaigns against bigbox stores that have been mounted by U.S. consumer activists since the 1980s (Scroop 2008). Until recently, it was conventional for historians to dismiss the antichain store movement out of hand on the grounds that it was backward looking, based on nostalgia, and as such doomed to fail. From an early twenty-first-century vantage point, however, that older view looks somewhat outmoded. Unease about the influence and large scale of major retail organizations, after all, is commonplace in contemporary culture, and not just in the United States. This fact points to a key issue for the future development of the history of consumption because it suggests that accounts of the 1930s (and indeed of other periods), based on the crude adoption of modernization theory, are in urgent need of refinement and revision. The shift from a producer to a consumer order was uneven and unpredictable. Americans responded to the emergency of the Great Depression in complex, and sometimes contradictory, ways. So too did policymakers, intellectuals, and other elites. In the form of the New Deal, the principal political reaction was decidedly haphazard. Given this complexity,

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historians of consumption and consumerism in the Great Depression are likely to develop approaches and perspectives more alert than ever before to the contingent nature of historical change. In particular, they are likely to pay greater attention to the ways in which the rise of a consumer order was contested and resisted, shaping political outcomes and suggesting alternative possible futures. Daniel Scroop See also Advertising; American Dream; Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War; Credit; Cycles of Production and Consumption; History; Keynesian Demand Management; Modernization Theory

Further Readings Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Depression and War. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936. Hawley, Ellis. The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Horowitz, Daniel. The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Jacobs, Meg. Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993. Scroop, Daniel M. “The Anti-Chain Store Movement and the Politics of Consumption.” American Quarterly 60 (December 2008): 925–949. Zunz, Olivier. Why the American Century? Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998.

H in styles of dress, and so on. It is, then, marked on the body, but it is not confined to these manifestations of the body: it also exists in dispositions, perceptions, attitudes, and tastes. Indeed, habitus is a concept that cuts across conventional mind/body splits. Equally, the concept confounds conventional distinctions between conscious and unconscious, objectivist and subjectivist sociology, emotion and rationality, and structure and agency. Habitus carries the concept of history—both personal history and social, or collective, history. It is “the individual trace of an entire collective history” (Bourdieu 1990, 91). But in its incorporation into a nonconscious second sense, it is forgotten as history. This emphasis on history is an important means by which Bourdieu grounds his theory of practice. What this argument suggests is what we like, what we feel comfortable doing, how we know how to behave in certain situations and not others, how we know what to take notice of—all are unconsciously incorporated, not through a dynamic repression (as in psychoanalytic accounts) but through a generative “forgetting.” We have learned to know and like certain things; we have learned how to do certain things, but we have forgotten that we have learned them. We do not typically “remember” the rules of eating when we sit down to eat: they have usually been learned by the body. If this is so for such apparently banal practices, it is equally so for practices that are regarded as more elevated such as the appreciation of cultural artifacts. Thus, for Bourdieu, taste is an effect, not of individual perception or innate ability but of social processes. The incorporation

HABITS See Habitus; Rituals; Routines and Habits; Theories of Practice

HABITUS Habitus is a “socialized subjectivity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2002, 126); it is Pierre Bourdieu’s way of theorizing a self that is socially produced. The concept is designed to capture the dynamic and mutually constitutive relation between the person and the social world, in which social relations become constituted within the self but also the self is constitutive of social relations. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is key to his analysis of social identity, social practice, and social relations. It represents his attempt to theorize the ways in which the social is literally incorporated. As such, habitus is central to Bourdieu’s sociological analysis. Although used by earlier theorists, from Aristotle to, more recently, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Norbert Elias, Bourdieu claimed—with some justification—to have developed a distinctive use of the term. Certainly, it is in Bourdieu’s work that habitus is put to the most sustained analytical work. Habitus has been described as a “second sense,” “practical sense,” or “second nature” that equips social actors with a practical “know-how.” It is manifest in styles of standing and moving, taking up space, in ways of speaking (idioms, as well as accent), 695

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of these social processes into the habitus, however, makes them, in a very real sense, part of who the person is. The social actor, in this schema, acts out of prereflexive knowledge rather than through rational calculation. This emphasis on the incorporation of the social world, and on history, has led to one of the main set of charges against the concept of habitus—that it is determinist. However, Bourdieu emphatically refuses this characterization, arguing that habitus is not determining but generative. Although reproduction across generations does occur within this formulation, the dynamic character of the social world means that it will not occur perfectly: for example, more or less identical habitus can generate widely different outcomes. Practical sense is bounded rather than determined. Furthermore, Bourdieu charges his critics with a failure to acknowledge what the social world is like—to relinquish the illusion of mastery of the self that is fostered by social relations: What is it about [the concept of habitus] that is so shocking? The answer, I think, is that it collides head-on with the illusion of (intellectual) mastery of oneself that is so deeply ingrained in intellectuals. To the three “narcissistic wounds” evoked by Freud, those visited upon humanity by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself, one should add that which sociology inflicts upon us, especially when it applies to “creators.” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2002, 132)

In this respect, one important point to note is that habitus has to be understood in relation to the fields that provide its context and to the various forms of capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic) that Bourdieu theorizes as being traded within the social world. A field is a set of objective, historical relations. If habitus is a feel for the game, fields can be seen as the games themselves. As such, they compose the rules of the game as well as the people playing the game. Fields are distinct but overlapping; they are highly structured and governed by rules that come to seem natural or consecrated. For Bourdieu, however, they are the play of power relations and the outcome of social struggles. The relationship between habitus, field, and capitals is summed up in Bourdieu’s famous formulation (1998, 101): (Habitus × Capital) + Field = Practice This formula is far from transparent but does delineate Bourdieu’s understanding of the ways in

which practice is an outcome of the interrelationship between personal dispositions, objective positions, and the volume and composition of various capitals at one’s disposal. The relationship between habitus and field is crucial since habitus are not freefloating but products of, and at home in, specific sets of relations. Bourdieu and Wacquant argue, Social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside social agents. And when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in water’; it does not feel the weight of the water and takes the world about itself for granted. (2002, 127)

People develop their habitus within specific fields such that their sense of themselves can seem entirely attuned to the world in which they exist. Thus, ways of being are cultural forms turned into nature. In other words, it is through habitus—routinely exercised and embodied—that cultural distinctions come to seem natural. Conversely, according to Diane Reay (2004), when people enter an alien field, the lack of fit is deeply felt within the self, generating dis-ease, but also potentially generating new social forms since fields are determined by habitus, which are in their turn determined by fields. Because habitus are profoundly social, they carry the traces of the lines of division and distinction along which the social is organized. That is, class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on, are all marked within the habitus. Further, and because these social distinctions are hierarchical, not all habitus are “worth” the same. Some are normalized, while others are pathological. In this sense, habitus clash, as well as class. Part of the second sense embodied in habitus entails a judgment of other habitus. However, only some people have the authority to make such judgments “stick.” What gives habitus its particular force, in this context, is that power is conceptualized as working such that it is not what you do, or what you have, that is marked as wrong or right, normal or pathological, but who you are. Certainly, subjects can resist such a positioning, and habitus may be imperfectly aligned with the field. However, there are some people who, by virtue of their habitus, field, and capitals, are able to pass judgment, implicitly or explicitly, on others, and to make that judgment count. “Differences” between habitus, then, come

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to be made into inequalities through the exercise of symbolic violence. Through the notion of habitus, Bourdieu draws attention to the ways in which domination works at the level of affect. It becomes part of who we are, not in making us passive but in fostering reactions and forms of emotion that do not readily translate into resistance. Domination fosters ressentiment, which cannot then simply be turned into a badge of honor. Although Bourdieu has made the most use of habitus in his analysis of class inequalities and classed identities, he himself saw it as having wider analytic purchase, suggesting it could be used to explain all forms of identity and inequality. Certainly, he explicitly uses it in the context of gender. The extent to which this attempt is successful is debated: many feminist scholars have pointed to its inadequacies, arguing, for example, that in Bourdieu’s work, women figure simply as bearers of capital rather than as actors in their own right. Others, such as Lois McNay, have found the notion of practical belief a prereflexive set of understandings and practices, productive in theorizing gender as something more than externally imposed definitions simply internalized by a preexisting subject. Habitus has been less widely taken up than Bourdieu’s metaphors of capitals, perhaps because of charges of determinism. When it is invoked, as Diane Reay notes, it is sometimes simply referenced rather than “put into practice” (2004, 440). Reay is critical of this usage of habitus especially in her own field of educational research, not because she is dissatisfied with the concept but because she argues, as does Bourdieu himself, that his concepts are intended to be used and applied, rather than simply referenced as concepts. Nevertheless, there have been numerous successful attempts to work with the concept to show the links between personal and collective, freedom and constraint, past and present (see, e.g., Reay 2002, Nash 2002). Steph Lawler See also Cultural Capital; Embodiment; Identity; Routines and Habits; Social Distinction; Symbolic Capital; Taste; Theories of Practice

Further Readings Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1998. First published 1986. Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. First published 1992. McNay, Lois. “Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity.” Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 95–117. Nash, Roy. “The Educated Habitus, Progress at School and Real Knowledge.” Interchange 33 (2002): 27–48. Reay, Diane. “Feminist Theory, Habitus and Social Class: Disrupting Notions of Classlessness.” Women’s Studies International Forum 20 (1997): 225–233. Reay, Diane. “‘It’s All Becoming a Habitus’: Beyond the Habitual Use of Habitus in Educational Research.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 25, no. 4 (2004): 431–444.

HAIR CARE/HAIRDRESSING Hair care/hairdressing is a form of bodily grooming, performed by either the self or another to hair on the head. Hair care pertains to the wider practices of hair maintenance, whereas hairdressing refers more specifically to the act of paying a skilled professional to work on hair. Such practices may involve washing, styling, coloring, cutting, setting, perming, or straightening the hair. Due to the complexities of some of these practices, and the skills and tools required, many people choose to pay a hairdresser to perform them. Hairdressers, or hair stylists, as they are often referred to, may be mobile—visiting one’s home—or a person can visit a hair salon where hair care services and products are sold. Arguably, women in the Western world spend more time engaging in hair care practices than men due to societal norms and expectations.

History Hair is a universal substance with a global history. Evidence of hair care has been found dating back to ancient civilizations. The ancient Greeks favored blonde hair, applying mixtures of potassium, pollen, and gold in an attempt to lighten their locks, and in Roman society, women’s hair was set in high, elaborate styles using fake hair pieces, while Roman

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men would visit a tonsor to have their hair curled. Evidence of a hairdressing role has been found dating back to the Egyptian period, where the hair of noblewomen would be attended to in the private space of the female toilette. Such privacy regarding women’s hair in the Western world remained unchanged until the twentieth century. Prior to the seventeenth century, women’s hair was dressed at home by female servants, in keeping with the protection of a woman’s decency and reputation. However, around this time, the frisseur, or coiffeur, emerged. Generally a male figure, the frisseur would dress the hair of rich women at home. This marked a change in women’s hair care and the beginning of professional female hairdressing, at least for the upper classes. Nevertheless, women’s hair was still only being dressed, not cut. It was the emergence of the late-nineteenth-century department store that provided the space for the public dressing of women’s hair and eventually its cutting. In the 1920s, the “bob” cut was born with thousands of women, on both sides of the Atlantic, turning to barbers, the only people skilled enough to cut their hair. Within a matter of years, many previously male barbershops had become women’s hair salons, catering for the new hair care regimes of their now female clientele. At this time, the gendering of employment within hair salons also began to change with a significant growth in female hairdressers. In contrast, the barber has always been a male figure, cutting and shaving men’s hair in the public space of the barbershop or the street from as early as ancient Greece. As the many incantations of Christopher Bond’s original 1973 play Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street have illuminated, the European barber performed a multifaceted role, offering minor surgical procedures, such as bloodletting and teeth pulling, alongside the usual hair care practices. The role of the barber is no longer a medical one; however, the remnants of the barbershop’s history are still symbolized in contemporary society by the traditional red and white pole, representative of the “blood and the bandage” of past practices.

Symbolism, Social Regulation, and Resistance Found at the margins of the body, hair’s unique status as both a corporeal substance and social object has ensured it a history cloaked in mystery, magic, and

potency. Constantly growing, yet easily removed, hair has been imbued with symbolic notions of phallicism, castration, and rebirth. The shaving and cutting of hair has commonly operated as the physical outcome of metaphorical rites of passage and ritual purification. Similarly, discourse surrounding hair has operated to regulate class, race, and sexuality, and hair also works as a key site of resistance and rebellion. Racial discrimination based on hair texture and hair classification has a profound history grounded in essentialism. Despite the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, such prejudices continued as black people were “assimilated” into white hegemonic society. Various tools and techniques were invented in an attempt to straighten black hair so that it “resembled” that of white people. However, from the 1960s, the tide was turning. Straightened black hair began to be understood as a symbol of a white civilizing process, and black beauty ideals were promoted in their place. Dreadlocks and Afros became popular styles celebrating liberation and symbolizing black, as opposed to white, ideals. Such contestations undoubtedly established hair as a politically charged substance. Hair’s potency within the feminist movement is a clear parallel. The 1920s bob, for example, is closely associated with the suffragette movement and women’s struggle to gain the right to vote. Similarly, the various subcultures that emerged over the twentieth century all used hair as a political weapon, both to mock the ruling elite and to challenge established ideals of masculinity and femininity. The long, unkempt hair of the 1960s (male) hippy; the Mohawks and Mohicans of 1980s punk; the shaved head of the skinhead and the highly stylized greased hair of the teddy boy are just some of the most striking examples of how men’s and women’s hair has been used to signal particular identities. Thus, while hair can be used to classify and control society, it has also been used to signify resistance and rebellion.

Contemporary Relevance and Future Research In contemporary Western society, the hair salon is an integral feature of most urban districts. In the United States alone, the hair salon industry has a combined annual turnover of $16 billion, alongside a multimillion-dollar DIY hair care sector. Propelled forward by fashion and the media, the latest hairstyles

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are endorsed by celebrities, the glamorous personas of contemporary society occupying the esteemed sought-after position the aristocracy once held. With advances in technology and science, the practices available for purchase at the salon are extensive. Chemicals are used to permanently color, straighten, or curl. Tools are employed to dry, temporarily wave, or set. Even human or artificial hair extensions can now be attached to one’s own to create added length and volume. Hairdressing is a highly skilled business. Despite the general appreciation of hair care as a predominantly feminine activity, recent research by the hairdressing industry suggests that men are taking much more interest in hair and hair care. Alongside products for hair loss and gray coverage, traditionally aimed at men, hair product manufacturers are also launching male hair care ranges. The gender division of labor and the clientele within the hair salon also appears to be changing: the number of male salon employees is steadily increasing, and many salons are actively encouraging male customers to boost profits. The hair-product company ghd has even begun marketing its famous mini-styler hair iron at the male hair care market, aligning men’s hair styling much more closely to women’s. Doubly gendered in terms of both clientele and staff, the salon is still primarily a feminine space. Some barbershops remain, as do more recent unisex salons, but these too are staffed by a predominantly female workforce. Only the coveted positions at the top of the profession remain dominated by men. The growth in salons devoted specifically to black hair indicate that race continues to inflect practices of hair styling. Outside of the salon, supermarket shelves are filled with DIY home dyes, highlighting and perming kits, shampoos, conditioners, sprays, gels, and waxes. Electrical retailers sell hairdryers, straighteners, tongues, crimpers, and heated rollers, all to meet home hair care demands. Even salons provide support to certain brands, encouraging their customers to “take the salon experience home” in the form of a bottle of shampoo or a pair of the latest hair irons. Yet in spite of hair’s ubiquity, its political history of control and subversion, or its everyday importance to consumer society, hair/hair care and hairdressing remain subjects overlooked by scholars. Helen Holmes See also Beauty Myth; Celebrity; Cosmetics; Ethnicity/ Race; Fashion; Femininity; Gender; Self-Presentation

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Further Readings Biddle-Perry, Geraldine, and Sarah Cheang. Introduction to Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion, edited by Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Sarah Cheang. Oxford: Berg, 2008. Cox, Caroline. Good Hair Days: A History of British Hairdressing. London: Quartet, 1999. De Courtais, Georgine. Women’s Headdress and Hairstyles in England from AD600 to Present Day. London: BT Batsford Ltd, 1973. Harvey Wingfield, A. Doing Business with Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons and the Racial Enclave Economy (Perspectives on a Multiracial America). New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Hebdige, Dick. Reggae Rastas and Rudies: Style and the Subversion of Form (Stencilled Occasional Paper 24). Birmingham, UK: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1974. Stevenson, Karen. “Hairy Business: Organising the Gendered Self.” In Contested Bodies, edited by Ruth Halliday and John Hassard, 137–152. London: Routledge, 2001. Trasko, Mary. Daring Do’s: A History of Extraordinary Hair. Paris: Flammarion, 1984.

HAPPINESS What could be more important to contemporary consumer culture than the search for happiness? It seems obvious that attempting to accumulate consumer items that carry with them significant symbolic power is driven forward by the desire to “find happiness,” to discover success, contentment, satisfaction. However, the critical literature on consumer culture that has grown rapidly in recent years appears to indicate that happiness is not the necessary by-product of consumerism and that dissatisfaction and waste are often the end point of the consumer cycle. While consumerism is often seen as highly exploitative, alienating, environmentally destructive, and culturally corrosive, the myth of consumer happiness remains a popular notion. Some of the liberal accounts of consumerism that developed during the 1960s and 1970s highlighted innovative subcultural creativity and ironic symbol inversion, and often pitched unusual fashion and leisure pursuits as protopolitical activities that sought to destabilize capitalism and its oppressive state. For these commentators, the subject could never be fully incorporated into

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the discourse of capitalism. Human subjectivity was fleet-of-foot, creative, and rebellious, and could rearticulate the meaning of consumer symbolism so that bland, mass-produced items would come to reflect something defined by the community itself. During the 1980s, this kind of speculation of the nature of the subject became one of the dominant modes of accounting for the formation of subcultures within the broader framework of consumer culture. It is probably not a coincidence that this approach found favor at exactly the same time as global capitalism was radically reconfiguring its business plan and leftist politics was forced to capitulate to neoliberalism’s apparent ability to improve living conditions for the majority of the people. Such liberal accounts, in which progressive politics is boiled down to the ability of the subject to resist the prescribed meanings of global capitalism, continue to linger, but as the twenty-first century begins to take shape, it has become almost impossible to ignore the very real problems of global consumerism. We might assume that the myth of consumer happiness is an ideological strategy that is used to propel consumers back to the market, to forget their previous consumer dissatisfactions, and to hand themselves over to a spectacular world of potential indulgence, blocking out any reservations they might have about the geopolitical downsides to the global consumer market. Consumers are told that they work hard, that they deserve it. What is life without a little bit of indulgence now and then? That enduring sense of contentment, that ephemeral “thing” that can make us genuinely happy, has been something that people throughout history have strived for. Philosophers have argued persuasively that the essence of life is struggle and hardship and that we are condemned to always want what is beyond our reach. But this debate takes on a decidedly different hue when this logic is applied to contemporary consumer culture. Twentieth-century politics was profoundly utopian and promised to actually deliver human happiness and contentment to its populations. We have now progressed beyond this point. Utopian political projects are now almost universally seen as unworldly, hopelessly optimistic, and deeply misguided. In the early years of the twenty-first century, many believed that we had hit on the perfect political and economic formula, a pragmatic but progressive formula that had transcended ideology and promised to enable people to

embrace freedom and actually experience a sizable portion of enduring happiness. That formula was an open liberal democracy accompanied by global free market capitalism. Almost all political parties in the West treated this model as a fait accompli. This formula, until the 2008 global economic crash, succeeded in producing real rises in material wealth. In Western societies, we could actually speak, albeit in hushed tones, of the demise of real poverty. Inequalities were growing, but that didn’t seem to detract from the general rise in living standards or the sense of forward motion toward the enigma of happiness. Despite the sense of compulsory optimism, voices on the margins were beginning to recognize that increased material wealth didn’t appear to be producing genuine human happiness. Indeed, people seemed to be getting less happy: more gloomy, withdrawn, dissatisfied, and dejected. This is the problem for contemporary consumer culture: we appear to have freed ourselves from actual material need, and consequently, we now have the existential space to begin to explore the possibility of happiness with greater energy. But contemporary consumer culture appears totally incapable of yielding that happiness. In order to ensure the continued circulation of commodities, we must look negatively at our lives and possessions, we must be anxious about our cultural worth in relation to our peers, we must believe that, though happiness is not yet ours, it can be, if we continue to work hard and history continues on its present course. In what follows, this entry expands on these themes, paying particular attention to the place of happiness in sociology.

Happiness in Contemporary Culture Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has much to contribute to our understanding of contemporary happiness. Zizek’s philosophy suggests that we have, in recent history, witnessed a fundamental transformation in the constitution of human subjectivity. The cultural super-ego, which was for generations the moderating voice of reason that encouraged the subject to respect those parameters of social behavior laid down by one’s culture, has evolved. The crucial psychodynamic power of the super-ego is guilt. In traditional societies, the super-ego encouraged us to recognize the impact of our behavior on others and to predict likely cultural responses to our behavior. The power of the super-ego, analogous

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to an insistent regulatory “voice in our heads,” attempted to prevent those who had been successfully installed within the symbolic order from pursuing purely instrumental behaviors. Zizek contends that the role of guilt within the contemporary super-ego has adapted to fundamental shifts within Western societies, the most notable of which, for Zizek, is the death of the “big other” and the dissolution of the traditional symbolic order. Now, we are more likely to feel guilt as a result of our failure to become fully immersed in the forms of personal indulgence that are laid out for our delectation by consumer culture. Without regular involvement in these hedonistic cultures, we are likely to feel less than a full participant in mainstream society, that something important is missing from our identity, and, more disturbingly, that our lives are somehow being slowly erased by our failure to adequately display an active involvement in the cultural and economic logic of our times. Zizek is attempting to draw our attention toward a new cultural imperative, the active injunction, “Enjoy!” We are increasingly compelled to seek enjoyment in cultural fields, to chase experiences, to attempt to satisfy a desire that cannot be satisfied. For Zizek, this new injunction is controlling and restrictive and not at all as liberating as one might assume. We are obliged to find pleasure in those activities that are encouraged and designated “acceptable.” The symbolic law remains intact and prevents us from encountering the jouissance of those activities that are external to our immediately social experience. The ultimate point to take from this discussion, and in relation to the place of happiness in contemporary consumer culture, is that when we are ordered to enjoy something, enjoyment itself becomes impossible. Enjoyment is indeed everywhere in consumer culture and is a key component in the ability of consumer culture to sustain and regenerate itself. Life without consumer enjoyment seems to be a life deprived of color, a bland almost-life that somehow falls short of achieving the full potential of human experience. Zizek’s observation therefore helps us to make sense of key currents within contemporary consumer culture—not just the desire to experience indulgence and personal pleasure but also the clearly identifiable absence of pleasure and happiness that is a demonstrable aspect of the dedicated consumer lifestyle. It is as if, surrounded as we are by the constant spectacle of indulgent consumerism, we are

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increasingly incapable of experiencing any durable sense of happiness or contentment. If we follow Zizek’s logic, we appear to have traded a philosophical concern with contentment, a happiness that endures and shades the life of those lucky enough to find it, for the thrill of hedonistic enjoyment, a fleeting pleasure that is quickly replaced with a renewed sense of want. Mark Fisher, for example, talks about the “depressive hedonia” of contemporary Western youth, who appear transfixed by the constant flicker of shallow excitation that exists within contemporary media and cyber cultures, so utterly dedicated to this ostensibly indulgent world that they feel a marked sense of longing if they are separated from it for one moment longer than is absolutely necessary. Fisher’s critical point is that these young people often fail to notice that they aren’t really enjoying themselves very much, that they are in fact rather sullen and withdrawn, cynical, and painfully aware that their lives are devoid of real excitement or existential passion.

A Sociology of Happiness? Despite being at the very heart of historical philosophy and of considerable importance in many allied fields, sociologists have contributed surprisingly little to our understanding of human happiness. It could be reasonably argued that, as a discipline that developed and began to define itself at the beginning of the twentieth century, sociology instead chose to focus on forms of immiseration, exploitation, and enslavement that were constructed by the new world of industrial capitalism and enacted in its global economic relationships, social structures and institutions, and everyday forms of social interaction. We might imagine that, in comparison to these crucial issues, attempting to construct a modern sociology of happiness seemed a rather trivial concern. For much of the twentieth century, happiness was thus considered tangential to serious sociological analysis, and while sociologists dealt with many issues closely related to the actual constitution of human happiness in industrial societies, they failed to adequately challenge the prevailing assumptions about the meaning and nature of happiness and shape a progressive discourse about how the individual might attempt to improve the sum total of happiness in his or her life or how the state might address this problem on a grander scale.

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It is also worth noting that in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, people were simply less concerned with ephemeral questions of identity, biography, and the constitution of “the good life.” During a time of prescribed roles and clear biographical pathways, there was little space to engage in speculative self-analysis or to adopt radically new life strategies in the hope of banishing the pressures and strains of everyday life. It is only now, in an age in which we appear beset by ontological insecurity, depoliticization, risk, uncertainty, and fear, that happiness has become a topical issue, provoking serious sociological analysis. Some theorists have argued that the dizzying array of choices we face in postmodern culture prompts us to feel something akin to vertigo as we struggle to make sense of who we are and our place in the world. A great deal of contemporary social and cultural theory suggests that we are increasingly apprehensive and introspective, forever analyzing ourselves and our social, cultural, and economic performance, hoping that the social mirror will indeed reflect back at us an image of enviable success, happiness, and achievement. As Oliver James has noted, the nature of postindustrial Western societies propels individuals into a ceaseless series of social comparisons that tend to produce forms of anxiety and depression rather than happiness and reward. The contemporary search for happiness is thus a reflection of its increasingly elusive nature and the rise of new forms of dissatisfaction, insecurity, and restlessness. What Frank Furedi calls our “therapy culture,” a culture that appears to exist within what Robert Frank and Philip Cook have called a “winnertakes-all” society, seems to provoke within us all the desire to prove to ourselves that we have “led a good life,” “found happiness,” “made our mark on the world,” and so on. Perhaps now more than at any point in our history, we believe that happiness is actually out there waiting for us, that with a determined attitude and a little bit of luck it can be ours. A brief stroll around a local bookstore should reveal rows of self-help books, all claiming to help consumers to improve their lives, to block out negative experiences, and to strategically pursue happiness and contentment. Glancing at these rows of books, or at the TV shows that address the same themes, one can’t help but be struck by the problem of a population desperately striving for happiness, apparently laboring under the misapprehension that, with one or two slight adjustments, happiness can be

theirs. Those lucky enough to occupy a social and economic setting that enables them to create a space between themselves and the practical and material pressures of everyday life are perhaps more likely to engage in subtle and occasionally productive forms of self-analysis, but there is more than enough evidence to suggest that even marginalized populations engage in fantasies of brisk upward mobility, rapid accumulation of status, and the “happiness” they believe accompanies symbolic success. The current preoccupation with finding happiness in one’s life is then tied in a complex way to our shifting social structure, the postmodern problematization of truth, the new ways in which we pursue and embrace image identities, and the dominance of a market ideology that is highly skilled at manufacturing desire and applying symbolic significance to “things,” states of being, places, and so forth. This is not to say that a concern with happiness was entirely missing from public culture during early modernity. In America, a society founded on and still deeply committed to a particular version of philosophical, political, and economic liberalism, the “answer” to the question of happiness has always been readily apparent: the incremental progression of Western civilization, and the personal enrichment of each individual within it, is best secured by the gradual reduction in external pressures that impinge on human freedom. After a brief flirtation with progressive social democracy during the New Deal era in the 1930s, America returned to its ideological roots and assured its populace that its commitment to existential and economic freedom would inevitably lead to a happy and rewarding life for each and every citizen. In the American imagination, every individual is free to plot his or her own course in life and pursue his or her own reward, and left unencumbered by government regulation and intervention, the individual retains a greater degree of freedom and, therefore, a better shot at happiness. In America, the idea that wealth and success lead inexorably to happiness has become normalized and endlessly repeated throughout its culture. To be rich is to be happy, and true happiness can only be experienced by those who manage to accrue such capital that allows them to cut themselves free from the workaday world of pressure and responsibility and drift closer to the vivid dreamworlds of perpetual indulgence, hedonism, and ostentatious consumerism.

Harried Leisure Class

Happiness in consumer culture is associated with freedoms to consume ever more goods: prosperity equates with economic growth and greater consumption. This ideology of liberal capitalism, however, inspires forms of anxiety, insecurity, and enmity. What constitutes happiness and the good life is coming under increasing scrutiny as material abundance is called into question by the challenges of global inequalities, climate change, and the apparent dissatisfactions and contradictions on consumerism (Jackson 2009). As these challenges become increasingly salient, what constitutes happiness and its equation with consumer culture will come under increasing scrutiny in both academic and public debates. Simon Winlow See also Affluent Society; Alienation; Capitalism; Consumer Anxiety; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Hedonism; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Well-Being

Further Readings Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books, 2009. Frank, Robert, and Philip Cook. The Winner-Takes-All Society. London: Penguin, 1996. Furedi, Frank. Therapy Culture. London: Routledge, 2003. Jackson, Tim. Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. London: Earthscan, 2009. James, Oliver. Britain on the Couch. London: Arrow, 1998. Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 2000.

HARRIED LEISURE CLASS The Harried Leisure Class was written by Staffan Burenstam Linder, professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. In a concise and thought-provoking book marking a departure from the majority of his writings on international trade, Linder challenged his fellow economists to consider the consumption of time in the same way that they considered monetary consumption. From this starting point, in The Harried Leisure Class, he presents a depressing but recognizable vision of the negative consequences of economic growth in affluent economies. The title of the book makes reference to Thorstein Veblens’s classic The Theory of the Leisure Class,

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written in 1899, in which Veblen describes an emerging ruling class who are in fact a “leisure class,” doing very little productive work. Linder’s title makes direct play on this by suggesting that the “leisure class” have become, in modern times, a “harried leisure class.” The theoretical structure of The Harried Leisure Class, which Linder calls “a theory of time allocation,” begins by drawing attention to the existence of two main types of competing resources in the process of consumption—time and goods—with the implication that as one increases, the other must decrease. The argument is based on the economic logic of a vicious circle in which increasing rates of productivity must be matched by an increasing acceleration in consumption. Consumption, however, takes time, so that in a situation of economic growth, consumers need to consume a larger number of goods per unit of time. The outcome is an acceleration of the pace of life in high-income countries where there is an abundance of commodities, thus creating a “harried leisure class.” In addition, increases in productivity do not necessarily mean that people work less— indeed, the more goods that are owned, the greater the time needed for their maintenance and servicing, and hence the time spent in domestic work can also rise. The overall increases in time necessary to sustain greater levels of consumption in high income countries also means that, contrary to intuition, other aspects of the quality of life tend to decline— the quality of services declines as their quantity increases, as does the decision-making capabilities of the consumer faced with an over-abundance of consumption goods and an increased opportunity cost of the time required to make an informed purchase. Consequently, less time is taken on each act of purchase, which becomes increasingly irrational. For an affluent society to continue to consume more in a situation of rising productivity, Linder proposes three mechanisms by which the “time-yield” (the way in which leisure goods are combined with leisure activities) of consumption may be increased. First, consumption goods are continually replaced with newer ones. Second, more than one type of consumption good may be consumed simultaneously (eating in front of the TV, for example). Third, goods are consumed consecutively, but each one for a shorter duration of time. Whether there is an increase in the total duration of time spent in consumption due to these mechanisms cannot be determined, but for certain types of goods, at least, there is a decline

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in the quality of consumption due to less time being devoted to them. In addition, for activities that in general take more time, such as cultural activities, those that are less time-consuming tend to replace more time-consuming ones (e.g., reading). The prognosis for the future of affluent societies is a depressing one according to Linder because of the decreasing marginal utility of increases in income due to an increasing scarcity of time. According to this logic, income growth has to increase in a frantic race to increase material standards—a situation that may have negative effects on the environment, which is not taken into consideration in official measures of well-being. The insatiable demand for growth may lead to a situation in which such societies enter into a new kind of economic “unfreedom”—a destructive mania for economic advancement coupled with a constant hunt for time. Because it resonated with the debate about the negative impacts of economic progress on the quality of life made popular in John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958) and favored by the “limits to growth” generation of the 1960s and 1970s (in which economic and technological progress intended to reduce the amount of work and improve standards for living was seen in fact as speeding up the pace of life and making life seem more stressful), The Harried Leisure Class has had a considerable impact, becoming a classic in research on the relationship between economic growth, time, and consumption. Its influence has been greatest in the area of sociology and cultural consumption, since its message resonates both with the work of classical sociologists who wrote about increasing acceleration tendencies in capitalism and modernism and with more recent debates on the pressure of time in late modernity. Predating Fred Hirsch’s Social Limits to Growth by six years, The Harried Leisure Class nevertheless carries some worrying accurate predictions about the future of affluent society that many can recognize and identify with. These are as follows: 1. An increasingly hectic tempo of life 2. An expanding mass of consumption goods 3. A decline in the time available for those in need of welfare 4. An increasing attachment to goods as a class but increasingly less to any single good

5. A decline in time spent in the cultivation of mind and spirit 6. A declining utility of income, hence an increasing emphasis on further economic advancement 7. An increasing number of irrational decisions made in the name of rationality 8. A new form of economic unfreedom that forces destruction of the natural environment

Many of these predictions are likely to speak particularly to those most likely to read Linder’s book (that is, to academics and researchers into time use and the quality of life in late-modern society) because it tells their personal story: an increasingly frantic pace of life both in work and leisure. However, this ad hominum explanation of the appeal of Linder’s work does not do justice to the theoretical importance of the focus on time both as a resource and as a principle of social organization, which links The Harried Leisure Class both to the work of the classical sociologists who wrote about the increasing acceleration of society associated with capitalism and modernism and to modern debates about the pressure of time in late modernity. Among the classical sociologists, Georg Simmel, for example, focused on the ambivalence of the consequences of modernity and discussed changes in fashion as an example of rapid transience. Karl Marx’s formulation of the circulation of money in capitalism also predicts direct consequences for the pace of life, since money has constantly to be circulating both in production and in sales in order to retain its value. In contemporary industrialized societies, a huge volume of both academic and more popular literature suggests a preoccupation with the idea of an increasing pressure of time in modern society. The early emphasis of this literature (dating from the 1990s) was an inexorable increase in work (Schor 1998) and the pace of life, leading to an increasing pressure of time and stress, and contributing to dramatic metaphors of late-modern society such as the “runaway juggernaut” (Giddens 1990). More recently, academic attention has focused on more-detailed empirical research that highlights the diversity of the experience and the perception of time pressure among different socioeconomic and demographic groups (Robinson and Godbey 1999; Jacobs and Gerson 2006). In particular, it appears

Health Care

that substantial increases in feelings of time pressure have been in the main a feature of the changing employment structures and conditions of those from specific socioeconomic and demographic groups— especially those in higher-status jobs and dual-career households. The Harried Leisure Class has also provided theoretical inspiration within research based on time-use diary studies for the concept of “time deepening” (Robinson and Godbey 1999) and for research into the “temporal strategies of consumption” of the “work-rich, time-poor” (Sullivan 2008). In both, Linder’s concept of the time-yield (the way in which leisure goods may be combined with leisure activities), and his three mechanisms for increasing this time-yield, is linked to the ability to crowd more activities/goods into the same twentyfour-hour period. In the concept of time deepening, this may take the form of attempting to speed up a particular activity; substituting lengthy leisure activities by shorter ones; doing more than one leisure activity simultaneously and planning the duration of leisure activities more carefully. The temporal strategies of consumption among those with high incomes but little time involve the successive purchase of expensive consumer goods that are simply stored away rather than used and cramming a greater number and variety of leisure activities into the available time. Oriel Sullivan See also Affluent Society; Conspicuous Consumption; Convenience; Downshifting; Economics; Leisure; Time-Use Diaries; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Jacobs, Jerry A., and Kathleen Gerson. “Who Are the Overworked Americans?” Review of Social Economy 1, no. 4 (1998): 442–459. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906. First published 1867. Robinson, John P., and Geoffrey Godbey. Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. 2nd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

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Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American. New York: Basic Books, 1998. Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” In Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine and Morris Janowitz, 294–323. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. First published 1904. Sullivan, Oriel. “Busyness, Status Distinction and Consumption Strategies of the Income-Rich, TimePoor.” Time & Society 17, no. 1 (2008): 71–92. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Viking, 1967. First published 1899.

HEALTH

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FITNESS

See Alternative Consumption; Body, The; Health Care; Leisure; Obesity; Recreation; Tamed Hedonism; Well-Being

HEALTH CARE Health is a relative condition. Is an individual or population healthy? The answer depends on both the definition of health being applied by those undertaking an assessment and how health is understood by the people themselves. Health care is more tangible—a set of resources that are understood as having a particular relationship with health. The health care industry is the term often applied to the organization of these resources and their expression in terms of goods and services. Through the seeking of health care and commodities associated with advancing health, the users of medical services in Western capitalist countries have increasingly been regarded by policymakers as consumers. Whereas the term patient implies a relationship with a health care professional, the term consumer has more complex associations and implies a commodification of care. This reconceptualization has often occurred in tandem with changes in the spaces in which health care consultations take place. This entry considers the reasons for, as well as the characteristics and implications of, this transition toward health care consumption. The historical roots of health care lie in the role of the traditional healer whose work was, like a priest, a vocation rather than occupation. This “calling” dimension is reflected in the Hippocratic

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oath, which, although still embraced by physicians today, has its integrity threatened by concerns relating to remuneration and liability. Doctors (and other health care professionals) are increasingly asked to be conveyors of a commodity (health care) and not the healers of their historical origins in contexts like ancient Greece. The origins of the use of the term consumer and consumption in health care lie in the field of economics in which studies of demand constructed users as consumers. However, many such demand-based studies were in fact studies of utilization, because in health care, the practices of consumers are heavily influenced by the activities of suppliers such as doctors and insurance companies, notes Alistair McGuire and colleagues. Over recent decades, consumer culture has grown to mediate many aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural life. So, too, health care has become part of the set of resources that consumers use to satisfy their needs. Indeed, the convergence of changes in technology, advertising, and cultural acceptability has seen the medicalization of domains of everyday life previously shrouded in privacy and secrecy (e.g., Viagra and the commodification of sexual performance). In the past, researchers have largely viewed the consumption of services in terms of utilization behavior. However, a strict focus on behavior can overlook a number of key elements of consumption: how providers shape practices, how spaces are crafted to be conducive to consumption, how the media is used to promote a culture of health care consumption, and how nonpatients (e.g., philanthropic donors, family members) can be complicit in creating consumer’s world of health care. Being a consumer implies having choice and (literally or metaphorically) shopping around. Although “doctor shopping” may exist, health care reforms based on the assumption that this is a widespread behavior appear to do little to improve the access to, or quality of, care for those who need it most, according to J. R. Barnett and R. A. Kearns. As E. D. Pellegrino states, the commodification of care raises the question of whether the marketplace is the right instrument for distributing health care. Access barriers are pervasive and, if health care is constructed as a consumption good, then distance, costs, language, cultural acceptability, and hours of opening can all mitigate against someone finding the care that they need.

However, a deeper question is whether care itself can reasonably be seen to be a consumable “good.” In one sense, if a price is attached (either in the form of cash-over-the-counter or via payment of insurance premiums), such care is a consumable. However, at a more fundamental level, there can be the presumption that individual units of a good or service are capable of mutual substitution (i.e., one unit is essentially identical to another). Hence, visiting a grocery store, one expects that the qualities of one bag of flour are the same as the next. Can this presumption (known as fungibility) be applied to health care? No, says Pellegrino, who points to the essentially human dimensions of the medical encounter and the intrinsic variability of such encounters. Health care is not a product that a doctor produces and a patient simply consumes. Rather, there is invariably some measure of relationship involved, even if only arising from the trust that is extended by a patient in discussing personal matters, or even to be touched by a doctor. In the case of the bag of flour, by way of contrast, the producer and consumer do not know each other. To some critics, imposing a consumption framework debases health care. Indeed, there are arguably moral consequences of imposing a market ethic on the domain of health resulting in some people being healthy and others not. Beyond the relationships and “goods” such as knowledge or services that define health care, consumption practices can be seen in the built environments in which formal transactions of care occur. The very occupation of a space by patients and families can be construed as “consuming” through the act of “being there” and “dwelling” in the place in however transitory a manner. For instance, being able to choose the most reputable specialist, or enter the most prestigious hospital, can be seen as endorsing a person’s self-ascribed status as well as involving the more obvious receipt of medical treatment. In other words, the place of care can affirm (or detract from) their identity or place in the world. Hospitals have arguably been the health care sites that have most explicitly appealed to consumer tastes. These are specific places of medical care that have conventionally been highly functional in design and location. Until about mid-twentieth century, hospitals generally only advertised themselves through their location (e.g., on a hill or central city location) or through their form (e.g., large size relative to other buildings, prominent signs at entrance). Competitive

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private medicine has brought change with some private hospitals being not only sites of treatment but also key elements within the landscape of discretionary consumption. Yet the “packaging” of consumption activities has also been noted in the public parts of the hospital sector. Rather than ancillary and privatized elements of status (e.g., luxuries available within a private hospital room), in public hospitals, the patient is more likely to be treated to “consumer comforts” within the quasi-public space of the hospital atrium. In 1997, for instance, Auckland’s Starship Children’s Hospital controversially introduced a McDonald’s into its foyer. Although this outlet could not sustain controversy and shifts in the cultural acceptability of fast food and closed in 2004, other elements of the consumption landscape such as iconic children’s storybook characters and evidence of corporate sponsorship remain. Ultimately, health care consumption is a paradox. Confronted by pain or injury, consumers are unlikely to be ready or equipped with knowledge to navigate their way through the variety of possibilities for treatment and care offered by a competitive and privatized health care system. However, the paucity of “pure” consumerist behavior has not diminished the emergence of consumption landscapes and practices. In summary, there is a shift in the locus of health care from the world of the service user to the world of the consumer. Through being embedded in a capitalist society, according to Iain Hay, health care has become a “caring commodity”—something that until recently was sought and dispensed relatively inconspicuously behind the doors of professional offices. A focus on costs recasts health care as a purchasable product rather than a relationship. Beyond formal health care settings like clinics and hospitals, there is an increasing diversification of practitioners across a range of ancillary and “complementary” forms of care and treatment (e.g., acupuncture, chiropractic, Ayurvedic therapies). Along with this trend, the study of consumption practices and the crafting of consumption spaces could be broadened considerably. Any such investigation ought to be informed by a suite of qualitative methodological approaches such as the discursive analysis of advertising, the interpretation of architecture and signs, as well as attention to “consumer” voices through interviews or focus groups. The last of these approaches requires ethical deliberation: to

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what extent is it reasonable to approach participants in the course of their seeking treatment? Or do we settle for engaging with potential consumers (i.e., members of the public at large who may be, but are not at present, using such facilities or services)? Some further promising directions in understanding the links between health care and consumption are likely to include the preferences and practices of diverse populations (e.g., new migrants), the role of the Internet and other new media in “selling” health, and place of consumption in reproducing health inequalities. Robin Kearns See also Alternative Medicine; Body, The; Commodification; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Regulation; Cosmetic Surgery; State Provisioning; Well-Being

Further Readings Barnett, Ross., and Robin A. Kearns. “Shopping Around? Consumerism and the Use of Private Accident and Medical Clinics in Auckland, New Zealand.” Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 1053–1075. Evans, Robert G., and G. L. Stoddart. “Producing Health, Consuming Care.” In Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not? The Determinants of Health of Populations, edited by Robert G. Evans, Morris L. Barer, and Theodore R. Marmor, 27–64. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994. Gesler, Wilbert M. The Cultural Geography of Health Care. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1991. Hay Iain. The Caring Commodity. Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1988. Joseph, Alun E., and David R. Phillips. Accessibility and Utilization: Geographical Perspectives on Health Care Delivery. London: Sage, 1984. Kearns, Robin, and Ross Barnett. “Happy Meals in the Starship Enterprise: Interpreting a Moral Geography of Health Care Consumption.” Health and Place 6 (2000): 81–93. McGuire, Alistair, John Henderson, and Gavin Mooney. The Economics of Health Care. London: Routledge, 1987. Pellegrino, Edmund D. “The Commodification of Medical and Health Care: The Moral Consequences of a Paradigm Shift from a Professional to a Market Ethic.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 24 (1999): 243–266. Tiefer, Leonore. “The Viagra Phenomenon.” Sexualities 9 (2006): 273–294.

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Hedonism

HEDONISM To put it at its simplest, hedonism—and thus, the related issues of hedonistic thought and hedonist behavior—concerns the constant pursuit of pleasure and happiness, which are taken to be the only worthwhile outcomes of any process of thinking or any bout of action. Hedonism is thus a philosophy and a way of being in the world that adheres firmly to the belief that pleasure and happiness are the ultimate and most important pursuits of any individual and indeed of humanity itself. This has significant implications, therefore, for the pleasure- and happiness-seeking pursuits of individuals within the context of global consumer cultures, specifically as it is the very promise of the arrival of these properties that is often seen to motivate consumer behavior. Before reflecting more on this, however, there is a rich and varied tradition of hedonistic thought that is instructive for us here. Perhaps still the most widely known doctrine of hedonism—although neither proponent is likely to have agreed with that label—is expressed in the philosophical writings of the nineteenth-century British thinkers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. One of the most celebrated figures in the history of liberalism, Mill advocated “one very simple principle” that provides the foundation for the liberal idea of the private realm of freedom guaranteed to the individual. In sum, he argues, the state is only permitted to exercise power of the individual in order that it may prevent the consequences of his actions causing harm to others. This is significant because Mill believed that, if left to their own devices, individuals would go about pursuing their own good in their own way, and thus it is the pursuit of personal happiness and pleasure that guides individuals as they go about the business of their everyday lives. Linked to this assumption is the claim that individuals have the capacity to exercise free choices, guided solely by their belief in making those choices based on the perceived chances of obtaining pleasure and happiness. In this way, individuals use their freedom of choice to seek the betterment of themselves, and thus, taken together, individuals pursuing their own good in their own way lends itself to an overall social process that is able to deliver the perfectibility of mankind. Crucially, then, what is motivating human thought and action is the pursuit of pleasure

and happiness, which when translated into a collection of individual pursuits of pleasure and happiness are ultimately beneficial to society as a whole. Before Mill, Bentham offered a rather simpler calculation that of the importance of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” As such, both individuals and governments ought to be guided in their thoughts and actions by a single, dominant concern, which is to quantitatively calculate the most efficient way of achieving the maximum level of happiness for the maximum number of people. If this is realized in practice, so the theory goes, then it will be possible to achieve the greatest total amount of happiness in a given society. Although there are nuanced differences between the two approaches outlined, each is clearly informed by the logic of hedonism: that pleasure and happiness ought rightly to be the only worthwhile concern of any thought or action. The tradition of hedonistic thought goes back much further, however, and to bring this discussion more explicitly into line with the concerns of analyzing consumer culture, there is another proponent of this theory worthy of time here. If Mill and Bentham are both well-known and prominent characters in the historical studies of consumer culture, then the figure of Aristippus of Cyrene (ca. 435–356 BCE) is perhaps far less renowned. Nevertheless, in spite of occupying a position of relative historical obscurity, largely because none of his own writings remain, Aristippus provides one of the earliest defenses of the pursuit of sensuous enjoyment in his exchange with Socrates (as told in the Memorabilia of the student Xenophon). In dialogue, Aristippus refuses to accept Socrates’ claim that happiness is simply one outcome of moral action and instead proffers the argument that happiness and pleasure are the single supreme good and so ought to be the sole end of all action. Notorious among his contemporaries for maintaining a constantly calm demeanor, Aristippus is also one of the earliest figures to argue staunchly for immediate gratification as offering far greater levels of pleasure and happiness than any attempt to defer satisfaction in the pursuit of an identified longer-term objective. In relation to the global consumer societies of today, then, it is perhaps possible to suggest that there is something of the spirit of Aristippus informing the hedonistic pursuits of individual men and women as they dutifully play their roles as pleasureseeking consumers. This is certainly one of the lines of enquiry suggested in Colin Campbell’s seminal

Hegemony

work The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Informed by Max Weber’s classic study of the Protestant ethic’s ascetic principles, which provided such a fertile habitat for nascent capitalist systems, Campbell argues that consumerism functions precisely in its capacity to stimulate individuals’ desires by frequently promising immediate gratification, even though a more sober analysis of empirical outcomes reveals this satisfaction to be typically elusive. Campbell identifies an underlying cultural logic at work in modern consumer culture, one in which human imagination, desire, and emotion play an essential role, signifying an often unrecognized commitment to those values and pursuits associated with the movement known as Romanticism, in particular its celebration of the “cult of the self” as a legitimating basis for the pursuit of purely hedonistic activity. That modern consumerism has become the playground of hedonism is one of the lasting contributions of Campbell’s analysis. Given all of this, then, one wonders how we are to define this happiness and this pleasure that we are all, each one of us, engaged daily in chasing. One of the standard criticisms leveled at those who proffer a hedonistic philosophy is that the concepts of “happiness”—and, by extension, “unhappiness”— lack that fundamental universalism they require in order to be meaningful beyond anything other than a narrowly individualistic, narcissistic understanding. The nature of happiness itself is peculiar, often arising from the end of a specific bout of unhappiness and thus defined by the absence of a particularly irksome quality, rather than the presence of something tangibly wonderful. To illustrate the point, Zygmunt Bauman has recently reminded us that it was Sigmund Freud who taught us that although “a sudden end to a toothache may make the sufferer feel wonderfully happy, teeth that are not painful hardly ever do” (2007, 43). Consumerism as a mode of being essentially works on a fundamental paradox: that the chasing of ever more happiness and pleasure, promised by the acquisition of goods and services identified as capable of delivering these qualities, does not result in satisfaction but, paradoxically, in further unhappiness. As Campbell’s study also identified, the more creative one is in imagining the possible satisfactions that ever more novel and original goods may bring, the more frustrated and dissatisfying the actual acquisition of goods becomes. That is to say,

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the capacity of consumer societies to enhance either our personal or collective happiness is seemingly fairly limited, with evidence of this derived from the ceaselessness with which the pursuit of these qualities continues unabated. As such, as a way of organizing our individual life projects and our global societies, the consumerist model would fail the tests laid down by Bentham and Mill in the early stages of modern liberalism. Consumerism as a mode of being thrives only so long as it manages to render the nonsatisfaction of its members—the meaning is quite clear: the unhappiness of consumers—the perpetual state of normality. The reasons for this would appear to be fairly explicit. To satisfy a consumer, to make a consumer happy with her or his lot, is to stop a consumer from spending more. The mantra of today’s global consumer societies and perhaps the best way to capture the paradox of hedonism is, to borrow again from Bauman, delivered through the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “to travel hopefully is a far better thing than to arrive” (1881, 190). Mark Davis See also Asceticism; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Desire; Happiness; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Novelty; Protestant Ethic; Tamed Hedonism; Well-Being

Further Readings Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Oxford: Polity, 2007. Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. First published 1789. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998. First published 1859. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1994. First published 1904. Xenophon. Memorabilia: Conversations of Socrates. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990.

HEGEMONY Hegemony is a sociological concept developed by Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci in prison, after he was incarcerated by the Fascists,

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between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. It refers to the dominance of a social class or group over the others in a given society. The dominance is practiced without materially violent methods but through veiled dynamics, by making all the other social classes of groups perceive its own values and choices as natural norms, which are claimed to benefit everyone but actually, and invisibly, express the interests of the ruling class and its strategic will to control and dominate. In many respects, the concept of hegemony underpins many contemporary fears of consumer culture as an ideological tool for controlling the masses, for example, the mass-culture thesis of the Frankfurt School and, later, developments in cultural studies. The concept of hegemony was articulated through a number of fragmented reflections collected within twenty-nine Prison Notebooks, which were written in prison by Gramsci before dying sick at the age of forty-six, posthumously published by Einaudi (Turin) in 1949 and partially translated into English in 1971. Gramsci’s critical thought was intrinsically based on the historical and political environment of Italy’s post–World War I period in which it developed. In his daily notes elaborated in prison, Gramsci was trying to address two major sociopolitical problematic conditions in Italy: the economic underdevelopment of the southern regions and the failure of the project of a working-class revolution. Gramsci’s explanation was elaborated precisely through the concept of hegemony—an originally Russian term that had also been adopted by Lenin. Conceived as the moral and civic dominance of a social class over another, hegemony refers to the power of the dominant (industrial and rural) bourgeois class over the so-called subaltern classes and, at the same time, of the arguably more advanced working class on the rural class, which was mainly living in Italian southern regions. This second hegemonic form was claimed to hopefully and strategically induce rural peasants to give up their historically rooted spirit of resignation to enter into an alliance with the working-class members in a joint revolutionary project (this was also the reason behind the title chosen by Gramsci for the national newspaper he founded in 1924, L’Unità [The Unity], which is still diffused in Italy nowadays). Even without providing a coherent theoretical model, Gramsci’s fragmented and critical reflections on the concept of hegemony provided an explanation of the historical, political, and cultural foundations

on which class dominance operated in Italy during the first decades of the twentieth century. What really differentiated and made Gramsci’s theory so fertile was his focus not only on material power relationships but also, and most interestingly, on the ability of acquiring consensus over the subaltern classes through the ruling class’ moral and intellectual—that is, deeply cultural, not merely economic—leadership. Gramsci’s explanatory efforts were indeed profoundly connoted in political and cultural terms: his analysis of the class domination dynamics was highly focused not only on traditional political institutions (such as the parliament, the law courts, the prisons) but also on the institutions of the so-called civic society (such as the media, the schools, the churches, the trade unions) that perform educative, cultural, and representative functions. The role of culture in Gramsci’s theory indeed represents one of the most innovative and insightful rearticulations of Marx’s thought. Fundamentally based on quite a rigid opposition between the socalled (determinant) material-economic structure and the (determined) cultural-ideological superstructure, Marx’s political theory argued that a capitalistic society’s economic inequalities would induce the working class to revolutionize the existent social order to depose capitalism and establish a new communist model. Gramsci advanced an explanation of the failure of Marx’s prediction based on the relevance attributable to both material and symbolic forms of conflict, and more specifically on a crucial analytical distinction between the so-called war of position and war of maneuver. His prison notebooks were explicitly dedicated to “the intellectuals and the role of culture.” Gramsci claimed that the war of position represents a culture war, where the intellectuals strive to acquire a dominant position and have a louder voice in the media and the institutions of the civil society in order to “speak for” their own (low) classes and unveil the power-making dynamics of the dominant class. This passage is crucial, since the concept of cultural hegemony assumes that the prevailing cultural norms are usually conceived to be naturally given and therefore inevitable, while their existence is actually rooted in a historical and strategic project of class domination. While workers and lay people usually concentrate their concrete efforts on the immediate concerns of their everyday lives, socalled organic intellectuals must make them refocus their attention on the reasons and sources of their

Hegemony

subaltern condition and perceive the historically systemic nature of their social and economic oppression and exploitation based on cultural hegemony. If and when intellectuals win the so-called war of position, their new visibility and public role will let them play an educational role, increase class consciousness, and start inspiring new organizational social forms and revolutionary projects. By proving successful in the war for position, communist leaders would eventually acquire the fundamental popular support and political legitimation to begin the so-called war of maneuver that will lead to (armed) insurrection against the existing capitalistic power. Through the concept of (cultural) hegemony, Gramsci opened up a whole stream of sociological research as well as political thought on the relationships between society and culture. Over the years, Gramsci’s intellectual influence has been particularly strong in the transdisciplinary fields of (British) cultural studies (as explicitly recognized by worldknown scholar and ex-director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Stuart Hall in 1980) and of (Indian) subaltern studies and postcolonialism studies (as evident in the critical analyses carried out by Ranahit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and, more recently, by Dipesh Chakrabarty). In the field of cultural studies, in particular, Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and resistance have proved extremely fertile in the elaboration of new Marxist-oriented critical concepts and methodologies and have been adopted to investigate the process of production, diffusion, and consumption of institutional discourses, media contents, and popular cultural forms as well as of subcultural practices (as manifest in the very influential theoretical analysis of the possible forms of readings and resistant rearticulation of hegemonic media messages developed within the so-called encoding/decoding model by Hall in 1973). Since the late 1980s, however, Gramsci’s reflections on the concept of cultural hegemony have been widely applied, integrated, and critically rearticulated within a wider variety of disciplinary fields, from anthropology to cultural studies, from sociology to political science, to critically deal with different social and cultural structural conditions from “white hegemony” to “male hegemony,” as well as with the multiple interweaving dynamics between “race” and gender. Over the last two decades, one of the most widely debated applications of

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Gramsci’s concept of hegemony emerged in the intersection between the field of geopolitical international relations and media studies. This increasing literature has particularly contributed to articulate an ideological critique of the hegemonic role of the United States by underlining the drive to create consumer capitalism abroad through political pressures and the pervasive industrial diffusion of advertising and commercial commodities for mass consumption, as well as by advancing explanations of the U.S. foreign policies as a wider hegemonic strategy that would aim at the formation of an empire. From this perspective, both scholars and political commentators (such as Noam Chomsky) have strongly criticized recent political and military interventions such as the Iraq war and the propagandistic use of international media, which have, arguably, subtly diffused the U.S. hegemonic vision of a new world order post–September 11. Marco Solaroli See also Colonialism; Gramsci, Antonio; Marxist Theories; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Political Economy; Production of Culture; Social Class

Further Readings Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. Gitlin, Todd. “Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment.” In Television—the Critical View, edited by Horace Newcomb, 574–594. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Gramsci, Antonio. Selection from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Guha, Ranahit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media, Culture & Society 2 (1980a): 57–72. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love, and Paul Willis, 15–47. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1980b.

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Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post War Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Holsti, Kalevi. The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory. Winchester, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1985. Lash, Scott. “Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation?” Theory, Culture, and Society 24 (2007): 55–78.

HIERARCHY

OF

NEEDS

While many social theorists resist the notion that humans are driven by innate forces, the term need is well established in everyday use and various traditions of social and economic thought and practice. Need can be explicitly normative, pointing to conditions to be met for human beings to be healthy, happy, free, fully human, fulfilling their potentials, and so on. Such needs do not necessarily become wants, because people may not know that particular conditions are required, or may reject the struggle to be more fulfilled (having decided that it is easier, less painful, or more rewarding to settle for immediate gratification). One critique of consumer culture is that it creates wants (e.g., for junk food) detrimental to satisfaction of needs (for health, etc.). Proponents of consumer sovereignty, seeing this as “we know better than you do what is good for you” elitism, argue that people should be free to satisfy their needs through the exercise of consumer choice. (Though when it comes to children, adults often believe that they know best—hence efforts to restrict advertisements aimed at creating new wants among children.) Another use of needs is more akin to the notion of motives (many social researchers prefer this term). Needs for achievement, affiliation, and the like have been popular topics of psychological research. Such needs are properties of individuals, deep-seated desires that drive peoples’ behavior. The relative strength or mode of expression of such needs may be seen as a personality trait that can vary across people. Conscious wants are interpreted as being expressions of needs, mediated through cognitive structures and social circumstances shaping the perception of how far specific activities and choices are likely to satisfy them. Thus, a need to achieve may be expressed in efforts to excel at sports, business, professional, political, or artistic life. It may even take the form of ambitions to be a particularly effective consumer—getting

the best value for money, being knowledgeable about a particular class of goods, and so on. Particular social theorists may stress one or another need (Sigmund Freud on sex, David McClelland on achievement, Thorstein Veblen on status). But most users of the need concept would agree that individuals have multiple needs. Then the question arises of how the different needs interact. A course of activity may simultaneously satisfy several needs—dining out with friends may satisfy both hunger and social needs, buying an expensive car may satisfy needs for mobility and for status. But often we face options that would satisfy different needs to different extents, quite possibly satisfying some at the expense of others. Many psychologists and behavioral economists see individuals as making choices based on calculations of the probable amount of satisfaction (and the risk of frustration) associated with different options. One need may be particularly dominant in an individual, but the relative strength of different needs is liable to fluctuate over time, as internal and external conditions change (time elapses since the last meal, a bad experience leads an individual to feel devalued in terms of achievements). Advertising may be oriented to making consumers dissatisfied with what they have or enhancing the salience of specific needs, or it may be more aimed at changing cognitions, convincing consumers that one way of spending money (e.g., on one particular brand) will be most satisfying. The “hierarchy of needs” approach assumes that certain lower-level needs have to be satisfied (at least to some extent) before higher-level ones can emerge or be addressed. Designers often employ such an approach when considering requirements that should be fulfilled for the product to be used at all, as opposed to those required for more sophisticated use. More broadly, the best-known generic approach, and the one that has done most to popularize ideas of a needs hierarchy, is that developed by Abraham Maslow. Maslow’s account of individual psychological motivation was developed from examining normal and particularly accomplished people, in contrast to the more dysfunctional or troubled individuals emphasized in psychiatry and psychoanalytically inspired psychology. His framework has proved popular among management and market researchers for several decades, though it has little traction among professional psychologists. Maslow modified his model throughout his career, though core features remained fairly stable. The

Hierarchy of Needs

hierarchy is presented as a triangle, with the basic needs at the base and more sophisticated ones at the apex. As the more basic needs (Maslow described them as deficit needs) are satisfied, the foundation is established for higher-level ones (growth or meta-needs) to be pursued. Basic needs take priority over the higher needs: extreme hunger or insecurity is liable to dampen interest in one’s appearance or the availability of good music. When deficit needs are threatened, people who have become used to functioning at higher levels may regress to a lower need level. There are four deficit needs that can be satiated. Most basic are essential physiological needs, requirements for biological necessities (food, water, etc.). These are succeeded by safety needs, striving for security and reduction of dangers, then social needs—for friendship, community, love—become important, followed by esteem needs. Esteem has interpersonal dimensions (status and recognition in a community) but also intrapersonal ones (self-respect). The growth needs can be pursued but are not satiated like deficit needs—they involve self-actualization, fulfilling human potentials. Failure to satisfy growth needs may lead to such responses as depression, alienation, and cynicism. Maslow elaborated on these growth needs in various ways. In some later work, Maslow suggested that cognitive (for knowledge and understanding) and aesthetic needs (for creativity and beauty) might lie between esteem and higher self-actualization needs, while above selfactualization self-transcendence, involving the quest for spirituality, can emerge. Eventually Maslow identified some seventeen types of self-actualization needs and relaxed the idea of a strict hierarchy across growth needs: they do not necessarily appear, or need satisfaction, in a rigid inherent order. This lack of strong hierarchy at the higher levels may encourage users of Maslow’s approach to treat them simply as different expressions of higher-order needs; his later elaborations are often neglected and the more basic and less complicated model taken to be sufficient. In the course of human development, people are expected to progress through the various levels of the pyramid—though if needs at one level remain unsatisfied, individuals may remain restricted to this level. Thus, the hierarchy can be used to differentiate among people in terms of which needs are predominantly shaping their attitudes and behaviors. The triangular visualization of the model (why not

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a staircase or column?) has significant implications. The most sophisticated needs occupy a smaller area—perhaps signifying that they are quantitatively less powerful, or that relatively few people are achieving these higher levels. (Maslow believed that, even in affluent societies where most people’s basic needs are met, self-actualization needs predominate for only a small percentage of the population.) Ronald Inglehart has explored value systems around the world and over time, using survey data to argue that generations who have had their basic needs satisfied by growing up in times of material affluence and security are more likely to display “postmaterialist” perspectives. (Though they may consume rather high levels of material goods, and affluent consumer societies are adept at amplification of materialistic desire.) This is a rare case of (a rather simplified version of) the needs hierarchy approach being taken seriously within contemporary empirical social science. More generally, psychometric research has repeatedly found little support for more elaborate versions of the Maslowian hierarchy, and social psychology examines individual differences in other frameworks. Meanwhile, the appearance and celebration of highly spiritual or artistic individuals in impoverished regions and subcultures argues against taking the hierarchy to be a staircase (where one step has to be mounted before scaling the next). Maslow’s analysis is still frequently encountered in management and marketing fields. Some of the appeal of the model is that it provides an easily graspable account of the different types of motivation that may come into play in the choice of lifestyles and career paths—and which are relevant to decisions as how to market goods and services (or to decide which to bring to market) and how to reward and inspire employees. Psychodemographic market research often groups consumers into groups dominated by security, status, and similar concerns—and Arnold Mitchell’s well-known VALS (values, attitudes, and lifestyles) approach to segmenting consumer groups was originally inspired by Maslowian thinking. Discussions of working life often refer to Frederick Herzberg’s two categories of hygiene needs and motivators, resembling Maslow’s deficit and growth needs. Another popular approach is Clayton Alderfer’s ERG theory. This outlines a three-level hierarchy of existence (the basic physiological and safety motives), relatedness (for social relationships and esteem), and growth needs (personal development).

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Alderfer argued that a need does not have to be completely satisfied for other needs to emerge; an individual’s psychological state may reflect a mixture of needs, which can potentially be drawn from different levels of the hierarchy. Whether such approaches are proposing a strict hierarchy of needs, or a more fluid spectrum of needs, which may be ordered in different ways across people and circumstances, is debatable. Ian Miles See also Desire; Happiness; Inalienable Wealth/ Inalienable Possession; Maslow, Abraham; Materialism and Postmaterialism; Needs and Wants; Psychology

Further Readings Alderfer, Clayton. “An Empirical Test of a New Theory of Human Needs.” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 4 (1969): 142–175. Herzberg, Frederick. Work and the Nature of Man. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1966. Inglehart, Ronald. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Maslow, Abraham. Toward a Psychology of Being. 2nd ed. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. 2nd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Trigg, Andrew B. “Deriving the Engel Curve: Pierre Bourdieu and the Social Critique of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Review of Social Economy 62, no. 3 (2004): 393–406. Wahba, A., and Lawrence Bridgewell. “Maslow Reconsidered: A Review of Research on the Need Hierarchy Theory.” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 15 (1976): 212–240.

HIGHER EDUCATION Higher education refers to education of undergraduate degree level or above that is generally, but not exclusively, undertaken within universities. It also encompasses the broader set of activities of universities including research and enterprise. The growth of consumption terminology, values, and practices within higher education arose within a context of rapid and complex global change that included the increasing commodification of education and research, which accelerated from the 1980s onward. Globally, universities have become comparatively

more dependent on their relationships with industry and less dependent on their relationships with states. This contrasts with a former era where they were primarily aligned with states, and research and teaching were more frequently conceptualized as public sector activities provided as welfare. The new commodified higher education is characterized as managerialist: market-orientated managers control and shape the work of academics to maximize income. Also, the all-encompassing nature of marketization has resulted in consumption-orientated behavior and values permeating all activities and relationships within universities. Education markets are not pure markets. One reason is that a range of nonmarket factors shape what happens in universities. The declining proportion of state funding is coupled with increasing state control of universities, which is achieved by granting and withdrawing state funding according to current national priorities; for example, states might fund universities that are successful in widening access to students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those who prioritize vocational or science courses. Publicly available league tables that rate universities nationally and internationally are not produced by states but are also influential in shaping the activities of universities as they are important in conveying and reinforcing reputations in national and global higher education markets. Universities respond to league tables because they are influential. Students draw on them in choosing courses, and the most qualified students expect to go to the highest-rated universities. The status of staff in universities is also heavily dependent on reputation and league-table positions. Universities use league tables in their marketing to attract students, staff, and private and public financers of research and training. States, industry, and universities increasingly act similarly because in neoliberal societies, they are all organized through market relations. State funding therefore does not necessarily reduce marketization or the commodification of universities business. A whole range of commodified products and activities are associated with universities, including the following: the use and creation of textbooks that package knowledge; the creation and utilization of commercial software packages in teaching students; and the increasing role of patents, copyrights, contracts, trademarks, and logos in branding and asserting ownership. This restricts access to knowledge to those who can afford to pay.

Higher Education

While the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom are the often-cited examples of increasingly marketized higher education systems, a broader literature describes global trends that play out differently in various national contexts. There has been a global increase in the proportion of funding from private sources (e.g., industry, alumni, benefactors, and public-sector customers who pay for research and training) and students (home and international) and their parents (who pay fees), but the degree of money from different sources varies as does the role of higher education in different nations. The massification of higher education, which involves a continuous global expansion of student numbers, has accelerated since the 1980s: the global number of students rose from 28,084,000 in 1970 to 143,723,000 in 2006 (Unterhalter and Carpentier 2010, 11) and is projected to rise to more than 160 million by 2020 (Marquez 2002, 88). This globally significant market, which was estimated to be worth $27 billion in 1995, is currently dominated by the United States. Marketization has resulted in diverse provision internationally with the growth of virtual, privately funded, corporate-owned, technical, franchise, and offshore universities and museums as some of the alternative types. Current debates dispute the degree to which these changes impact positively or negatively on different aspects of higher education, including the knowledge produced through research, students’ learning and identities, the pedagogies and curricula of universities, academic staff, fair access to higher education, and national and global economic and social (in)equality. Commodification has grown as universities have become key global institutions as a consequence of the global knowledge economy that attaches economic value to knowledge and its production. Universities supplement the research of private companies, providing important infrastructure (e.g., personnel and equipment), and are in a position to contribute research that is not immediately profitable that multinational companies would be unlikely to carry out. However, private income has not necessarily meant an overall increase in income for universities. There is debate about whether knowledge produced within universities has become too shaped by its commodification as a product for industries whose interests are most often allied with wealthier nations and the production of profit rather than being governed by intellectual or disciplinary priorities or by the needs

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of the disadvantaged groups and nations. These criticisms reflect debates about the ownership of knowledge and the accountability of universities: it is strongly connected to the question of whose interests should shape the production and dissemination of knowledge through research and teaching. Universities are involved in a complex set of consumption relationships involving a wide range of actors, including states, industry, students, and their parents. A key moment in the development of higher education markets was the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATs), which defined education as a product and gave international license to this trade. It positioned neoliberal states as potential consumers or producers of higher education systems: universities and private companies can be the providers of or accredit higher education courses in a variety of nation-states. Thus far, the wealthier nations of Northern America, Europe, and Australasia have tended to be producers, setting up campuses or courses in the less-wealthy nations of regions such as Asia and Africa or providing online courses. This commodification of education systems appears to be increasing the already unequal relationships between countries. It is possible that as the global economy shifts, nations like China and India might benefit economically, and educational hierarchies might also shift. However, in current global league tables, existing status and wealth hierarchies are reflected and reinforced. There are different but overlapping approaches to researching higher students as consumers that are based on disciplinary traditions. From a business and marketing perspective, higher education is a problematic service because it is a nebulous product. Its success is dependent on the relationship the studentconsumer has with different facets of education (e.g., educational materials, tutors, buildings, and other students). Students find it hard to judge prior to purchase/engagement, and evaluation of services can be based on factors that are hard to control (e.g., the appearance of a provider/teacher); reception is also heavily dependent on expectations. The rational consumer model that higher education marketers use is seen as problematic because a range of factors influence student choice, including background, social class, ethnicity, school contexts, teachers, the media, and lifestyle. Marketing in this field is viewed as lacking a theoretical and conceptual framing. Marketing research also suggests that the information about

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universities that governments seek to make transparent though league tables and that they believe will help student-consumers make choices are unlikely to achieve this because the latter do not straightforwardly choose. However, the same could be said of many services and products. Sociologists and educationalists critique commodified higher education for the poorer quality of experience and the lower standard of education they think will emerge if educational courses are conceived of as a standardized product and the difficulties they think will arise if they are taught to increasing masses of students in systems with less resources. Sociologists and educationalists also believe that students will have poorer relationships with education if they conceive of themselves as consumers of an educational qualification, a student lifestyle, and a passport to a vocation. Although some authors see the increasing bureaucratization or McDonaldization of services for students as a somewhat inevitable consequence of massification, which does provide access to higher education for more students, they also believe that remedial action is needed to stop higher education deteriorating due to more students being educated with fewer resources. They suggest that diverse teaching methods, a wider variety of learning experiences, and the creative use of technology can revitalize higher education. This view contrasts with those who suggest that higher education should not be marketized and should be state funded. There is an increasing wealth of research relevant to the commodification of higher education. These include the following factors, already discussed: massification; marketization; the changing relationships between universities, states, and industry; the globalization of higher education (including that facilitated through technology); the growth of quality regimes; the global knowledge economy; and the consumption and marketization of higher education. However, other factors—including the vocationalization of higher education, the brain drain, and the global movement of students and academic staff— should also be explored for a fuller understanding of the field. Andrea Abbas See also Bounded Rationality; Commercialization; Commodification; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Markets and Marketing; McDonaldization; Systems of Provision

Further Readings Abbas, Andrea, and Monica McLean. “Tackling Inequality through Quality: A Comparative Case Study Using Bernsteinian Concepts.” In Global Inequalities and Higher Education: Whose Interests Are We Serving? edited by Elaine Unterhalter and Vincent Carpentier, 241–267. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010. Delanty, Gerard. Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society. Buckingham, UK: The Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press, 2001. Foskett, Nicholas H., and Jane Hemsley-Brown. Choosing Futures: Young People’s Decision-Making in Education, Training and Careers Markets. London: Routledge/ Falmer, 2001. Hayes, Dennis, and Robin Wynyard, eds. The McDonaldization of Higher Education. London: Bergen and Harvey, 2002. Hemsley-Brown, Jane V., and Izhar Oplatka. “Universities in a Competitive Global Marketplace: A Systematic Review of the Literature on Higher Education Marketing.” International Journal of Public Sector Management 19, no. 4 (2006): 316–338. Hill, Frances M. “Managing Service Quality in Higher Education.” Quality Assurance in Education 3, no. 3 (1995): 10–21. Marquez, A. M. “The Impact of Globalization on Higher Education: The Latin American Context.” Chapter 7 of Globalization and the Market in Higher Education: Quality, Accreditation and Qualifications. Paris: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Editions Economica, 2002. McLean, Monica. Pedagogy and the University: Critical Theory and Practice. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. Morely, Louise. Quality and Power in Higher Education. Buckingham, UK: The Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press, 2003. Ritzer, George. “Towards a Spectacularly Irrational University Quotidian.” In The McDonaldization of Higher Education, edited by Dennis Hayes and Robin Wynyard, 19–32. London: Bergen and Harvey, 2002. Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Globalization and the Market in Higher Education: Quality, Accreditation and Qualifications. Paris: Author and Editions Economica, 2002.

Hinduism Unterhalter, Elaine, and Vincent Carpentier, eds. Global Inequalities and Higher Education: Whose Interests Are We Serving? Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2010.

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The pervasive and inherent godliness of all creation—living or inanimate—is thus the key metaphysical basis of Hinduism. All animate subjects and objects, including subatomic particles not yet discovered, are manifestations of god.

Cultural Aspects Hinduism refers to the religious beliefs, rituals, practices, philosophies, and worldviews of people who self-identify as Hindus. Hindu religious practices emerged in the northwestern parts of South Asia (present-day Pakistan and northern India) several centuries prior to Christ. While some trace the advent of Hinduism to deep antiquity, a wider consensus places the formalization of Hindu ideas to 1750 BC. The word Hindu is an aspirate Persian-Arabic pronunciation of the river Sindhu (Indus), which people to the east of it called Hindus. Hindu majorities exist only in Nepal (99 percent) and India (85 percent), with sizable minorities in Fiji, Mauritius, and Suriname, and tiny but often economically powerful minorities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and some nations in Africa and the Middle East. There is no founder or prophets in Hinduism. There are, however, numerous gurus or teachers who claim to show their followers the correct practices and paths of Hinduism. Hinduism does not provide formal mechanisms for proselytizing or conversion. People are born into the religion. Some sects and branches, however, do allow conversions (such as the ISKCON Hare Krishna movement), but these are minor. Although there are numerous ancient religious texts, unlike the Bible or the Koran, no single text can lay claim as the word of god. Hindus are thus not “people of the book” in the sense of submitting to one authoritative text.

Metaphysical Aspects A major philosophical-metaphysical distinction between Hinduism and the “religions of the book”— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is that Hinduism “postulates no absolute distinction between divine and human beings” (Fuller 2004, 3). Thus, people greet each other and pray to gods with the same gesture of folded hands, bowed head (“Namaste”). As Fuller notes, however, there is almost always an implied hierarchy: humans may be divine—but are highly stratified—in the Hindu worldview.

In cultural terms, the continuous blending of divinity and humanity implies blurring of the lines between the sacred and the profane. A car can be used for amorous dalliance, perhaps even a robbery, and then worshipped with flowers and incense during Vishwakarma Puja (a day to worship technology). Several interesting and sometimes contradictory views of consumer culture are found in Hinduism. At a deep philosophical and spiritual level, the world of goods is regarded as Maya—an illusion, a web of entanglements in which humans are trapped through unending cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. Ultimate salvation (Nirvana, Moksha) is seen as an escape from the reincarnation cycle, from the web of Maya, and hence from all desire. And yet, there is pragmatic realization that daily life of ordinary people is rooted in materialism. Hinduism therefore offers multiple paths to godliness, including paths that rely very much on material means. Swami Bhaskarananda, a monk in the Ramakrishna Order, writes, “Hinduism offers two major spiritual paths. . . . The path for householders is . . . ‘the path of permitted sensual desires.’ The path for monks is . . . ‘the path of renunciation of sensual desires’” (2002, 109). The notion of what is “permitted,” however, is quite flexible. Unlike Islam or Orthodox Judaism, there are no explicit proscriptions about any form of consumption in Hinduism. Even the “sacred cow” notion and the admonition not to eat beef are generally seen as late developments in Hinduism, probably to safeguard the economically vital cattle stock in periods of famine. Explicit consumer-related Hindu texts include the call to hedonism by Charvak (“Consume clarified butter, even if this entails getting into debt”) and elaborate rules for trade and payments specified in Kautilya’s Arthashastra. Unlike Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, Hinduism does not employ sin concepts to govern human behaviors. Instead, it employs the cosmic concept of karma—all actions have consequences, but it could take multiple incarnations for the consequences to unfold. The basic moral message thus is, “Be

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good, because it is good to be good.” Evil deeds and immoral behaviors do accumulate in a cosmic account, and the consequence could literally be a dog’s life—reincarnation in subhuman forms.

The Original Postmodernism? The cultural polyphony of Hinduism, and of India, in fact could be characterized as the original postmodernism: “Indeed, Postmodernism looks as if it could have been created for India because it makes no attempt to produce one order, construct one principle” (Michaels and Harshay 2003, 9). Without an identified founder or prophet, and without a designated savior—and because of its polyvalence— Hinduism is highly adaptive. Monk Bhaskarananda compares a religion to an attic in an old home: Unless the attic is regularly cleaned, it gathers dust and cobwebs and eventually becomes unusable. Similarly, if a religion cannot be updated or cleaned from time to time, it loses its usefulness and cannot relate anymore to changed times and people. (2002, 5)

Because of adaptability, even the fundamentalist strands in Hinduism, which do arise from time to time, are not obscurantist or puritanical. Instead, they tend to be revivalist and heritage glorifying. Competing views of Hinduism—progressive, fundamentalist, and everything in between—are like a postmodern coffeehouse: numerous blends, flavors, and concoctions are available, and people can further modify these by adding their preferred sweeteners and sprinkles. Nikhilesh Dholakia See also Christianity; Islam; Postmodernism; Rituals; Sacred and Profane

Further Readings Bhaskarananda, Swami. The Essentials of Hinduism. Seattle, WA: Viveka Press, 2002. Fuller, C. J. The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Michaels, Axel. Hinduism: Past and Present. Translated by Barbara Harshay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Narayan, Kirin. Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Sugirtharajah, Sharada. Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective. London: Routledge, 2003.

HIRE-PURCHASE RENTAL GOODS

AND

A hire-purchase (H-P) activity is a transaction that involves regular fees for the access to an entity, coupled with an option to buy provided that all conditions agreed in the contract are fulfilled at the end of the predetermined period. As such, H-P can be considered a type of installment credit. It allows the consumer to gain immediate possession of a property without obtaining the legal ownership of the physical entity over an agreed period of time. Through offering direct access to the property, H-P fosters customers’ “buy now, pay later” attitude and encourages a culture of borrowing, thereby strongly contributing to an expansion of the consumer credit market. H-P is a purchase of rights, not of a property. According to property rights theory, the ownership of a physical entity (property) consists of a bundle of property rights: the right to exclude third parties from the use of the property, the right to retain the profits yielded from the use of the property, the right to change the good, and the right to sell the property or to convey some of the rights to others. In contrast to ownership, which includes all four property rights, H-P allows the debtor to obtain only the two former, while the two remaining rights rest with the creditor. The legal ownership of the property vests with the lender until the final installment payment is made. As it is initially agreed on, with completion of the final payment, the lessee can either exercise the option to purchase the physical entity at a predetermined price or return it to the lender. In case of default on payment, the lender is able to repossess the property. The lessee is bound to reimburse the lender for any deficiency from the sale if it is repossessed. Mostly, rental goods are the foundation of H-P transactions. Generally, a rental good can be described as a physical entity. For example, vehicles, machinery, technology, clothing, and handbags all represent rental goods. Theoretically, with H-P, the resale value of the rental good ought never to fall below the sum of all installment payments, as in case of default of payment, the lender may repossess the

Hire-Purchase and Rental Goods

rental good, which needs to retain sufficient value for reselling purposes. Therefore, those rental goods subject to H-P contracts need to be sufficiently durable in order to ensure that they can be sold secondhand. H-P agreements can be concluded between wholesalers and retailers or retailers and customers. Initially, the purchaser and the seller signed the contract. Only at the beginning of 1900 did finance corporations start to involve themselves in H-P transactions. Today, typically a finance company or commercial bank enters the contract. The vendor assigns his interest in the agreement with the customer to the finance company, which purchases the rental good from the retailer and then hires it to the consumer. Thus, the finance company acts as intermediary between the buyer and the seller. H-P was introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century by Singer to promote the sale of sewing machines among the working class in Britain. With the cheapening of the motorcar before World War I, the rate of increase in H-P contracts accelerated markedly. Between 1920 and 1939, the further expansion in installment credit was mainly attributed to the growing use of H-P as a means for financing automobiles, furniture, audio equipment, household commodities, and pianos by middle- and workingclass customers and for financing of machinery by producers. H-P agreements remained unregulated in Britain until 1938, when the Hire Purchase Act was passed providing a legislative definition of the rights of the customer in order to mitigate the abuses perpetrated by many vendors. The Depression led to a sharp decline in H-P transactions. During the first years of World War II, H-P activities recovered, and by 1941, they reached their peak. After the war, the demand for durables surged and, as a result, the uptake of H-P credits again gathered pace until 1960, when other forms of consumer credits started to play a bigger role. Today, H-P agreements have gained importance in the context of the credit crunch that began in 2008. Many lenders are increasingly wary of providing finance due to the credit crisis. As retailers offer interest-free credits and deferred-payment starts, H-P seems to be an attractive form of financing for a growing number of private as well as business customers. H-P regained its popularity especially in Britain where the value of goods bought on H-P rose by 9 percent between 2008 and 2009, according to the Finance and Leasing Association.

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Many customers enter H-P contracts because it allows them to obtain possession of a physical entity that they are unable to acquire against immediate cash payment. For those without sufficient savings, H-P makes a wider range of physical entities become available. Additionally, for many customers, materialism seems to be a driving force to engage in H-P transactions. With H-P, customers can possess socially important durables and hence enhance their status and social position. H-P appears to be especially attractive to lower-income groups because it allows customers to gain access to goods that are otherwise out of their reach. For businesses, H-P provides a viable alternative form of finance to those who are struggling to find funds or do not have a significant asset base to use for debt security. As it implies lower monthly payments than the firm directly paying the purchase price, H-P has a positive effect on the firm’s liquidity. However, there are also disadvantages to the H-P concept: first, there is the risk for the customer that in case of default of payments, the lender has the right to repossess the rental good; second, H-P can be more costly than the purchase of the good, as the sum of the installment payments may exceed the purchase price. A third disadvantage is that in comparison to total sales, H-P sales vary more sharply. Therefore, according to Albert Haring, they lessen the stability of the durable goods industry. Sabine Moeller and Kristina Wittkowski See also Appropriation; Consumer Durables; Consumer Regulation; Credit; Debt; Economics; Great Depression (U.S.)

Further Readings Finance and Leasing Association. Consumers Seek Good Deals in Tight Credit Market. May 26, 2009. http:// www.fla.org.uk/media/260509_consumer_finance_mar_ figs (accessed September 3, 2010). Haring, Albert. “Instalment Selling of Durable Consumers’ Goods.” The Journal of Marketing 2, no. 4 (1938): 278–281. “Hire-Purchase.” The IPA Review 8, no. 1 (1954): 16–21. Knowles, Harry, Greg Patmore, and John Shields. “From Hire Purchase to Property Development: The Rise and Demise of the Industrial Acceptance Corporation in Australia, 1926–77.” Accounting, Business and Financial History 18, no. 3 (2008): 283–302.

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Ponchio, Mateus Canniatti, and Francisco Aranha. “Materialism as a Predictor Variable of Low Income Consumer Behavior When Entering into Installment Plan Agreements.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 8 (2008): 21–34. Scott, P. “The Twilight World of Interwar British Hire Purchase.” Past and Present 177, no. 1 (2002): 195–225. van der Eng, Pierre. “Consumer Credit in Australia during the Twentieth Century.” Accounting Business & Financial History 18, no. 2 (2008): 243–265. Walker, John. “Hire Capacity of Rental Services.” Managing Service Quality 9, no. 2 (1999): 116–120.

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS Historical analysis refers to the methods, time periods, and places that have been used to study consumption in past human societies. Historians have studied consumption in its economic, cultural, and political forms. They use a variety of techniques, both quantitative and qualitative, to investigate changing consumption patterns and practices, and the changing meanings of consumption and “the consumer.” Although Enlightenment histories contained discussions of what is now called consumer behavior, it only emerged as a serious topic of historical research in the nineteenth century. Cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt examined the fashions, eating habits, and festivals of sixteenth-century Italy as a way of revealing important values in Italian culture. In the twentieth century, historians expanded their approach, becoming more systematic and analytical. They also moved forward in time and began to scan areas outside of western Europe. Werner Sombart argued that there was a casual link between luxury goods and preindustrial manufacturing, calling capitalism “the child of luxury.” Fernand Braudel explored how between 1500 and 1800 the lives of ordinary people in Europe and Asia were limited by material scarcity, including in consumption. A debate also emerged about the origins of consumer society, which was variously dated back to eighteenth century, between the 1880s and the 1920s, or after World War II. This hunt for origins has been abandoned, however, mainly over disagreements about how to define terms like consumer society or mass consumption. Attention has now shifted back to some of the concerns of Burckhardt: understanding

the meanings of consumption, although with a more rigorous approach.

Economic Histories Economic historians have focused on the importance of consumption in everyday economic behavior and its role in economic change. They explore changing levels of expenditure and ownership of possessions and shifts in the popularity of different kinds of goods, for example, the move from woolen to cotton clothing during the eighteenth century. These are often related to wider economic trends— in this case, the move in textile manufacturing from cottage industry (wool) to factory production (cotton). To compensate for the lack of household financial accounts in all periods, they have used a variety of sources including probate inventories, insurance records, and court records. This has enabled a careful examination of exactly what kinds of things people owned, the materials used, length of ownership, and cost. This approach is particularly well developed for clothing and has established that there was a lower-class interest in clothes and fashion by the eighteenth century, especially in England and France (Styles 2007; Roche 1994). Historians have also used international flows of commodities, such as sugar or rubber, to explore the connections within the imperial and world economies since ca. 1700. Some historians have addressed debates over supply versus demand factors in causing economic growth. Jan de Vries has controversially argued that an increase in the consumption of commodities among lower-class European households was crucial for laying the foundations for the Industrial Revolution. Once households acquired the desire for new or better food, clothes, or furniture, they began to direct more of their labor and time toward production for the market and away from self-sufficiency. This meant they received more payment in money, enabling them to buy more consumer goods. It also increased the amount of commodity production taking place. De Vries has called this the “industrious revolution” and sees it as crucial for creating both the demand for the goods that would be produced by factories, as well as the time-disciplined workers needed to labor there. Not all historical analysis is so grand or sweeping; smaller-scale studies often focus on specific places

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such as the home. This approach has given historians a detailed picture of the mechanisms of consumption and brought gender into sharper focus. Ruth Schwartz Cowan has combined the two by looking at the twentieth-century home as a “consumption junction”—the time and place when women had to choose between rival household technologies (e.g., different types of ovens) and why they did so.

Cultural Histories Economic historians of consumption have sometimes run into difficulty generating the same longrun and reliable statistics as compared to topics like capital formation or prices. Therefore, the role of consumers in driving economic growth in the past remains open to question. Partly in response to this problem, attention has turned to the creation of consumer desire and notions of taste. The role of consumption in presenting or constructing identity, especially around class, gender, and ethnicity, has also become an important topic. But it has also allowed historians to practice the technique of using a set of materials to pry open the very different values held by societies in the past. Simon Schama used a variety of sources, including household possessions, to explore attitudes in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century to such things as water and cleanliness, which he argued were particularly distinctive to the Dutch at that time. He also explored how the Dutch could hold two apparently different values at the same time: Calvinist aestheticism, on the one hand, and the desire for consumer goods, on the other. This was partly intended as a historians’ response to Max Weber’s link between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism.

Political Histories Political histories of consumption explore how it has created and organized political power and how it has become a politicized activity. A well-developed area has been the study of conspicuous consumption in royal courts. Historians have shown how lavish display was a key way of presenting royal power, and the emulation by nobles of royal taste helped to cement their loyalty to the monarch. A newer development has been the study of consumption as a political act and the consumer as a political identity. Rioting to enforce “fair” bread or rice prices stretches a long way back into European and Asian

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history. However, it is the nineteenth century that is seen as the period when political movements of consumers emerged, beginning with the boycotts of plantation sugar by antislavery campaigners. Historians have argued that consumption was important to the emergence of mass politics, pointing to the popular campaigns for free trade for liberalism, or the spread of working-class consumer co-operatives for social democracy. For nationalism, C. A. Bayly showed how Gandhi was able to draw on long-standing Hindu attitudes toward textile production in his demands for swadeshi (home industry) in India. Ideas that traditional ways of making textile were moral acts mapped onto the nationalist campaign to promote indigenous forms of manufacture and to drive out British mass-produced cloth. For the twentieth century, recent work has focused on consumer movements and their changing conception in political discourse and policy. There has been a strong comparative and transnational basis to this work (Chatriot, Chessel, and Hilton 2006). Future research will almost certainly concentrate on places outside of western Europe and North America. For example, despite the well-established links between producers in China and India and European consumers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, little is known about Indian and Chinese consumption outside of elite level. This will be important to answer “the Great Divergence” question—when, how, and why did western Europe break away from Asia in economic development—as consumption remains a key factor (Pomeranz 2008, 114–165). Historians have shown a bias toward certain goods—food, textiles, or cars—over others. Similarly, certain sites of consumption have been privileged: homes, shops, and markets. What might histories of consumption look like if they focused on paper clips or fields? Finally, there is very little work on periods before 1500 BCE, which highlights how the history of consumption is implicitly tied to the rise of capitalism. For those who want to take a longer view, histories of consumption of precapitalist societies could shed a very different light on current understanding. William Farrell See also Colonialism; Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War; Enlightenment; Fashion; History; History of Food; Industrial Society; Luxury and Luxuries

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Further Readings Bayly, C. A. “The Origins of swadeshi (home industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 285–322. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. Translated by Siân Reynolds. London: William Collins, 1981. Burckhardt, Jacob. Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Penguin: London, 1990. First published 1860. Chatriot, Alain, Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, and Matthew Hilton, eds. The Expert Consumer: Associations and Professionals in Consumer Society. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. de Vries, Jan. “Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe.” In Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by J. Brewer and R. Porters, 85–132. London: Routledge, 1994. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Roche, Daniel. The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. London: William Collins, 1987. Schwartz Cowan, Ruth. “The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by W. Bijker et al., 261–280. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Sombart, Werner. Luxury and Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967. First published 1913. Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

HISTORY Historical research, with some notable exceptions, has usually privileged economic and quantitative approaches to consumption analysis rather than the cultural processes implied in consumption. Research into consumption cultures has only emerged since the 1980s and has focused on some fundamental

questions. This entry discusses the key aspects of these current developments: the birth of a modern consumer culture that evolved after the breaking up of the “ancient regime of consumption” (i.e., a social regulation of the consumption processes that was based legally on sumptuary laws); the first globalization of consumptions; the analysis of consumption cultures in terms of class, birth, and development of new spaces and premises for consumer within the modern urban environment; mass production/consumption systems; development and the differentiation of consumer cultures in the latetwentieth century.

From the Sumptuary Laws to the Birth of Modern Consumption The beginning of the modern age of consumption can be traced back to the eighteenth century when the social and material framework of the consumption processes changed. The overcoming of the ancient regime of consumption allowed for the birth of new consumption cultures. Sumptuary laws pursued two goals: an ethical concern that descended from a Christian conception according to which consumption had to be linked to social rank, and an economic philosophy that saw luxury as a cause of the impoverishment of nations, requiring the enforcement of strict social boundaries related to it. The controversy surrounding luxury in eighteenth-century Europe had strategic significance for the political debate because of the dangers of extending previously prerogative consumption by the aristocracy to wider social strata. Thus, sumptuary laws provided a tool for disciplining consumption and therefore setting a symbolic social order. While the enforcement of these regulations was difficult with engendered resistances and protests, they were continuously reiterated in order to reassert the hierarchical structure within society and to eliminate symbolic challenges appearing from the lower classes (Hunt 1996). The success of The Fable of the Bees (1704) by Bernard de Mandeville presents proof of the profound transformation that was taking place in the eighteenth century within the concepts of consumption. Mandeville maintained the complementarities of private vices and public virtues, reappraising the role of luxury, which became the cornerstone of individual satisfaction as well as the wealth of

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the nations. Thus, in eighteenth-century Europe, a wide intellectual debate led to a new appreciation of consumption as a factor in civilization endorsing individual desires to pursue a more comfortable life and aesthetic pleasantness. One supporter of luxury was Voltaire, while one of its detractors was Rousseau, who gave the Roman empire as a case in point for historical decline that was brought about by a degeneration of morals caused by luxury and by the pursuits of immediate pleasure. Inside the works found in the Encyclopédie, as well as within the Scottish Enlightenment, recognition of the economic importance of luxury was associated with the necessity to temper it with equity, moderation, and propriety. This definition of luxury was very different from the competitive luxury of court society, notes Norbert Elias, because it did not comply with the custom of climbing social hierarchy through conspicuous consumption but instead, according to Phillippe Perrot, helped to improve material life and comfort. This was the direction in which the nineteenth-century middle-class ethic of consumption developed, resulting in the growth of markets, the widespread acceptance of new consumptions, and the conservation of social distinctions that permitted luxury to become domesticated and associated social dangers to be restrained. This transformation in the prevailing discourse that governed the ethics of consumption coincided with the material transformations taking place in society, in particular in northwestern Europe, which was eventually epitomized by the expression “industrious revolution,” a term coined by Jan de Vries after the traditional category of the “Industrial Revolution.” By comparison to the Industrial Revolution, the industrious revolution is characterized by a longer interlude, beginning in the seventeenth century. It involved complex social transformations within domestic spheres, within labor, and by default consumption cultures. Recent historiography has recorded a general increase in consumption that had already begun to happen during the second half of the seventeenth century in places such as northern Europe and in the North American colonies. Some historians, according to Neil McKendrick and colleagues, felt that the “consumption revolution” was a kind of logical and historical premise of the Industrial Revolution. Improvement in living conditions and the building of new lifestyles is well documented in several geographical contexts and

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has proved that new consumption styles depended more on an autonomous cultural factor rather than economic trends.

First Globalization of Consumption One important change that suggests singling out the seventeenth century as the watershed in the history of consumption is the definitive globalization of consumption resources. Even though commercial transactions between continents had already occurred during the Middle Ages and the ancient world, a stable and substantial interconnection between all world continents dates back to the late-seventeenth century. These evolving relationships not only consisted of simple geographical extensions of a commercial network but also involved profound changes in the interaction of power between the different world areas as a result of the rise of European imperialism, which in turn reshaped the exploitation of material and human resources. The world system of economies was built by means of fierce conflicts between various European empires that challenged each other on the oceans and therefore touched off conquest wars in order to acquire merchandise and to compel a new world geography of production suitable for European demands. Navigation techniques, military force, and financial wealth were fundamental tools in commercial expansion. The principal actors in this enormous commercial development were several West and East Indian Companies. Subsequent initial attempts by the Portuguese to build a commercial system protected by the state instigated the pattern for successful companies, and following this pattern, Dutch and English companies thus become the key players in the world of commerce until the early nineteenth century. These European institutions managed to unite the force of modern states with that of capitalist companies. In the first phase of expansion, Asia was a main source of consumption resources for European consumers, but the conquest of the Americas set into motion a different, but equally important, set of economic dynamics. The American colonies were settled by European empires that formed stable settlements by means of forced or free migration, in particular through the slave trade and the importation of slaves from Africa and through the near extermination of the native population. American colonies became a fundamental supplier of consumption goods and raw

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materials for European transformation industries, and it has to be considered that without the use of slavery, the consumption dynamics of Europe would have followed a completely different path. European and North American consumers took advantage of this imperial expansion by modifying their consumption cultures and experimenting with new exotic products—which were initially only consumed by the elite in society but became the norm in the mass-consumer practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the modern era, the range of consumption goods imported from other continents extended considerably: Asian textiles, coffee from Africa, American cocoa, China tea and chinaware, cotton from America, and sugar from Caribbean isles, as well as tropical fruits, potatoes, tomatoes, rice, and turkeys—all of these products were extraordinarily new in Europe and were commercialized on a wider scale compared to that of the Middle Ages. Some of these products found an immediate and enthusiastic appropriation by European consumers; others encountered mistrust because they altered habits and consumption hierarchy. Why was it that products such as tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar, and cocoa found a rapid and enthusiastic reception in Europe? There is no simple answer to this question. Initially, the novelty, exotic origins, and high prices of these products afforded a role of social status marker. Nevertheless, through the course of time, prices decreased, creating an increase in the social spectrum of consumers so that the elite character of these consumption goods faded. In the seventeenth century, the medical culture too favored the diffusion of these products, appraising their beneficial qualities on health, which was occasionally encouraged by the same commercial companies importing the goods. The overefficient commercialization of these products facilitated their widespread diffusion, too, in particular toward the end of the eighteenth century. Tea, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, and sugar were products commercialized on a large scale and were processed industrially, stored in enormous warehouses, and distributed logistically, maintaining a regular supply even to small urban markets. The revolution in distribution eventually included the provincial middle classes that developed consumption habits that also depended on global markets; this in turn irritated those who saw the social diffusion of elite consumption as a sign of moral and cultural decline. Despite these eighteenth-century

critics, however, free trade philosophy—a popular notion that free trade was a basic right because it guaranteed the freedom of the individual consumer and the right to take advantage collectively from economic development (Trentmann 2008)—triumphed during the nineteenth century, particularly within the United Kingdom. This ideology became a worldwide concept by the middle of the nineteenth century and proved to be durable in the United Kingdom, where it was supported even by workingclass organizations. The appropriation of exotic consumptions was distinguished according to geographical and social contexts and resulted in the invention of new combinations of substances. Tea and coffee, for example, were blended with sugar by European consumers, whereas in the original context of consumption—in Asia, for example, with tea, and Arabia with coffee— they were not. Social class structures were influential in the mode of consumption. Aristocratic consumption of tea and coffee emphasized the exotic nature of these products and of their ritual consumption, which required expensive chinaware and sometimes even specific garments. Whereas for the middle classes, consumption was a sober event and usually occurred in coffeehouses, which became the centers of economic activity and for the discussion of public affairs. Coffeehouses were usually attended by male customers, but by the late-eighteenth century, domestic consumption of tea or coffee became occasions for women’s sociability. Finally, the success of the new beverages depended to some extent on the stimulant effects proffered by them or on their intoxication effects—as with tobacco—and they eventually substituted older substances used in rural areas of the then medieval Europe.

Class, Cultures, and Consumption The decline of the ancien régime of consumption based on sumptuary laws did not mean the end of social regulation on consumption culture. In the nineteenth century, consumer cultures were remapped according to distinctions in social class. Conspicuous luxuries of aristocrats, which during the nineteenth century blended together with the bourgeois elite forming a common consumption culture, were very different from the sober consumption culture of the middle and lower middle classes. Middle classes invested in decorous houses and clothes in order to

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distinguish their wealth and social status from that of the working classes, who were compelled to be prudent with the spending of their low incomes. Within the same working class, there were differences in consumption cultures, and this depended on the specific material conditions to which they were subjected. One difference clearly separated bluecollar workers, who could rely on a stable job and a regular income and who adopted some of the features of the lower middle classes, from that of the casual laborer with irregular incomes, who, in turn, minimized their fixed expenses—particularly homecentered consumptions—and preferred to spend any surplus in the pub, gambling, or attending popular variety shows. In spite of these differences within the lower classes, the comparative difference with middle-class consumption culture was much greater. This difference depended not only on income but also on a diverse use of resources linked to social circumstances, nutritional needs, and social networks. In 1912, Maurice Halbwachs began to analyze consumption behaviors through the lens of class affiliation, demonstrating that a white-collar worker and a blue-collar worker had very different consumption styles even if they were in the same income bracket. Moreover, sudden variations of this income did not significantly change their consumption behavior. This approach was aimed at criticizing Engels’s law and, more broadly, the economists’ approach to consumption that suggests consumer choice is based on utilitarian and rational criteria. Rather, Halbwachs maintained that consumption behavior depended on “social representation,” that is, on the social position with which the consumer identified himself and on a sort of habitus ascertained from childhood. Working-class families did not minimize their spending on eating and drinking, as they considered them requirements for the energy and strength needed for hard labor, and because such practices were central to patterns of sociability. Lodging, heating, and lighting were, however, regarded as less important by the working classes when compared with the middle classes, while the middle classes placed greater emphasis on the home, the domestic sphere, education, and cultural consumption. In research carried out in 1933, Halbwachs reaffirmed the importance of social-class affiliation in defining consumption cultures, although reassessing boundaries that had strongly characterized the nineteenth-century consumption culture. World War I

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and the advent of the 1920s epitomized further modifications in social structures both in Europe and more so in the United States, outlining a trend toward mass consumption that weakened traditional class consumption cultures, especially those of working-class families in which the breadwinner was able to support the whole family and women were not compelled to work outside the home. Focus was on domesticity, children’s education, and a thrift-shift consumption behavior toward a more middle-class pattern; by contrast, the lower working classes to whom a women’s wage was essential eventually perpetuated an active plebeian culture. Women worked in the factories, attended pubs along with men, socialized and drank in public places, dressed their families with low-grade ready-made clothes, and dedicated as little time to housework as possible. Although this distinction between “respectable” and “wild” working class has merit, it must be said that the boundaries between the two categories could be fleeting. A period of long unemployment, serious illness, or the death of the breadwinner could rapidly degrade the standard of living from that of a “respectable” working-class family to that of a beggar. It was not until the late-twentieth century that the welfare states in Western countries were able to protect the lower social classes from the dangers of poverty. The “survival strategy” of the lower working class became highly elaborated and was recently defined by a historiography that stresses the complex mobilization of productive and consumption resources on a microsocial level. The classification of consumer cultures according to social-class affiliations proved particularly effective for the “long nineteenth century,” as well as during the interwar years, but was criticized on two fronts. The first relates to massification processes that occurred by the late-nineteenth century, weakening social cleavages. These massifying processes were particularly strong in the United States and were accompanied by the transformation of industrial production and commercial distribution. Some peculiarities in American social history made the United States a fitting location for consumption massification. The absence of an ancien régime and a highly mobile society weakened the rigid social distinctions of traditional consumption cultures that had characterized nineteenth-century European societies. Because of favorable social conditions, wide and unified markets that encouraged large-scale production,

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and rapid transformations in commercial and marketing infrastructures, the mass consumption culture was able to quickly develop with the promise of well-being for all. American businessmen tried to export this new consumption concept into Europe after World War I but encountered many obstacles due to social, cultural, and political resistance that in turn refused to promote a consumption culture that would vanquish the old social distinctions, and due to general economic stagnation. It was only after World War II that the American blueprint in consumption spread throughout western Europe, disguised as the framework of an Atlantic market under U.S. hegemony. Thus, it was not a “pacific conquest” but more a consequence of World War II. This criticism can be said to be only partly acceptable because it is true that the massification processes created a common base for consumption cultures that traversed social divides, but they did not completely eliminate consumption based on social-class affiliation. Rather, they created a common ground based on new consumptions. Moreover, the simple mass diffusion of consumption items did not necessarily represent the principle factor of cultural massification because of the embodiment of the consumption appropriation process that involved the consumer group and the social context in which the appropriation occurred. The second critical point in connection to the differences within the social classes is that the historiography on working-class culture has for many years only taken into consideration the adult white male within these social backgrounds, obscuring differences of gender, ethnicity, and generation. Thus, recently, gender and ethnicity have become important heuristic tools in the representation of a more vivid and effective image of the life within working-class districts and the tensions and conflicts that also characterized them. Generation—as it has been revealed by research conducted on the younger generation of workers—has proved to be a very significant element of fracture for examining the complexity of working-class life, when considering that consumption was often a field of conflict between old and young workers. This criticism has helped to move research from the social roots of consumption cultures toward a deeper and more composite understanding of the differences within working-class cultures. Nevertheless, the fact that women and men, old and young, and

black and white workers established different types of consumption cultures does not prevent us from looking at them through the lens of commonalities, which can be pointed out by a comparison with the consumption of other social strata, such as that of the middle classes and that of aristocracy. Thus, social class remains an effective scientific tool for the analysis of consumption cultures.

Commercial Distribution and Consumer Cultures Commercial distribution is a key aspect of the consumption process, and not only in functional terms. The production of a commodity, the buildup of a social relationship within commercial premises, and the design and packaging that mediate the selling of the product are all aspects that substantially contribute to the symbolic dimensions of consumption. Urbanization and the increasing division of labor in the nineteenth century strengthened the role of the marketplace in supplying society with goods. Commercial and technical infrastructures enhanced the influence of these marketplaces. Water and road networks in the eighteenth century, and railways since the mid-nineteenth century, widened the scope of markets and increased commercial competition by allowing for the movement of goods to be faster and cheaper, more punctual, and therefore reliable. Medieval institutions such as annual fairs—typical of a rural, poorly networked economy—waned markedly or dramatically changed shape. The image and function of urban markets were also transformed: city markets became the junctions of commercial networks based on the regional specialization in production integrated by new transport technologies. Urged on by reform movements that struggled to improve health conditions, the state intervened to guarantee food quality and to regulate the handling and processing of food in such places as shops, stores, slaughterhouses, butchers, bakeries, and dairies. The number of shops and the connections between retailers, wholesalers, and producers increased greatly. Although transformations were wide ranging, capital and large cities had a vanguard role in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the provinces, people traveled to the capital cities to buy fashion items (paintings, books, potteries, clothes, etc.) and to attend the latest shows. This signified

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the importance of provincial industrialists’ reaching the capital cities to obtain more visibility for their products. Cities were at the forefront of commercial entertainment, too. Amusing gardens with an entry fee provided an atmosphere of rural mystery within the city. They provided music and performance shows, fireworks, food and drinks, as well as a space for social activities. They advertised their initiatives in the press. Vauxhall Gardens offered simulation and illusion, which became commodities, making it possible to play with one’s own identity experiencing new social encounters due to the commercialization of pleasure. At the end of the nineteenth century, theme parks had been established in several large cities. At the Prater park in Vienna, the Venedig in Wien (Venice in Vienna) was opened, which attempted to reproduce Venice by combining the exoticism of nineteenthcentury fairs with new technological attractions such as photography, electric lighting, phonographs, and cinema. The simulation of Venice—complete with buildings, canals, bridges, shops, coffeehouses, even Venetian gondoliers—proved popular, and it remained open for five years before it was finally dismantled. It began a new trend in amusement and was followed by later simulations of Japan, Spain, and Egypt. Venedig in Wien and its successors thus created a new space for reconfiguring the public consumption, using as its base mass entertainment. Modern consumption processes refer to an imaginative dimension that has been dated to between Reformation and romanticism. By transforming inner desires and sensibilities, it became possible to increase control and manipulate emotions. This was also due to some special products created out of the cultural industry, such as eighteenth-century gothic fiction, which induced dreamlike experiences in dimensions where fantasy did not substitute reality but manipulated the very elements of realism producing the exalted and previously extinct emotions. The melding of contrasting sensation (also typical of modern hedonism)—mixing pleasure, sadness, and nostalgia—nurtures in effect modern consumerism. The insatiable consumption of objects, images, and stories is a means of stimulating the imagination. Thus, modern commercial organizations must feed this need for image consumption as well as rationalize distribution for widening urban markets that cannot rely on self-consumption alone.

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Arcades were privately owned spaces that were open to the public, where new building materials and technologies created an environment that combined consumption with sociability. Walter Benjamin saw in the arcades a resource for reenchanting the world by means of the aesthetic dimensions of world commodities, the seductive experiences of consumption, and the commercialization of social life. The capital city that embraced this kind of urban consumption, more than any other, was Paris, but arcades eventually spread throughout Europe and into many large capital cities as well as early tourist cities like Bath. Special exhibitions and world fairs also prompted new forms of consumption, and besides some of the more famous exhibitions found in London and Paris, medium-sized cities also hosted exhibitions. Promoters of pathbreaking technological innovations showcased them at great expositions (e.g., the telegraph in London in 1851; the elevator and reinforced concrete in Paris in 1867; the sewing machine, typewriter, and telephone in Philadelphia in 1876; the refrigerator and electric light in Paris in 1878; the phonograph in Paris in 1889). In addition to these spectacular innovations, the great expositions displayed the tableaux of modern life. They made the public aware of the commercial application of such technologies and the daily impact they could have, from personal body care to household appliances, from food products to hobby items. Moreover, they were a platform for glamorous representation bridging commercialization and ethnographic exhibition built up by imperial cultures. The myth of progress was celebrated within popular shows that mixed the higher and lower cultures, fine arts and industries, and circus and technologies. The birth and diffusion of department stores remains another important turning point in a cultural historical assessment of consumption. At the end of the nineteenth century, department stores became the space par excellence for the modern consumer culture. Although they had forerunners such as the luxury shops during the first half of the nineteenth century—which had already introduced sophisticated selling techniques—they represented a striking discontinuity on the symbolic and practical levels. In the mid-nineteenth century, the larger European cities changed from being “introverted” to being “extroverted.” The department store represented a catalyst, a result, and an accelerator of this transformation process. Private capitalists invested in these

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urban areas promoting commercialization, urban transportation, tourist infrastructures, commercial institutions, and various other services. Thus, they significantly modified the urban landscape through commercialization and entertainment, providing new social opportunities by consumption. Department stores aimed at involving the public within a spectacle of commodities that created an exciting environment in which the ongoing renewal of shop windows and the rhythm of sales modified the time dimensions of mass consumption. Shopping became an element of urban leisure through which to define individual and collective identities, and department stores became the benchmark of twentieth-century urban maps, garnering mention in tourist guides along with civil and religious monuments. They stood out with their imposing premises but also invaded cities with promotional material, picture cards, calendars, and diaries. They recovered some of the traditional communication tools such as cheap prints and almanacs by means of modern advertising strategies carried out with bizarre, magical, exotic, and fantastical iconography that attracted predominantly children and young people. Department stores also played an important role in the cultivation of modern consumptions. They displayed methods of dressing oneself, they built up environments, they introduced the consumer to the “needs” of modern life, and they set new standards in clothing, home furnishing, and leisure. Their role in promoting consumptions provoked heavy criticism and found opposition on the whole for the negative influence they exerted on middle-class women, disrupting their mental balance and restraints, lowering self-control, and even inducing kleptomania. Department stores had a great impact on gender, not only from a consumer point of view but also from an employment point of view because they hired many young saleswomen. The image and lifestyle of these young women became more apparent as department stores and commercial cultures challenged traditional relationships of patronage for unmarried women in the metropolis. Department store owners were well aware of this subversive potential of consumer cultures and tried to arrange a sort of compromise between tradition and modernity, between national image and the new consumer culture. The boundary between emancipation and dependence was thin and ambiguous: on the one hand, the new consumption cultures allowed women

subjectivation processes; on the other, advertisements created an image of femininity that set new standards and requirements to which women had to respond. Shopping areas provided infrastructures in a female public sphere where women could associate and new initiatives could take place.

The Crisis of Individual Consumerism in the Interwar Period Belle époque Europe seemed to have been launched toward a future of progress that promised a continuous increase in wealth, and on the other side of the Atlantic, new production and commercialization systems also promised to maintain this development in mass consumption. The interwar periods dampened enthusiasm due to the misery created by the wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The free-market ideology—which had accompanied consumption increase for most of the nineteenth century—fell into disgrace when consumption cultures became increasingly influenced by states both in material and symbolic terms. State control of main resources during and after the wars and Soviet and technocratic experiences of economic planning were accompanied by new emphasis on consumption as a collective or a national question that attacked individualistic views on consumption. The Soviet experience was a sort of workshop of new theories on consumption that would affect the whole of Eastern Europe after World War II. During the “war communism,” the abolition of moneyed salaries reduced the role of money as a mediating tool in individual consumption. Salary paid in kind made it possible for the state to determine and organize “scientifically” consumption styles on “real and biological needs,” overcoming the waste of individual consumerism. The rejection of bourgeois individualism was based on a view of the individual as an expression of the social organism questioning the legitimacy of his right to decide on his own. To bind consumption to the physiological needs seemed to be a decisive step toward increasing and optimizing social resources and the building of socialism. Thus, the socialist state became the regulator not only of production but also of the entire social sphere. After World War II, Nikita Khrushchev attempted to legitimize the Soviet system by increasing consumption after the long shortages induced by Stalinism, and he reaffirmed the famous Marxian quotation from the

History

Critique of the Gotha Program urging the apparatus to organize production in order to give to each one according to his own needs. Thus, it was necessary to establish consumption standards that would satisfy social needs excluding the idea of individual desires as well as the consumer subjectivity implied within it. The politics surrounding consumption in Eastern Europe was easily governed because prices were established by the state and were independent from production costs. The state established which goods to produce and, through the regulation of prices, was also able to establish who would consume individual goods and in what quantities. Advertisements in socialist countries were developed in order to symbolically support these bureaucratic decision processes. During the interwar periods, there were other approaches to individual consumerism besides that of the Soviet Union. In Germany, there was great interest in American Fordism, which predictably affected the consumption spheres. Rationalization promoted new modern lifestyles for changing the daily lives of the masses, their domestic spheres, and entertainment channels through the use of new mass consumption. Nevertheless, the stagnation of the European economy during the interwar periods and the persistence of a class structure within consumption cultures limited the possibility of developing mass consumption, and attempts to rationalize consumption depended more on a need to cope with shortages rather than that of commercial expansion. At the forefront of the catastrophic effects of the Great Depression on German economy was a debate on “the end of capitalism,” which proposed a reorganization of the economy on the basis of corporatism and state intervention according to the patterns of economic organization found in fascist and pan-German ideologies. This autarchic perspective required a necessary nationalist rhetoric on consumption because it implied a closed system within which to accomplish the production/consumption cycle. Nationalist consumption ideologies were already present in the nineteenth century, particularly in the protectionist context of capitalistic expansion, but in the 1930s, it became more effective not only in Germany but also in other central European countries, for example, in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. These assumptions found a breeding ground in Germany because they were associated with anti-Semitism—since Jews were represented as agents

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of the free-market global economy—and Italy where autarchy was the necessary premise of war economy.

The Golden Age of Mass Consumption Consumption and well-being were the fundamental pillars of democracy in United States by the late-nineteenth century, although consumption was tempered by ethical principles and moderation. In this context, which prematurely legitimized consumption for the masses, new knowledge and selling techniques easily developed, enlarging and renewing the consumption spheres. Marketing and advertising would boost consumption, resulting in a new pattern in daily lifestyles. The American commercial culture had a fundamental influence on the global history of consumption in the twentieth century, promoting trends toward massification of consumption and opposing the traditional class structures and symbolic hierarchies that characterized the European consumption cultures. The encounter between these two philosophies of consumption was not easy, and attempts by several American businessmen to export mass consumerism into Europe during the interwar period were frustrated by rigid cultural resistance. Mass consumption was associated with bad taste and low aesthetic standards and therefore considered a risk that threatened the social hierarchy based on taste and glamorous consumption. In spite of these resistances—which came mainly from the hegemonic classes in Europe—there was in the first half of the twentieth century a popular enthusiasm for entertainment patterns coming from the United States, witnessed by the success of shows like the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, the revue negre of Josephine Baker, or Hollywood movies (Kroes-Rydell 2005). After World War II, new political and economic circumstances drew Western Europe and Japan under American influence, which laid the foundations for the spread of mass consumption. Thus, World War II was fundamental in sweeping away European social resistance and in turn observed the unfolding of American hegemony on the Western world on military, economic, and symbolic levels. Tensions between American managers of the European Recovery Program (ERP) and Italian businessmen revealed different visions for the development of a consumer society. The ERP was deemed

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to have created the industrial basis for high wages and in turn expanding consumption, while several European businessmen continued to consider low wages as the main tool of capital accumulation. They maintained that in Italy, capital was expensive and labor was cheap, so they would have to reward with more capital rather than labor to make the economy grow, and they felt that they had to invest particularly in the production of luxury goods for which a strong market was anticipated. This was a common idea in the early 1950s, which shows how far away the hegemonic economic culture was from the acknowledgment of mass consumption as a fundamental tool for economic development. Nonetheless, the American blueprint of mass consumption fully unfolded in Western Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, dramatically changing consumption cultures. This process has sometimes been defined as “Americanization,” which was effective in emphasizing the depth of transformation and the role played by the United States, but it was misleading, too. First of all, when considering the role of American mass-consumption patterns, one must consider the long-term context, from at least the 1920s onward. But above all, it could be said that American influences have always been contested somehow, even at the time of its most powerful hegemony after World War II. Active processes for reception and reinterpretation of significance spread by an American consumption culture were normal. Thus, it became necessary to analyze the concrete vehicles of cultural mediation, the selection of successfully imported elements of American material culture, and, above all, the reception process. Reception processes were not linear: there was not a simple transfer of meanings between the United States and Europe because—as was pointed out by anthropology and cultural studies—the reception of a cultural product always implied an adaptation of meaning that resulted in something new by comparison to that of the original. Moreover, reception processes occur within niche or specific social circuits so that the building of consumption cultures have to be analyzed as hybrid phenomena permeated by material and symbolic global flows—in which the United States certainly had a fundamental role during the twentieth century—but embedded deep within specific social contexts. Nevertheless, the spread of mass consumption during the second half of the twentieth century has

exerted a certain standardization of a material culture: privatization of domestic space furnished with mass-produced furniture and equipped with electric household appliances; individual mobility based on the mass spread of cars and scooters for commuting and—above all—for entertainment and tourism; and commercialization of leisure within commercial area, cinemas, clubs, and seaside resorts. The commercial institution that supported this powerful consumption growth was the supermarket, which was already widespread in the United States by the 1930s and which could compete with traditional shopkeepers because of the reduction in prices allowing for self-service and economies of scale. In Europe, supermarkets spread only after World War II, and in some countries only during the 1960s, and rapidly became the symbol of wealth, of consumer choice, and of improved consumption standards for the masses. It was a fundamental change that focused primarily on food consumption with the diffusion of packaged products that changed the relationship between the consumer and the product. The brand became the element that founded consumer trust in the product, an idea reiterated by the function of advertising—which could by this time advertise on television, creating the consumption semiotic. The diffusion of durable and other products was often not, or not completely, new: sometimes these products were in the marketplace already at the beginning of the twentieth century. The newness was the mass characterization of consumption that revolved around clothes, durables, furniture, leisure activities, LPs and singles, motorbikes and cars, and books and magazines. This relative standardization of consumption sometimes associated with a sluggish social conformism was the target of critiques of the affluent society in the 1960s. This was just one side of the argument because along with standardization, which effectively made for a more homogenous consumption behavior on national and even global levels, the expansion of the material platform within society allowed for different consumption styles due to the enormous widening of the commercial offer. New subcultures grew up around peculiar consumption styles that affirmed different values, images, and messages that fractured the social map. This process of differentiation occurred at the same time as standardization because old regional and local specificity were dissolved, opening up consumption to a larger world

History

while at the same time allowing new identities and cultural differences to arise from the differentiation of consumption.

The Postmodern Age of Consumption The trend in social differentiation by means of the consumption styles accelerated in the 1980s, configuring the so-called postmodern styles of consumption. These consumption styles were the result of a sort of bricolage of different cultural elements that made decline usual and placed coherent distinctions on class, generations, and even gender. In the 1980s and 1990s, the enormous growth in global commercial media widened communication opportunities and made it possible to articulate identities through a broader field of symbolic resources, but the roots of this current progress lay in the 1960s when youth subcultures and the critics of social conformism and mass consumption started a new wave of consumer cultures and business initiatives: on the one hand, there was grassroots innovation that challenged hegemonic consumption cultures; on the other, the semiotic of consumption was built up by advertisers and businessmen who had begun to use this social differentiation trend in an attempt to develop a marketplace that seemed to be full of standardized goods for the masses. These two elements—“from below” and “from above”—could be distinguished by an analytical frame because, by historical experience, they inevitably melded. Each social experience is part of a semiotic circuit in which meanings build up from the process of a commercialization flow. Even the most radical subcultures are somehow linked to commercial spheres, even if for reversing its message for example in the case of the punk subculture. Thus, the cultural roots of the postmodern styles of consumption refer to the countercultural social practices of the 1960s and 1970s and possibly earlier to the artistic practices of manipulation through the use of symbols and signs typical of the vanguard during the 1920s. But it was in the 1980s that they became a common social experience because of the global restructuring of capitalism after the depression of the 1970s; its recovery was due to key words such as flexible specialization, small-scale, network enterprises, just-in-time production—a whole institutional organization of the global economies that endorsed and encouraged growing differentiation of consumption. Standard mass production did not

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disappear, but the definition of consumer styles and cultural identities did not depend on mass consumption but on the goods able to signify distinctions and identities. There are some elements that contradict these ideals because throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the diffusion of global brands reached unknown dimensions, representing a potential homologation of global consumption. The global triumph of McDonald’s during these decades is symbolic of the homologation of cultural identity and social organization—or is it proof of a more complex phenomenon? The research into the expansion of McDonald’s within the Asian marketplace stressed the role of this brand in standardizing consumption throughout the world, primarily due to benchmarking in the production processes and to the commercialization of food, but it is also maintained that McDonald’s was not able to control the social message that spread through the globe (Watson 1997). The messages represented by McDonald’s food as well as the McDonald’s commercial premises can be very different according to social and cultural contexts through which they spread. They may be rejected as an alien invasion or accepted enthusiastically as an exciting novelty, but more often than not, they are noticeably appropriated in the context of eating habits and in the use of urban space that may be very different country to country. This suggests that even something so commercially standardized such as that offered by McDonald’s may become the object of appropriation and domestication that differentiate its messages. This may also be true of several other American and global brands. These appropriation processes are understood by cultural studies as the agency of consumers able to modify the meanings imposed by the commercial semiotic, a sort of resistance to the social homologation through consumption. The approach of cultural studies consumption has been extremely important in stressing the limits of standardization in society by means of consumption and in turn giving back to consumers an active role. Nevertheless, it may be misleading to ensue from this consumer agency a sort of counter hegemonic role of a subjective consumer culture toward the global dynamics of capitalism. Indeed, global capitalism expands because of cultural differences, marketing, and advertising that recognize and celebrate those differences in order to foster new commercial markets. In other words, the goal

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of global capitalism is not cultural standardization but the pursuit of profits, and if profits are achieved through cultural differences, the entire semiotic apparatus of commercial capitalism will encourage cultural differences. If we remain narrow-mindedly at a cultural level, consumer processes seem to fully realize the postmodern freedom, but consumption items are inevitably embedded in material processes because they are not simply floating signifiers but are produced with raw materials, because they require labor and investment, and because they have an impact on health and the environment. Commercialization processes involved all aspects of these, and to have a critical perspective on them requires the consideration of their environmental consequences, the labor conditions applied in the production processes, and their effects on social, gender, and ethnic inequalities. Consumption cultures are rooted in material contexts that cannot be separated because they are an integral part of their understanding. Paolo Capuzzo See also Capitalism; Department Stores; Great Depression (U.S.); Historical Analysis; Luxury and Luxuries; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; Social Class

Further Readings Berry, Christopher J. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge, 1993. Crossick, Geoffrey, and Serge Jaumain, eds. Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999. De Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005. de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Elias, Norbert. Die höfische Gesellschaft [The court society]. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Lang, 1969. Hunt, Alan. Governance and Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and John H. Plumb, eds. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Perrot, Phillippe. Le luxe. Une richesse entre faste e confort XVIIIe–XIXe siècle [Luxury: A wealth between pomp and comfort 18th–19th century]. Paris: Seuil, 1995. Rappaport, Erika D. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1996. Roche, Daniel. La culture des apparences. Une histoire du vêtement (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) [Cultural appearances: A history of clothing (17th–18th century)]. Paris: Fayard, 1990. Roche, Daniel. Histoire des choses banales. Naissance de la consommation dans les sociétés traditionnelles (17.–19. siècle) [History of mundane things: Birth of consumption in traditional societies (17th–19th century)]. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Rydell, Robert W., and Rob Kroes. Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World 1869–1922. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon, 1989. Trentmann, Frank. Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Watson, James L., ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Williams, Rosalind H. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

HISTORY

OF

FOOD

Studying history of food, or rather food from a historical perspective, has been part of several disciplines’ research agenda, though archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have perhaps been those most likely to dig deep into the earth and the archives to interpret human remains in relation to food consumption and to analyze foodways across the globe, such as food customs in everyday life, food production, preparation of dishes, cooking, and cultural behaviors at table in different social environments. During the nineteenth century, other specialists such as sociologists—and later on in the twentieth century, nutritionists and researchers from the medical profession—have shown an interest in explaining and discussing the modern consumer

History of Food

society by looking at historical processes and later outcomes; at the beginning of the twenty-first century, researchers from different disciplines have used historical insights to put their own studies into context, as demonstrated in several recent encyclopedias on food and history and food and culture. Although the number of studies on food in history has increased considerably during the past decades, the focus has mainly been on the Western world.

Food Habits Food habits have changed considerably over time, from the early history of human beings characterized as Homo sapiens more than a hundred thousand years ago to today’s consumer society in the early twenty-first century. In this process of feeding mankind, we have gone from survival to plenty, from hunting and gathering in the wild to hunting and gathering among shelves and freezers in modern supermarkets, from an unprocessed unique selection of various foods in the wild to industrialized, mass-produced, and distributed food. In the past, a person’s food habits were dependent on local availability of food, but in modern society, we see a global exchange of food as a commodity, where food has become a form of cultural expression among consumers. This also entails that the function of food has made a transition from being regarded foremost as fuel to being something that essentially fulfills psychological needs. Many modern researchers see nutritional intake during the prehistoric era as preferable in many ways to modern food intake, provided that energy requirements are fulfilled, whereas our food habits at the beginning of the twenty-first century are associated with welfare problems such as the metabolic syndrome, which is linked to overeating and an unbalanced diet. Looking more specifically at food intake over time, there have been some major periods of transition in the history of food. There are debates as to whether man, meaning the first hominids during the early prehistoric era, snatched carcasses or behaved as daring hunters, as meat played an important part in their diet. Moving forward in time, we know that the human diet consisted of both vegetable foods, such as wild plants, berries, roots, nuts, and mushrooms, and food from the animal kingdom. Man learned to catch all sorts of aquatic animals, including fish and shellfish, such as fresh-water mussels,

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while everything from birds to mammoths were among the hunted land animals. Insects were also a common foodstuff. Hunting and fishing tended to be men’s work, while gathering of plants was seen as a female task, showing that food-related work was gendered long before modern times. During this early period, cooking was invented. Cooking distinguished man from the animal kingdom and made both animal and vegetable food more digestible. About 10,000 years ago, there was a shift from food collection to food production. In the process of controlling nature, both animals and crops were domesticated, which made food items such as different grains and milk products (where milk-giving animals existed) an important part of man’s food habits. Yet not only cows were associated with milk products. In Kazakhstan, the horse was used as a milk-giving animal, resulting specifically in the product koumiss, which is dated to about 3500 BC. In different parts of the world, grains became a staple food early on, for example, rice in Asia, rye in the northern parts of Europe, wheat in the southern parts of Europe, and corn (maize) in South America. Thus, the cuisines of most agrarian societies have two important elements: a staple food and accompaniments, the latter consisting of vegetable- or animal-based foods. Though we may suspect that the process by which food transitioned from merely meeting nutritional needs to symbolizing identity and cultural expression started before the Neolithic period, it is during this period that the latter function was more accentuated. An example of this was the decision not to domesticate the deer. In the Greek and Roman cultures, food from the untilled, uncultivated landscape was a cultural symbol of the poor and was therefore avoided by more fortunate citizens. However, it should be noted that the developing agricultural society was still highly dependent on hunting and fishing, and food products from these activities were important features of many food cultures and in many regions. Thus, different cuisines were established around the world. These could include the same food items, but they were presented in different meals. Meals were based on cooking with characteristic foods in distinct combinations, with different preparation methods and eating techniques depending on the specific value system, according to which some foods were acceptable and others were not. There were foods for the gods and for humans, and foods

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that played a part in the religious and political world. For example, the pig and wine were associated with Christian Europe, which was quite different especially from the Muslim, but also from the Jewish, world. Thus, in many cultures, religion has established the rules and rituals we associate with a specific group and its food choices. Food was categorized as edible, as medicine, as food for the civilized, or as food that only the barbarians would choose. Dietary rules in relation to human health have frequently been part of the interpretation of ancient food regimes, in which, for example, spices had a special role. Important discoveries and foods are associated with different cultures. For instance, Egypt is credited with the art of making bread and fermentation, Greece played a key role in making olives not only an acceptable but also fashionable food in the Mediterranean region, while the Romans made spices an essential part of refined cooking. Rice was originally cultivated in Asia, either in the southern parts of China or in Thailand. In China, household pigs were seen as early as perhaps 2000 BC, and in this part of the world, the words for meat and pig became synonymous. From a contemporary perspective, it could be said that the Romans were the first to experience mass consumption through their so-called annona system, which was established to relieve poverty. The annona was sanctioned by the authorities and meant that almost one third of the citizens of Rome were given free grain so they could stay alive, but with Severus Alexander, the free grain was replaced with ready-made bread. Thus, mass-produced food was distributed to a group living within one region and within one culture. However, to say that we see here the first examples of consumers would probably be a misinterpretation, as Frank Trentmann posited that the construction of the consumer as an identity and a category would not be seen until the eighteenth century. Yet in the coming millennia, we find many examples of how food choices were associated with cultural and social values, such as when food becomes fashion and a sign of luxury and when food comes to represent different strata in society. A specific example of this is when food was used to establish regal and imperial legitimacy during the Roman period, and later on to establish other social and political hierarchies through feasts and banquets. Spices and salt were used early on in different cuisines but conquered kitchens all over the world when the spice trade was intensified during the medieval

period. The most characteristic development of the late Middle Ages in Europe was that most people came to be dependent on an agrarian economy for their sustenance and that markets became an important part of society and in relation to the purchasing of food. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, food from the New World, the South American continent especially, was discovered, and food items such as potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, and corn (maize) were introduced to the kitchens of Europe. The more frequent traveling and trade around the world affected food habits and cuisines by introducing new tastes, especially associated with fruits and vegetables and new combinations of foods, leading to the construction of new dishes and meals. During the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, conservation and preservation of food were developed, which made food from almost any part of the world available. Although alteration and adulteration of food by dishonest tradesmen had been widespread during the medieval period and perhaps earlier, food scares and awareness of food safety among citizens became more common during the nineteenth century. It is during this period that the consumer—as a demanding, active, and identity-seeking citizen—is constructed. The British taste in food was shaped during the Victorian era, and tea gained new meanings in the course of political, scientific, and popular debates: tea packed in China was considered more dangerous than tea domestically packed and distributed. Thus, the notion of foreign food and specific beliefs about unknown food that we associate with consumer attitudes in the twenty-first century were also seen centuries ago. During the twentieth century, food habits changed rapidly, including food fashion, which is perhaps the most dominant feature of the modern period, together with the fact that we today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are dependent on industrial mass-produced and distributed food. All this means that the consumers of today must constantly relate to food choices and identity. At the same time, food and health have become an integrated part of society, the consumer, the citizen, and the individual’s everyday life, which also affects consumers’ identity in relation to food.

Food as a Research Area History of food as a research area has transitioned from studying the food itself—including what, how,

History of Food

when, and where it has been consumed—to looking at the identities associated with food consumption. This change in focus can be seen among archeologists as well as among anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. What we have witnessed during the past decades is the publication of a number of anthologies on food in history in which scholars from many different disciplines are represented. Historians who previously dealt with agrarian and starvation crises or questions of social and economic history became interested in the concept of identity in the second half of the 1990s. The quantitative approach to food history studies—meaning the food budgets, food prices, and calories that were in focus until the 1990s—was replaced by qualitative approaches. As an example of the quantitative approach used in early food history studies, class equality was discussed in terms of calories, cost, and expenditure, rather than in terms of food choices, beliefs, and stigma, which would be more common factors in a qualitative approach. Analytical attention was also given to, for example, culinary cultures and taste and how signs, codes, and consumption are crucial to the construction of identities. A special group of scholars were those belonging to the socalled Annales School, the histoire des mentalités, which represented scholars studying everyday life. In the late-twentieth century, interest in the construction of the consumer was beginning to take shape also among food history researchers. Thus, we see a movement from presenting descriptive studies on food in history to more analytical and theoretical approaches. A more recent special focus on food in history is nutritional anthropology, which could be explained by the increased interest in health and diet among consumers and the medical profession during the late-twentieth century. The health benefits of prehistoric food are discussed, and some experts recommend that consumers eat a Stone Age diet as an alternative to mass-produced industrial food. However, the notion of how this so-called Stone Age food is to be produced in modern times is not altogether clear. The focus on identity and culture as analytical inputs when studying food in history is problematic because of the problem of perspective: who is conducting the analysis? How can remains, in terms of artifacts and documents, be interpreted by modern man, when modern man has not only developed over thousands of years as a biological creature,

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both physically and mentally, but is also continually affected by the culture in which she or he lives? Yet it seems that more scholars than ever before, from many different disciplines, are becoming interested in the history and legacy of man that has shaped our food habits, food choices, the way we as human beings relate to food in everyday life, and how we construct ourselves as individuals and group members, such as the family. The research area of food in history has just started to develop and will be interesting to follow in the future. Because of the mundane image everyday food has had, the area of gender and food in history has been neglected. It would seem likely that this area will receive more attention in the future. Christina Fjellström See also Dieting; Family Meal; Food Consumption; Food Scares; Historical Analysis; History; Spices; Sugar; Tea

Further Readings Baker, Sera, Martyn Allen, Sarah Middle, and Kristopher Poole, eds. Food and Drink in Archaeology. Vol. 1. Totnes, UK: Prosper Books, 2008. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Food: A History. London: Macmillan, 2001. Flandrin, Jean-Louise, and Massimo Montanari, eds. Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Translated by Albert Sonnenfeldt. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Menell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Menell, Stephen, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. Van Otterloo. The Sociology of Food, Eating, Diet and Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Mintz, Sidney M., and Christine M. Du Bois. “The Anthropology of Food and Eating.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 99–119. Montanari, Massimo. The Culture of Food. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Outram, Alan K., Natalie A. Stear, Robin Bendrey, Sandra Olsen, Alexei Kasparov, Victor Zaibert, Nick Thorpe, and Richard P. Evershed. “The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking.” Science 323 (2009): 1332–1335. Rappaport, Erika. “Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party.” In The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by Frank Trentmann, 125–146. Oxford: Berg Publisher, 2006.

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Scholliers, Peter, ed. Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Strong, Roy. Feast: A History of Grand Eating. London: Pimlico, 2003. Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. London: Eyre Methuen, 1973. Trentmann, Frank, ed. The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

HOBBYISTS

AND

AMATEURS

Hobbyists and amateurs distinguish themselves from many other kinds of participants in leisure in that the first two systematically pursue, typically over a period of many years, a complex, specialized, highly fulfilling free-time activity. Such leisure engenders acquisition of substantial skill, knowledge, or experience, usually a combination of these. Amateurs enjoy a special relationship with professionals in the same activity and with an interested public. Meanwhile, hobbyists are distinguished from amateurs primarily by lack of a professional counterpart. Hobbyists may also have commercial equivalents and often have small publics who are interested in what they achieve. Sometimes called enthusiasms, amateurism and hobbyism are largely Western pastimes. They are classified as “serious leisure,” which is frequently compared with “casual leisure”: the immediately, intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived, pleasurable core activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it. Thus, a casual leisure dabbler on the piano differs in attitude and acquired skill from an amateur, who in turn differs along these same lines from a professional. Likewise, people who accumulate a few old books are not book collectors, since collectors are hobbyists who, among other accomplishments, systematically acquire books, learn their value as collectibles, and know the place of each in society, culture, and history. The consumptive practices of hobbyists and amateurs vary considerably according to type of participant. Amateurs are found in art, science, sports, and entertainment. Hobbyists turn up in collecting, making and tinkering activities, activity participation (noncompetitive, rule-based pursuits, e.g., fishing, barbershop singing), sports and games (competitive, rule-based pursuits, e.g., field hockey, long-distance

running), and the liberal arts hobbies (extensive selfdirected learning in an art, cuisine, language, science, culture, history, etc.).

History As professionalization spreads from one occupation to another, what was once considered hobbyist leisure in some of these spheres quietly, inevitably, and unnoticeably evolves into a new pursuit—one best named modern amateurism. Modern amateurism has been rising alongside those occupations where some leisure participants in the occupation have discovered a livelihood there and, consequently, can now devote themselves to it as a vocation rather than an avocation. What has been happening is that those who play at the activities encompassed by these occupations are being overrun in significance, if not in numbers, by professionals and amateurs. It is a process that seems to unfold as follows. As opportunities for fulltime pursuit of a skill or activity gradually appear, those people with even an average aptitude for such skills are able to develop them to a level observably higher than that of the typical part-time participant. With today’s mass availability of professional performances (or products), whatever the field, new standards of excellence soon confront all participants, professional or not. Although the performances of professionals are frequently impressive, no category of participant is more impressed than that of nonprofessionals who, through direct experience, know the activity intimately. Indeed, once they become aware of professional standards, all they have accomplished seems mediocre by comparison. They are thus faced with a critical choice in their careers as participants: either restrict identification with the activity to remain largely unaffected by such invidious comparisons or identify sufficiently with it to attempt to meet those standards. With the first choice, which is still common, the part-time participant remains a player, dabbler, or dilettante. For him, the activity is casual leisure. It lacks necessity, obligation, and utility; it is enjoyed with a disinterestedness that sets it apart as an activity from the participant’s everyday life. The second choice, which is less common, impels part-time participants away from play toward pursuit of durable benefits. The road to these benefits, however, is characterized by necessity, obligation, seriousness,

Hobbyists and Amateurs

and commitment, as expressed in regimentation (e.g., rehearsals, practice) and systematization (e.g., schedules, organization), leading to the status of amateur for some and professional for others. There was a time when casual and serious participants were alone in their leisure—without professionals to compete against, model themselves after, or simply mingle with. Lacking such people, they were, in effect, hobbyists. Indeed, the early history of many contemporary professions is exclusively about hobbyists, the only participants in the activity at the time. In effect, these activities were too new, too little in demand, or too underdeveloped to be pursued as livelihoods. When their fields began, a number of astronomers, archaeologists, teachers, musicians, painters, jugglers, bowlers, soccer players, and so forth, earned their living doing something else. Still, by the standards of the day, they were the experts in their areas of leisure. Following the rise of professionalism in some fields, amateurism lingered as an honorable tradition, while attempts at full-time employment, not to mention professionalization, were derided. Many nineteenthcentury, free-time (typically upper-class) artists, athletes, and scientists despised making money this way. Knowledge about the history of hobbies centers mainly on industrialized capitalist Europe and North America from the mid-nineteenth century. Steven Gelber observes that industrialism separated work from leisure such that employment became more work-like and nonwork became more problematic. Americans, he said, responded in two ways to the threat posed by leisure as potential mischief caused by idle hands. Reformers tried to eliminate, or at least restrict access to, inappropriate activity, while encouraging people to seek socially approved freetime outlets. Hobbies and other serious leisure pursuits were high on the list of such outlets. Like work, leisure had to be productive. Hobbies were also particularly valued, because they bridged especially well the worlds of work and home. And both sexes found them appealing, albeit mostly not the same ones. Nevertheless, before approximately 1880, before becoming defined as productive use of free time, hobbies were considered “dangerous obsessions.”

Consumption and Serious Leisure Many serious leisure pursuits, for participation in their highly appealing core activities, require one

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or more preliminary purchases. This is facilitative, leisure-based consumption (Stebbins 2009). Here the acquired item only inaugurates a set of activities, which when completed enable the purchaser to use the item to generate a satisfying and fulfilling leisure experience. Consider an example: to play music, amateur violinists must usually rent or purchase a violin—a consumptive act. Yet their most profound leisure experience is competently and artistically playing music and, earlier, practicing to accomplish this, all of which costs nothing, though, obviously, it is facilitated by using the acquired instrument (a consumer product). Moreover, this profound leisure experience may be further facilitated by buying music lessons and tickets for transportation to a teacher’s studio. And there are hobbies and amateur pursuits where consumption is negligible, if nonexistent. Here participants need not buy or rent something, as in collecting (e.g., leaves, seashells, insects), the liberal arts reading hobbies, and certain outdoor sports and participation activities (e.g., playing soccer or touch football, walking in nature, swimming in a lake). Still, noteworthy exceptions exist. For some, consumption, although peripheral to the core activity of the serious leisure in question, may nevertheless be a momentous act. Thus, buying an expensive, fine violin is thrilling for a committed amateur violinist, as purchase of a purebred dog is for a hobbyist breeder or a top-class sailboat is for a hobbyist sailor. In fact the intricate relationship between consumption and serious leisure grows ever more intricate when the act of acquisition is itself complicated. This intricacy seems especially common in the hobby of collecting. Consider the efforts of a coin collector to locate and buy a rare specimen. This person must learn where to look for the item, travel there to acquire it, and perhaps bargain with its owner for an affordable price. This is, in fact, a core activity of all collecting—acquisition of collectibles—though there are typically other such activities, among them, cataloguing and preserving the collectibles acquired. Collectors of fine art, old cars, and antique furniture, and possibly other objects, also commonly experience in these involved terms acquisition of their collectibles. Furthermore, the violinist and dog breeder just mentioned, though not collectors, may still make acquisitions at this level of intricacy in the relationship between consumption and serious leisure. Since, in these

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instances, consumption is itself a core leisure activity, it has been dubbed core facilitative consumption.

Importance of Complex Leisure Common knowledge has it, erroneously, that leisure is casual. Research and theory on its complex forms (hobbyism, amateurism, volunteerism) have begun to correct this misconception, albeit slowly. Health implications alone justify distinguishing the two types. For serious leisure, unlike casual leisure, has been found to generate personal well-being and, where it is physical (e.g., sports), also bodily well-being. These are key benefits in a society with abundant stress, obesity, and ill health. Robert A. Stebbins See also Art and Cultural Worlds; Collecting and Collectibles; Electronic Video Gaming; Leisure; Lifestyle; Prosumption; Sports; Well-Being

Further Readings Cross, Gary. A Social History of Leisure since 1600. State College, PA: Venture, 1990. Gelber, Steven M. Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Haworth, John T. Work, Leisure and Well-Being. New York: Routledge, 1997. Stebbins, Robert A. Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007. Stebbins, Robert A. Leisure and Consumption: Common Ground, Separate Worlds. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

HOLLYWOOD Hollywood was a nineteenth-century agricultural district in Los Angeles, California, that entrepreneur H. H. Wilcox transformed into America’s cinematic heartland. For some, it is synonymous with the Americanization of the culture industry— that is, the production and distribution of cultural works, such as movies and television shows. Wilcox bought the district (initially named Rancho La Brea and inhabited by Amerindians) in 1886 and, together with his wife, converted newly christened “Hollywood” into a village. Within a few years, the Wilcoxes had devised a grid plan to turn

the area into a flourishing community with a paved Prospect Avenue (today known as Hollywood Boulevard) and lots that were marketed primarily to Midwesterners to build residential properties. The community became part of the city of Los Angeles in 1910, and a year later, Centaur Film Co. moved in to establish the first studio. Other corporate businesses followed, gradually turning Hollywood into Los Angeles’ artistic commercial hub. Banks, clubs, restaurants, and movie studios completed this process, catering to the demands of a growing film industry (Paramount Pictures [1912], Columbia Pictures [1920], Warner Brothers [1923], Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [1924], 20th Century Fox [1935]) that by the 1930s had acquired a global reputation. The area has since developed into a global tourist attraction, and in 1985, Hollywood Boulevard’s commercial district was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Although some studios have always been situated outside Hollywood, the name itself came to signify the entire U.S. film industry with its satellite commerce. By the 1960s, Hollywood had embraced the music industry, too, with recording studios migrating to Sunset Boulevard to complement the nightclubs of the district. Hollywood’s power extends beyond the history of cinema and into that of a cultural communications complex that has become integral to post1880s capitalist exchange. Its emergence coincided with the decade in which social historians locate the economic origins of World War I and the neoimperialist booming. The U.S. film industry established itself internationally on the eve of the totalitarian slide in Europe (1920s–1930s), something that almost coincided with the ideological use of mass communications by the Nazi regime. The first systematic theorization of media industries originates in the radical critique of mass consumption pioneered by the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt University) whose members fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to relocate in the United States. There, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed the culture industry thesis, casting American new communication technologies as demagogic tools that divert collective consciousness from sociopolitical problems. In a Marxist vein, popular culture (music, film, magazines) was seen as a force that destroys the potential for a social revolution. Especially in the light of the increasing success of Hollywood musicals from the 1930s, Adorno

Hollywood

and Horkheimer expressed the fear that the recipients of cinematic messages may become consumers in abstracto—that is, consumers who have lost their particularity and become interchangeable and quantifiable entities (Kellner 1989). This interpretive model formed the basis on which third world activists, artists, and critical political economists developed the theoretical complex known as cultural imperialism. The appropriation of a vast array of culturally significant machines by the United States (airplane, typewriter, electric light, and telephone) and their use to consolidate military domination from the 1960s (in Philippines, Thailand, Cuba) turned the United States into a global political player. Hollywood narratives reflected this technological triumph, developing simultaneously other ideological devices that endorsed American sociocultural supremacy. Racist agendas found an unhappy continuation in cinematic representations of African and Asian cultures as inferior and backward, whereas practices of boycotting foreign films (through introduction of patent and distribution or copyright restrictions) further ensured America’s ideological insularity. Hollywood and its multiple production companies spread their control globally by absorbing smaller companies with less capital to finance expensive cinematic enterprises. Compelling though this sociological model may be, it underestimates the complexity of production, because it considers the manufacturers of cultural goods as mere participants in a conspiracy against collective consciousness. Because manufacturers of cultural goods are involved in creative manipulation of symbols, some theorists view them as agents of sociocultural change (Hesmondhalgh 2002). The relationship between creative arts and commerce seems to have become closer since sectors of creative industries that were not commercial in the past (e.g., performing arts, broadcasting) have been commercialized. Applied to Hollywood-centered practices of production and consumption, cultural imperialism identifies corporate globalization with its communicative counterpart. Doubtlessly, however, the Hollywood industry remains an important global player in the field of communications, especially because its original cinematic commerce has diversified to embrace communication technologies (e.g., the Internet) and other arts (e.g., music or theater). Specific cases indicate the limitations of the cultural imperialism model. The film The Beach (2000)

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used material from another industry (it was based on Alex Garland’s novel), generated a new one (tourism in filmed Thai regions), promoted another (CDs with the movie soundtrack), and produced links between all three (Internet advertising of Thai tourism, movie advertising of the book and the soundtrack). The creation of such supra-industrial complexes based on common ideas (“signs”) has become standard Hollywood practice and defines the new knowledge economy of productive consumption of ideas, note Scott Lash and John Urry. This phenomenon may involve actual convergence of industries—for example, with computer games providing material for cinematic scripts (e.g., Tomb Raider, initially a computer game, inspired two movies [2001, 2003] starring Angelina Jolie) and products for young consumers becoming movies (e.g., Transformers, a series of 1970s cartoons turned toys fed into three films [2007, 2009, 2011] that targeted young audiences). Nevertheless, lack of economic regulation of such ventures may promote exploitation and induce reaction to further commoditization. The Beach provoked reaction by regional and global activist networks that condemned Hollywood and its auxiliaries (e.g., tourist entrepreneurs or local, national and supranational authorities) for the “destruction” of filmed locales to produce pleasing shots for the cinematic tourist gaze. Hollywood actors, including Leonardo DiCaprio and director Danny Boyle, figured in interviews in an attempt to counter such criticism (Tzanelli 2007). Hollywood has also been challenged by foreign media industries. For example, Tamar Liebes found that although Israel’s television system has embraced American technologies, genres, advertising styles, and organizational modes, it has simultaneously subjected all these to domestic economic and political interests. In addition to native viewers, Bollywood films have millions of fans among expatriate Indian communities and Western audiences. The very genre (Bombay Hollywood) can be considered a culturally situated response to Hollywood that fuses American narratives with Hindu and Islamic traditions, producing hybrids of global appeal. Hong Kong and Chinese cinemas also have a global influence, invading foreign markets traditionally controlled by Hollywood. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner note, just as audiences adopt different viewing positions (interpretations of movies), Hollywood

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films may project a polyvocal view of the world that both contests and reinforces the social status quo. The symbolic creativity of movie industries can only be studied in its sociopolitical context (postcolonial, nationalist). Hollywood is only one such context, comprising various agents who may have conflicting agendas. Rodanthi Tzanelli See also Americanization; Audience Research; Cinema; Circuits of Culture/Consumption; Culture Industries; Disorganized Capitalism; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Media Convergence and Monopoly

Further Readings Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1993. First published 1944. Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. London: Sage, 2002. Kellner, Douglas. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage, 1994. Liebes, Tamar. American Dreams, Hebrew Subtitles. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003. Miller, Toby, Nittin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang. Global Hollywood 2. London: BFI, 2005. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1996. Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Tzanelli, Rodanthi. The Cinematic Tourist. London: Routledge, 2007.

HOME See Appropriation; Architecture; Do-It-Yourself; Ethnology/Folklore Studies; Gardening; Gender; Gendering of Public and Private Space; Households; Souvenirs

HOME COMPUTER The history of the home computer provides an example of how a technology once felt to be far

removed from the home and everyday patterns of life was subsequently developed, promoted, and embraced—indeed consumed—as a product. For many, the home computer continues to mediate a wide range of consumer activities from e-commerce to online gaming. The home computer consists of a technology originally called a microcomputer to distinguish it from the larger minicomputer and mainframe computer. The most well-known brand is IBM’s Personal Computer (PC), based on Microsoft software, and hence these devices are sometimes referred to as PCs, using the brand name as a generic one. In many developed countries, the majority of households now have a home computer, although even here adoption reflects sociodemographics such as age (fewer machines used by the older population) and socioeconomic status (fewer used by those with lower socioeconomic status). In the early 1970s, a variety of individuals, including some working within information technology (IT) companies, had been building prototypes of “small” computers—ranging from the size of a desk to that of a large television. But in general, there were industry doubts about whether there would be any widespread interest in using such devices. This was in large part because the main trajectory of development in the computer field was toward larger, faster, and more powerful machines, not smaller ones that could do less (the exception being minicomputers whose real-time operation offered a different functionality to mainframes). Hence, most of the original interest in the possibilities offered by a microcomputer, a machine one could personally own and even build for oneself, came from the electronic hobbyist community. This included some working within the computer industry such as the later founders of Apple. U.S. hobbyist magazines portrayed computing as a new frontier for these enthusiasts, and the first kit microcomputer to be sold within this community was the Altair in 1975. By the late 1970s, these machines were being sold for educational and business purposes, and in 1981, IBM launched its PC, using Microsoft’s operating system. While its success and that of other machines using this system helped establish the product within these markets, there were still doubts in the consumer electronics field about whether there would ever be a market specifically for a “home” computer, whether it would

Home Computer

be useful in that setting, although some hardware companies such as Tandy, Texas Instruments, and Commodore persevered in trying to create this market. As had happened decades earlier in the case of radios, the design of microcomputers had by now changed, initially with the Apple computer, to make them aesthetically more attractive than the original hobbyist machines that looked more like pieces of technical equipment. The history of home computers varied slightly in different countries. For example, in the United Kingdom, Sinclair brought out the ZX80 and then ZX81, much cheaper than contemporary U.S. machines and marketed as machines to learn about computing. One key use of home computers in the early 1980s that helped to establish the product in the home was game playing, where the home computer took some of the market dominated by games consoles. In fact, in the United Kingdom, it took a decade before game playing was replaced by word processing as the major use. Two developments in the 1990s helped to boost the adoption of home computers. The first was the move to the machine being “multimedia,” principally through the addition of sound cards and CD-ROM storage. The second was the use of home computers to access the emerging Internet. Since that time, the PC has remained the most common device, or “platform,” for accessing the Internet, and hence for communicating and socializing online (e.g., through the emergence of social network sites) as well as for watching streamed and downloaded audiovisual material such a catch-up TV. But other, especially wireless, devices—from laptops to (increasingly smart) mobile phones and iPads—increasingly offer alternative platforms. To put research on people’s experiences of home computers into context, it was only in the 1980s that social scientists started to take an interest in the “consumption” of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in general, and this applied to traditional media like TV as well as the telephone. As a new technology, it was understandable that early social surveys examining home computer adoption from the mid-1980s considered factors shaping the take-up of these machines. The early 1990s was also the period when the domestication framework was emerging, which generated research into how the home computer was fitted into the routines of the home.

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From the start, certain strands of that research were also interested in the consequences of home computers, for example, whether it displaced time spent on other activities, including watching TV and socializing with others. These were research issues that in many ways prefigured the questions that would be asked of the Internet a decade later. This also applied to the concerns over the home computers’ “addictiveness” that was explored in various studies as well as explorations in what home computer use could mean for people’s sense of identity. As in the case of other ICTs, a number of these concerns related specifically to the potential consequences for children and youth since young people were perceived as being potentially more open to formative influences at this point in their development. Since those early studies, occasional work of children continues to appear. Several studies dealt with gender and the home computer, with different emphases: for example, Jane Wheelock focused on a mother’s lack of leisure time constraining interest, whereas Leslie Haddon (2004) studied the differences in motivation arising from boys’ and girls’ gendered social networks. One key focus of various studies has been the issue of male versus female engagement with technologies connected with the gendered process of identity formation. Such qualitative studies, including ones examining ICTs more generally, have commented on gender interactions in the home, such as competition for computer use. Meanwhile, a 2006 quantitative research by Malcolm Brynin has suggested a decline in gender differences as regards actual uses. There has been a trickle of home computer studies from the later 1990s, including a book on the topic by Elaine Lally. But to an extent, studies of the Internet seem to have attracted research attention away from the home computer itself. Leslie Haddon See also Addiction; Consumer Durables; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Domestic Technologies; Electronic Video Gaming; Gender; Hobbyists and Amateurs; Information Society; Innovation Studies; Virtual Communities

Further Readings Brynin, Malcolm. “The Neutered Computer.” In Computers, Phones and the Internet: Domesticating Information Technology, edited by Robert Kraut,

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Malcolm Brynin, and Sara Kiesler, 84–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Haddon, Leslie. “The Home Computer: The Making of a Consumer Electronic.” Science as Culture 1, no. 2 (1988): 7–51. Haddon, Leslie. “Explaining ICT Consumption: The Case of the Home Computer.” In Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, edited by Roger Silverstone and Erik Hirsch, 82–96. London: Routledge, 1992. Haddon, Leslie. Information and Communication Technologies in Everyday Life: A Concise Introduction and Research Guide. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Lally, Elaine. At Home with Computers. Oxford: Berg, 2002. Rogers, Everett. “The Diffusion of Home Computers among Households in Silicon Valley.” Marriage and Family Review 8 (1985): 89–100. Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. London: Granada, 1984. Turkle, Sherry. “Computational Reticence: Why Women Fear the Intimate Machine.” In Technology and Women’s Voices, edited by Cheris Kramerae, 41–61. London: Routledge, 1988. Vitalari, Nicholas, Allardi Venkatesh, and Kjell Gronhang. “Computing in the Home: Shifts in Time Allocation Patterns of Households.” Communications of the ACM 28 (1985): 512–522. Wheelock, Jane. “Personal Computers, Gender and an Institutional Model of the Household.” In Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, edited by Roger Silverstone and Erik Hirsch, 97–112. London: Routledge, 1992.

HOMOGENIZATION HYBRIDIZATION

VERSUS

See Americanization; Delocalization; Diaspora; Globalization; Glocalization; Japan as a Consumer Culture; Multiculturalism; Tourism Studies

HOMOSEXUALITY See Pink Pounds/Dollars; Queer Theory; Sexuality

HORKHEIMER, MAX (1895–1973) Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and social scientist. He was the founder of critical theory. Horkheimer’s intellectual sources included the philosophies of the French Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. He also drew on ideas from sociology and psychoanalysis. Between 1931 and 1958, Horkheimer served as the director of the Institute of Social Research of Frankfurt am Main, Germany (also known as the Frankfurt School). The 1933 National Socialist takeover forced Horkheimer, who was of Jewish origin, to immigrate to America, where the institute was temporarily set up. He returned to Germany in 1948. Horkheimer ranks as one of Europe’s most prominent twentieth-century social thinkers. His work has shaped the projects of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and many others. Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” is widely read as a programmatic statement of critical theory. Horkheimer rejects theory’s “traditional” role as a scheme for classifying data. A critical theory of society determines the basic structure and processes of the capitalist condition, notably class relations and commodity exchange, and examines their operation on individual life and specific social phenomena. Critical thought also surpasses theory’s traditional status as a set of hypotheses to be tested by empirical observation. Since even perception and theoretical thought—decisive components of humankind’s interaction with nature—are socially predetermined, critical theory cannot accept empirical data as representations of reality but must scrutinize factual and theoretical knowledge claims with regard to their hidden social dimension. Traditional theory, Horkheimer further alleges, denies the connection between science and socially transformative practice, thus serving to perpetuate the status quo. Critical theory, by contrast, consciously combines social analysis with social critique and opposition in the interest of humanity’s “emancipation from slavery” (1972, 246) and the “happiness of all individuals” (248). Horkheimer’s development of critical theory is linked to his critique of the dominant modes of thinking in capitalist society. Human thought, he argues in Eclipse of Reason, has been reduced to a

Household Budgets

“subjective” instrumental rationality essentially concerned with calculating the most effective means to given ends (good or evil). Thinking has been aligned with industrial commodity production. The capacity of “objective” reason to determine truly rational ends congruent with the attainment of human fulfillment is atrophying. Instrumental reason chiefly aids mankind’s domination and exploitation of external nature, which culminates in people’s domination of their inner nature, especially their desires, and in the subjugation of others. When nature “revolts” against its repression, it releases forces—notably instinctual energies—that become susceptible to mobilization by violent political movements. Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer coauthored with Adorno in the 1940s, interconnects these considerations with a vehement critique of mass culture. Horkheimer and Adorno highlight the culture industry’s capacity to cultivate widespread consumer demand for its products. These cultural commodities in turn have the power to shape their consumers’ consciousness to the effect of enlisting the masses in the maintenance of the capitalist order. For example, popular literature, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, and cinema depict life primarily in its familiar, everyday mundanity. Unlike genuine art, mass culture never critically judges social reality, failing to convey the possibility and desirability of improved conditions. The message is plain: “This is reality as it is and should be and will be” (2004, 96). Moreover, many TV programs and films are structured according to patterns of punishment and reward for their characters. Thus, deviance is repeatedly admonished, while socially acceptable behavior is glorified, sometimes even dictated. In fact, the very distinction between leisure and labor drawn by the culture industry is illusory. “Entertainment,” argue Horkheimer and Adorno, “is the prolongation of work under late capitalism” (2002, 109): the consumption of mercilessly standardized cultural artifacts resembles the mechanized operations of the industrial workday; the time set aside for amusement and relaxation mainly functions to re-create the individual’s labor power for production. The culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno warn, encourages people to adapt to the capitalist condition, to silence their urge for material fulfillment, and to surrender their social resistance. Matthias Benzer

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See also Adorno, Theodor; Capitalism; Commodities; Culture Industries; False Consciousness/False Needs; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Rationalization; Sociology

Further Readings Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. First published 1937. Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. London: Continuum, 2004. First published 1947. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. First published 1947. Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.

HOUSEHOLD BUDGETS A household can be defined as one person living alone, or a group of people living at the same address, with common housekeeping and sharing either some living space or at least one meal a day. Budgets are the arrangements made to balance income and expenditure over a given period of time. When the two words are used together, as in the term household budgets, the result is a topic that has recently been the focus of vigorous critical debate, in which anthropologists, sociologists, and some economists have collected new empirical data to mount an attack on a key concept in traditional economics. These debates have been concerned with the definition of the term household and with the extent to which the household is the appropriate unit for analyzing consumption budgets and discussing the living standards of individuals and families. To understand these debates, it is necessary to outline three different interpretations of the term household budgets.

Interpretations The Household as a Unit First, there is the traditional approach of classical economics in which the household is a key unit of analysis. Theoretically, the household is treated as though it were an individual, earning and spending money to maintain a standard of living that is assumed to be shared by all household members. Working with this definition has underlined the enormous variations in household incomes and the extent

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to which budgets, and patterns of expenditure, vary with income level. In general, the proportion of its income that a household spends on food decreases as household income rises; this is known as Engel’s Law and it also applies to spending on housing and other necessities. Thus, the proportion of income spent on food in developed countries varies from under 10 percent for affluent households to over a third for low-income households. In the world as a whole, over a billion people live on less than $1.25 per day (United Nations 2009). At these income levels, managing the household budget becomes less a matter of making choices and more a matter of surviving at the most basic level.

Income and Expenditure The second approach grows out of a critique of the traditional definition of a household, outlined already. This argues that in reality households neither earn nor spend money; both these activities are actually carried out by individuals. Anthropologists and economists working in developing countries have shown that how the money enters the household can affect the way it is used and spent. Different members of households may have different spending priorities. This means moving away from models of the household that emphasize sharing, altruism, and cooperation, to models that include the possibility of negotiation, bargaining, and even conflict. Many studies have shown that there is a positive association between the amount of money controlled by women and the amount the household spends on food, household necessities, women’s and children’s clothing, and child-care expenses. This was the key finding of the cross-national study carried out by Agnes Quisumbing and John Maluccio. There can be poor individuals in households with adequate incomes. Studies such as these have suggested that important social and economic processes take place between earning and spending and that the intrahousehold economy warrants investigation in its own right.

The Intra-Household Economy This third approach, focusing on the intrahousehold economy and sometimes described as opening up the black box of the household, has been adopted mainly by sociologists and social policy analysts. Given the disparity in incomes between men

and women, and their different spending responsibilities, there has to be some redistribution of resources within households if those who earn less are not to live at a lower standard of living than those who earn more. Every household has to devise some arrangement by which this redistribution of resources can take place. Most of the empirical research has been concerned with couple households and with their systems of money management, with individual partners being interviewed separately as well as together. Studies have now been carried out in Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, the United States, and elsewhere, with broadly comparable results. Systems of money management vary greatly, but research has shown that there are clear patterns in how couples control and allocate their money. Early qualitative research carried out in Britain suggested a typology of allocative systems (Pahl 1989) that has since been refined and expanded in quantitative surveys. One such typology made distinctions between • the female whole wage system where the woman manages all the money except the man’s personal spending money; • the housekeeping allowance/male whole wage system in which the man either gives the woman an allowance for housekeeping or manages all the money; • the pooling system in which couples pool all their money, usually in a joint account; • the partial pool in which couples pool some of their money to pay for collective expenditure and keep the rest separate to spend as they choose; and • the independent management system in which both partners have their own independent income that they keep separate, each having responsibility for different items of household expenditure. One study of couples under thirty-five living in Britain in 2002 showed that the pooling system was used by just over half of all couples; 7 percent used the female whole wage system, 7 percent used the housekeeping allowance system, 19 percent used the partial pool, and 13 percent used independent management of money (Vogler et al. 2008). Compared with earlier work, these figures suggest that the move toward independence in couple finances is taking place quite fast.

Households

Explanations and Implications Explaining patterns in the intra-household economy is complex, and any summary is necessarily a simplification. When the household has a low income, typically women control and manage finances. As household income rises, the sources of that income become important. If only the husband is earning, typically he controls finances and delegates management of part of the budget to his wife. If both partners are earning, it is likely that finances will be considered joint, though the partner who contributes the larger proportion of income is likely to have a greater say in financial decisions. Younger couples, those without children and those who are cohabiting rather than married, are more likely to maintain independence in financial matters by keeping some or all of their income separate from any household budget. Independent management of money is also more often found among remarried couples, who may have financial responsibilities toward people in other households; this motive may also be relevant to parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where the system of “separate purses” is common. New forms of money, such as credit cards, debit cards, and Internet banking, are accelerating the trend toward independence. Research continues about the implications, for individuals and families, of different systems for managing the household budget. Some key points include the following: • It cannot be assumed that all members of households have the same standard of living; there can be poor individuals in households with adequate incomes. • Money that enters the household through the hands of a woman is in general more likely to be spent on children and on collective household necessities than money that enters the household via a man. • When income is short and making ends meet is difficult, it is more likely than the woman will manage the budget; the higher the household income, the more likely it is that the man will be in charge of finances. • Independence in couple finances works well as long as both partners are earning similar amounts; however, when one partner’s income falls, this can be a route to inequality within the household.

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Ideologies can also be crucial in shaping the access that individuals have to household monies, though some ideologies will conflict with others. For example, the idea of sharing money within a loving relationship can be at odds with the idea that earners have an entitlement to the money they have earned. The idea that the man should be the breadwinner is being undercut by aspirations for gender equality and individual financial autonomy. All three approaches outlined have a contribution to make to understand the complexities of household budgets; using just one approach risks ignoring much that is important. As household compositions change (such as the rise of single-person households) and trends in consumption diversify, the ways that households distribute and manage their resources will remain an important subject for identifying the continuing inequalities of consumer cultures. Jan Pahl See also Domestic Division of Labor; Families; Gender; Households; Inequalities; Measuring Standards of Living; Money; Systems of Provision

Further Readings Pahl, Jan. Money and Marriage. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989. Pahl, Jan. “Family Finances, Individualization, Spending Patterns and Access to Credit.” The Journal of Socio-Economics 37 (2008): 552–576. Quisumbing, Agnes, and John Malaccio. Intra-household Allocation and Gender Relations. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2000. Stocks, Janet, Capitolina Diaz, and Bjørn Hallerod. Modern Couples: Sharing Money, Sharing Life. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. United Nations. Millennium Development Goals Report 2009. New York: Author, 2009. Vogler, Carolyn, Michaela Brockman, and Richard Wiggins. “Managing Money in New Heterosexual Forms of Intimate Relationships.” The Journal of Socio-Economics 37 (2008) 552–576.

HOUSEHOLDS In recent years, much social theorizing has focused on changes in personal life. In particular, structural changes associated with late modernity, including especially globalization and individualization, are

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recognized as having had a profound effect on the routine construction of the life course and the patterning of family commitments and relationships. Most noticeably, in Westernized countries, albeit with significant national variation, there is far greater diversity in patterns of family formation and dissolution than there was in the mid-twentieth century. In particular, there have been substantial shifts in the social patterning of sexual relations, partnership, cohabitation and marriage, and childbirth. In turn, the timing of key life markers has been altering. Not only are marriage rates declining, but the fewer marriages that there are now occur at later ages. Similarly, age at first birth, whether inside or outside marriage, has been increasing, as has the age at which people finally leave the parental home. As a result, life-course transitions now tend to be less ordered and clear-cut than they were previously. These relational and life-course changes are having a significant impact on the social organization of households. There have, of course, always been shifts in household composition across the life course, with living arrangements inevitably being shaped by the wider circumstances of people’s lives. Expressed differently, the decisions people make about their household arrangements depend on the options open to them at different phases of their life course, which in turn depend on both the character of their domestic and familial commitments and the availability of different forms of housing. With the reordering of personal life characteristic of late modernity, there is significantly greater diversity in household experiences across time, with movements into and out of new and existing households routinely being more varied and less predictable. Flux in these matters is more common and more normative now than it was for much of the twentieth century. In turn, this has raised interesting questions for the study of household consumption. This entry focuses on three of these: the changing constitution of households, the relationship between individual and household consumption, and the emergence of the home as a domain for—rather then just a site of—consumption.

Household Composition The demographic shifts summarized already, particularly with regard to partnership and family formation and dissolution, have involved significant changes

in the patterning of people’s “household careers.” Two changes are especially important in considering consumption. First, there has been an appreciable decrease in the size of households. This tendency stretches back a long time but has been particularly marked in recent years. For example, in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, average household size was around 4.5. By the turn of the twenty-first century, average household size had almost halved to 2.4. Aside from more housing units being available, the major cause of this change lay in the increasing numbers of single- and two-person households. In particular, increased longevity has meant that more people are living longer as a couple or alone as widows or widowers in later life, with the rise in separation and divorce also contributing to these shifts. Second, different pathways in and out of households have developed over the last thirty years. Again, increased levels of separation and divorce, as well as consequent repartnering for many, have been important in this. Like the life course itself, household careers inevitably reflect the greater diversity there is in the decisions people individually and collectively make about the desirability of different partnership arrangements at different phases of their lives. As partnership commitment, whether marriage or cohabitation, becomes characterized by greater degrees of fission, consequent household arrangements reflect these changing commitments. In addition though, there has also been increased flux in household careers as a result of the radical transformations that have been occurring in early adulthood throughout the Western world. In essence, the lifestyles and responsibilities of young adults—those in their early and middle twenties—are quite distinct now from the patterns that were dominant thirty years ago. In particular, with increasing median age of both marriage (and similar committed relationships) and first birth, the young adulthood phase of life is being constructed as one that offers relative exemption from “adult” responsibilities. Although there is a good deal of diversity in this, influenced in part by class location, early adulthood has come increasingly to be seen as a period of individual freedom rather than the initial phase of “settling down.” This shift has had significant impacts on the household practices and trajectories of people in this age range. Two tendencies are worth highlighting here.

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The first is that there are significant numbers of young adults now living in variations of shared households. These are not family households but rather households of (largely) unrelated individuals who are living together for some period. This can take a number of forms. Some are based on existing friendship groups; others are developed through people advertising for others to share a household with them. Some may involve one or more cohabiting couples, though the patterns of cohabitation are likely to be quite flexible. Some involve shared responsibility for the property; others are built more around one person having legal tenancy and the others being effectively lodgers. As well as this flexibility in household composition, there is often a quite high degree of turnover and mobility in and out of these households. The second marked change in patterns of household membership among young adults concerns the transition out of the parental household. In the past, this quite typically occurred by the time the young adult reached his or her early twenties. More importantly, this tended to be a once-and-for-all transition. That is, once a young adult “left home,” be this for education, employment, or marriage, he or she rarely returned to live in the parental household again. (Of course, some continued to live in the parental household after marriage because of housing shortage, but typically these people had never lived away.) Contemporary patterns are far less clear-cut. It is now more common for young adult children to return to the parental home following periods of living in alternative households. This may be as a result of relationship breakdown, employment change, or completing education. The parental home has become recognized as more a form of “safety net” for adult children, mirroring the acceptance of this phase of life as a period of decreased stability compared to previous generations’ experiences.

Defining Households So far, questions of how “household” is to be defined have been left implicit. At one level, household seems a straightforward concept. In reality, it is more complex than is commonly assumed. A household consists of those individuals who live together and share a common residence. But complexity arises because not everyone constructs a lifestyle that involves doing all the things routinely associated with sharing a

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residence and living together with the same group of people. For example, living together is normally seen as involving coresidence, a shared domestic economy, and common meal times. Within this, no one individual needs to be present for all pertinent household events, but they do need normally to be participants. For many people, this is unproblematic. They do share a common residence with others and participate with them in activities that are defined as “household relevant.” For some individuals, though, and consequently for some households, these issues are less straightforward. To use an example from the past, it was quite common for some children in large workingclass families to live much of the day in the parental household but sleep at a grandparent’s home or with an aunt or uncle. Contemporary lifestyles involve other complexities. For example, some people work away from home for significant periods of the week or for longer blocks of time. Some couples spend a great deal of time together but maintain their own separate homes. University students often have membership of different households—their university one and their parental home. Other young adults may also be “irregular” members of the parental household. Similarly, some ethnic minority groups may find that housing design in their country of residence is ill suited to their extended family practices, with the consequence that the household is enacted across a number of different properties. All these examples illustrate how the greater flexibility in the construction of family relationships occurring under late modernity creates difficulties for specifying the boundaries of household. For administrative purposes, such as local tax collection and the collection of national censuses data, these difficulties need resolution through bureaucratic “rules.” For social enquiry, the task is less the precise specification of household boundaries and more a recognition of the greater diversity occurring in people’s domestic and household arrangements. Not everyone lives in easily defined, conventional households.

Individual and Household Consumption Equally, though, the diverse patterning of household composition has consequences for scholars interested in consumption behavior. The most evident questions concern the appropriate units of consumption. It is clearly relevant at times to base analysis

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on individual consumption, but at other times—or, perhaps more accurately, for other questions—the household is the appropriate analytical unit. Yet the idea of household consumption itself contains some problematic elements, in particular around the unity that the concept implies. As with analyses about how “the family’ operates in contemporary society, so a focus on “the household” seems to imply a clearly demarcated and well-bounded household configuration among whose members there is agreement and a common purpose. Just as family scholars now rightly emphasize family diversity rather than an assumed uniformity, so too in issues of consumption, it would be inappropriate to assume that households necessarily operate as a single, unified entity. Family members experience the same “family” in different ways, depending in part on their structural location within the family. So, too, household members experience the same household in different ways, again in part depending on their position within the household. In this, position within the household is clearly influenced by factors like age and generational status, but also reflects the relative power and authority of the different actors. Whether or not there is within a particular household someone who can be designated as “head of household,” differential control of resources will inevitably reflect both the dynamics of the household group and the external social and economic positions of those within it. So, too, the relationships that exist between the household members in terms of commitment and patterns of involvement will also influence the degree to which the household effectively acts as a social entity in consumption matters. Households comprising a committed couple and their dependent children will, in these regards, clearly act differently compared to households consisting of two recently cohabiting adults or households comprising unrelated young adults. Within family sociology, David Morgan introduced the idea of “family practices.” His intention was to convey the importance of thinking about families as constituted through the ordinary, and sometimes extraordinary, activities that compose these relationships. Rather than perceiving the family as a given structural formation, he wanted to emphasize the agency through which family members create family organization. Rather similarly, it is useful to think of households as constituted through their household practices and, in the current context, their household consumption practices. The

advantages of this perspective are twofold. First, it captures the agency of the different household members in the creation of household consumption patterns. Second, as a consequence of this, it highlights the diversity there is in the ways households manage consumption, both across different households and over time. It makes it more apparent that consumption within households is sometimes collective, sometimes individual, and sometimes a combination of the two. Key questions concern the following: the patterns of consumption in different households, who within the household makes decisions about different types of consumption, the relationship between individual and collective consumption, and who benefits in what ways from the consumption decisions made. These concerns mirror those of much research into marital inequalities. Famously, the decision-making approach to marital power pioneered by Robert Blood and Donald Wolfe is in significant measure built on decisions related to consumption. So, too, studies of money management within marriages and other committed relationships are principally concerned with consumption differences and who controls which expenditures. Studies of moneymanagement strategies in family households where there are comparatively few resources have highlighted the importance of distinguishing between control and responsibility. Typically, in these circumstances, women as wives and mothers are given responsibility for managing routine household consumption but have to do so with insufficient resources to satisfy all needs. Though they seem powerful in holding responsibility, in reality the way that most manage is through prioritizing expenditure on other household members. These issues are of less consequence in other forms of household—for example, single-person households or households of nonfamily others—where expenditure is not pooled in the same ways. With these latter, of course, there can still be conflicts over consumption issues, but they are generally framed differently. For example, in student households, tensions can emerge over setting levels of contribution to shared “pots” of money for household services or over the doing—or, perhaps more accurately, the nondoing—of household shopping. In addition to being interesting in their own right, examining consumption practices, including those that generate disagreement, in these and other nonfamily households

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can help illuminate household consumption dynamics in other household types.

The Home and Consumption As noted, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish household from family consumption; indeed, at times, doing so is unhelpful. Similarly, discussions of household consumption inevitably overlap with consideration of the home as the symbolic and material location of the household. Higher living standards over the twentieth century resulted in significant improvements in housing standards in Western societies, as well as changes in tenure patterns. The significance of the home was transformed: as well as being the site of domesticity, it became an arena symbolizing individual and familial identity. With technological innovations and the development of new products, expenditure on the home itself, as distinct from the costs of daily living, became increasingly significant within domestic economies. Not only were larger amounts of money spent on mortgages and rents, but creating an appropriate style and ambience in the home also came to be seen as a major lifestyle project. Reflected in the growth of, for example, furniture outlets, do-it-yourself stores, and magazines/TV programs devoted to home design, home refurbishment became of increasing importance both culturally and economically. These shifts in expenditure on the home as a material artifact clearly impact household consumption practices in ways that are different to routine domestic expenditure. For instance, how issues of style and fashion operate in this sphere, how people come to decide what to spend and what to prioritize, how consumption is related to capital accumulation in the home, and the like, are issues of some consequence for understanding patterns of household consumption. The ability of people to spend resources on the home is clearly related to their material circumstances. Those who are better off have always used modes of conspicuous consumption on their homes to indicate their superior status. The difference now is twofold. First, there is greater wealth among Western populations, so more people have resources available to fashion their domestic environments. And second, the market has responded to this by mass-producing far more home-oriented artifacts and technologies

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than previously. Yet there remain many whose homes are inadequate by contemporary standards and who lack the resources required for these forms of home consumption. So while the place of the home in social and cultural life has been altering, in part as a result of household consumption decisions and practices, people’s economic location clearly patterns the extent to which they are able to engage in home consumption of this sort. Moreover, economic location is not solely about class position, important though this is. It also incorporates other structural inequalities, particularly those of gender, age, and ethnicity.

Future Research There are many areas of household consumption that require further research. To begin with, it is important that researchers continue to recognize that in some contexts, consumption is as much collective as it is individual. Within this, families and households both represent important “collectivities.” Researching the development of different consumption practices and regimes in families and households remains an important task, especially across time. Moreover, it needs recognizing that while households and families frequently overlap, analytically, they are distinct. Further research would be particularly welcome on households that do not consider themselves to be families. The growth of new forms of partnership, including cohabitation, in which family connection is less established, are especially pertinent here, as are other forms of household that involve friendship rather than kinship. The ways in which consumption decisions are collectively organized in such increasingly common “nonstandard” households offer many new and interesting avenues for future research. Graham Allan See also Do-It-Yourself; Domestic Division of Labor; Families; Household Budgets; Life Course; Romantic Love; Sex; Single-Person Households

Further Readings Allan, Graham, and Graham Crow. Families, Households and Society. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Blood, Robert, and Donald Wolfe. Husbands and Wives: The Dynamics of Married Living. New York: Free Press, 1960.

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Darling, Elizabeth, and Lesley Whitworth, eds. Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1940. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Heath, Sue, and Elizabeth Cleaver. Young, Free and Single: Twenty-Somethings and Household Change. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hogg, Margaret, Carolyn Folkman Curasi, and Pauline Maclaran. “The (Re-)Configuration of Production and Consumption in Empty Nest Households/Families.” Consumption Markets & Culture 7 (2004): 239–259. Morgan, David. Family Connections. Cambridge: Polity, 1996. Rybczynski, Witold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. New York: Viking, 1986. Saunders, Peter. A Nation of Home Owners. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Stacey, Judith. Brave New Families. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Vogler, Carolyn. “Cohabiting Couples: Rethinking Money in the Household at the Beginning of the Twenty First Century.” Sociological Review, 53 (2005): 1–29.

HYPERREALITY Hyperreality literally means “more (real) than real.” According to Jean Baudrillard, with whom the term is particularly associated, “The hyperreal . . . effaces the contradiction of the real and the imaginary” (1993, 72). Unsurprisingly, the term has gained currency wherever reality has been remade to the measure of the imaginary: one thinks of theme parks like Disneyland, the themed environments of shopping malls, and the “virtual worlds” conjured up by digital technologies. The term hyperrealism was, however, initially coined in the 1960s, as the European term for superrealism or photorealism (Battcock 1975)—the U.S. art movement that engaged in generating “hyperrealistic” reproductions of the real (such as paintings of incredible, “photographic” accuracy and detail). The way in which the term is most frequently used today is aptly illustrated by the (now defunct) “Palace of Living Arts” in Los Angeles, visited by Umberto Eco on one of his Travels in Hyperreality. There, waxwork displays reproduced “in three dimensions, life-size and, obviously, in full color, the great masterpieces of painting of all time” (Eco 1987, 18). The “living” art was advertised as better than the originals. Alongside the waxwork tableaux were reproductions of

the old masters they represented—in vivid colors, unblemished by the ravages of time, as fresh as the day the completed canvas was first lifted off the easel. “The Palace’s philosophy is not, ‘We are giving you the reproduction so that you will want the original,’ but rather, ‘We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original’” (19). Nonetheless, while the idea that the “copy” is better than the “original”—or the “image” more important than the “reality” (Boorstin 1961)—is frequently implied whenever the term hyperreality is invoked, the concept has more complex implications than this casual usage implies. It is telling that Baudrillard cites Disneyland explicitly not as a geographically delimited example of a hyperreal environment—an enclosed space where the imaginary becomes more real than reality—but as a means of “deterrence,” intended to put us off the scent of an altogether more disturbing hypothesis: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal” (1994, 12). Disneyland is presented as “fake” in a vain attempt to resuscitate the real: “It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” (12–13). It has been a commonplace of Western thought to distinguish between the real (what really is the case, which belongs to the order of being) and the imaginary (what merely seems to be the case, which belongs to the order of appearances). The former is solid and reliable, the latter, flighty and untrustworthy. The notion of the hyperreal threatens to undo several centuries of dedicated effort to keep the two separate and clearly distinguishable—not least where representations (or copies) could be confused with the real (or the original). Baudrillard’s suggestion that Disneyland functions to convince us that all is well on this score, when in fact all is far from well, launches a challenge to a way of thinking to which we have become thoroughly accustomed. Little wonder, therefore, that attempts to think through the concept of hyperreality can all too easily slip back into a way of thinking that the concept actually disqualifies. Baudrillard’s point is not that the image has become more important than the real but that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of a distinction between the two—that this distinction

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can no longer be maintained, and that it is no longer upheld in our culture (even if our culture still insists on using now-redundant terms, in a desperate bid to disguise the fact that the distinction is no longer operative). If the distinction between reality and representation has been effaced, one cannot, for example, maintain that erstwhile reality is becoming more and more image-like and less and less real—the basis of innumerable critiques of consumer culture as image saturated and insubstantial—without equally upholding that erstwhile images are becoming more and more real, that there is an excess as much as a lack of reality. But this formulation is already inadequate in that it leaves the initial distinction between reality and its representation intact, surreptitiously smuggling it in again by the back door. If hyperreality implies a world where there are no longer any grounds for taking the so-called “representation” as inferior to, or derivative of, the thing it (purportedly) re-presents, the appropriate conceptual lexicon now hinges on the terminology of simulacra and simulation. The sense of simulation proper to hyperreality does not, however, imply a degree of dissimulation, falsity, or deception, which would be to obliquely construe the presence of a solid and durable reality elsewhere. On the contrary, the erstwhile representation becomes “its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 1994, 6)—a “copy” for which there is no “original,” where the supposed “copy” is an “original” in its own right. In such a world, all things stand ultimately for nothing but themselves—there is no division between things that mean and things that are meant. More exactly, each such division is but momentary, protean, and ultimately reversible. It is just by linguistic inertia that we still talk of signifiers, bereaved of signifieds, as signifiers; of signs which stand but for themselves, as “appearances.” (Bauman 1993, 36)

The term appearance spontaneously implies its distinction from an underlying reality (from what actually is the case, despite appearances to the contrary). By their very nature, appearances are deceptive—prompting efforts to dig deeper and ascertain what is really the case. Our ingrained habit of thinking in such terms is increasingly misleading. The hyperreal is powerful precisely because it sidesteps the kind of questions appropriate to situations where the distinction between reality and

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appearance holds good. Its power “derives from its immunity to the sort of interrogation which one would address to an appearance” (Bauman 1993, 36). Having effaced the distinction between reality and appearance, the hyperreal automatically disqualifies the kind of objections that reassert the distinction by insisting on speaking in terms of appearances, images, and representations as if these were mere shadows of the real, somehow less real than anything else. The trajectory of modernity has progressively ensured that they are not. The serial production methods set in sway by industrial capitalism were responsible for generating an initial situation where the real no longer equated to the original, where the copy no longer carried the pejorative implications of the counterfeit (technological means of reproduction such as the photocopier, for example, produce facsimiles, not fakes). This paves the way for a further transition toward a situation in which the opposition between the real and its derivative copy breaks down entirely, to the extent that the “very definition of the real [becomes] that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent reproduction” (Baudrillard 1993, 73). For example, the real vanishes into the code of the word processor: none of the three copies of the document I print out can be identified as the original; each is a pure simulacrum, implying “a real without origin or reality” (Baudrillard 1994, 1). Precisely this property saturates consumer culture. Consider, for example, a product like margarine, which was first devised as a utilitarian substitute for butter—buerre économique. Not only was margarine not the first counterfeit butter—the long history of trading standards reveals considerable evidence of counterfeiting and adulteration—but it was not, in fact, a counterfeit at all. Despite its resemblance to butter, margarine is its own substance. Its initial marketing, as Roland Barthes (1973) famously demonstrated, attempted to establish this in a rhetorical form of inoculation. The consumer’s reticence to consume margarine instead of butter formed the basis of early advertising campaigns proclaiming it to be better than butter: “Margarine’s resemblance to butter entails that its simulacral features themselves become the foundation of its advantages, and of its delights in the mouths of sceptics” (Genosko 2008, 83). Margarine is not, then, simply a degraded copy of butter. Meanwhile, butter is itself an industrialized simulation of the degraded motifs of nature

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and tradition (it is colored golden yellow with added dyes, for instance). Both butter and margarine are realized in an ever-shifting play of signs. Held together in simulation, the transmogrification of one transforms the substance of the other: a flavorless margarine makes for a tastier butter, a vitaminenriched margarine makes for a more unhealthy butter, and so on. Butter and margarine are not held together by a force of nature—still less by the force of semblance—but by contingent encounter. This is the all-pervasive pattern of a hyperreal culture. The “real” of the simulacrum is reproduction, not resemblance. While the radical implications of the hypothesis of hyperreality are all too readily reappropriated into ways of thinking that disarm and domesticate its force—particularly in uses of the term that confine its consequences to themed megamalls or the virtual reality of cyberspace, insistent on maintaining the contrast between the real and the imaginary—its force cannot be so easily constrained. In significant measure, it is in relation to consumerism that the implosion of the distinction between appearance and reality assumes its paradigmatic role (Clarke 2003). David B. Clarke

See also Authenticity; Counterfeited Goods; Disney; Postmodernism; Reality TV; Semiotics; Simulacrum; Virtual Communities

Further Readings Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Paladin, 1973. Battcock, Gregory, ed. Super Realism: A Critical Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 1993. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1992. Bauman, Zygmunt. “The Sweet Scent of Decomposition.” In Forget Baudrillard? edited by Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner, 22–46. London: Routledge, 1993. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage, 1961. Clarke, David B. The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City. London: Routledge, 2003. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. London: Picador, 1987. Genosko, Gary. “Better Than Butter: Margarine and Simulation.” In Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories, edited by David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, William Merrin, and Richard G. Smith, 83–90. London: Routledge, 2008.

I IDENTITY

Theories and Approaches Most recent engagements with theorizing identity have been seen as antiessentialist, that is, as challenging the notion of a fixed, unitary subject and a single self or identity. Identities are seen as always changing and thus both indicative of contemporary anxieties and also offering possibilities of transformation in a world characterized by the speed of change and new configurations of the self. This stress on change has also meant that identities are seen as fragmented and fluid and even in crisis. Many critiques, especially those of cultural studies, picked up on the speed of change and the mobility and contingency of identifications in the contemporary world and the difficulties in modern life of knowing “who we are.” However, the transformations that result from the significant movement of people and knowledge in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries can be also be understood as creating contexts in which people seek stability and a sense of belonging. Stuart Hall’s work recognized some of the dilemmas posed by the concept of identity in his productive reconfiguration of the ideas of routes, rather than roots, and by positing the advantages of an identity that engages with becoming rather than seeking myths of origin. His arguments have stressed the possibilities of becoming and a particularly creative version of what is largely a social constructionist approach. Identity politics associated with what were called new social movements, which focused on issues of race and

Identity matters in all sorts of ways in the academy and in everyday life. The concept has been used in a variety of fields of study, especially from the 1970s in relation to politics, through what was called identity politics and as a focus for understanding some of the national and ethnical conflict in the global arena, which characterized the latter part of the twentieth century. Identity brings together personal investment and the social worlds in which those investments are made and which shape who we are. The concept of identity has particular resonance within the field of the study of consumption. The relationship between production and consumption has been transformed and traditional certainties subverted through new processes and practices, including a massive reconfiguration of work. Consumption is now seen as extending not only to a wide range of goods and services but also to an ever-expanding range of identities. Those who promote products are only too aware of the need to link their product to a desirable and attractive lifestyle and to the idea that change is always possible. The idea of consuming identities suggests that growing numbers of people might shape who they are through what they consume. Such ideas fit in well with contemporary cultural stress on individual choice and the importance of consumption rather than production in the making and remaking of identities.

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ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, and environmental matters, challenged the hegemony of social class as the key determinant of identity within new explanatory frameworks. Debates at the level of the individual and in the wider international arena have been framed by the idea of identity crises in many different areas of experience from personal concerns with intimacy, sexuality, gender, and embodiment to identifications with nation and place and ethnic affiliations within global as well as local politics. A major strength of the concept of identity is the possibilities it offers for exploring the relationship between personal, inner and social, outer worlds. Identity always incorporates being situated in the social world where each person plays a socially recognized part or role, as posited by Erving Goffman, or sees the self through the eyes of others, in what George Herbert Mead in 1934 called the “I” and the “me.” Identity has a long history in the academy, although the explosion of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary interest of the twentieth century can be seen to be most powerfully linked to ideas of social change and fragmentation, including the developments of globalization in relation to self-identity, as suggested by Anthony Giddens, and the idea of identity crisis as a social, cultural phenomenon as argued by Kobena Mercer or as inner conflict in Erik Erikson’s work on the psychosocial stages of development. Questions of identity have become central to the human and social sciences. Just as what had previously been the remit of psychology in relation to subjectivity, the self, and inner worlds, so social psychology and sociology in interrogating the relationship between individuals and the wider society became a means of explaining social uncertainties and dislocation and a key component of culture as argued by Ernesto Laclau. This interest in identity as a focus for theories of social change in the global arena has developed along with the shift, especially in Western cultures, to a focus on the self and projects for understanding and improving the self or, more critically, through what Nikolas Rose has called psy-discourses of self-obsessed Western cultures. Of the two strands, however—the first emphasizing the primacy of inner worlds and the second placing the wider arena and social worlds at the center of the analysis of the driving forces in identity formation—both see individual selves constituted through inner worlds and change on the global arena and social worlds that highlight the two main themes in the development of thinking about identity.

Identity always involves the interface and interconnections between inner and outer social worlds, which are enmeshed in often complicated ways. Each has capacities to affect the other. Although the focus of each strand is different, there are shared concerns with exploring how identities are made and remade and in challenging essentialist versions of the self as fixed. The first strand includes psychological, psychoanalytic, and psychodynamic approaches that have focused more on identity formation and the second, the sociological, includes approaches that seek to explain the emergence of different identity positions historically, such as the rational individual in relation to social institutions and regulatory practices in the wider social, political, and economic world. The language of identity has shifted across time, and there are still distinctions made between self, subject, and identity positions although there are also blurred boundaries, and “self” is in common currency. Zygmunt Bauman distinguishes between self, identity, and agency over time but argues that such differences have limited application in contemporary society. However, along with Anthony Giddens, he claims that the autonomy of the self as agent concerns producing accounts of oneself. Giddens has endeavored to combine the personal and the social in a theoretical approach that combines social regulatory forces with the possibilities of agency by bringing together structure and agency in the idea of structuration. Subjectivity has at some points been more closely linked to psychoanalytic approaches and those which stress irrational as well as rational forces in play. Subjectivity includes a sense of self, which is constituted through conscious and unconscious thoughts and sensations, but subjects are subjected to social forces and flows and have to take up a position within the social worlds in which they are situated and which make up the multiple identities of each person, according to Kath Woodward (1997). The interconnections between inner and outer worlds have been a feature of psychological and psychodynamic approaches to identity, in many cases drawing on Freudian theories of identification as the process through which a child comes to take in the outside world of persons and objects. The psyche is thus made up of an ego, superego, and unconscious, which are in constant tension. Psychoanalytic thinking has been very influential within cultural studies’ approaches (Woodward 1997) and what has been called the “subject of language approach,” which

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drew on Althusserian, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Redman in du Gay, Evans, and Redman 2005). What was distinctive about this approach was the idea that identities are made up in and through difference and, as a result, are dependent on an outside that both denies them and provides the conditions of their possibility; subjects are thus hailed or interpellated unconsciously recognizing themselves as named by forces outside themselves. Identities so reproduced might appear to be determined by language and symbolic systems. This approach suggests not only that identities work but also that subjects have very little control over their constitutions. Symbolic systems seem more important than any inner conflict or contradiction and endeavor to present a broad-based explanatory framework, which can be applied to all aspects of identity formation and which prioritize representational systems. The stress on language and cultural representations, however, still has much to offer in a media-saturated world of semiotic, symbolic systems. The tendency of such Lacanian-influenced theories to generalize may account for the development of alternative approaches that draw on object relations thinkers and practitioners following Melanie Klein. These approaches have stressed different aspects of Sigmund Freud’s work and focused on the motherchild relationship in the formation of identity rather than the Lacanian entry into the patriarchal symbolic of language and the “law of the father.” The object relations branch of psychoanalytic thinking offers a different normative perspective and focuses more on the clinical context of therapy, counseling, and self-improvement to explore the complex processes through which individuals recognize themselves through inner-directed rather than outer-directed processes. Thinkers within this tradition have endeavored to demonstrate how the social world both impacts on the psyche and is influenced and shaped by psychic forces and that individuals unconsciously use aspects of the outer, social world to represent aspects of their own internal world. Thus, “internal objects” are allowed a relative autonomy, which can be destructive or creative so that inner life is not a simple or mere reflection of the external world; it has its own dynamic as Ian Craib argued. Theories of identity have also played a key role in sociological and philosophical theories, which have emphasized the importance of social material processes in the formation of identities. Such views

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have often mapped the historical emergence of new versions of the self and in the latter part of the twentieth century were often in dialogue with Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach, such as in the work of Nikolas Rose. Foucault’s approach suggested that selves are constituted through a process of discursive, historical construction of identities. Foucault’s subject is reproduced through discursive regimes with historical developments creating particular figures, which are identity positions reproduced through knowledge and political and social systems. It is not only figures like the “hysterical woman” or the homosexual who are “put into discourse” through the circulation of knowledge systems, such as psychological or psychoanalytic theories, but it is also that the very notion of the rational individual, or the sovereign consumer, could be seen as constituted historically through the emergence of a set of practices and knowledge rather than any sense of agency, either collective or individual. Psychoanalysis is one such discursive regime according to Foucault whose arguments are in many ways antithetical to those of psychoanalysis, although there have been attempts at rapprochement, notably in the work of Judith Butler, who endeavored to bring together the strongly social constructionist ideas of Foucault and psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious forces that shape the self and the power of psychic investment. Some of the challenges of object relations theories, although not always directly engaging with Foucault, have stressed the absence of any sense of agency in Foucault’s notion of subjectification, in spite of his attempts to relocate the self as active in his technologies of the self.

Identity and Consumption The concept of identity has played an important part in the field of consumption and consumption studies, especially in the shift in emphasis from production to consumption in social and economic theoretical critiques. To grasp what is happening when consumers purchase goods and services, an understanding of both identity formation and the range of identities available and how they might be linked to products is vital, as demonstrated by Roberta Sassatelli in her work on consumer culture. Identity politics opened new avenues of creativity and routes for the promotion of diverse identifications. Identity has particular resonance in the field of consumption, where

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theories of identity offer understanding of the interrelationship between production and consumption and the specific processes that are implicated in the practices of consumption. Consumption, especially in late modernity, when it is characterized by aspirations and desires as well as need, invokes the importance of how people see themselves and are seen by others and suggests that the question of who am I? could be answered by buying into identities. Consumption brings together the two major dimensions of identity, as a concept that links inner and outer worlds and presents the interface between the personal and the social, the individual and the society. The idea of consuming identity has different inflections, but identity involves the creation, enactment performance, and understanding of “who you are” in everyday life, in the context of the globalizing forces that also become routine and individualized. Identity bridges the gap between the personal and the social, the local and the global and speaks to material practices, which open up and constrain the possibilities for difference, so that people may be both consumed by and consume identities in multiple and contested ways, which are not simply a matter of rational choice, nor are they entirely determined. Discussion of consuming identities has also acknowledged the embodiment that is also constitutive of identity, for example, as emphasized in the work of Parsi Falk. In what Alexandra Howson has called the corporeal turn, there has been increasing recognition of Pierre Bourdieu’s focus on body practices, for example, through the investment of physical capital in particular identities and his claim that we are our bodies and that self and body, as mind and body, are inextricably enmeshed. Embodiment is central to Bourdieu’s account of taste and the ways in which consumption shapes and is shaped by embodied identities. Much recent work has drawn on phenomenological accounts of embodiment to demonstrate the complex ways in which bodies are part of making sense of the self and of shaping identity and offer possibilities as well as presenting a limit to our projects.

Addressing Imbalances Each of these strands of thinking about identity, although each has a different focus, can be seen as challenging a unitary view of the self, which is anyway grounded in either an embodied fixity or the unitary, bounded, rational individual of the Enlightenment as has been explored in Hall’s work

on cultural identities. Attempts at reconciling different theoretical positions have largely been involved in addressing imbalances between the two elements of the identity equation as well as exploring the possibilities of agency in what seems often to be a field dominated by constraints and social forces. Identity, however, is always attentive to the interrelationship between inside and outside, the self and the social, wherever particular emphasis lies. Approaches that stress the social or discursive construction of identity might appear guilty of what was called oversocialization, which the incorporation of psychoanalytic theories has sought to redress. However, identity always has to have a self or a subject, who is interpellated or subjectified, which means that the concept retains its relevance in spite of some imbalance. The usefulness of the concept of identity has been challenged in different ways in recent times. For example, the links between identity and identity politics in the late-twentieth century is seen to imply fixity rather than the dynamism and motor for change that it needed. Paul Gilroy argues that identification is more useful. Slavoj Žižek suggests that identity cannot adequately explain or make possible resistance to the global, diffused, and homogenized hegemony of global consumers, which may be sacrificed to literal consumption, at least for those who can afford it, which subverts the utility of identity in relation to political and social equality, especially for the growing numbers of impoverished people across the globe. Identity, however, retains enormous importance through its interdisciplinary applications and its usefulness in bringing together inner and outer worlds and providing a genuine theoretical tool for the reconciliation of the personal and the political and the individual and the social, which has considerable usefulness in the field of consumption, especially as a space that offers possibilities for the making and remaking of identities. Kath Woodward See also Belonging; Collective Identity; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Cultural Studies; Gender; Individualization; Interpellation; Postmodernism; Self-Reflexivity

Further Readings Du Gay, Paul, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman. Identity: A Reader. London: Sage, 2005. Eliot, Anthony. Concepts of the Self. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.

Imaginative Hedonism Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Hall, S. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Howson, Alexandra. Embodying Gender. London: Sage, 2005. Rutherford, Jonathan, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Woodward, Kath. “Concepts of Identity and Difference.” In Identity and Difference, edited by Kath Woodward, 7–62. London: Sage, 1997. Woodward, Kath. Questioning Identity. London: Routledge, 2004. Woodward, Kath. Embodied Sporting Practices: Regulating Bodies, Regulatory Bodies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2009.

IMAGINATIVE HEDONISM The concept of imaginative hedonism has been developed by Colin Campbell (1987) to account for the apparent insatiability of the modern consumer. Campbell states that this insatiability cannot be explained by a generalization of aristocratic luxury consumption. Such luxury in “traditional hedonism” typically is not innovative but merely quantitative excess over need satisfaction. Having moved beyond necessity, the traditional hedonist tries to re-create the pleasure of need satisfaction by intensifying and refining the sensual stimuli involved. But in relying on sensations, such hedonism still remains bound by the absolute limits to possible physical arousal. Further, overstimulation does not only fail to infinitely increase pleasure, but also it often achieves the opposite: nausea. Traditional luxury consumption normally has the function of asserting social rank (cf. conspicuous consumption), and this performance character, too, militates against the possibility of achieving genuine pleasure. To allow insatiability, Campbell argues, the link to sensual stimuli must be severed and pleasure seeking has to shift to emotions instead. Pleasure then no longer is a property of stimulating external objects but of internal “spiritual” processes. Here, pleasure

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is gained by conjuring up emotional states through a skilled mastery of the imagination, by indulging in daydreams. While these daydreams are facilitated by the use of consumer goods, the pleasure is not in the immediate sensual effect of those goods on the consumer but in the consumer’s self-illusionary engagement with them. As this involves a considerable degree of self-control, Campbell also speaks of “autonomous” hedonism. The imaginative hedonist enjoys involvement in fictional worlds, shares the adventures of invented characters he or she can identify with, or dreams him- or herself into a semifictional identity while, for example, donning a certain style of dress, driving a particular car, and being on holiday or in a theme park. This self-illusion does not lead to multiple personalities or a loss of reality in a world of simulacra as it is performed in a cynical mode: the illusions are “felt to be true”—but “known to be false.” Crucial for this feeling of truth is that the dreamed-up parallel realities are still realistic in that they are internally consistent worlds—not entirely arbitrary fantasies. The imaginative hedonist not only uses consumer goods as a launch pad or aide for further daydreams but also is able to anticipate the pleasure to be had from objects not yet acquired. Thus, not only the desired object is a source of enjoyment, but desire itself also becomes an object of gratification. This leads into a dynamics of longing in which the acquisition of the desired object nearly always must disappoint as daydreams will be more perfect than any reality they anticipate. This frustration then triggers new longings, which fuels demand for novel products and thereby accounts for fashion as “most central of all institutions of modern consumerism” (Campbell 1987, 93). To explain the emergence and persistence of modern autonomous imaginative hedonism, Campbell employs an argumentative strategy modeled after Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic. As the economic system does not “produce” mentalities but can only favor some already existing ones over others, the “spirit of modern consumerism” like the “spirit of capitalism” must have sprung from other sources. Just as Weber singles out Calvinism as source of the spirit of capitalist producers and administrators, so Campbell identifies Romanticism as the source of the spirit of consumerism. This genealogy has been criticized as it does not account for the continued existence of consumerism after the demise of the Romantic movement (Holbrook and Hirschman 1993). Campbell holds against this that

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once the consumerist mentality has emerged, like the Protestant ethic of production, the romantic ethic of consumption no longer needs the originating spiritual movement as it is sustained by its fit to the current social system. Campbell locates the site of reproduction in the gendered personality attributions in the middle-class nuclear family that reproduce a “purito-romantic personality system” in which the father identification encourages a rationalistic work ethic and the mother identification encourages emotionality, creativity, and imagination. In recourse on Georg Simmel, one could also argue that such an institutionalized support is to be found in what could be termed structural romanticism of money. Money mediation encourages romantic imagination by creating distance between the subject and the desired object and thus establishing a space for longing. It also brings the entirety of reality (existing and possible) within reach of the moneyowning subject, allowing for realistic daydreams about desired objects. Finally, since money represents all possibilities, every concrete purchasing decision constitutes a rejection of other possibilities while they are still symbolically represented as such. It thus contributes to the frustration of realized desires. Sharon Boden and Simon J. Williams point out that the concept of imaginative hedonism is limited in scope. It does not address those areas of consumption that are driven by corporeal emotional stimulation, addictive attachments, and social pressures. Daniel Miller also insists that everyday shopping behaviors are more driven by “ordinary” love and care than by romantic pleasure seeking. Imaginative hedonism clearly does not cover the entirety of the contemporary consumer experience—and Campbell (2003) makes it clear it is not intended to. It is designed to highlight that part of the modern consumer mentality that is new and can be seen as the force behind the expansive drive of consumerism. While there are many relatively “unimaginative” consumer goods to be had (albeit the fact that even washing powders and potatoes are advertised in contexts of dream worlds), there are product groups that are primarily directed at imaginative hedonism. A pioneering case is books, especially novels, where the enjoyment rests entirely on the consumers’ ability to imagine themselves as witness or even protagonist in the fictive world created. This is still a strong element in consumer culture, with novels not only offering access to parallel worlds but also, from the ponds of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia

to the Riemann cuts in Phillip Pullmann’s His Dark Materials trilogy, making parallel worlds a subject matter in its own right. Popular novels to this day encourage identification without asking for serious commitment. They also operate on the hypothetical realism of daydreams rather than mere fantasy even where, as in the case of Harry Potter, they dive into an explicitly “magic” world. Cinema and television are developments of this field, creating more realistic illusions and demanding higher skills in decontrol and recontrol of emotions. Virtual worlds from their beginnings in handbook- and map-based role games to computer games and the Internet-based adoption of “imaginary forms of selfhood” (Streeter 2003) radicalize this form of romantic pleasure seeking in parallel worlds by making the consumer player a coauthor of the plot. Other commodities may be less fully romanticized, but most combine functional elements responding to needs, emotional attachment, and signification of belonging and standing, with aspects of imaginative hedonism. For example, food—for Campbell the ideal object for traditional hedonism and still laden with necessity, sensual attachment, and status (e.g., Lupton 1996)—has clearly acquired an imaginative aspect during the Romantic period (Gigante and Morton 2003). The concept of imaginative hedonism can also be employed to account for the quasi-religious nature of consumerism (Varul 2008). Thomas Luckmann argues that the “symbolic universes” instituted by religions refer at once to everyday life and point “to a world that is experienced as transcending everyday life” (1967, 43). Imaginative hedonists as daydreamers do precisely this: they conjure symbolic universes, dream worlds that are rooted in their ordinary existence, but take them from there into a range of imagined situations, adventures, and identities. Campbell therefore sees imaginative hedonism contributing an “other-worldly” trait in contemporary culture. Imaginative hedonism is transformative in that it is widening the consuming individual’s spiritual existence, giving access if not to higher, at least to parallel worlds. The difference from traditional religiosity of course is that the suspension of disbelief here is willing and that the transcendent worlds conjured are at the command of the consumer. Matthias Zick Varul See also Desire; Happiness; Hedonism; Needs and Wants; Postmodernism; Protestant Ethic; Simulacrum; Tamed Hedonism

Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions

Further Readings Boden, Sharon, and Simon J. Williams. “Consumption and Emotion: The Romantic Ethic Revisited.” Sociology 36, no. 3 (2002): 493–512. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Campbell, Colin. “On Understanding Modern Consumerism and Misunderstanding the Romantic Ethic Thesis.” Sociology 37, no. 4 (2003): 791–797. Gigante, Denise and Timothy Morton, eds. Cultures of Taste—Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Holbrook, Morris B., and Elizabeth C. Hirschman. The Semiotics of Consumption. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body, and the Self. London: Sage, 1996. Miller, Daniel. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Streeter, Thomas. “The Romantic Self and the Politics of Internet Commercialization.” Cultural Studies 17, no. 5 (2003): 648–668. Varul, Matthias Zick. “After Heroism: Religion versus Consumerism.” Islam and Christian Muslim Relations 19, no. 2 (2008): 237–255.

IMPLICIT ATTITUDES See Attitude Surveys; Psychology

INALIENABLE WEALTH/INALIENABLE POSSESSIONS Inalienable wealth, or inalienable possessions, according to Carolyn Folkman Curasi, Linda L. Price, and Eric J. Arnould, refers to a particular category of possessions: those items that should not be given away or sold but that are instead maintained from generation to generation, within the tight boundaries of their owning family, clan, or group. Objects in this special category of possessions remain inalienably attached to their original owner, even long after the object has been transferred from that individual. Inalienable possessions are maintained with the clear intention of passing the object forward within that family or owning group for perpetuity. The key value of inalienable

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wealth is its ability to define the identity of the group in a historical sense, suggests Annette B. Weiner. These items hold a power over the owning people who have come to understand the items’ meanings and history and thus the importance of the object to their family or group members. Family heirlooms often fit this description, when the heirlooms are continually passed forward through the family lineage with layers of the object’s family history bundled with it.

History Inalienable wealth and inalienable possessions were first examined in studies by anthropologists focusing on the material culture of indigenous populations or tribes. In these studies of geographically confined and socially homogeneous societies, anthropologists found that a few objects seemed to remain inalienably attached to their original owners and came to represent the identities of larger social groups. Deep meanings typically accrued in these objects through the possession’s close association with its original owner’s achievements, fame, ancestral history, aesthetics, and/or economic value. The deep meanings and strong history invested in inalienable possessions increased the cultural density of those items and in so doing greatly increased their value. Possessions that became especially culturally dense circulated exceptionally slowly within a population, in comparison to objects less dense with cultural meaning. Inalienable possessions, symbolically dense with cultural meaning, were so valued that their owning families refused to allow these items to circulate outside of their family or clan. The objects that were withheld from circulation for extended periods of time became increasingly valuable. The resulting inalienable possessions are objects that have been strategically held back while other less culturally dense items were exchanged instead.

Inalienable Possessions in Contemporary Society Contemporary middle-class North American families behave consistently with those described in previous theory on inalienable possessions and inalienable wealth. North American research participants are able to easily identify possessions that closely conform to those described in earlier anthropological accounts. Consumers’ behavior surrounding family heirlooms often share the themes and behaviors

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depicted in earlier anthropological studies examining inalienable wealth.

Valuing and Meanings of Inalienable Wealth The inalienable possession’s value is substantial; but this value lies in its strong affective component, directly tied to its significant meaning to the family or to the owning group. Its value is well in excess of its monetary exchange price in the marketplace. Inalienable possessions have a history and meanings that are understood by those in the family or descent group within which it is transferred, but they may have far less meaning and thus far less value to those outside of the group. An inalienable possession has the ability to define an individual or a group in a historical sense. Inalienable possessions have the capacity to transport the past into the present, allowing the achievements, titles, history, accomplishments, and mythology of past family members to be transferred to the identity of the present generation. Stories told about inalienable possessions and passed forward through the lineage socialize new generations of that family to the values held by older members of the lineage, helping to shape and perpetuate that family’s identity. John, age 48, illustrates. He inherited his greatgreat-grandfather’s ring, brought back from California during the gold rush. John describes the ring as “a link to the past” and explains that the ring symbolizes the ideal of pursuing a dream through adversity. John’s story of the ring includes “family history,” a mythical time, “the Gold Rush, along with the Wild West and Indians.” The ring’s history suggests values held by the family and passed down within the lineage that are communicated each time the story of the ring is retold. At the end of John’s narrative of the history of this inalienable possession, he summarizes: “So every time I look at the ring I appreciate it more, because I know what he had to go through, walking all the way to California to pursue a dream” (Curasi, Price, and Arnold 2004, 617). Inalienable possessions allow an individual and its family members to become more and greater than they would be without the inalienable possession. The family’s identity is enlarged and expanded because they are able to take ownership of the achievements, titles, mythologies, and histories of past family and group members. In bundling histories with valued items, these objects become greater than their own

materiality. These objects become a tangible scaffolding on which to attach and pass forward important family stories. As long as the possession and its meanings are protected, the object provides a mechanism by which individual mortality is transcended, ensuring the survival of a measure of the individual’s or the group’s immortality, notes Weiner. Not only is the original owner immortalized through the telling and retelling of his or her life story as the inalienable object is passed forward through the lineage, but the later generations of later family members are also within the layers of stories about the possession that accumulate as the contemporary histories of new generations are added to the meaning bundle of the inalienable possession. With each additional layer of stories told, additional family members also become immortalized as their stories, too, are added and passed forward through the lineage, bundled with the inalienable possession. Passing inalienable wealth forward through the lineage has important societal benefits as well as benefits to the owning family. It is one of the ways that societies as well as families are able to continually perpetuate themselves. Stories, passed forward through the lineage attached to inalienable possessions, are often rich with lessons and have the ability to socialize younger family members about the values, gender roles, and behaviors that hold sway with older generations of that family group.

Caretakers The boundary of ownership of these items is porous. Although an individual may be given primary responsibility for holding and protecting the item, in actuality the inalienable possession belongs to the group and not to a particular individual within that group. Because inalienable possessions are deemed to be so incredibly valuable to the owning group, a caretaker or curator is carefully selected and groomed over time to understand the true meaning and history of the wealth. Caretakers are trained to vividly retell possession stories, passing forward the myths, stories, and histories bundled with the inalienable possession so that the owning group will not lose sight of the significance of the possession or of their family lineage. Caretakers are responsible for educating others within the group of the meanings and values inherent in these objects. In addition, caretakers also are responsible for protecting the inalienable wealth from loss or harm.

Income

The Danger of Loss or Damage Transferring the possession to a new caretaker is inherently dangerous because at the time of transfer, loss or damage to the possession or its loss of meaning is a far greater possibility. Such a loss could lead to a reduction in the caretaker’s and the group’s identity and thereby their perceived distinctiveness and status. Thus, the selection of a curator and the transfer of the inalienable possession to this new possessor can be a precarious period of time. Loss or damage to inalienable possessions is believed to foreshadow the loss of this part of the group’s identity within the current group’s generation and, for all generations to come. Being able to maintain the inalienable possession against all of the exigencies that may arise attests to the caretakers’ and the group’s ability to hold themselves and their group together. Thus, owning families will go to great lengths to prevent damage to or the loss of these inalienable possessions. Josie, age 83, illustrates the obligation to protect the inalienable wealth she is entrusted with. She describes a sword that belonged to her grandfather, a Civil War veteran. She explains that her grandfather carried the sword at the legendary battle of Vicksburg. As a toddler, Josie inherited the sword because she was “his namesake and his favorite grandchild,” and she plans to pass the sword on to her grandson. Josie sees the sword as a proud, distinct family possession that future generations of her family must keep. She preserves the stories of the sword by frequently retelling them to her family, and she hides the sword when she leaves town (Curasi, Price, and Arnould 2004, 617).

Importance in Societies With Ranking or Hierarchies Inalienable wealth provides evidence of the hierarchy within families, made visible by caretaker selections and the associated possession transfers. Inalienable wealth or inalienable possessions are politically salient within societies, too, because keeping a treasured possession in the face of all of the eventualities that could cause its loss, over generations, defines and entrenches the owning group’s distinctiveness and achievement. Age adds value to inalienable possessions and so does the ability to hold onto these objects for extended periods of time. Understanding all of the ill fortunes that can happen to a family,

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company, or to a people over an extended period of time, the ability to hold on to these items, over generations, and to protect them against all of the exigencies that could happen provides the owning group with documentation of their distinctiveness and superiority in a particular realm. Thus, inalienable wealth has its greatest importance in societies that maintain a system of social ranking or hierarchy because inalienable wealth allows individuals to demonstrate their status, achievement, continuity, prestige, and/or distinctiveness. The longtime ownership of such an object confirms the owning lineage’s superiority and preeminence within the existing social hierarchy. An individual’s role in social life is fragmentary unless attached to something of permanence. The history of the past, equally fragmentary, is concentrated in an object that, in its material substance, defies destruction. Thus, keeping an object defined as inalienable adds to the value of one’s past, making the past a powerful resource for the present and for the future. . . . With inalienable wealth we also find “visual substitutes” for history, ancestors, and the immortality of human life. (Weiner 1985, 224)

Carolyn Folkman Curasi See also Anthropology; Collecting and Collectibles; Dematerialization; Identity; Inheritance; Material Culture; Memory; Positional Goods

Further Readings Curasi, Carolyn Folkman, Linda L. Price, and Eric J. Arnould. “How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth.” Journal of Consumer Behavior, 31 (December 2004): 609–622. Weiner, Annette B. “Inalienable Wealth.” American Ethnologist 12 (1985): 210–227. Weiner, Annette B. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Weiner, Annette B. “Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects.” American Ethnologist 21, no. 1 (1994): 391–403.

INCOME Income “is broadly speaking that what comes in” (Simons: The Definition of Income, 1938/1969, 64), incorporating monetary and/or natural income. Both

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kinds are key indicators for consumption patterns and thus for consumer culture. Monetary income can be generated from land, produced goods and services, and consumers’ capital, and gained from trading profit. The following dimensions are important determinants of income: income type—gross versus net; the entity—varying from a rather macroeconomic (countries, population groups) to a microeconomic level (households, individuals); the timeframe—on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis or regarding individuals’ long-term income or life cycle view.

Concepts of Income and Their Measurement Income is especially relevant in comparing different entities over time in various contexts and for different purposes. Thus, many psychological, social, economic, and managerial theories have the central idea of social comparison and use income as one of the main indicators. Today’s concepts are mainly based on John Maynard Keynes’s first systematic conceptualizing of income comparison in 1936, followed by James Duesenberry’s notion on relative income and consumption in 1949, and Richard Easterlin’s statement in 1974 that welfare does not depend on absolute but rather on relative income. In 1957, Milton Friedman introduced the concept of permanent income, which is closely related to the concept of welfare. Income is a key determinant of individual and household consumption patterns. For an individual, the income is the sum of all wages, salaries, interest rates, profits, payments, rents, transfers, and other received earnings. A widely used concept for comparing individuals’ or households’ welfare is disposable income that consists of earnings, self-employment and capital income and public cash transfers, from which income taxes and social security contributions paid by households are deducted. Comparing households’ welfare calls for a definition of the term household itself. Here, different approaches coexist: the household as economic unit, dwelling unit, family, or network (Warner and Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik 2003). Moreover, an equalization of the income is essential to account for the different household sizes and compositions. One of the most widely used scales is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) weighting scheme that is

perpetually adjusted from the old Oxford scale over the modified OECD scale toward the square-root scale. The latter one uses the net income divided by the square roots of the number of household members as equivalence income. On a societal level, social income is a prominent measure to evaluate and compare countries’ welfare. The OECD compares societal incomes, such as the gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the value added in a region—usually a country—by goods and services produced by labor and property or transaction profits. On a per capita basis, it reflects economic welfare or well-being. Purchasing power parities (PPP) equalize incomes and show relatively what the same shopping basket costs in different countries. PPPs are preferable over exchange rates. Converting the GDP via PPP to a common currency and considering the unequal purchasing power of national currencies (price levels) allow for international comparison of economic sizes and welfare.

Application for Discussions on Poverty and Inequality Income inequality and poverty are highly prominent issues in policy and popular debate. Several incomerelated measurements are suitable for displaying income inequality and poverty. Two important measures of income inequality are the Lorenz curve and the Gini-coefficient. Whereas the Lorenz curve plots the cumulative shares of the population—from poorest to richest—against the cumulative share of income that they receive, the Gini-coefficient displays the area between the line-of-equality and the Lorenz curve. The values of the Gini-coefficient range between 0 in case of “perfect equality” and 100 in case of “perfect inequality.” Scandinavian countries have a Gini-coefficient of around 25 while the United States had one of 41 in 2007 (United Nations Development Programme 2007/2008). To measure income poverty, there are a number of approaches—all using disposable household income: Some take the shopping basket approach where typical costs of required goods and services that ensure a minimum living standard are assessed and equalized over time. Others use relative thresholds of income, for example, the 50 percentage or 60 percentage of the median income. The concept of income poverty experienced an extension by including other indicators such as the access to education, dwelling, health,

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and resources to debt. Another approach considers consumption streams instead of income, which is justified by a closer connection to long-term income. Using the latter approach, the difference is that households experiencing temporary income falls are not defined as poor. Thus, consumption data report generally lower poverty and inequality rates than mere income estimates. The measurement of poverty has strong policy implications, for example, how to reduce poverty or how to equalize opportunities. On both individual and societal levels, monetary income is often thought of as a proxy for full income. Besides financial aspects, full income incorporates other nonmonetary incomes such as leisure or health. However, the nonmonetary income is difficult to assess. For example, involuntary leisure time due to unemployment might be evaluated rather low whereas voluntary leisure is estimated to be high in value, but attempts to price nonmonetary income lead to the same hourly value for both types of leisure. On the societal level, the description of values and goods that are produced within a society depends on the definition of goods and services that count as productive and on the values ascribed to them. Wencke Gwozdz See also Debt; Economic Indicators; Economics; Household Budgets; Inequalities; Keynes, John Maynard; Leisure; Money; Poverty; Well-Being

Further Readings Case, Karl E., Ray C. Fair, and Sharon M. Oyster, Principles of Economics. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009. Eurostat. Consumers in Europe. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2009. ISBN 978-92-79-11362-8. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]. What are Equivalence Scales? Paris: OECD Social Policy Division, 2005. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]. OECD Factbook 2009: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics. Paris: OECD, 2009. Simons, Henry C. “The Definition of Income.” In Readings in the Concept and Measurement of Income, edited by Robert H. Parker, 63–73. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Originally published in Personal Income Taxation: The Definition of Income as a Problem of Fiscal Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938.

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United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Human Development Report 2007/08. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Warner, Uwe, and Jürgen H. P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik. “How to Measure Income.” In Advances in Cross-national Comparison, edited by Jürgen H. P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik and Christof Wolf, 307–326. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2003.

INDIVIDUALIZATION Classical sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel recognized individualization as a feature of Western modernity together with functional differentiation and rationalization. Drawing on their work, individualization is defined as the social surfacing of the individual as a unique intersection of social roles, responsibility, and functions as well as the cultural accentuation of the individual as an independent, separated, and original being. Through the workings of functional differentiation, each social actor comes to occupy a fairly unique social position in the complex web of interdependencies that makes up the social space, while rationalization of the self in the form of reflexive self-monitoring allows for integrative effects. Individuality thus acquires a particular moral value: the individual human being as an autonomous self is thus, Durkheim suggested, the God of the apparently secular culture of modernity. Individualization is an ambivalent phenomenon, clarified Simmel; individuals are not simply free to constitute themselves, they are required to do so. According to Foucault, psychologizing becomes the norm as to lay explanations of human behavior, while self-control takes the place of external control in the ordinary government of human subjectivity. The theme of individualization has recently been taken up again by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens to put forward a theory of second or late modernity. Following the classics, Beck considers that individual behavior has become less bound by traditional norms and class-based collective identity and argues that one’s life is increasingly a reflexive self-programmed project. Thus, in contrast to traditional societies where social norms emanated from the collectivity, in modern societies, “individuals must, in part, supply [norms] for themselves, import them into their biographies through their own actions” (Beck and Gernsheim 2002, 2).

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Beck contends that although individualization came about at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, this was largely confined to middle- and upper-class males whereas in second modernity—largely coinciding with the postindustrial economy and the postmodern culture emerging since the 1960s—individualization has extended to other social strata. Furthermore, first modernity entailed both disembedding and re-embedding (actors were disentangled from traditional structures such as hierarchical structures based on privilege or lineage and re-embedded into new, fairly stable structures such as bureaucracies and family); however, second modernity works through a general process of disembedding without re-embedding. At the macrolevel, this entails a social and cultural shift that happens not through the breaking of the fundamental structures of modernity but through their radicalization; at the microlevel, this entails emphasis on individual choice and identity. At both levels, consumption acquires relevance.

Reflexive Individualization Participation in the market as consumers is crucial for the accomplishment of individual identity in the age of what not only Beck but also Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman have called reflexive individualization. Much emphasis has thus been placed on purposive individual stylization of oneself through consumer choices. In this perspective, in a situation of cultural declassification and increasing emphasis on individuality, the self becomes a reflexive and secular project, which works on an ever-refined level of body presentation. This involves unremitting self-monitoring, self-scrutiny, planning, and ordering of elements and choices into a coherent narrative of identity. If for liberalism, choice is just freedom, for these theories, choice is somehow compulsory: we are forced into it not so much by the drive of the capitalist economy but by the absence of a stable social and cultural order in a post-traditional society. Consumer choice is not only central, but also it is obligatory. We have “no choice, but to choose,” writes Giddens (1991, 81). For Beck (1992, 131), “Liberalism presupposed a coherent identity, yet identity seems to be precisely the main problem of modern existence and is itself something to be chosen”; the self is thus “a project which is directed to us by a pluralized world and must be pursued within that pluralized world.” Of course, together with choice comes self-responsibility for the chosen self, and

risk-perception changes accordingly: now risks are in the region of anomie, linked to the incapacity to perform convincingly a positively valued self through one’s own choices. As Giddens observes (1991, 80), late modernity confronts the individual with a complex diversity of choices that is “non-foundational,” produces anxiety, and offers “little help as to which options should be selected.” The solution to such risk and anxiety to be found in consumer culture is, for Bauman (1992, 200), “technical”: it solves the problem of the durable and coherent self in the face of incessant nonfoundational complexity by treating all problems as solvable through specific commodities. Each of them may be highly functional for a precise task, but they still have to be arranged in a coherent, credible whole. Lifestyle, as a reflexive attempt at consumer coherence, can be seen as a way in which the pluralism of post-traditional identity is managed by individuals and organized (or exploited) by commerce. Giddens stresses that in the context of posttraditional societies “the cumulative choices that combine to form a lifestyle define the nucleus of a person’s identity”: “the very core of self-identity” is “mobile” and “reflexive,” made of “routinized practices . . . reflexively open to change,” with consumer choices the “small decisions a person makes every day,” being “not only about how to act but who to be” (1991, 81). Lifestyle orders things into a certain unity, reducing the plurality of choice and affording a sense of “ontological security.” Social reproduction is thus transferred from traditional culture to the market for goods (and labor). The notion of individual wants become central to economic growth, and standardized consumption patterns become central to economic stability, reducing risks not only for individuals but also for corporations. This may bring us to conceive of the self as a commodity itself, and indeed, Giddens seems to adumbrate a process of self-commodification with “self-actualization [being] packaged and distributed according to market criteria” (198). While similar arguments have been important to link a reflection on consumption to broader theoretical debates, they run the risk of overemphasizing disembedding effects as well as reflexivity, either in a triumphant or in a worried voice, as paramount characterizations of consumption and the consumer. They also tend to stress hegemonic grand narratives of consumer culture and identity rather than situate

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ordinary and yet meaningful practices of consumption. Certainly, identity, consumption, choice, and projecting are strongly related in contemporary culture. Yet we should be wary of considering consumption as a purely reflexive activity as it may appear in theories of reflexive individualization. Indeed, in many domains of action mediated by commercial relations, we are not asked to rely only on our freedom of choice to account for participation, preference, and taste. Reference to an ultimate “authentic,” “original,” and “natural” self are becoming strong cultural options, often related to the advice of experts and supported by the norms of consumers’ institution, much as other cultural options such as snobbism, imitation, distinction, or fashion have come to be looked at with some suspicion. More broadly, routines have been shown to be important in understanding ordinary consumer practices—from eating to supermarket shopping, from going to a gym to using a car. When we consume, precisely because we act in practical ways, we do not reflect on everything; to the contrary, the meanings we attribute to our practices and the narratives with which we reflexively create our trajectory of consumption at least partly reflect (and thus blindly construct upon) the conditions in which we find ourselves and act. The bounded reflexivity of consumption corresponds to the fact that people not only express but also constitute themselves through what they get and use. Consumption not only expresses but also performs identity: through making objects their own, social actors make themselves, both as consumers and as selves with specific and different roles linked to different identity markers such as ethnicity, gender sexuality, social status, and so on, which are loosely coupled with specific styles of consumption. All in all, there is a tendency in the reflexive individualization thesis to provide fairly abstract theories of consumption and identity to the effect of overlooking everyday consumer practices (what people do with goods) and how they engage with a variety of social identities not reducible to consumption. This tendency corresponds to a conflation of the normative aspect of identity building (what consumers are as normative social persona) and the practical aspect of agency constitution, which is much more embedded, varied, conflicting, and contested and which feeds back on the consumer as a normative social identity. Admittedly, in post-traditional societies defined by consumer culture, the relation of the self to

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commodities is crucial and subjectively elaborated (via personal style, self-narration, and so forth). But just as it is wrong to conceive of it as crystalline, allpowerful reflexivity, it would be mistaken to consider that reflexive individualization preludes the death of the subject, as if what the consumer-self at the end of their projects expects is meaningless subjugation. According to Simmel, as modernity progresses, social actors move from a situation in which their identity is, as it were, imposed by the things they happen to possess (i.e., their actions are determined by bundles of objects corresponding to a traditional and rigid distribution of roles and resources) to a situation of “absolute potentiality.” With the triumph of commercial culture, individuals are freed from the structural links with goods that “enslave” them: objects have become commodities, which can be bought and exchanged by subjects. The most immediate consequence of this is the neutralization of the power of things to determine people’s identity. However, the freedom that money confers paves the way to indeterminacy; it is a freedom “without any directive, without any definite and determining content. Such freedom favours that emptiness and instability that allows one to give full rein to every accidental, whimsical and tempting impulse” (Simmel 1990, 402). In this situation, we have greater negative freedom (i.e., freedom from external bonds, including restrictions as linked to tradition) on what to consume and how, but positive freedom (i.e., freedom to do things) may be in jeopardy. In fact, negative freedom does not afford indications for the constitution of individual identities consistent through time; thus, people’s life may be dominated by a nostalgic desire to confer new meanings to things and a constant uneasiness with respect to the rationale of their consumption. This perspective is resolutely opposed to the idea that commoditization, and with it the multiplications of images and objects, accompanies the dissolution of the subject and the collapse of available space for appropriating, decoding, and decommoditizing objects and images. Instead, the space available for the subject increases, but paradoxically, it is precisely for this reason that one can find oneself paralyzed, incapable of giving personal value to things. In other words, the constitution of the subject through goods is an active but inconclusive process, a neverending endeavor that cannot provide once and for all a stable identity. Still, it is precisely because of this inconclusiveness that consumption is a creative and

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dynamic process, an ongoing emancipation from the constraints implicit in the possession of any particular good or goods combination. Expressed in wider sociotheoretical terms, we may say that contemporary consumer practices allow for a maximum of individual specificity but leave on the subject the onus of justification, the possibility that such specificity finds its place in the social order. This may well correspond to what Erving Goffman famously branded as “bureaucratization of the spirit”: the fragmentary condition of the modern subject who has to manage a highly specific set of different roles while projecting a unitary and coherent self. Clearly, in many ways, this is broader than consumption. The experiential investment of the self, for example, extends into the corporate world, whereby creative workers are expected to be good at selling themselves: adopting an entrepreneurial, promotional outlook as their own, needing a projectable, flexible, creative self who is always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always looking forward to and preparing for something. On these premises, we should avoid considering that reflexive individualization simply couples with an unremitting process of commoditization, which extends entirely to the self. Surely, commercial relations extend today in private domains, which were often encoded through what was construed as opposed to the market and deemed “affective” or “personal.” But we have come to appreciate the extent to which market and emotions have always been intertwined, sustaining each other in a continuous dialectic made of conflicts and accommodations. Furthermore, if we focus on consumption and identity, we should appreciate that modern consumers are basically asked to be active, to produce themselves as the source of value, participating in the process of decommoditization and indeed constituting themselves as agents of such a process. Put differently, consumption is a sphere of action regulated according to the cultural principle of individual expression. Obviously, this is not to say that the actor is absolutely free. To the contrary, the subjectivity required by consumption is, in some ways, a binding individuality. To adequately perform their social roles as consumers, actors must thus find a point of balance between the bored indifference of the blasé, the pursuit of difference as an end in itself of the eccentric, and indeed the other-directed striving for distinction of the snob. They must express their deepest and most peculiar subjectivities.

Individual Choice As a normative cultural identity, the consumer appears in striking continuity with hegemonic modern views of subjectivity. The development of capitalist society has consolidated and popularized a particular notion of the subject: the autonomous actor in a growing distance from things. Things are increasingly seen as radically different from humans, and this growing distance between the nature of people on one side and that of objects on the other accompanies the idea that objects can compromise people’s humanity rather than complete it. Still, from John Locke onward, modern identity also relies on material objects and property for grounding. There is thus a fundamental contradiction in the way we conceive modern identity: a paradox between idealism and materialism, which clearly defines our relation with consumption. Briefly, such paradox entails that subjects perform their identity through commodities as difference from commodities. Idealism thus stimulates materialism: in fact, in contrast to many tribal societies where people become the objects through which the values of a culture are fixed, in our culture, things have been given the fundamental role of objectifying cultural categories, of tangibly fixing meanings and values. In such circumstances, the notion of individual choice acquires momentum as a hegemonic normative frame, which has both been sustained by expert knowledge and deployed through a myriad of local norms and particularities to evaluate consumer practices, their worth, moral adequacy, and normality. Choosing things just for a try or just for fun, for present physical enjoyment, or for sophisticated aesthetic pleasure is fine so long as it is the self who is playing the game. As such, choice relies on specific anthropological presuppositions: invited to think of themselves as choosers, individuals are asked to promote their desires and pleasures as the ultimate source of value while keeping mastery over them. To consume properly, people must be masters of their will. In other terms, consumers are sovereigns of the market in so far as they are sovereigns of themselves. The consumer’s sovereignty is a double-edged sovereignty: hedonism, the search for pleasure, must be tempered by various forms of detachment, which stress the subject’s capacity to guide that search, to dose pleasures, to avoid addiction, to be, in a word, recognizable as someone who autonomously

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chooses. If renouncing the material world has been one way that many cultures have used to signal a spiritual calling (early Christian anchorites, Buddhist monks, medieval saints refusing food, etc.), our world, both idealist and materialist, calls on us all to positively demonstrate our capacity to choose. In this situation, even the fact that our desires may discover different objects and that these objects are continuously changing may help in sustaining the game of having a self-possessed self. The development of the so-called post-Fordist economy may be seen in this light: the ceaseless innovation of consumer goods, the continuously superseded adoption of different fashions, the endless combination of styles that appears to grant consumers a continuous liberation from the specific objects, which they have chosen, allowing for the renewed exercise of choice. Still, the possibility to “exit” (i.e., choose not to choose) a particular good remains a powerful means to guarantee that what links us to it is indeed our choice. This obviously doesn’t imply a return to asceticism but rather that the emphasis must remain on the subjects and their ability to govern the world and themselves, on the right of the subjects to satisfy their own desires with objects, and not on the objects and their pleasures.

Contemporary Research Directions Seen in this light, individualization is both a process and a perspective defining both a type of society and a historical period with different accentuations from early to late modernity. And it is a deeply ambivalent phenomenon whereby consumption is shaped by an individualistic activity and increasingly appears as a terrain of ambivalence for the development of human identities. Individualization has a dual character, whereby it may be able to emancipate people but binds them to specific conditions; to offer significant capacities, which may become heavy burdens; and to solve certain problems but create others. Invested by individualizing forces, both cultural and social, consumption is a disputed terrain, which not always heralds freedom but nonetheless potentially carries social change, creativity, and satisfaction—depending on its organization. In (late) modernity, consumption has largely been organized around the expression of self, with a far too autonomous, self-contained, self-possessed vision of the self as its moral benchmark. And yet consumption remains a symbolic and practical affair of a deeply social nature: it can only

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partly be reflexive as it is grounded in institutionally enforced rituals and interactions; it can only partly reflect the wishes of an autonomous self as this very self constitutes itself through practices of consumption that fundamentally involve webs of social relations. In many ways, thus, contemporary researchers confronting the individualization thesis have to bring it back to everyday reality, to consider what are the limits that deeply rooted and multilayered ordinary practices, social relations, structural hierarchies, and institutions put to reflexivity and self-projection while offering taken-for-granted routes for choice and trust. They have to consider how actor-consumers occupying different social positions face and translate individualization both as an opportunity and as a limit, and they have to consider how different commodities or commodities’ domains materialize different occasions for different forms of individualization. All in all, scholars of consumer culture are called to problematize the individualization thesis as a grandtheoretical scheme that needs to be variously nuanced, if not overturned, when dealing with the extremely varied world of consumption. Roberta Sassatelli See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Identity; Ordinary Consumption; Postmodernism; Promotional Culture; Self-Reflexivity; Social Class; Tamed Hedonism

Further Readings Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage, 1998. First published 1970. Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Post-modernity. London: Routledge, 1992. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992. First published 1986. Beck, Ulrich, and Elizabeth Gernsheim. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002. Durkheim, Emile. “Individualism and the Intellectuals.” In Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, edited by R. Bellah, 43–57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. 2 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978 and 1982. First published 1936 and 1939. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 208–228. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983.

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Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Sassatelli, Roberta. “Trust, Choice and Routine: Putting the Consumer on Trial.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 4, no. 4 (2001): 84–105. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory, Politics. London: Sage, 2007. Simmel, Georg. Philosophy of Money. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1990. First published 1907. Taylor, C. The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Warde, Alan, and Jukka Gronow, eds. Ordinary Consumption. London: Routledge, 2001.

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY Industrial society refers to a society that has passed through an industrial revolution, with the large-scale organization of manufacturing and other sectors of the economy and high levels of division of labor and mechanization of processes having become commonplace. The products of manufacturing industry will be present in many spheres of consumption, from the infrastructures of energy and transport to manufactured appliances in the home and everyday life. Often, new consumer goods are “domesticated” versions of what were earlier industrial goods—sewing machines, telephones, computers, and so on. The term industrial societies is part of everyday speech. It is commonly applied to countries of North America, to practically all European countries, to much of the former Soviet Union, to Japan (and often Korea), and to Australia and New Zealand. Those cases where the label has been applied for many decades are often viewed as advanced industrial societies and contrasted with newly industrializing countries (NICs) and emerging economies (especially China and India). (Deindustrialisation is used to refer to severe loss of manufacturing to NICs and emerging economies.) Finally, other developing countries or underdeveloped economies may be seen as awaiting their own industrial transformations. These categories are prevalent; however, the term industrial society has been, and remains, contentious.

At its most basic, contemporary use of the term refers to societies with a strong manufacturing sector, integrated into the wider economy (i.e., not mainly focused on overseas exports). Such societies feature a shift in the workforce away from agriculture, where mechanization and agribusinesses’ pursuit of economies of scale act as “push factors” and the greater attractions of city life as a “pull factor.” They also feature a decline in the role of craft production of goods and a greater divorce between home and workplace. The market provides many basic goods and services that were previously self-produced, though domestic work still remained highly important for meal preparation, personal care, and so on. Early industrialization is typically connected with largescale urbanization, as many workers move to be close to factory and related workplaces. This means the emergence of modes of consumption based on urban living and the dwellings, goods, and services that go along with this. The bulk of the population becomes urbanized, with employment shifting to manufacturing and service industries. The archetypal industrial revolutions in Europe and the United States stretched over many decades, as new factory systems and technologies were introduced, accompanied by massive changes in occupational structures and workplace organization and experience. Many commentators describe two industrial revolutions—the first beginning in Great Britain in the late-eighteenth century and involving the use of water power and steam engines, the organization of work in factories, the growth of machinebased manufacturing (e.g., in textile industries), the construction and use of canals and improvement of roads, et cetera. New techniques in metallurgy were used to make machinery that could be employed in many industries. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Second Industrial Revolution involved the wider application of coal and steam power, including in transport—railways and steam-powered ships— and improved communications through telegraphy. In the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the internal combustion engine and electrical machinery made much more mobility and flexibility possible, so much so that some commentators refer to a Third Industrial Revolution. (New information technology is similarly seen as the core technology in a further revolution.) The leadership of the first revolutions may have been with Great Britain, but the approaches and techniques diffused widely round the

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world, with the United States being at the forefront of many twentieth-century developments. The factory system, with increasingly advanced mechanization and grueling working hours, was accompanied by new approaches to industrial discipline. One important area for discipline involved time use—experience of time became governed more by the routines of the workplace, less by the natural cycles of the sun and seasons. Though the evidence is debated, there are indications that the amount of free time (for consumption) that workers had declined in the course of the Industrial Revolution, though it grew again in the twentieth century. Various efforts to codify industrial discipline reached their apogee in Taylor’s “scientific management,” which emerged in the twentieth century as a set of principles about the division of labor, standardization of tasks, application of time-and-motion methods, and so forth. Mass consumption of new industrial products emerged alongside the growth of mass consumption. Mass markets for many goods that had previously been the preserve of the rich became possible as the price of clothing, metalware, and other goods was brought down. New consumer goods were also introduced, along with mass media and other consumer services. The archetypal new consumer good was the motor car, whose production became the central industry of many Western economies—and whose most famous producer for mass markets gave its name to a whole system of production. The so-called Fordist system of mass production aimed at using highly standardized and intensive work organization (with some elements of Taylorism and emphasis on assembly-line operations that could use less skilled labor) to produce standardized (and thereby relatively cheap) products for newly affluent mass markets. Social researchers argue about the accuracy of characterizations of Fordism and how much of the economy really did fit this model. But industrial societies in the middle years of the twentieth century—when not caught up in depression and war—were evidently entering, and being reshaped by, an age of mass consumption. One argument goes that de-skilled, highly routinized work in factory contexts, with less exercise of craft skills and less scope for exercise of autonomy in the workplace—the patterns of work supposedly characterizing Fordism and Taylorism—means less scope for fulfillment in working life. The same situation applies to office and other white-collar workers

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operating in routinized service organizations. In some accounts, this leads to more passive orientations and more consumption of mass cultural products of a fairly standardized and undemanding kind. In other accounts, consumption of goods and services and leisure activities become more critical features of identity and goals for life. Consumption here becomes a compensation for the alienating effects of industrial work, but the forms that consumption takes may reflect this alienation, together with other features of the new industrial order (its inequalities, speeding up of activities, etc.). Yet other accounts take a more instrumentalist view—industrialization permits more affluence and higher levels of consumption, and thus, leisure pursuits become more salient in people’s lives. The accounts vary in how critical they are of industrialism and its styles of consumption, but they have some points of agreement. Growing emphasis on leisure and consumption means, for many of these commentators, that decisions such as where to live, how long to work, and of course what income to seek are related to these desires; and this is one determinant of what job opportunities are pursued. How far employment prospects are limited and constraining is a matter on which different authors disagree. Thus, industrial society is seen as influencing consumer culture in many ways—through the patterns of living established around urbanization and working hours, through industrial work’s influences on social organization (e.g., trade unionization and identification with other workers) and individual psychology (e.g., opportunity to gain knowledge and creative fulfillment), through the availability of consumer goods, and so on. The patterns of influence have varied across countries and cultures, as the precise course of industrialization has been shaped by geography, social structure, forms of governance, and other features of the preindustrial society. Consumer culture around the world reflects preindustrial heritage and not just uneven pace and extension of industrial development. Industrial society always had its critics, sometimes taking the form of backward-looking pastoralism, sometimes challenging the power structures and alienated relationships of industrial society. Many critics of the age of mass consumption saw mechanisms of social control at work, with consumer culture encouraging the masses to embrace things as they are and to see ongoing change as welcome progress. Other perspectives were more critical of the

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banality of mass culture, and various social movements sought to step outside of the mainstream. More recent critics have stressed the environmental costs of industrial ways of life. The forms taken by industrialization have also evolved over time. In the pioneering industrial societies, industrialization extended its scale, with new industries being created and more parts of the economy being organized in industrial fashion (so that we now talk of agricultural, service, even cultural industries). New technologies were introduced—from steam power to electricity and petroleum-driven equipment, with these latter power systems also becoming the basis for a wide range of consumer goods. Manufacturing production became more automated and capital intensive (and with the development of new information technologies this also became the case for many service industries). Lowered communication and transport costs enabled the creation of large-scale production for dispersed markets in the early years of industrialism, and as costs of coordination and distribution have continued to fall, we see further international division of labor, with the relocation of production and the establishment of new supply chains—what is described as globalization. Other changes in industrial society are seen by some commentators as meaning a decisive restructuring of the nature of this society—or even a sharp break with it. By the late-twentieth century, the idea of a post-Fordist and even postindustrial society was becoming commonplace—manufacturing is increasingly automated and offshore and employment is more centered on service industries. But of course consumers continue to purchase and use goods produced by manufacturers—even if more of these manufacturers are located overseas (often in NICs). And the advanced economies still value and compete in high-technology manufacturing, with one of the key tenets of the post-Fordist argument being that mass markets have themselves changed as affluence continued to grow. Consumer markets have become more fragmented, the argument goes, with people less inclined to want basic standardized products and more keen on pursuing and expressing their own tastes and lifestyles. As leisure has become more central to how people define their identities, so they are less content to be part of a homogeneous mass. Thus, the argument goes, there is a shift away from Fordism toward production systems based less

on mass production (though this still remains important) and more on “mass customization.” Postindustrialism has sometimes been welcomed as the beginning of a new era where social conflicts based on the old conflict of proletariat-industrial worker and capitalist-manager will be eroded in an “end of ideology” or even an “end of history.” Such pronouncements have appeared premature, to say the least, in the wake of the rise of new social movements and conflicts around ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and the like. Early discussions of the coming industrial society, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, similarly welcomed it as ushering in a new age of reason, a resolution of the social and ideological conflicts associated with feudal power structures—overcoming the vested interests and authority of church and aristocracy. The emphasis on reason and scientific-technical progress is also echoed in contemporary discussions of the “knowledgebased economy.” Ironically, then, both the establishment and the transcendence of industrial society are welcomed in some quarters as the continuation of the project begun by the Enlightenment. Ian Miles See also Alienation; Capitalism; Division of Labor; Leisure; Mass Production and Consumption; Postindustrial Society; Service Industry; Urbanization

Further Readings Amin, Ash, ed. Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994. Badham, Richard J. Theories of Industrial Society. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1994. Cunningham, Hugh. Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780–c. 1880. London: Croom Helm, 1980. Fraser, W. Hamish. The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914. London: Macmillan, 1981. Freeman, Christopher, and Francisco Lourça. As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Piore, Michael J., and Charles F. Sabel. The Second Industrial Divide. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Inequalities Scase, Richard, ed. Industrial Societies: Crisis and Division in Western Capitalism and State Socialism. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Whitley, Richard. Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

INEQUALITIES Inequality is a broad concept that takes many forms but can be generally thought of as an uneven distribution of power. It is not easy to imagine inequality. What one sees depends very much on where one is situated and where one is looking. Consider Zanzibar; for example, the Indian Ocean islands, which put the zan into Tanzania. Tan came from the German colonial name for mainland Tanzania, which was Tanganika. Zanzibar Town, like Bristol in the United Kingdom, was a key port for the trading of people as slaves among other tradable entities. People were stolen from the mainland of Africa to be sold into an international slave trade. That the grandeur of these cities is built on such exploitation of other people is sufficient to make one uneasy about the magnificent buildings that remain from that period. Slavery, the ownership of one person by another person, is an extreme example of inequality, an inequality of rights, of consumption and ability to command goods where one person is commanding and the other is the “goods.” Another example is Sheffield, a city in England that came to be a city because it was for a short time the best-known place in the world for making steel. The remaining men making steel, mostly employed in the Stocksbridge plant, have been laid off because of the aftereffects of the economic crash of 2008. That steel was often used to make armaments; more recently, it was used in making cars. The city emphasizes cutlery rather than weaponry production. However, it was not because of spoon manufacturing that Sheffield was bombed during World War II. Although some children in Sheffield are taught that steel was invented in Sheffield, the techniques of turning iron into steel were developed in China after having first been brought from villages in Africa, where smiths first made rudimentary steel in furnaces, now long forgotten. Usurping history is another extreme example of inequality. Inequalities exist in access to health care, in how law operates, and in low pay for people doing the

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most dangerous, most boring, or hardest of jobs. Inequalities are easily observed in the differences in what people are able (have the power) to do, to choose, to use and the places that they are able to go. Yet inequality has to be distinguished from differences in identity, just as equality does not mean sameness. When there is a relatively small difference in two people’s ability to command goods and to choose the direction of their lives, they are not unequal but do have different experiences. The focus in this entry is on economic inequalities. Various people have stressed the importance of looking at a broader range of variables; however, some contend that many of the inequalities that exist today can be traced back to people’s means—in subsistence societies, this may take the form of livestock and land but in many parts of the world primarily means money. Examples include politicians “buying” votes and voters “buying” politicians (economic power relates to political power) and richer people affording better health care and more nutritious food (economic power relates to life expectancy). Thus, those with money can often translate this money into other forms of power and advantage. However, the power of their money depends on what their money is worth compared to that of others.

Inequality and Consumption The concept of inequality is important to understanding the actions and positionings of individuals when studying consumption. Someone who is rich is able to command goods and services in a very different way from someone who is poor. Income, while not necessarily determining identity or style, affects how much and what someone can consume. As Naomi Klein points out, inequalities also affect the relationships between people, typically with poorer people producing/servicing and richer people consuming, which can herald additional inequalities in human rights, pay, and respect. There are also inequalities in the negative effects of consumption. For example, people in poorer countries are said to be the first to suffer from climatic changes brought about by others’ consumption of carbon. It is hoped that future historians will look back to the inequalities that we live with today in the same way that we now reflect on past (and sometimes contemporary) forms of slavery. However, it often takes time for it to become socially desirable rather than

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avant-garde to say that exploiting others for one’s own advantage is unacceptable. It can take time to even use those terms to think about unequal societies. Recent research, reported by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, investigated the attitudes of workers in the financial district of the City of London and shows the views people have of their own wealth. Some rich people felt that they were successful because of their skill and hard work, based on the idea that everyone has an equal chance to choose their career and fortune. As such, some felt that people who make the “wrong choice” or “do not work hard” have no right to complain about their circumstances. A recent opinion piece from Clive James suggests that attitudes toward wealth have changed and that valuing money for its own sake is a thing of the past. Throughout his discourse, James expresses confusion about what someone would actually do with their millions or billions. He argues that people with too much money look silly, especially when they do ridiculous things such as star in perfume advertisements to earn money they can’t possibly need: I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind. Getting rich for its own sake will look as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu. And on the men it looks even worse. (James 2009)

This critique of wealth is an essential companion for more established critiques of poverty, if inequality is going to be successfully challenged. This is because inequality, as discussed later, is bad for the rich, the poor, and the in-between, not just for those who initially appear to lose out most.

A Nugget of Intellectual Context Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” in the eighteenth century. He argued that inequality is something that is created and sustained by human society, which did not exist among men in nature. Rousseau also argued that the powerful construct institutions to keep peace and stability, protecting their property; this remains an opinion held by many today (it is often said of the welfare state). As George Monbiot has argued, such constructions can be seen

at the level of international institutions where voting structures do not necessarily reflect population size but the political, economic, and military power of the country. An alternative is greater equality. For instance, historical utopian socialisms have proposed an equality which, according to Bob Sutcliffe (2005, 2) is “very far from homogeneity or conformity; it means the protection of freedom through equal civil and political rights and distribution according to need and not ability to pay.”

Geographies of Inequality Inequality is a highly geographical phenomenon, as often rich and poor people occupy different physical spaces, or—if they are in the same place—they are likely to play different roles. The highly spatial nature of inequality makes it relevant to geographers and particularly suitable for mapping. Maps can quickly show uneven distributions of goods, money, access to communications, and much more between individuals, groups, and national population. When Charles Booth and his research team drew “poverty” maps of London, they were mapping inequality. The maps show seven social classes, ranging from the poorest to the well-off or, in his terms, from the “vicious and semi-criminal” to those with “good ordinary earnings” to the “upper middle and upper classes.” Zooming out, Figures 1 and 2 show global distributions of net imports and net exports of toys, measured economically using purchasing power parity. Similar trade maps showing dozens of varieties of goods and services can be found at the WorldMapper website. These examples of mapping exemplify the range of scales at which inequalities exist.

Methodological Issues Although inequality has many forms, it is often measured in economic terms. Common measures include the Gini coefficient and ratios of the earnings of the richest to those of the poorest. The Gini coefficient measures income inequality on a scale of 0 to 1: where 0 is perfect equality (e.g., when everyone has the same earnings) and 1 is mathematically “perfect” inequality (e.g., where one person gets 100% of total earnings and everyone else gets nothing). Countrylevel Gini coefficients do not reach these extremes. Comparing earnings of the richest and poorest deciles (10%) or quintiles (20%) of the population produces a ratio of earnings of the rich to the poor. Comparing the richest and poorest deciles by definition produces

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Figure 1

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Net Exports of Toys in 2002; Territory Size Shows the Proportion of All Net Toy Exports (Measured in US$ Purchasing Power Parity)

Source: www.worldmapper.org. © Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

Figure 2

Net Imports of Toys in 2002; Territory Size Shows the Proportion of All Net Toy Imports (Measured in US$ Purchasing Power Parity)

Source: www.worldmapper.org. © Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

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larger ratios than does comparing quintiles. The different measures of economic inequality, different types of inequality, and multiple scales on which to measure it can add ambiguity to debates about how inequalities are changing. At the world level, inequality can be measured using international data, which use the country as the unit of analysis; global data compare individuals in the whole world population. The international comparison, between countries, which works on the assumption that everyone within a country shares the national average, gave a ratio of 30:1 of income of the richest 10% of countries to poorest 10% in 1997. A global comparison of individuals, irrespective of their country, shows greater inequalities of 63:1. As Sutcliffe has shown, comparing incomes using both these methods shows increases in inequalities leading up to 1997. Bigger inequalities are shown when global comparisons are made because the very richest people in the world are being compared to the very poorest, as extremes are not moderated by national averages.

Contentions What Causes Inequality? The causes of inequality are the subject of some disagreement—some blame poverty on those who suffer it whereas others cite the structure of society as the cause of inequalities. A case in point is ex-World Bank economist Paul Collier’s work on who he views as the problematic bottom billion. In identifying what causes poverty, Collier looks within countries but overlooks the history of international inequalities, including 500 years of underinvestment in poorer countries combined with net wealth transfer from the poor to rich world. In a review of research spanning two centuries, David Gordon shows that most poverty has structural causes. For example, the rich and powerful often use their position to keep themselves in a privileged state, as was argued in the 1700s by Rousseau. Examples of this are, according to Monbiot, that the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization are all skewed in favor of the rich. Is Inequality Bad? There are many arguments against inequality, stating that equality is preferable because it can allow people to use human resources more fully, it could

create a larger market for goods, and it would reduce policing costs. However, others such as Sutcliffe and Göran Therborn stress that redistribution is desirable because of the central component of social justice, independent of consequences. Social justice here could pertain to rights, health, and the conviction that people are equal and so deserve equality. In contrast, some argue that inequality is good because it stimulates competition, it motivates, it is selective, and it rewards. Rousseau suggested that “inequality easily gains ground among base and ambitious souls” (quoted in Sutcliffe 2005, 47), people who have more concern for themselves than for living in a functional society. It is rarely discussed that inequality afflicts the rich as well as the poor. In his 2007 book Affluenza, Oliver James documents some negative outcomes of being rich, which include depression and paranoia. According to James, living unequally as a rich person means possibly feeling threatened by others who have less and feeling depressed from looking for fulfillment in objects of social status and how others respond to these rather than in the engaging in enjoyable activities. An example of paranoia, or even justified fear, is the gated communities of rich people in South Africa (among other countries). Placing spikes, barbed wire, high walls, closed-circuit television (CCTV) and security guards between oneself and others is illustrative of societal breakdown and distrust, which is psychologically unhealthy for all involved. Richard Wilkinson and colleagues have argued that among rich countries, those that are more equal are also more healthy. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that in rich countries “average standards cease to matter, but whether you are doing better or worse than other people, where you come in the social pecking order, continues to be important—for health, happiness, and for a large array of social problems” (2009, 13).

Inequality and Policy Discussion of inequality is arguably more politically charged than that of poverty. Poverty conceptually focuses on a “problematic” segment of society; inequality is concerned with society as a whole, so everybody is under the microscope. Poverty and inequality are related because the poor are those with less when resources are unequally distributed. Focusing on poverty rather than inequality conceals the role of the rich and middle classes, almost

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conceptually excusing them for the poverty that is part of the society in which they live. An example of this is the Millennium Development Goals that, according to Samir Amin, focus on the poor rather than inequalities. As such, meeting the goal of the Millennium Development Goals for reducing the mortality rates of under five years does not necessarily lead to reductions in the gap between the underfive’s mortality in the richest and poorest quintiles of the population. Kath Moser, David Leon, and Davidson Gwatkin reveal that sometimes the differences can actually increase.

Future Directions In 2007, it was suggested that “everyone is talking about inequalities now.” Since then, discussions about inequality in the U.K. media have increased. Anna Barford reports that inequality was a key topic of debate in the run up to the 2010 U.K. general election, in part due to the cross-party pressure exerted by the associated Equality Trust and One Society groups. Yet inequality has been a topic of discussion for hundreds of years and remains an academic concern. Geographical location and historical period influence the type of inequality that is evident. In the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis, perspectives on wealth may be changing. To take a longer view, the world became much more equal from 1929 to about 1978. However, in 2011, world inequality seems more and more like it did in 1929. Inequality has been reduced before and can certainly be reduced again. Anna Barford and Danny Dorling See also Affluent Society; Consumption Patterns and Trends; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Global Institutions; Happiness; Health Care; Poverty; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings Amin, Samir. “The Millennium Development Goals: A Critique from the South.” Monthly Review 57, no. 10 (2006): 1–9. Barford, Anna. “An International Comparative Study of Attitudes Towards Socio-Economic Inequality.” PhD diss., Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, UK, 2010. Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Gordon, David. “Eradicating Poverty in the 21st Century: When Will Social Justice Be Done?” Inaugural lecture, University of Bristol, UK, October 18, 2004. James, Clive. “New Year Prediction: On Getting Rich Quick.” In BBC Radio 4: A Point of View, 2009. Also available online at http://clivejames.com/point-of-view/ get-rich-quick. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: HarperCollins, 2000. Monbiot, George. The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order. London: Flamingo, 2003. Moser, Kath A., David A. Leon, and Davidson R. Gwatkin. “How Does Progress Towards the Child Mortality Millennium Development Goal Affect Inequalities Between the Poorest and Least Poor? Analysis of Demographic and Health Survey Data.” British Medical Journal 331 (2005): 1180–1182. Sutcliffe, Bob. 100 Ways of Seeing an Unequal World. London: Zed Books, 2005. Therborn, Göran. “The Killing Fields of Inequality.” In The Crash: A View from the Left (a collection published through the journal Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture), edited by Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford, 109–117. Middlesex, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, 2009. Toynbee, Polly, and David Walker. “Meet the Rich.” Guardian—Money Section. August 4, 2008. Wilkinson, Richard, and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London: Allen Lane, 2009.

Websites WorldMapper. www.worldmapper.org.

INFORMAL ECONOMY The informal economy is defined as all work that is not “formal employment,” by which is meant paid work registered with the state for tax, social security, and labor law purposes. This defining of the informal economy in terms of what it is not accurately displays the centrality of formal employment in contemporary society. The consequence is that the informal economy is a residual catchall umbrella category into which all work that is not formal employment is cast. The result is that multifarious forms of work are brought together under this heading of the informal economy. To differentiate the heterogeneous types of work practice grouped together in this leftover, or residual, category, three broad types of informal work are commonly distinguished. First, there is

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self-provisioning, which is the unpaid household work undertaken by household members for themselves or for other members of their household. Second, there is unpaid community work, which is unpaid work conducted by household members by and for the extended family, social, or neighborhood networks and more formal voluntary and community groups. Third and finally, there is paid informal work, which is monetized exchange unregistered by or hidden from the state for tax, social security, and/or labor law purposes but which is legal in all other respects. The value of this concept to consumer culture and consumption is that it reveals that the production is not confined to the workplace and consumption to the home but is much more complex and nuanced in contemporary consumer culture.

Historical Depictions of the Informal Economy Throughout much of the twentieth century, the informal economy was nearly universally depicted as a dwindling sphere that was rapidly disappearing from view. The trajectory of economic development was widely believed to be one in which there was a natural, inevitable, and unstoppable shift of work from the informal into the formal economy. The informal economy was consequently viewed as a residue, or leftover, from precapitalism, and its continuing presence a sign of “underdevelopment,” “traditionalism,” and “backwardness.” The formal economy, meanwhile, was viewed as representing “progress,” “development,” “modernity,” and “advancement.” From this classical perspective that has been variously referred to as the “formalization,” “dual economy,” “modernization,” “leftover,” or “residue” thesis, the formal and informal economies were portrayed as stable, bounded, and constituted via negation, with the “superordinate” formal economy endowed with positive attributes and impacts and the subservient “other”—the informal economy—with negativity. In consequence, the formal and informal economies were both temporally and hierarchically sequenced. They were temporally sequenced in that the formal economy was portrayed as in the ascendancy and replacing the informal economy that was read as “the mere vestige of a disappearing past [or as] transitory or provisional” (Latouche, 1993, 49). Indeed, this was seen as a natural, organic, inevitable, immutable, and unstoppable process. They were

hierarchically sequenced, meanwhile, in that the informal economy was normatively deemed “regressive” and the formal economy “progressive,” as clearly depicted in “modernization” thinking, which hierarchically (and temporally) convenes differences between countries by placing first world nations at the front of the “development” queue while those nations in the second and third worlds are positioned behind them due to their slower progression toward formalization (Massey, 2005). This residue thesis, in consequence, is not simply a theory that has been seeking to reflect reality but has been a “performative discourse” that has sought to make the real world conform to its representation, justified by the claim that the failure of the real to conform to the portrayal is a consequence not just of imperfections of lived practice but a failure that itself has undesirable impacts. This has been nowhere more finely exemplified than in the seminal work of Arturio Escobar (1995) who uncovers how so-called third (majority) world countries became viewed as a problem due to their lack of “development” (i.e., formalization) and charts how a whole range of institutions and practices were constructed to help them conform more to the prescribed desired end-state of “formalization.” In recent years, however, not the least due to the widespread finding that in the contemporary era, the informal economy appears to be growing rather than declining relative to the formal economy, this view of formalization as natural, inevitable, and unstoppable has come under attack. The result is the emergence of a range of different contemporary schools of thought regarding the informal economy, all of which have emerged directly out of an attempt to challenge various aspects of this formalization thesis.

The By-Product Thesis A first contemporary perspective explains the reemergence and growth of the informal economy as a direct by-product of the advent of a deregulated open world economy. This is asserted to be not only encouraging a race-to-the-bottom in terms of labor standards but also resulting in the off-loading of surplus labor onto the informal economy. On the one hand, therefore, the growth of the informal economy is viewed to directly result from employers seeking to reduce costs by adopting new strategies that involve the use of informal labor, such

Informal Economy

as subcontracting various stages of production to those employing informal employees under degrading, low-paid, and exploitative sweatshoplike conditions, exemplified by the garment manufacturing sector. As Mike Davis (2006, 186) puts it, what we are currently witnessing on a global scale is the reemergence of “primitive forms of exploitation that have been given new life by postmodern globalization.” On the other hand, the recent growth of the informal economy is also seen as a by-product of the demise of the full-employment and/or comprehensive formal welfare state regime that characterized the Fordist era where responsibility for the social reproduction of the unemployed was provided by the state via public welfare provision. In the new post-Fordist era, it is asserted that those of little use to capitalism are no longer maintained as a reserve army of labor and socially reproduced by the formal welfare state. Instead, they are off-loaded into the informal economy where they eke out their survival as a last resort in the absence of alternative means of livelihood. The informal sphere is therefore viewed as extensive in marginalized populations since its role is to act as a substitute for the formal economy in its absence. This rereading consequently adopts the same normative hierarchical depiction of the formal and informal economies as the earlier residue thesis. It reads the informal economy negatively and adheres to the formalization as the “route to progress” perspective. In contrast to the residue thesis, however, this is more a prescription of the required trajectory rather than an organic, inevitable, immutable, and unstoppable view of the direction of change. A prominent example is the International Labor Organization whose “decent work” campaign advocates that marginal populations decanted into the informal economy should be reintegrated into the formal economy and therefore decent work. Here, in consequence, the informal economy is an exploitative low-waged sweatshoplike sphere and/or inhabited by marginalized populations excluded from the formal economy who engage in such work out of necessity as a survival strategy and last resort, and “progress” is depicted as lying in a process of formalization.

Chosen Alternative Thesis For other contemporary commentators who recognize the prevalence and growth of the informal sector, however, this hierarchical ordering that

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privileges the formal economy as the path to progress is replaced by a depiction of informalization as the route to advancement. Akin to the residue discourse, the informal and formal economies are here often portrayed as separate and discrete, but unlike both the residue and by-product approaches, participation in informal work is viewed as possessing positive attributes and impacts and portrayed as undertaken as a matter of choice rather than due to a lack of choice. Conventionally, the most prominent group representing informal work in this manner has been the neoliberal who portrays informal workers as heroes casting off the shackles of an overburdensome state. More recently, however, they have been joined by radical green commentators who positively view informal work as resonating with their desire for localization and self-reliance as well as an array of postdevelopment, critical, and post-structuralist scholars seeking to imagine and enact alternative futures for economic development beyond formalization and commodification. Inverting the hierarchical portrayal of formal and informal work in the residue and by-product discourses, this perspective therefore views informal work as possessing positive attributes and impacts. The conventional normative portrayal of economic development as a process of formalization is countered with an alternative inverted view of development and progress as a process of informalization.

Complementary Thesis A final contemporary discourse again depicts the informal economy as possessing largely positive attributes and impacts but views the formal and informal economies as inextricably intertwined rather than as separate. In this representation, formal and informal work are viewed as complementary in the sense that they grow or decline in tandem, rather than one contracting when the other expands. This is argued at a range of spatial scales. At the global and national level, for instance, both are seen to grow or decline in tandem. Similar arguments are made at the level of localities and households. Relatively affluent populations and households, who are the major beneficiaries of the formal economy, are also seen as the major beneficiaries of the informal economy, conducting not only more self-provisioning, unpaid community exchange, and undeclared work than households

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excluded from the formal economy but also more rewarding forms of informal work. The consequence is that uneven development is characterized not as a polarization between formalized and informalized populations, or put another way, between those pursuing formalized work strategies and those consigned to informal work practices. Instead, uneven development is depicted as a rift between “work busy” or “fully engaged” households with multiple formal jobs and high levels of engagement in self-provisioning, unpaid community exchange, and paid informal work and “work deprived” or “disengaged” households excluded not only from the formal economy but also from engagement in the informal economy due to their lack of resources, skills, and networks. Here, therefore, progress is depicted as not simply a process of formalization but in terms of the capabilities of populations to engage in both formal and informal work.

Informal Economy in Lived Practice The contemporary studies of the informal economy reveal that no one school of thought is universally applicable. Instead, different schools apply to different types of informal work and populations at varying times. When considering the limited number of households pursuing subsistence modes of production, for example, and how very few households remain untouched by the formal economy, the historical residue thesis appears valid. Indeed, this seems to be further reinforced by the evidence from many rural areas, which reveals that the numbers of subsistence households are dwindling as the young leave the countryside and move to the towns in search of formal employment. When considering other types of informal work, however, it is the representation of the informal economy as a by-product of a new emergent form of capitalism that is using informal working arrangements to compete and off-loading onto the informal sector those no longer of valid use to it. Support for this comes not only when examining forms of informal waged employment such as sweatshoplike factory work but also when wider trends are recognized such as that participation in the informal economy is much greater among lower-income populations excluded from the formal economy. Yet to depict all of the informal economy in this manner is a misnomer.

As the evidence in support of the representation of the informal economy as a complement to the formal economy clearly displays, informal work, at least in some of its varieties and in some populations, is often not a sphere inhabited purely by the marginalized but rather is a realm that reinforces, rather than reduces, the sociospatial disparities in the formal economy. This is exemplified in the realm of do-it-yourself activity, for example. It is also apparent in the many studies that reveal that the level of self-provisioning, unpaid community exchange and paid informal work is often greater in affluent than deprived populations. There are also types of informal work that are a chosen alternative to the formal economy. Not only is there a culture of resistance to immersion in the formal economy, at least among some engaged in subsistence production as their primary work strategy, as exemplified by “back-to-the-landers,” but there is also the extensive “hidden enterprise culture” of off-the-books enterprise and entrepreneurship being pursued as a widespread resistance practice to the (in their eyes) overexcessive regulation and state corruption, which provides solid support for the depiction of informal work as a chosen alternative (Snyder 2004). The result is that although varying discourses are appropriate as representations of different types of informal work and varying populations, no one articulation fully captures the diverse nature and multiple meanings of the informal economy. However, if the view is transcended that these are competing discourses and it is recognized that each is a depiction of particular types of informal work and various populations, as Martha Chen has prominently suggested, then it becomes quickly obvious that by incorporating all of them, a finer-grained and more comprehensive understanding of the complex and diverse meanings of the informal economy could well be achieved. How, therefore, might these articulations be coupled together to reach this more holistic understanding? To fuse these contrasting representations to achieve a finer-grained and more comprehensive understanding of the complex and multiple meanings of the informal economy, it is necessary to recognize (a) first, a spectrum of informal work ranging from varieties that are relatively separate from the formal sphere (e.g., subsistence-oriented households) to those that are relatively intertwined with the formal economy (e.g., “envelope wages,” do-it-yourself activity) and (b) second, a continuum of types of

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informal work ranging from those with mostly positive features (e.g., paid favors, unpaid community exchange, informal entrepreneurship) to those with largely negative attributes (e.g., exploitative sweatshoplike informal waged employment). Adopting this integrative conceptual framework facilitates an understanding of the multifarious nature of informal work and its variable consequences and impacts.

Future Directions In the past, the study of the informal economy has been plagued by persistent debates between representatives of rival discourses who contest each other’s viewpoint despite their talking about different forms of informal work (e.g., neoliberals on informal selfemployment and by-product theorists on informal waged employment). The above more integrative conceptual framework, if widely adopted, will enable such erroneous debates to be transcended. It might also begin to put a stop to the all-too-common occurrence whereby discourses simply focus on those forms of informal work that conform to their depiction of informal work while ignoring those that do not. As Michael Samers has highlighted, for instance, postdevelopment theorists viewing informal work as a chosen alternative seem to display a myopic disregard for forms of informal work that do not conform to their portrayal such as low-waged informal employment conducted under sweatshoplike working conditions. This, however, is not unique to these commentators. It applies across the spectrum of discourses. Second, if this more integrative conceptual framework is more widely adopted in the future, it might also start to result in more nuanced public policy approaches toward the informal economy. Currently, a largely negative approach predominates, reflecting the dominance of the residue and by-product perspectives. This is particularly the case when considering what needs to be done about paid informal work where the dominant approach is to eradicate such work by increasing the probability of detection and the penalties if caught. It is similarly the case when considering other forms of informal work. Few, if any, governments move beyond a formal employment-centered discourse when discussing economic development. If the above conceptual framework is more widely adopted, however, then this would help identify those forms of informal work that need to be eradicated and those that need

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to be either transformed into formal employment or tacitly condoned rather than adopting a “one size fits all” public policy approach that treats all types the same. Finally and perhaps most importantly, this more holistic framework might also help the long-standing but simplistic arguments about whether formalization or informalization is the path to progress to be finally transcended. Rather than an “on-off” decision about whether formalization or informalization is the way forward for economic development, more nuanced and finer-grained debates about the nature and direction of economic development could perhaps start to emerge that pursue a more “pick and mix” approach toward various types of informal (and formal) work. So too might depictions of consumer culture adopt more nuanced understandings of what constitutes production and consumption that transcend the representation of production as confined to the employment-place and consumption to the home. Colin C. Williams See also Collective Consumption; Globalization; Informalization; Post-Fordism; Poverty; Self-Service Economy; Social and Economic Development

Further Readings Castells, Manuel, and Alejandro Portes. “World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the Informal Economy.” In The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developing Countries, edited by Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Laura A. Benton. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Chen, Martha. “Rethinking the Informal Economy: Linkages with the Formal Economy and the Formal Regulatory Environment.” In Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies, edited by Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Ravi Kanbur, and Elinor Ostrom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006. De Soto, Hernando. The Other Path. London: Harper and Row, 1989. Escobar, Arturio. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Gershuny, Jonathan. Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gibson-Graham, Julie-Kathy. A Post-Capitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006

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Latouche, Serge. In the Wake of Affluent Society: An Exploration of Post-Development. London: Zed, 1993. Leyshon, Andrew, Roger Lee, and Colin C. Williams, eds. Alternative Economic Spaces. London: Sage, 2003. Maloney, William F. “Informality Revisited.” World Development 32 (2004): 1159–1178. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Pahl, Raymond. Divisions of Labour. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Samers, Michael. “The Myopia of ‘Diverse Economies,’ or a Critique of the ‘Informal Economy.’” Antipode 37 (2005): 875–886. Snyder, Karen. “Routes to the Informal Economy in New York’s East Village: Crisis, Economics and Identity.” Sociological Perspectives 47 (2004): 215–240. Williams, Colin C. A Commodified World? Mapping the Limits of Capitalism. London: Zed, 2005.

INFORMALIZATION The concept of informalization was coined in 1976 by the Dutch sociologist Cas Wouters. It was developed primarily to understand and interpret the growing leniency in codes of conduct and feeling in Western societies of the 1960s and 1970s. In Amsterdam, discussions of this increasing “permissiveness” included the question of how to interpret these changes and, more specifically, whether they involved a change in the direction of what Norbert Elias had called the civilizing process. The framing of this question within Elias’s theory of wide range and scope gave rise to the theory of informalization processes. It provides a perspective in which both the process of informalization and the spread of consumer culture turn out to have sprung from the same speedup of social interweaving processes and the same intensification of social competition. In his 1939/2000 book The Civilizing Process, now a classic for being the first systematic study of the history of manners and emotion regulation, Elias shows how between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, European regimes of manners and emotions had expanded and become increasingly strict and detailed, giving rise to a particular type of selfregulation, a type of habitus and personality with a particular conscience formation. It was a long-term process toward the formalizing of manners and the disciplining of people and their emotions. By presenting a large number of excerpts from manners books

in chronological order, focusing particularly on manners regarding basic human functions, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, defecating, and blowing one’s nose, as well as on those regulating sexual and aggressive impulses, Elias uncovered evidence of long-term changes in the codes of manners thus opening a window to developments in social structures and personality structures. The overall directional trend in codes of behavior and feeling provided an empirical basis for integrating historical sociology and psychology. The process of formalizing manners and disciplining of people continued in the nineteenth century, and although many a change had been perceived before the 1960s and 1970s—particularly in the 1920s—it was only during the “expressive revolution” (Parsons 1978, 300–324) that changes in manners and lifestyles became so impressive as to give rise to the question of whether the whole civilizing process had changed direction. With regard to the informalization of manners, the answer was that it obviously had, but regarding the disciplining of people and their emotions, developments had continued in the direction of increasing demands on emotion management or self-regulation. Later studies showed the expressive revolution to have been a moment of rapid acceleration in a long-term process of informalization, involving much broader social layers than in earlier accelerations such as around the turn of the century and in the 1920s. Particularly, Wouters’s monographs Sex and Manners and Informalization provide extensive evidence that from the last decades of the nineteenth century onward, the code of manners and lifestyles in four Western countries (Britain, the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands) came to allow for an increasing variety of behavioral and emotional alternatives: manners becoming more lenient, more differentiated, and varied for a wider and more differentiated public (see also Elias 1996; and Stearns 2007). Many modes of conduct that in the preceding long-term process of formalization had been curbed or forbidden came to be allowed, particularly in matters of sexuality. With one significant exception, all behaviors, manners, and arts, such as the written and spoken language, clothing, music, dancing, hairstyles, conduct, and emotions, became less formally restricted and regulated thus giving way to a widening range of acceptable behavioral and emotional options. People became more frank and more at ease in expressing and discussing their feelings.

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For several reasons, however, an acceptable and respectable usage of these alternatives implied a continued increase of the demands that were being made on self-regulation. One reason is because the ways in which individuals fashion their selection of alternatives became increasingly important as a criterion for status attribution. Another reason, closely connected, is that any selection of alternatives should look “natural”: it is a constraint to be unconstrained, at ease, and authentic. Moreover, informalization also involved rising external social constraints toward such self-restraints as being reflexive, showing presence of mind, considerateness, role taking, and the ability to tolerate and control conflicts and to compromise. And last but not least, there was no “liberation” of displays of superiority and inferiority—quite the contrary. This observation touches on the exception to the widening of the range of socially acceptable behaviors and feelings and also on a major difference from permissiveness: informalization implies that feelings and displays of superiority and inferiority were increasingly curbed and forbidden. Particularly, by the social ascent of a wide variety of groups—the working classes, women, youth, homosexuals, blacks and other immigrants—and their integration within national and international networks of interdependency, all concerned were expected to treat each other increasingly on the basis of equality, that is, to avoid open displays of inferiority and superiority. Thus, declining power differences between various groups and social classes went hand in hand with expanding mutual identification and diminishing social and psychic distance between people. Expressing any such distance, whether pertaining to people of different social class, age, or gender, had to be done in relatively cautious and concealed ways. Increasingly, information on differences in rank was disguised or concealed. The established codes of behavior changed accordingly, and as rising numbers of people came to direct themselves to these codes, status competition turned more subtle and demanding, without losing any of its intensity. Competition in smooth manners and relaxed lifestyles functioned as a driver of both informalization and consumer culture, particularly from the 1960s onward, when the increase of wealth and its spread in most Western countries via welfare state arrangements triggered a wave of emancipation and informalization as well as a spread of consumer culture.

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Directly connected to the informalization process is an “emancipation of emotions”: their representation in the center of personality—consciousness. This is a partial reversal of what had happened to the regulation of emotions in the process of formalization. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “dangerous” emotions such as those related to physical (including sexual) violence had come to be avoided, repressed, and denied in increasingly automatic ways, that is, increasingly regulated by the inner fears of a rather rigid and authoritarian conscience, functioning as a “second nature.” A secondnature or conscience-dominated type of personality became dominant. In the process of informalization, all kinds of emotions that in the long-term process of formalizing manners and disciplining people had been repressed and denied gained access to consciousness and wider acceptance in more informal social codes. They were again “discovered” as part of a collective emotional makeup—representing a shift from conscience to consciousness. The Wouters studies provide evidence of a rising control of the fear of slippery slopes, the rise of a stronger and yet more flexible self-regulation in which these emotions were expressed but kept under control. Between the 1950s and 1980s, these processes of social and psychic emancipation and integration accelerated dramatically. The conviction that being open to dangerous emotions would almost irrevocably be followed by acting on them was destroyed. This old conviction expressed a fear that is symptomatic of rather authoritarian relationships and social controls, as well as of a rather rigid type of self-control, dominated by a more or less automatically functioning authoritarian conscience. From being an advantage, this “inner-directedness” (Riesman 1950), that is, internalized social controls of a fixed kind, changed into being a handicap when in less hierarchical relationships, when overcoming this fear came to be taken for granted. Only a more ego-dominated self-regulation allowed for the reflexive and flexible calculation that came to be expected. Thus, increasing numbers of people have become aware of emotions and temptations in circumstances where fears and dangers had been dominant before. It was the overall emancipation and integration of “lower” social groups in Western societies that triggered and allowed for the emancipation and integration of “lower impulses” and emotions in personality.

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Yet it was only after the 1950s that the dominant mode of self-regulation had reached a strength and scope that increasingly enabled people to admit to themselves and to others to have dangerous emotions without provoking status anxiety and shame, particularly the shame-fear of losing control and having to give in. In the process of informalization, both psychic and social censorship declined, and to the extent that it has become natural to perceive the pulls and pushes of both first nature and second nature, a third nature type of personality has been developing. Its further development depends on the above-mentioned exception, that is, on the control of emotions connected with the struggle for power, status, and value, particularly the feelings of inferiority and superiority. For these feelings appear to be highly significant for understanding why social and psychic conflicts erupt in violence. Cas Wouters See also Civilizing Processes; Collective Identity; Elias, Norbert; Emotions; Habitus; Lifestyle; Self-Reflexivity; Sex; Social Class

Further Readings Elias, Norbert. The Germans, edited by Michael Schröter. Cambridge: Polity, 1996. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. First published 1939. Parsons, Talcott. Action Theory and the Human Condition. New York: Free Press, 1978. Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd. With N. Glazer and R. Denney. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950. Stearns, Peter N. “Informalization and Contemporary Manners: The Wouters Studies.” Theory and Society 36, no. 4 (2007): 373–379. Wouters, Cas “Is het civilisatieproces van richting veranderd?” Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 3, no. 3 (1976): 336–60. English version in Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, edited by P. Gleichmann, J. Goudsblom, and H. Korte, 437–54 (Amsterdam: Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 1977). Wouters, Cas. Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West 1890–2000. London: Sage, 2004. Wouters, Cas. Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890. London: Sage, 2007.

INFORMATION SOCIETY Information society refers to a society where modern information technologies are widely used and where information-related work and sectors have become highly significant economic activities. Time and money spent on consuming both established informational goods and services (e.g., mass media) and new ones (such as computers, mobile phones, and websites) are liable to become more significant— though there may be competition for consumers between and within old and new media.

History The term information society (IS) was apparently first used in Japan in the 1960s. It became commonly employed in many Western countries in the 1980s, with many policymakers endorsing the term by setting up government departments or agencies, or at least strategy committees, concerned with IS policies. The European Union decided to label its program as dealing with “information society technologies” in place of the standard information technologies (or information and communication technologies)— partly to suggest a wide compass, partly to set its research strategies in the context of social goals, as opposed to what was seen as the overly technological and/or economic ideas in the United States (where “information superhighways” were being promoted) and elsewhere. The attention given to the idea of IS reflected the great interest directed to the new information technologies (ITs) that were beginning to proliferate in the 1980s. New products, such as the microcomputer (now better known as the personal computer), video games, the pocket calculator, digital watches, and digital audio equipment (the first compact disc systems), teletext, videorecorders, and more, were being introduced into many homes. Workplaces were similarly the site of introduction of new equipment—word processors and office microcomputers, programmable machine tools and industrial robotics, fax (a longstanding technology that really took off only in the 1980s), the beginnings of large-scale computer networking with e-mail systems, and so on. Videotex systems, allowing consumers to communicate with computer networks using simple terminals from their homes (basic keyboards, with

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household TV sets as the display medium, attached to the telephone system) were introduced in many countries to great acclaim. Most of these failed to evoke consumer interest—they tied up the TV and telephone, the information provided was often available by other means (not least teletext, which had been introduced at roughly the same time and which was free to use). The exception was the Minitel system in France, which used dedicated terminals (looking much like small laptops) and rapid telecommunications—which were given away by France Telecom as the alternative to printed telephone directories. Many observers were struck by the way in which the magazine racks of news agents suddenly featured large numbers of magazines dedicated to home computers in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere—but in France, there was enormous cultural interest in Minitel, and in particular the entrepreneurs behind, and the social groups using, its messagerie—the 1980s equivalent of social networking websites. The videotext story demonstrates that not every new information technology was embraced with open arms. There are several similar stories of investors setting up expensive systems that failed to gain mass markets. One striking case was an early mobile telephone system (CT2, which went under various proprietary names, including “Rabbit” in the United Kingdom) that would allow outgoing calls only (if you were within 100 meters of a base station). Pagers (text communication devices that had a brief popularity) had to be used to alert the user that someone else would like to talk with them. But many new consumer products achieved very rapid diffusion, with the popularity of CD technology astounding observers. (DVD systems later took off at comparable rates.) Underpinning this ever-expanding range of new products and industrial processes and the ongoing rapid development of their user-friendliness and capabilities were important advances in knowledge and in the key underpinning technologies that this knowledge fed into. Though there were many contributory technologies—lasers, optical fibers, new sorts of software, and so on—the most important of these was microelectronics. Microelectronics involves the ability to place the equivalent of huge numbers of transistors and other components on small pieces of silicon wafer. This meant that digital information of any kind could be processed—stored,

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communicated, displayed, transformed—by devices that were much smaller (often portable), cheaper, and more powerful than had previously been possible. After the 1980s, new products proliferated, with the mobile (cellular) phone, digital TV, broadband Internet, and the World Wide Web being only a few of many examples. Microelectronics itself has been subject to continual dramatic change, with Moore’s law describing how the number of transistors that can be embedded on a chip of a given size has been doubling every couple of years.

Approaches For some authors, the defining feature of IS is that it represents a society in which the use of these new ITs has become pervasive. One might argue about what “pervasive” means—what level of use of what types of microelectronics-enabled technologies is involved?—but new information technologies have certainly widely displaced established technologies in the industrial and domestic spheres. Even devices whose essential components operate more on the basis of motor power—washing machines, motor cars, for example—are typically reengineered so that their controls and displays employ microelectronics, and new features are added (from more programs for washing machines to automatic braking systems and in-car entertainment in motor vehicles). This approach to IS emphasizes the development and application of new technological capabilities and can thus be labeled a sociotechnical approach. For some commentators, this represents more than a revolution in technologies themselves; our ways of life and culture are also transformed as we use these technologies and exploit the opportunities they provide. Some have argued that these social transformations are necessitated by new ITs, that there is one logical set of consequences associated with the diffusion of information processing and communication capabilities—that may be resisted but eventually will triumph. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s was a major case in point: the command-and-control bureaucracy could not survive in an age of freer communications. Less dramatically, there have been many striking examples of firms and whole industries failing to adopt new ITs and adapt their practices accordingly—the crisis that digital downloading has meant for established music industries is just one of these. Technological determinism

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thus features prominently in some portrayals of IS as associated with new IT: but a sociotechnical approach can be more dynamic, seeing technological changes as one of a complex series of interacting social processes, with technology development and use stemming from within the social order, not impacting on it from outside. In some versions of the sociotechnical account, IS means a radical break away from industrial society— just as industrialism (which could contentiously be identified with new industrial technologies—such as steam and then electric motors) displaced agricultural society. The new technologies permit further automation of much industrial work; they promote the establishment of new, more creative and knowledge-based occupations; they enable more flexibility in production and the move toward post-Fordism with flexible customization of products, more responsible workers, and flatter organizational forms. Management information systems, mobile communications, and data warehousing and mining have rendered such new organizational forms more viable. Teleworking and new forms of mobile working become more possible, government is transformed through the adoption of e-government, and consumers become more active “prosumers” as they turn away from mass consumption to make their own music, films, and communities and contribute their own content to social networking sites and other new media. Radical social transformation—often portrayed in practically utopian terms—is often associated with the new ITs. But there are also bleaker views of IS, focusing on the growth of surveillance and new forms of social control, on digital divides and other inequalities, on polarization between knowledge elites and the population at large, and on the vulnerabilities of large technological systems and the dangers of a dehumanizing technocratic rationality. Many commentators have criticized the sociotechnical viewpoint, arguing that while in purely technological terms there may be a revolution, in terms of social affairs, we see much more of a slow evolution of practices and relationships—and how far this should be attributed to technology as opposed to autonomous social development is open to question. Indeed, the supposedly radical new microelectronics is a further step on an evolutionary trajectory from electronic valves through transistors and integrated circuits. Information technologies extend back before electronics to paper-based systems: photography,

phonograms, heliograms, mechanical calculating machines, and much more. But these various devices worked in different ways. New pervasive core technologies and digitalization are being applied to information of all kinds; this can be seen as representing qualitative change as well as simple augmentation of capacities. The argument about the slower pace of social change is more cogent, perhaps. Many social institutions remain unchanged in many respects, even though they are permeated by computer and communication systems. There may be new captains of industry associated with some of the new technologies, but fundamental change in power structures remains elusive. TV’s dominance as a mass medium has yet to topple in the face of the Internet, and prosumers do not seem to be increasing in numbers. In any case, it is misleading to think of new technology as causing social change: a more accurate view is that as social actors become aware of new technological capabilities (an awareness that is itself socially constructed through differential access to knowledge), they create opportunities (using capabilities and resources that are also unequally distributed across social groups) to pursue their interests. New social practices may be introduced; the differing interests of social actors can make this a protracted affair, and the results often differ from the protagonists’ expectations. A sociotechnical view need not involve a crude technological determinism—though there certainly are commentators who argue that new IT is the cause of the emergence of novel social formations that together constitute an information society. The sociotechnical perspective on IS is only one of a number of approaches that have attempted to define—or sometimes to displace—the term. A more socioeconomic approach was popular for some time in the 1980s and beyond, though it is less frequently encountered in the twenty-first century. This approach identifies the IS with the prevalence of “information sectors” and “information occupations,” and the most influential attempt to articulate this in statistical terms was introduced in the late 1970s by Marc Uri Porat in the United States—his classifications were subsequently employed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to map developments in many countries. The information sectors are those industries whose main functions are generating information products (publishing, broadcasting, etc.), distributing information (e.g.,

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post and telecommunications, bookstores, and news agents), and supplying the equipment and software to support information processing and communications (computer and telecommunications equipment and software, etc.). Porat differentiated between a primary information sector, whose outputs are information products, and a secondary information sector, whose information outputs are applied in the production of noninformation, or no information, goods and services. In terms of information occupations, he distinguished between information producers (scientists, artists, market researchers, consultants, many professionals), processors (administrative and managerial, process control and supervisory, and clerical and related staff), distributors (e.g., educators, communication workers), and infrastructure workers (information machine staff, post and telecommunications workers). The statistical analyses using such definitions charted, for most countries, a longterm and substantial growth in information work as a share of all employment (e.g., Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 1986). Porat’s approach was able to provide a graphic picture of the growing economic importance of specialized information activities. This made it very appealing, though many commentators took issue with the statistical classifications involved and argued that it is unhelpful to combine together widely disparate sorts of work under a single heading. There were, furthermore, concerns that new IT might automate away many of the information occupations that Porat charted. The impressive growth of information work revealed by these studies needs explanation, too. How far are these new activities and the effects of specialization and the division of labor fragmenting activities that were previously combined in more craftlike work? After all, all economic life throughout human history has necessarily depended on information—have we not always been information societies in this sense? If the new phenomena are largely associated with new generations of IT, then this is lost in the socioeconomic statistics generated by this approach to IS. Though the Porat statistics are encountered infrequently nowadays, the approach lives on in the more sophisticated accounts of a knowledge economy or knowledge-based or knowledge-driven economy. (Sometimes the word society is employed here.) While it is accepted that all human societies depend

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on knowledge, these accounts stress the large-scale investment, in modern times, into the production and reproduction of knowledge. Whereas information can be soap operas and escapist entertainment, knowledge is accorded a higher status. In these accounts, what is particularly stressed in formalized and to a large extent codifiable knowledge is created through activities such as research and development, testing and surveying and reproduced through the various levels of education and specialist media. Rather than attempt to aggregate these activities into a single measure, the claim is made that high quantity and quality of the activities is vitally important for international competitiveness. Indicators are cited concerning investment in these activities, the growth of institutions that support them (education and training, consultancy and related services), and the numbers of qualified scientists and engineers and employees in other knowledge-based occupations. Information— or rather useful knowledge and supporting data—are being used to steer economic activities, to render production processes more efficient and effective, and to underpin the innovations, which form new products and processes. Policymakers have been as ready to adopt the idea of knowledge-based economies as they have been to talk of information societies, and the two concepts have often seemed interchangeable. It is tempting to see the growing emphasis on evidence-based policymaking as an effort to extend the logic—or at least the rhetoric—of the knowledge economy to political practice. If the first two approaches are most prevalent among technologists and engineers, and economists and politicians, respectively, then a third approach is more often articulated by sociologists and media researchers. However, we should note that they will often be wary of the term IS, and prefer to use other terminology—postmodern society, for example. The approach or approaches here can be labeled sociocultural. Here the stress is put on how people relate to and use information, not so much in economic activities (as in the knowledge-based economy perspective). The arguments about postmodernity are wide-ranging and highly contested, but some key themes relating to the IS can be outlined. With economic growth and increasing affluence, with the decline of traditional agricultural and industrial work and more time spent in education, leisure, and retirement have come a set of changes in

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consumption and how we think about consumption. There is a greater penetration of commodity relationships into many quarters of life—mass media, organized spectacles, and corporate restructuring of public spaces, for example. Simultaneously, there is greater diversity of lifestyles, fragmentation of consumer demand, and growing scope for consumer-led generation of content (especially in new media, as well as in such well-established formats as TV and radio phone-ins). As basic requirements for shelter, clothing, transport, and the like are met, so consumer attention (and product differentiation from the industry side) has focused on symbolic attributes of consumer goods and services. Goods (e.g., motor cars, clothes) and services (e.g., holidays, theater performances) are chosen for what they symbolize, what they are seen to express about the consumer. In IS terms, this means a growth in the importance of symbolic—informational—features of products of all kinds, and this importance is reflected in the higher prices that are attached to, for example, designer clothes and products of all kinds. But the sociocultural approach also stresses qualitative change in the role of information in postmodern societies so that we enter an “economy of signs” where the signs effectively take on a life of their own. A striking example from outside the world of consumer culture itself is the huge expansion of the financial sectors of the economy, with the creation of many layers of financial “products” that are dealing with (often unreliable) information about information. Money, debt, and property rights are data that become the subject of dizzying layers of speculation, trade, and repackaging. Qualitative change is harder to capture statistically than diffusion of new IT and changes in technological capability or the expansion of information industries and occupations stressed in the other two approaches. But many telling examples can be amassed of how consumer choices, media content, and everyday discourse reflect the developments stressed in the sociocultural approach. This approach thus puts great emphasis on the informational elements of consumer culture in IS and tends to treat the material elements as more or less incidental. While each of the three approaches focuses on specific types of development, identifying these as constitutive of IS, it is not inevitable that they are mutually exclusive. Indeed, the approaches have many complementary features, as can be seen in various rich descriptions of contemporary change. For instance,

the notion of post-Fordism represents an intriguing combination of the three approaches sketched out above. To summarize extremely briefly, we can see sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sociotechnical elements in the vision of post-Fordism. Markets and consumer demand become more fragmented as consumers increasingly value symbolic features of the products they buy. Greater levels of information about consumer interests and requirements need to be built into the innovation and production processes, while work organization has to build on employee skills and knowledge. And new IT supports all of this, enabling rapid flows of intelligence about market reaction to product offerings and rapid reprogramming of production equipment. Over time, the three approaches to IS have become intertwined; discussions have had to adapt to the manifestation of trends that were merely the object of speculation in earlier periods. Developments such as those associated with new forms of globalization, demographic trends, and with new challenges of security and climate change have also come to preoccupy commentators. Arguably, we see less speculation about IS representing a transition away from industrial society and more framing of IS as a further stage of industrialism. Different forms of IS may be manifested in different cultural settings—partly as a matter of the governance of new information systems, partly reflecting diverse cultural (and economic) histories and patterns of taste.

Emerging Information Technologies and Consumer Culture IS itself may be set to evolve through successive generations, as new types and applications of IT emerge and their new capabilities are adopted (or not). Practically every decade since the 1960s has seen new patterns of IT use becoming widespread—from use of mainframe computers only by large organizations for back-office functions, through the adoption of PCs in professional office work, to the mass diffusion of consumer computer systems (and embedded microelectronics in many other consumer devices), to the widespread availability of the Internet and World Wide Web services, to Web 2.0 and mobile IT devices of many types. This list is only a telegraphed account of one series of changes, and a thorough accounting of the evolution of all sorts of media and consumer products would take up much space.

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A fuller account, less dominated by the sociotechnical approach, might not feature “generations” in the way that is familiar from the IT world. It describes rather smoother patterns of socioeconomic change (shifts in industrial structure often take decades to become apparent). Sociocultural development is multifaceted and harder to summarize and quite possibly features ebbs and flows, as what were at the time seen to be epochal trends turned out to be transitory fashions. But the fundamental point is that IS is dynamic and evolving rather than a fixed state toward which societies are moving. In terms of consumer culture, this suggests two things. First, cultural development may be built around new communication and information processing capabilities; be informed by the levels of education, new patterns of work, and structures of careers; and reflect “postmodern” concern with the symbolic content of consumption and the forms of reflexivity that accompany this. Second, consumer culture will itself continue to evolve and both shape and be shaped by these broad social developments, in ways that can reliably be predicted to be intriguing, even if little else is predictable about them.

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Kumar, Krishan. From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Machlup, Fritz. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Mansell, Robin, and W. Edward Steinmuller. Mobilizing the Information Society: Strategies for Growth and Opportunity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Trends in the Information Economy. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1986. Porat, Marc Uri. The Information Economy. Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce, Office of Telecommunications, OT Special Publication, 77–12(1), 1977. Webster, Frank, ed. The Information Society Reader. London: Routledge, 2004. Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2006. Wyatt, Sally, Felicity Henwood, Nod Miller, and Peter Senker, eds. Technology and In/equality: Questioning the Information Society. London: Routledge, 2000.

Ian Miles See also Diffusion Studies and Trickle Down; Disorganized Capitalism; Electronic Video Gaming; Governmentality; Home Computer; Mass Production and Consumption; Mobile Phones; Network Society; Postindustrial Society; Virtual Communities

Further Readings Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Duff, Alistair S. Information Society Studies. London: Routledge, 2000. Dutton, William H., ed. Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Dutton, William H., Malcolm Peltu, and Margaret Bruce, eds. Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Hobart, Michael E., and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Information technology refers to the hardware and software that are used to store, retrieve, and manipulate information. Information technologies (IT) have become embedded in so many systems, processes, spaces, and objects since the 1980s that entire societies are routinely referred to as information societies. In the broadest sense, information technologies refer to the means through which information is configured, stored, and used and might include early symbolic systems, alphabets, inscription, writing, and so on. During the twentieth century, information and technology have become inextricably tied together, latterly through the convergence of computing and telecommunications, enabling the development and diffusion of new commodities and modes of production, provision, distribution, and consumption. The range, nature, and geographical scope of information technologies has changed radically even over the first decade of the twenty-first century—especially in terms of networks and new mobilities—and has arguably challenged some of the basic tenets and boundaries of production and consumption. Reflecting this,

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the term now commonly includes communication to become information and communication technologies (ICTs) plus the distinction between media and ICTs has become harder to maintain, with theoretical and methodological implications for understanding the roles of communication and information technologies in mediating production and consumption.

Historical and Intellectual Context The emergence and character of information technologies over the course of the twentieth century are the outcome of complex technological, economic, social, political, and cultural contexts and processes. In technological terms, the fairly rapid development of personal computers, cable, satellite and digital television, office workstations, computer networks, and so on, are innovations as significant in scope and scale as the rise of agriculture and the machine technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Across disciplines, most changes have been understood under the rubric of the information society—characterized by informational service work and employment, a global economy, a reorganization of time-space, the saturation of everyday life by media—a term that is related in various different ways to processes of postindustrialization, postmodernization, and globalization (see Webster 2002). IT is thought to be implicated in a transition from industrial to postindustrial society, organized to disorganized capitalism, and mass production and consumption to flexible specialization and individualized consumption in service economies. The intellectual contexts for understanding IT and consumer culture in the context of an information society are varied. Economic approaches have favored measuring increases in informational goods and services and their relative worth to the overall national economy. Sociological approaches have often drawn on Daniel Bell’s canonical analysis of postindustrialism and in particular the new occupations and consumption patterns implied by such a shift. Geographers, and those interested in the sociospatial aspects of production and consumption, have examined the role of IT in enabling “networked” spaces to emerge, allowing for differentiated flows of goods and services to arise. Post-Marxist cultural theorists have inherited the legacy of the Frankfurt school critique of the culture industry, where the current consumer culture represents a perfect alignment of technology and capital. The intellectual context

of postmodernism has had a profound influence on theories of consumer culture, especially the production and consumption of images, signs, and lifestyle, and provides an important trajectory in locating ITbased media as central in mediating consumption and consumer identities through advertising and marketing, according to Mike Featherstone. Similarly, those studying “new media” have pointed to the novel characteristics of networked media, suggesting that many-to-many communication establishes radically different modes of distribution and exchange that have impacted on the form and content of goods and services, the relations between producers and consumers, and the theoretical assumptions underpinning conceptions of capitalist power. Others in information science and science and technology studies (STS), such as Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, suggest thinking about IT as the often-invisible infrastructure or architecture of classification, management, and ordering in contemporary societies.

Key Dimensions Information technology should be understood as both having a role in shaping cultures of consumption and as something consumed in its own right. In broad terms, mediating systems enabled by IT are implicated in major social, cultural, and politicaleconomic change. The shift toward a particular material culture of late capitalism coincides with the rise of information technology. Furthermore, most definitions of globalization or global consumption point to the increasing mobility of information, products, services, images, finance, and so on, all of which are in some degree shaped and facilitated by information technology. Debates have emerged dialectically in terms of promises and threats to the existing social, economic, and political order. Bell argued that Western economies were reorientating around the information and service sectors as opposed to manufacturing. The so-called postindustrial societies are characterized by the growth of scientific knowledge, particularly its use in economic productivity and growth. The concomitant growth in “knowledge industries” and “knowledge work” are partly the outcome of innovation in IT; indeed, the functioning of Western economies today is inseparable from the production, processing, and distribution of information goods and services. The related forms of occupational restructuring, and debates

Information Technology

about de-skilling, re-skilling and flexible labor, are now a major aspect of debates around the growth of e-commerce, the nature of information or media work, and the emergence of multiple digital divides. Within a sociological tradition, the work of Manuel Castells has been instrumental in moving recent debates about IT in the wake of the Internet from the sphere of production toward an expansive concept of the network society. While Castells supports the argument about informational labor, he links this to a new social structure (networks) and new forms of identity related to how informational flows stand in contrast to physical places. Economic activity becomes spatially dispersed but globally integrated, reducing the strategic significance of place but enhancing the strategic role of major cities as producers and consumers. Networks are composed of interconnected nodes where information is collated, analyzed, and used to shape decision making. Distinctions arise between IT enabled “timeless time”/“spaces of flows” and physical places, which continue to be the focus of everyday life, rooting culture and transmitting history. Digital television– and Internet-facilitated global flows are key components of global cultural communication, especially in advertising and marketing. The erosions of boundaries between home and work and public and private are other aspects of time-space reconfiguration and have important implications for our understanding of the dynamics of production and consumption. The actual continuities and discontinuities between digitally mediated global, national, urban, rural, and domestic forms of production and consumption are extremely complex. There are a number of related arenas within which the consumption of ICTs and/or the consumption of other goods and services through ICTs seem particularly significant. First, the terrain of advertising and marketing has arguably been transformed by information technology and especially digitization, including the increasing prevalence of screens and what Jonathan E. Schroeder calls visual consumption enhanced by the “new visuality” of the Internet and the vast visual content industries. This has been viewed as part of a shift toward experience, attention, or image economies in which images and signs are increasingly significant as products in their own right. From this point of view, individual and collective identities now appear inseparable from images in the Global North.

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There have been substantive changes in the nature of advertising, how and through what means objects are visually presented to consumers and how consumption itself is visually portrayed. The shift from product-orientated advertising to brand-orientated or lifestyle marketing in some ways exemplifies these processes, particularly where brand images are opened up to multidirectional flows of information, often with unpredictable or creative results. Second, the issue of the commodification of information is a major theme within both the political economy of production and consumption and within approaches stemming from cultural studies of media, according to Roger Silverstone. This relates to not only the above concern with advertising and imageloaded products but also concerns with the commodification of personal data, of informational goods such as music and movie files, financial products, health information, information applications, and intellectual property and copyright. This raises questions of the intangibility of products, the nature of market and nonmarket, state and nonstate modes of provisioning, and assertion of ownership, alongside issues of how such goods and services are actually consumed in relation to established trajectories of modern consumption. One line of thought is to theorize the forms of immaterial laboring undertaken by consumers as a critique of consumer empowerment. There is little doubt that diverse forms of cultural production and consumption are facilitated by the capacity for manyto-many communication (as opposed to the broadcasting model of one-to-many) and increasing access to information, with the development of the Internet. Greater volumes of data are being communicated by a range of technologies. On the basis of this, information society theorists argue that the changes underway represent not just quantitative but qualitative social change—transforming households, communities, education, health, work, democracy, and identities. Third, at the level of lived experience and practice in everyday life, there has been a huge growth of cultural activities, institutions, and practices in relation to information technology. In this particular sense, culture in terms of information and data has become increasingly significant in contemporary society, and with new ICTs, the means to produce, circulate, and exchange cultural objects has expanded enormously. Influential work on the consumption of ICTs in the domestic sphere has been largely ethnographic research. The emphasis here, as shown by Elaine

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Lally, has been to demonstrate the reciprocities between established patterns of domestic life related to class, gender and ethnicity, and the new technologies incorporated. Other major contributions in an anthropological vein have been that of Daniel Miller and Don Slater (2000), exploring the production and consumption dynamics of the Internet in Trinidadian society (also Livingstone on the consumption of ICTs by youth and children). Others such as Barry Wellman and Caroline A. Haythornwaite have situated these dynamics in terms of social network analysis. In a theoretical and speculative vein, many now describe economies in terms of cultural economies, emphasizing the amount of informational and symbolic goods and services generating capital. Social theories of identity and “liquid” or “fluid” social relations stem in part from the remote connections and instant communication based on IT. Fourth, how the production and consumption of IT is approached methodologically varies widely. The quantitative measures supplied by economic analyses of information work and the service economy have been criticized for applying arbitrary classifications of information. Political-economic approaches have highlighted the ongoing monopolization of cultural production through processes of commodification and convergence, notes Vincent Mosco. In cultural sociology and anthropology, some have argued for the development of online or virtual methods to track and interpret information flows. Most recently, the rise of social media, such as Twitter, are prompting questions about how acquisition patterns and trends have become more transparent and traceable. Such a phenomenon is of great interest to both academics studying consumer culture and to those seeking to understand or codify consumer behavior more generally.

Key Debates Several key conceptual and empirical debates underpin the relevant literature across these disciplinary domains. First, a core debate at the heart of the varied literature is the extent to which IT can be singled out as causally determining some of the broader changes in production and consumption. Many accounts of an information or network society have a residual determinism, which can reproduce a productive bias in consumer culture studies. Information society theorists can be broadly categorized in terms of

those who see technology as the driving force behind change versus those who see social factors as shaping technology and history. This debate, technological determinism versus forms of social or cultural determinism, lies at the heart of the sociology of technology, although more relational theories are arguably becoming dominant, according to Bruno Latour. The broader point concerns the hardware or materials of consumer culture and how they are accounted for in any theory or analysis of stability and change in cultures of consumption. Second, there are questions about whether and when quantitative changes (increasing information flows, growing information economy, increased ownership of IT devices) constitute qualitative change (a new social order). There is a debate here about whether the present is radically different or merely the continuation of long-running phenomena or tendencies. This in turn is inextricably tied to progressive and pessimistic accounts of stability and change. For some, the information society is characterized by greater freedom and fulfillment, whereas others point to the continuation or exacerbation of long-running inequalities and patterns of control. Debates about whether the production and consumption of information can be best understood quantitatively or qualitatively are ongoing, but it is increasingly recognized that IT itself in the form of software applications increasingly provides the ability to combine both approaches successfully. Third, as a consequence of the proliferation of information technology, it has arguably become less clear who producers and consumers are, what their characteristics are, or from the perspective of those researching media production and consumption, who the audiences are. In the last five years, the boundaries between production and consumption, especially in terms of labor and leisure, have become particularly contested when we consider the advent of Web 2.0 and wireless information technologies enabling unprecedented volumes of user-generated content. In this sense, the processes of simultaneous cultural production and consumption are linked to older and broader discourses of prosumption or cocreation, referring to mixed forms of provision, mass customization, professional consumption, craft consumption, and so on, each of which has implications for socioeconomic analyses of informational capitalism and also for issues of identity formation and power dynamics. It is important to note here, however, that there is much debate within analyses of ICTs about

Information Technology

local specificities and their relationships with accounts of macro- and mesolevel change. Such forms of IT-enabled dynamism have been integral to recent accounts of speed and mobility (of information, images, finance, devices, people) and arguments about the relationship between the social and the cultural. In advertising, for example, it is arguably becoming more difficult to retain an ocularcentric view of how vision operates in relation to consumption. On the one hand, the intertwining of the visual, of information, and of production and consumption through branding produces a radical intertextual immediacy that renders the notion of a separate realm of representation (and of ideological manipulation) highly problematic, according to Scott Lash. The development of multidirectional and multifunctional media is clearly central here, distancing these trajectories from those of mass media through radio and television.

Directions The aforementioned analyses of information technology as central to socioeconomic, political, and cultural shifts in production and consumption processes continue to provide robust and significant ways of understanding contemporary cultures of consumption. There are several ongoing trends, which bring to the fore issues of information technology and consumer culture. First, the spread and capacities of geospatial software and databases present new challenges in terms of how we conceive consumer behavior. On the one hand, there are highly nuanced forms of classification emerging through the mapping of acquisition in relation to the spaces and places of consumption. On the other hand, such software intervenes in consumption processes in potentially unforeseen ways. The ways in which numerous devices and their applications are reorganizing consumption activities is a major dimension of contemporary marketing strategy where the flows of information produced through ordinary practice (made visible in online data as “consumption patterns”) are invisibly classified by software. Instead of searching for our preferences in the marketplace, we are presented with our preferences as the result of algorithmic assessment of previous interests or purchases. As individual consumers, we are increasingly “socially sorted” into differentiated lifestyle categories and at the same time encouraged

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to “sort ourselves out” in terms of consumption orientations and preferences. Second, the development of IT systems in the Global South presents us with issues of how different cultures of consumption will emerge in relation to IT and how they might be similar or different from those of Western late modernity. Informational labor, which represents a growing sector in China, India, and elsewhere, involves IT as its central component. From a political-economic perspective such growth is highly significant in comparative terms. It also has implications for comparative analyses of socioeconomic change more generally and for relationships between changes in production and patterns of consumption in what may be very different national and regional cultures. Third, the increasingly important issues of sustainable consumption relate directly to the expansion of IT-based systems and devices. The growing prevalence of digital trash represents a key policy concern for those interested in establishing the parameters of sustainable or low carbon societies. The phenomenon of e-waste relates to issues of practice, systems, and ideals in future cultures of consumption and is likely to be of particular significance in theoretical, empirical, and policy terms. The realization that digital culture is an expansive material culture is particularly important in this regard. Martin Hand See also Actor-Network Theory; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling and Up-Skilling; E-Commerce; Globalization; Home Computer; Identity; Markets and Marketing; Social Shaping of Technology; Virtual Communities

Further Readings Bell, D. The Coming of Postindustrial Society. London: Penguin, 1974. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2007. Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Mosco, Vincent. The Political Economy of Communication. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2009. Schroeder, Jonathan E. Visual Consumption. London: Routledge, 2002.

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Silverstone, Roger. Media and Morality. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Thrift, N. Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage, 2005. Webster, F. Theories of the Information Society. London: Routledge, 2002. Wellman, B., and Haythornwaite, C. The Internet in Everyday Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

INFORMATIONAL CAPITAL The term informational capital designates the form of capital that prevails in an information economy. If industrial capital—such as machinery, stocks, and buildings—was the most important form of capital in an industrial economy, then informational capital—such as patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property, as well as less well defined entities such as goodwill, intellectual or social capital, know-how, and corporate culture—become the most important forms of capital in an information economy. In particular, in contemporary consumer culture, informational capital, such as brands, has acquired an unprecedented influence on consumer practices as well as the value of goods. However, the terms capital, information, and information economy are not simple. The concept of an information economy can be traced to postwar U.S. debates on a coming postindustrial order, where services and the production of information by means of information (essentially, scientific innovation, education, and overall societal management and planning) would be the economically dominant activities. In these debates, the notion of an information economy was linked to utopian projections of an emerging postmaterialistic consciousness, combining an artistic quest for selfrealization with ecological awareness and the end of ideology and social conflict. In reality, however, it would seem that the growing economic importance of informational assets has been linked to accelerating global injustices and conflicts. In short, there is no necessary link between an informationcentric economy and a progressive social order. Another critique that can be mounted toward the concept of information economy is its overly cognitive emphasis. Indeed, while codified knowledge, chiefly in the form of patents and other intellectual property, remains relevant and important, a lot of evidence—not least within the managerial literature itself—tends to stress

the growing relevance of things such as brand and intellectual or social capital that stands for assets that are essentially relational, not cognitive: for example, the ability of a firm to install an ambiance of consumer good will or a work environment that favors creativity and collaboration. This way, the postindustrial economy would not so much be an information economy as a relational or ethical economy and its chief assets not informational capital as much as relational or ethical capital. The term capital is equally complex (if less contested). If we want to construct a (provisional) theory of informational capital, then we need to depart from its three distinct meanings. From one point of view, capital is a thing. It is a tool that is employed to produce something, a means of production. A hammer, a steamroller, or a computer can work as capital in relation to the labor of some living human subject that employs it. From another point of view, capital embodies a relation of power. The machine, the factory, and the computer contain a series of affordances and constraints that push the labor process to evolve in a particular way, in accordance with the functional requirements of the particular production process. From a third point of view, capital is an embodiment of value. Different assets, factories, machinery, and goodwill appear on balance sheets as resources that can be capitalized on, that can work as collaterals for loans or support the price of stock. Given this diversity of meanings attached to the term capital, a theory of informational capital would have to embrace three diverse aspects: information as a means of production, information as a form of power, and information as a form of value. In the first sense, informational capital would signify a new kind of productive resource that is chiefly immaterial, that is, that consists of forms of information (or of relations) that can be productively put to work in generating outcomes that are valuable and that lend themselves to private appropriation. This would entail things such as web portals, knowledge capital, and social capital. However, these resources become useful only in relation to their ability to mobilize a productive power or some sort of informational or immaterial labor. The social capital of a firm is useful insofar as the network of relations that it encompasses enables the company to perform certain actions; a web portal is useful insofar at it accumulates traffic or (webpage) clicks. In general, informational capital tends to create value

Informational Capital

by mobilizing productive resources (labor) that are external to and independent of the firm that owns the informational asset. Indeed, one crucial characteristic of the development of an information economy has been the massive socialization of the production process (aided by new information and communication technologies and a concomitant reoccurrence to external resources and to “free labor” such as consumers giving attention to a brand, users contributing traffic to a website, or the public participating in socialized innovation processes). At the same time, this development has been paralleled by a continuous commercial mediatization of culture and communication. This way, informational capital is no longer located to a particular place, but it tends to saturate the life-world to the extent that it is no longer meaningful to maintain a distinction between media and reality or for that matter between labor and life. Informational capital would thus represent the proprietary appropriation of what is essentially a socialized productive power such as the “ordinary” ability of consumers to relate to or network around a brand, the ability of employees to construct the kinds of social relations that enable a firm to respond to market demands with a high degree of flexibility or agility, or the ability of a company to appropriate and own the fruits of a scientific research process that tends to employ a growing multitude of diverse actors. Seen this way, informational capital essentially represents the private appropriation of what Karl Marx called general intellect. In the second sense, this ubiquitous nature of informational capital is linked to a different logic of governance. Industrial capital was linked to discipline as a modality of governance. Discipline reached its fullest development in the factory system (and the other institutions such as schools and prisons that mimicked that model), where spatial and temporal recomposition, together with the omnipresent, objective rule of the machine, made possible new and more radical forms of reeducation and reforms. Informational capital works more like a program; it does not so much impose sanctions as much as it empowers and suggests a direction. A brand, for example, is a complex of information that enters into the informational flows of daily life and directs and anticipates it in particular ways. Brands are made by a kind of loop, similar to those employed in computer programming (if you chose this brand of coffee, then this kind of experience becomes possible).

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It is important to notice that these loops are not binding. Other forms of experiences, uses, and attitudes are possible. There are seldom sanctions. As a form of governance, programming is not restrictive as much as it is enabling. Brands, like informational capital in general, rule through the freedom of their subjects, empowering them in particular directions. Sometimes, such empowering loops can be merely symbolic; at other times, they have more tangible manifestations (architecture that directs the flow of impressions in a branded space; websites that link to other websites; branded computer operating systems, such as the Apple Mac OS, that automatically contain particular forms of software such as iTunes, which in turn link to particular commercial ventures, such as the iTunes music store). Such programming depends on the ubiquitous surveillance of the social enabled by information and communications technologies. Data mining, lifestyle clustering, cookies, and other online tracking devices and information systems that link cash registers, bar codes, and information gathered through loyalty cards create a myriad of feedback points through which the autonomous productivity of the social can contribute to, alter, and refine programming strategies. Finally, informational capital entails a different logic of value. Industrial capital was linked to a logic where the value of products had a linear relation to the amounts of scarce productive resources invested in their production (labor time, machine time, etc.). Since informational capital tends to function by putting to work external and ubiquitous resources that are per definition abundant and hence without value—like the abundant productivity of consumers or the collective intelligence or general intellect of a firm—productive time can no longer function as a measure of value. Indeed, the absence of an established measure of value is one of the main factors behind the speculative nature of the intangibles that represent informational capital on corporate balance sheets. Although there have been a few attempts at articulating a value logic of informational capital such as Daniel Bell’s knowledge theory of value in the 1970s, it is the contemporary theories, within and outside the managerial world, that tend to point to an emerging ethical logic of value, where economic value becomes increasingly dependent on the ability to create a positive social impact. This is logical, since informational capital is mainly relational capital; that is, the foundation of its ability to generate economic

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value is the stock of positive social relations that it represents. Seen this way, the salience of corporate social responsibility, socially responsible investments, and ethical consumption would reflect the rising importance of a value logic proper to informational capital, where value is related to the ability of firms and other actors to erect the kinds of durable social relations that allow them to appropriate generally available knowledge, employee or consumer creativity, a good reputation, and other productive assets that can neither be purchased nor contractually enforced. Adam Arvidsson See also Branding; Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS); Information Society; Information Technology; Materialism and Postmaterialim; Postindustrial Society; Social Networks

Further Readings Arvidsson, Adam. “The Ethical Economy: Towards a PostCapitalist Theory of Value.” Capital & Class 33, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 13–29. Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Mattelart, Armand. Histoire de la societé de l’information [History of the Information Society]. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2001.

INFRASTRUCTURES

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UTILITIES

Infrastructures are network-bound large technological systems through which utility services are supplied, distributed, and consumed. Utilities are the providers of these services, which encompass drinking water, electricity, gas supply, waste collection, and sewer services. Until quite recently, the term consumer, let alone consumer culture, was absent in the vocabulary of utility managers. Utility management has long been the domain of engineers and urban planners who have been actively rolling out huge networks of pipes and wires, with the aim of servicing the public at large. Right at the point where the pipes and wires reached the homes of individual users, utility

managers’ involvement suddenly ended. This point is physically marked with a meter and rhetorically and legally with the divide between the “public or collective” network on the one hand and the “private” network beyond the meter. Hence, references to consumption and consumers in utility management language are to be found in terms such as beyond the meter, the demand side, and connections. Viewed from the other side of the meter, much of the consumer culture literature has had a blind spot on how consumers relate to the network-bound systems that are providing them the basic services such as water, energy, or waste disposal. Narratives of identity building, distinction, or conspicuous consumption arguably deal with fashions and commodities, not with mostly invisible networks that supply “universal services” to consumers. An infrastructural perspective of consumer culture shows that consumption practices have always—at least partly—been shaped and constrained by infrastructural provisions. Even more so, the changes witnessed over the past decades in the organization and outlay of infrastructural provision point to even stronger alignment between consumer culture and infrastructures and utilities. The scope of this entry is that of water and sewer infrastructures, energy supply, and waste collection services, all networks that have been rolled out over more than a century in at least the Western part of the world. The following section presents an overview of the many ways consumer practices are related in material and sociocultural terms to the provision of network-bound services, followed by a roughly sequential presentation of five modes of network-bound provision with an emphasis on how these modes of provision have reshaped the relations between consumers and utilities. Special emphasis is given in the subsequent section on the present marketized mode of provision illustrating what a “consumerist turn” and a “splintering of network services” may entail for everyday life and consumption. Lastly, some theoretical and methodological implications for the study of consumption in relation to infrastructures are explored.

Infrastructures of Consumption It is not hugely surprising that most consumption studies tend to overlook infrastructures and utilities. In material and in symbolic terms, consumption has

Infrastructures and Utilities

been related to the purchase of goods, how we relate to goods, and how our goods tell a story about ourselves or how we construct a lifestyle by surrounding ourselves with carefully chosen matter. Only from the 1980s have scholars shown interest in how consumers relate to infrastructures. Ruth Schwartz Cowan in a now classic book, More Work for Mothers (1983), showed how the industrialization of the American household was not the result of individual householder’s decision making but of the rolling out of a number of crucial infrastructures of consumption during the first half of the twentieth century. Once rolled out and made available to the public at large, such infrastructures of consumption were taken for granted by consumers and providers as well as consumption scholars. Yet there is much to say for the crucial roles such infrastructures play in shaping our daily practices and how daily practices shape infrastructures. Availability of utility services in the Western households has shaped and in many respects pushed up the levels of cleanliness, comfort, and convenience consumers adhere to, as Elizabeth Shove and others have shown in numerous studies of practices such as bathing, showering, and air conditioning.

Development of Infrastructures of Consumption Over Time If consumer practices align with infrastructural provision, then the variety and development in modes of infrastructural provision is of crucial importance to understand the evolvement of consumer culture as well. Based on the studies of Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin for utilities in the United Kingdom and Thomas Hughes for electricity networks in the United States, Bas van Vliet, Heather Chappells, and Elizabeth Shove constructed five different modes of network organization and their underlying implications for consumption and everyday life. These modes of provision may occur in sequence but can also coexist depending on infrastructure and context. An autonomous mode of provision comprises stand-alone self-managed grids at a local scale in which consumers are the providers of localized resources. Harvesting one’s own drinking water from a private well and burning waste in domestic fires are examples. When independent suppliers become involved in providing such local services, we can speak of piecemeal modes of organization. Here, we

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see the forms of electricity provision by local suppliers who have built small grids for beneficiaries. Consumers are no longer comanagers as the balance of management is shifted toward the provider. The third, the integrated mode of organization, introduces a more centralized coordination and management of loads, which means that supply and demand over larger integrated networks are optimized to make maximum use of the capacity (power stations, networks) installed. In one step further, a universal mode of organization, demand is not regarded as something to be differentiated, promoted, or controlled, but as a nonnegotiable need that has to be met. As electricity, water, sewer, and waste networks were extended up to regional and national levels, demand had to be generated to sustain these systems of mass production. It is in this mode of provision, dominating during a long time from the 1950s to the 1980s, that consumers have become treated as passive connections of uniform services. Demand is predicted for them and services provided accordingly. A clear example of such rationale emerged after the discovery and exploitation of huge gas reserves in the Netherlands in the early 1960s. Within just five years, a nationwide piped gas network was built accompanied with a national media campaign for central (gas) heating and gas cooking. Instead of being stuck in the one and only heated room, central heating enabled householders to heat kitchens, studies, and bed- and bathrooms with numerous implications for everyday family life. The last mode of organization is a marketized mode and refers to the major turn that infrastructures of consumption have made since the 1980s as a consequence of privatization and liberalization of utility markets. A further analysis in terms of the alignment between marketized modes of service provision and consumer culture is given below.

Splintering Utility Services, Differentiating Consumer Roles A marketized mode or provision involves the diversification of utility services through multiple providers and partially fragmented grids. In most cases, marketized provision evolved from a paradigm shift from universal modes of provision, which means that market principles were introduced in situations where state companies had a natural monopoly, with captive consumers having no choice but to use

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and pay for the utility services provided. The logic of infrastructure management, in which fixed units of power and water were delivered at standardized cost as part of a wider universal service obligation, is being challenged by a new logic in which “infrastructure resources are becoming commoditized, gradually differentiated in terms of cost, availability and quality over space and time” (Guy, Marvin, and Moss 2001, 31). The call for liberalization of utility markets and private participation in the provision of utility services was based on the idea that state companies were overstaffed, inefficient, and not solvent enough to make the huge investments needed to upgrade the existing networks. Since the 1980s, everywhere in the Western world, services such as telecom, public transport (railways, bus lines), waste collection, electricity supply, and water supply have at least partly been transferred to private parties through concessions, lease contracts, and up to full divestiture. Much of the public and political debates around this issue has been devoted to responsibility of the state versus private businesses to provide the universal services to the population, about tariff setting and investments in hardware, and issues of equity and rights of access to basic services. What is at stake here, however, is the possible alignment between provision and consumption. The opening of utility markets like electricity led to the emergence of multiple providers who try to compete with differentiated services. The picture of single regional or national grids is revised into splintered, partly fragmented grids served by more localized resources and providers: grey and rainwater systems replacing parts of water supply, combined heat-power stations in residential sites, solar panels in the built environment, and wind turbines in rural communities that produce electricity on a localized scale. Environmental issues were among the first to be used to differentiate among infrastructure providers in the 1990s. Green electricity was the first differentiated service in European electricity markets as were green providers the first to differentiate from the normal ones. Consumers—who were so far considered passive connections—were being asked to consider switching to another electricity provider on the basis that they were “greener” and, later on, cheaper or more service-oriented than their competitors. The possibility for consumers to make a choice, between different providers, their services, and even the sources they produce electricity from, signals the

end of their role as captive consumer and the start of a new identity: that of customer. But the opening of utility markets has led to more than that. With the increased possibilities created by new legislation and subsidy programs for solar or wind electricity production, everyone, including domestic consumers, could become providers of electricity to the common grid. With this birth of the coproviding consumer in utility markets, the strict boundaries between the domains of consumption and provision of utility services have become blurred. Many more roles for consumers toward utility service providers can now be defined. Next to the roles mentioned above, the role of citizen-consumer should be mentioned: a consumer who bases new choices in utility services on societal or environmental considerations and becomes a local beneficiary of a windmill association, a supporter of a local waste recycling scheme, or a protestor against prospective nonsustainable developments in utility provision. Now that it seems that consumers have become much more visible in utility service provision and that infrastructures have become much more visible in consumer culture, some implications for the theory and methodology for understanding the relation between consumer culture and infrastructures can be given.

Theoretical and Methodological Implications Infrastructures have traditionally been the object of engineering sciences, economics, urban geography, and historical research. Major contributions from a historical perspective with strong implications for the social sciences are Hughes’s Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 and Cowan’s More Work for Mothers. Where Hughes introduced a systemic sociotechnical perspective on the change of large technical systems, Cowan showed how such changes have shaped and constrained American household consumption in the twentieth century. Since then, a diverse but linked school of thought has emerged under the umbrella of science and technology studies, part of which deliberately deal with the linkages between infrastructures, consumption, and everyday life. Although the approaches toward the links between consumption and infrastructures diverge from issues of technological scripting, consumer choice, and greening of lifestyles, all of these scholars

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emphasize the two-way nature of the relationship between infrastructures on the one hand and human behavior on the other. Consumer studies, on the other hand, has moved its scope from individualist or single goods points of view toward more contextual approaches including the relevance of studying consumption through a focus on access and use of different modes of infrastructural service provision. Not surprisingly, the two fields of consumer studies and science and technology studies have found a common ground in the classical sociological debate around structure and agency. Based on this structuration theory, Gert Spaargaren has built a model in which social practices rather than actors or infrastructural systems are central to the study of the interplay between the two. It enables an analysis of the reduction of environmental impacts of consumption in terms of deliberate achievements of knowledgeable and capable agents who make use of the possibilities offered to them through specific systems of provision. The key issue here is consumer choice around which many academic disputes have been built and especially in cases where consumers are connected to infrastructures that lock them into certain service regimes. Are consumers indeed free to choose between the new infrastructural services provided to them, or is this choice constructed, mediated, or manipulated by the larger sociotechnical infrastructures in which consumer practices are embedded? Where does agency end and (infra)structure begin? An important field of study in this respect is of how normality and everyday life routines are being constructed in the interplay between the larger systems of provision, consumption practices, and objects. Elizabeth Shove and others have studied the interplay for the practices of bathing, showering, air conditioning and Zöe Sofoulis for water demand. Although greatly revealing, these studies about the interplay between consumption and infrastructures are not going as far as suggesting how to influence consumer behavior in more ethical, fair, or sustainable ways. The role of technology and infrastructures in deliberately shaping consumer behavior may have unfavorable connotations for technological determinism and social engineering. But if certain infrastructures indeed manage to shape behavioral choices, then this might raise the attention of activists and politicians to propose “prescriptive”

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infrastructures to change behavior, notes Ralf Brand. Such deliberate construction of consumer choice through (participatory) infrastructural design is, however, rarely seen in consumer studies so far. Most consumer culture scholars deliver a thorough analysis of the interplay between consumer practices and infrastructure provision but are hesitant to enter the domain reserved for policymakers or activists when it comes to designing future policies for infrastructures and consumption. An emerging field of research in infrastructures and utilities within urban geography, the consumer culture and science and technology studies are of sensory aspects of infrastructures. When consumers become coproviders, services become differentiated, and environmentalists start to plea for making consumption patterns visible to encourage rational use, then “visibility” is indeed a key issue in a world that was until recently in the background and underground. The questions being addressed are, what exactly is made visible, for what purpose, and for whom? Smart meters for energy and water may reveal individual consumption patterns to providers, but they may also make providers visible to consumers. And now that they’ve become more visible, are infrastructure services also becoming objects of conspicuous consumption and distinction, and what are the social and environmental implications for that? Last, a further liberalization and differentiation of utility markets show a blurring of boundaries not only between provision and consumption but also between the different utilities. Energy providers become involved in the supply of hot water to households (competing with drinking water supply), waste managers in electricity production, and water suppliers perhaps in hydroelectricity. Traditional patterns of provision and consumption that were attached to either water or energy of waste now break up, and new alignments and possibilities may emerge. With such ongoing dynamics in the interplay between infrastructures and utilities on the one hand and consumption on the other, social scientific research in this field will keep on renewing and extending as it did over the last fifteen years. Bas J. M. van Vliet See also Air and Rail Travel; Collective Consumption; Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Consumer Demand; Cycles of Production and Consumption; Domestic

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Technologies; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Renewable Resources

Further Readings Brand, Ralf. “Urban Infrastructures and Sustainable Social Practices.” Journal of Urban Technology 12, no. 2 (2005): 1–25. Fine, Ben, and Ellen Leopold. The World of Consumption. London: Routledge, 1993. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. “More Than Ducts and Wires: Post-Fordism, Cities and Utility Networks.” In Managing Cities: The New Urban Context, edited by P. Healy, 169–190. London: Wiley, 1995. Guy, Simon, Simon Marvin, and Timothy Moss, eds. Urban Infrastructure in Transition: Networks, Buildings, Plans. London: Earthscan, 2001. Hegger, Dries. “Greening Sanitary Systems: An End-User Perspective.” PhD diss., Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands, 2007. Kessides, Ioannis N. “Infrastructure Privatization and Regulation: Promises and Perils.” World Bank Research Observer 20, no. 1 (2005): 81. Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Southerton, Dale, Heather Chappells, and Bas van Vliet, eds. Sustainable Consumption: The Implications of Changing Infrastructures of Provision. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004. Spaargaren, Gert, and Bas van Vliet. “Lifestyles, Consumption and the Environment: The Ecological Modernisation of Domestic Consumption.” Environmental Politics 9, no. 1 (2000): 50–76. Summerton, Jane, ed. Changing Large Technical Systems. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. van Vliet, Bas. “Greening the Grid: The Ecological Modernisation of Network-Bound Systems.” PhD diss., Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands, 2002. van Vliet, Bas, Heather Chappells, and Elizabeth Shove. Infrastructures of Consumption: Environmental Innovation in the Utility Industries. London: Earthscan, 2005. Warde, A. “Production, Consumption and Social Change: Reservations Regarding Peter Saunders’ Sociology of Consumption.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 14, no. 2 (1990): 228–248.

INHERITANCE Inheritance is defined as money, property, possessions, or a title that is received from a family member, especially at the time of his or her death, with the transfer of ownership legally protected by the court system. It is also defined as the receipt of a right or an object previously owned by a now deceased family member. It is often considered as the receipt of a legacy, that is, part of a family heritage. Something received from a parent or parents as in a genetic transmission is also considered an inheritance. In a social or societal context, inheritance is a process by which property relations, social relations, and cultural relations are reproduced over time, within families as well as societies.

The Historical Significance of Inheritance Inheritance, in a general sense, has existed since preliterate times. Intergenerational transfers are a phenomenon found in all societies, with inheritance as the most common technique for affecting these transfers. Inheritance filled an important economic function in preindustrialized societies, sustaining the economic health of family members. In premodern times, an inheritance had the ability to provide surviving family members with the finances needed to subsist after the death of a primary wage earner or provider. Their survival was commonly so dependent on this transfer of wealth that there were often laws in place to ensure that property owners bequeathed their property to their surviving kin. In a macro sense, an inheritance was a means through which society was able to perpetuate itself and to economically sustain itself. It was the means through which societies were able to reproduce their culture and social structures, filling a fundamental social role in societies. Items transferred intergenerationally as part of an inheritance also served to provide evidence of a family’s status within the community. Inherited items were a symbol of the prominence of the owning lineage. A family’s ability to maintain china, silver, jewelry, and other nonutilitarian household goods, even during hard economic times, demonstrated the social position and the sustained generations of strength and wealth of the owning family. Inherited possessions with their “patina,” or gentle signs of aging, on

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china, silver, and other items transferred intergenerationally documented the family’s status and provided evidence of the lineage’s long-standing honor, good name, and thus gentility. Along with the inheritance of most of their belongings, a sense of the family continuity was also transferred to the next generation. Each generation was then the beneficiary of the history, stories, and values of the previous generations of the family. Thus, as possessions were moved forward in the lineage, a sense of comfort, security, continuity, and the family identity were also passed forward.

Inheritance in Contemporary Society Inheritance became less important with the emergence of a consumer culture, traced to Europe beginning in the sixteenth century and becoming more fully visible in the eighteenth century. With a strong consumer culture, inherited possessions became less popular as individuals and families were swept up in the newly found consumption behavior of these times. Instead of demonstrating status through inherited possessions, individuals began to demonstrate their status in society through their ownership of the latest fashions. A number of factors in the early 1900s continued to lessen the importance of inherited items. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. life expectancy increased dramatically to an average of 78 years of age in 2009, a substantial increase since 1900, when life expectancies hovered around age 48. Coinciding with this increase in average life expectancy, governments created a range of programs, including society-wide welfare, social security, and insurance, that could sustain family members, especially the very young, the very old, and those not currently gainfully employed. With these governmental programs, the necessity of inheritances has been greatly lessened in contemporary societies, often making the symbolic nature of these transfers far more important than their monetary value. In more recent times, researchers in the early 1990s predicted that we would see the greatest transfer of wealth in history, as the World War II generation parents were predicted to transfer an estimated $10.4 trillion in inheritance wealth to their adult baby boomer children. Research that followed increased those expectations, with estimates rising to a prediction that each baby boomer would receive an average

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of just under $100,000 dollars. However, by 2002, as the stock market soured, economists reduced their estimates to less than half of the previously predicted amount, underscoring the lesser impact of this inheritance transfer between generations. In addition to the weakening economy, this generation of parents is living longer, thus, requiring the use of more of their accumulated wealth. Although inheritances have diminished in terms of their financial necessity, they can provide continuity to family systems and are still credited with helping to maintain the social structure of society. It is one way that societies and families are able to continually perpetuate themselves. Stories are often passed forward through the lineage attached to possessions and assets. These stories are often rich with lessons, with the ability to socialize younger family members about the values, gender roles, and behaviors that hold sway with older generations of that family group. The gift-giving nature of inheritance increases the likelihood of reciprocity and exchanges within the family unit, important characteristics of strong, cohesive social structures. Inheritance transfers have been linked with serial reciprocity, with members of one generation giving to a younger generation in a similar manner to that of the gifts they received from their descendants, often involving expected future generational transfers within families. With testamentary freedom, that is, the freedom to decide to whom one’s belongings will be given to on one’s death, consumers have the freedom to assign their possessions to individuals of their choice, within a framework set by the local or regional government. This testamentary freedom makes visible individuals’ feelings about which family members they prefer to transfer their possessions to, making apparent their perceptions of the boundaries of their kinship network. While the inheritance of assets may be relatively easy to divide, the inheritance of objects is rarely so easy to apportion among heirs. Familial competition may ensue among siblings, all hoping to inherit a valued family heirloom. Heirlooms also provide evidence of the hierarchy within families, made visible by these possession transfers. Inheritances may also transcend the kinship lines, serving to bring those individuals in the fringes of the lineage into the family. In these instances, families often entrust a

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daughter-in-law or a son-in-law, for example, with a family heirloom, providing documentation that this daughter-in-law or son-in-law is thought of “just like a daughter” or “just like a son.” In contemporary developed societies, inheritance, including the transference of heirlooms, remains pervasive across middle-class and upper-class families, although fewer items are transferred in contemporary kinship groups than were commonly transferred during medieval and early modern families. Few families traced in recent research denied the existence or value of family heirlooms and most voiced pride to have cared for intergenerationally transferred items through the many migrations and relocations typical of contemporary consumers. Individuals report that heirlooms received in their inheritances are beneficial by keeping their family units more cohesive, serving as a scaffolding to attach stories that illustrate their family identity, demonstrating their families’ status distinctions, and representing religious and moral values. Through the inheritance of heirlooms, consumers are able to enlist the achievements of ancestors and to move the distinction of their lineage forward in time. One particular type of inheritance is that of inalienable possessions. These are items that are thought to be too valuable to leave the confines of the family lineage. They are maintained by family members with the intention of passing them forward to the next generation. Family members envision future and yet unborn family members continuing to pass the inalienable possession through the lineage for perpetuity. Objects selected to be transferred to younger family members are laden with meaning, both through family descendents and through their carefully crafted histories. These objects have been carefully selected to serve as symbolic vehicles with the ability to imaginatively extend the status, honors, and achievements of their family group into the future. Inheritances allow contemporary consumers to pass forward items that preserve a favored group identity and make tangible their ancestral past. The meanings and stories attached to these items keep them inalienably tied to their original owner. Instead of individuals having ownership of these possessions, they are instead owned by the family, or lineage. Younger family members are schooled in the importance of passing these items on later to future generations. In addition to protecting these objects

for future generations, caretakers teach members of the youngest generation about the family history associated with the inalienable wealth and thus serve to also teach family lessons and values. Current caretakers have responsibility to select a member of the younger generation to someday transfer the item to, with the assurance that the items will be well cared for during that generation and that it will continue its ascent into the future. Although inalienable wealth is commonly thought to be objects, research also suggests that financial assets can also have the qualities of inalienable wealth. Inalienable possessions can serve as repositories of family histories, with the ability to link current generations to a stream of ancestors providing current family members a social distinction. Carolyn Folkman Curasi See also Age and Aging; Consumer Society; Families; Gifts and Reciprocity; Inalienable Wealth/Inalienable Possessions; Material Culture; Memory; Retirement

Further Readings Bradford, Tonya Williams. “Intergenerationally Gifted Asset Dispositions.” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (June 1, 2009): 93–111. Curasi, Carolyn F., Linda L. Price, and Eric J. Arnould. “How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (December 2004): 609–622. Epp, Amber, and Linda L. Price. “Family Identity: A Framework of Identity Interplay in Consumption Practices.” Journal of Consumer Research 35 (June 1, 2008): 50–70. Finch, Janet, and Jennifer Mason. Passing On: Kinship and Inheritance in England. London: Routledge, 2000. Goody, Jack, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson. Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Mukerji, Chandra. From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Innovation Studies Sussman, Marvin B., Judith N. Cates, and David T. Smith. The Family and Inheritance. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970.

INNOVATION STUDIES The Oxford English Dictionary credits the economist Joseph Schumpeter with the modern definition of innovation. In his 1939 book Business Cycles, this Harvard University professor distinguished between invention and innovation. Invention is the process of turning a new idea into a useful thing; the process can be accidental or deliberate. In contrast, innovation occurs when an entrepreneur or an organization purposely works to bring an idea, technique, or product into widespread use or to apply it to new settings. An innovation can be a new invention, but it might simply be an old product, process, or concept presented in a novel way. Innovation is important to consumer society for several reasons. The many novelties that are at the heart of daily experience—everything from the annual vehicle model change to the latest Disney production—are developed in response to public desires uncovered through consumer research. Over the centuries but especially since the early twentieth century, firms and industries have innovated with the aid of sophisticated mechanisms for determining what consumers expect from products. These mechanisms have included door-to-door surveys, motivational research, and World Wide Web polling and have involved a group of expert “go-betweens,” or “intermediaries,” that facilitate the interface with the marketplace. Examining consumer society from the innovators’ perspective can provide a deeper understanding of how consumer desires are perceived by manufacturers and how technical and managerial constraints came to shape products in the grocery store, the strip mall, and the airport duty-free shop.

The Sites of Innovation Historically, innovation has transpired in two settings: industries or firms. In industries, actors who might otherwise be competitors collaborate in pursuit of a common goal. This occurred in Gilded Age America, when different railroads grappled with a series of tragic accidents and joined forces to adopt new technologies and technical standards for the

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greater good. These new artifacts—secure coupling devices and a uniform set of colors for signals— were recent inventions, but the innovation was their application throughout the railroad industry. Similar innovation occurs today at the industry level through trade associations or standard-setting agencies, such as the National Bureau of Standards and the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO. The main function of standards is to facilitate the flow of products from farms, forests, mines, and sea to processing and manufacturing plants and to the ultimate consumer. In firms, innovation historically occurred when companies sought to improve existing processes and products or to create entirely new ones. In the first case, innovation was often linked to the rise of big business and the quest for economies of scale. As large firms made standardized goods for oligopolistic markets, they competed by introducing efficiencies in production, packaging, and distribution. In massproduction industries like meatpacking, cost-cutting imperatives gave birth to new processes, as was the case in Chicago at the turn of the last century. The slaughterhouses of Armour and Company and Swift & Company did not invent a new type of cow, sheep, or hog, but they achieved scale economies in part through a manufacturing innovation, the “disassembly” line. At the firm level, innovation could also be linked to the basic need to develop new products. Manufacturers that followed this path moved from one business cycle to the next in pursuit of “novelty.” They relied heavily on flexible production practices, awarded managers a great deal of autonomy, and paid considerable attention to the external environment. For example, in New York City’s garment district, which enjoyed a golden age of manufacturing from the 1920s through the 1980s, firms developed products by keeping tabs on Paris fashion and adapting new French styles to suit the distinctive needs of the American market. Innovation was crucial to the rise of consumer society in several ways. Innovative firms helped the economy grow. In the United States, big-business innovators like U.S. Steel, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Central Leather Company, General Mills, and General Motors dominated the economy and kept the country running. By employing large numbers of people in blue-collar and white-collar jobs, they extended abundance to countless Americans. They also created products like railroad cars, automobiles,

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meats, and cereal, which generally improved the standard of living. Less visible to the consumer, but just as important to consumer society, were the specialty manufacturers that catered to niche markets. Between 1909 and 2009, for example, the Rohm and Haas Company grew into the world’s largest maker of specialty chemicals by introducing leather processing chemicals, acrylic plastic sheeting, polymers for fast-drying latex paints, and the electronic chemicals in virtually all circuit boards and chips. The company had a distinctive corporate culture that emphasized customer service and its close relationship with customers— tanners in the 1910s, American and British aircraft builders during World War II, European farmers during the Marshall Plan, and electronics companies in the 1990s—allowed Rohm and Haas to create products for highly specific applications, such as Plexiglas canopies for fighter planes and helicopters. Although few people recognize the name of Rohm and Haas (which merged with the U.S. giant Dow Chemical in 2009), its products also go into consumer goods like sunscreen, water softeners, paint, circuit boards, and microprocessors, which help to make everyday life more comfortable and convenient. This alternative path to innovation—with its emphasis on niche markets and the continuous production of novel goods—was also the modus operandi for countless firms that made consumer durables. Companies producing the goods essential to consumer identity—household furnishings, china and glassware, hats and suits, shoes and handbags, electronics, and so forth—depended on rapid change in product design for their livelihoods. Product innovation, more so than process innovation, was the key to their future. Scholars who write about innovation often pose questions that are pertinent to the history of consumer society. What prompts companies to innovate? What leads some firms to grow into big businesses and other to remain smaller and more flexible? Does industrial research drive product development or vice versa? Who holds the power in innovation? Do manufacturers and retailers drive change, or do consumers somehow express cultural needs that manufacturers and retailers labor to fulfill? The relationship between producers and consumers is complex and variable, depending on the time, place, industry, and product.

Consumers have long been crucial to innovation in industries that are just getting started. Radio is one of the best examples of a consumer-driven innovation. In 1910, nobody could walk into a store and buy a tabletop or console radio that had been assembled at the factory, as an Apple iPad or a MacBook Air laptop would today. People interested in the new “wireless” technology had to buy electronic parts made for commercial and military use and put together their own radio sets at home. As technical journals and popular magazines began to publicize the wireless, middle-class people who like to tinker discovered the fun of home electronics. These hobbyists—mostly schoolboys but some men and women, too—bought electronic parts, assembled their own receivers, and spent countless hours sending messages to each other. Radio buffs were well-educated do-it-yourself types, the first “nerds.” They used large portable radios that ran on batteries, and they wore ear tubes or headsets to hear broadcasted sounds that were collected by large antennae. These early radios were not things of beauty but consisted of glass vacuum tubes, black boxes, and plastic knobs connected by wires. Twisting the knobs to find the right frequency was a fine art, often mastered by the young people in the family who relished the challenge. Radio’s popularity among amateur transmitters, later nicknamed “hams,” paved the way for its entry into the home as a major entertainment vehicle. Scholars of innovation in more mature industries have studied different situations to learn about interplay of supply and demand. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan emphasizes the importance of the consumption junction, the metaphorical meeting place for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. As shoppers selected products in the marketplace, their signals were picked up by manufacturers and retailers, who had to figure out what to make and sell. Early on, much data collecting occurred in markets and stores, as producers simply watched consumers as they shopped. Formal practices for gathering, analyzing, and disseminating data emerged in the Modern Era (1900–1945), when publishers, advertising agencies, and manufacturers embraced the new field of survey research. When statistics failed to explain shoppers’ motivations, another new profession—motivational research, which blossomed in the cold war era—borrowed insights from psychology and applied them to the analysis of markets.

Innovation Studies

Working at the consumption junction, managers seeking to innovate studied sales figures, designed products, and planned advertising campaigns. But the folks who ran American companies could not always leave their desks, so they sometimes relied on surrogates. These “fashion intermediaries” had the primary responsibility for making connections within the marketplace or “imagining the consumer.” Intermediaries worked in various types of jobs: interior decorator, fashion designer, retail buyer, merchandise manager, advertising executive, design consultant, home economist, sales analyst, market surveyor, and motivational researcher. Their principle job was to channel news from consumer to manufacturer, helping the wheels of production and innovation turn. An example from the U.S. pottery industry shows how fashion intermediaries standing at the consumption junction facilitated innovation. From the 1910s through the 1950s, the Homer Laughlin China Company of Newell, West Virginia, grew into the world’s largest pottery company by capitalizing on the U.S. demand for inexpensive tableware, a demand that emerged as working-class consumers strove to emulate the dining habits of their social betters. To learn what styles these shoppers liked, Homer Laughlin’s managers relied on the professional retail buyers who worked for their largest customers, the new five-and-tens that dominated the main streets in factory cities and market towns. From his office in lower Manhattan, the crockery buyer for F. W. Woolworth, the nation’s largest chain store, was responsible for selecting the merchandise that would appeal to blue-collar consumers across the land. Before the days of computers, large retailers like Woolworth’s kept track of popular lines by hiring an army of clerks to analyze the detailed, typed reports on sales assembled by local store managers. The buyers would also travel around the country, visiting stores and watching women as they shopped. The combination of quantitative and qualitative data provided the buyer with insight on consumer tastes. He knew which crockery shapes and decal decorations sold well in Pittsburgh and so on for stores across the country. Knowing the market, the crockery buyer visited the Homer Laughlin plant several times per year to select the next season’s merchandise. Together, the factory’s salesmen, general manager, and art director and the retail buyer would negotiate the look of next

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season’s styles. The aim was not to shape taste but to respond to the desires of Woolworth’s shoppers. Businessmen were embroiled in the culture of their times, and most knew something about household routines, as did Homer Laughlin’s managers and the Woolworth’s crockery buyer. There were certain patterns and preferences shared by most Americans. But when the intricacies of domestic life confounded, male executives turned to female fashion intermediaries for stylistic tips about clothing and home decoration. Since the eighteenth century, companies have understood the consumer to be female and the home to be the primary site of consumption. Women integrated goods into family and group rituals, sometimes using them in unexpected and creative ways. New styles and tastes emerged. The trick for business was to learn about these fashions before they bubbled into popular culture and to integrate them into product design to create new innovations. The need for the woman’s viewpoint created job opportunities for female professionals who could help companies to innovate. During the early twentieth century, Corning Glass Works became a leading specialty glass manufacturer through innovative practices such as research and development, licensing, and joint ventures. Corning’s diversified product portfolio—it made lightbulb envelopes and filaments for General Electric, drawn glass for thermometers, colored lamp covers for railroad signals, and Pyrex baking ware—allowed the firm to spread its highly specialized knowledge across a range of products and customers. But when the company ventured into consumer durables with Pyrex baking dishes, it stumbled and fell. Introduced in 1915, Pyrex bake ware was made from heat-resistant glassware that had been developed for railroad signal lamps. Corning managers hoped the shatterproof glass would appeal to homemakers versed in the efficiency and cleanliness crazes of the Progressive Era. But after the launch, Pyrex sales foundered and stagnated. Corning turned to the J. Walter Thompson Company, one of the nation’s leading advertising agencies, that through market research surveys discovered why women did not like Pyrex. It was too expensive and did not come in useful shapes and sizes. To get a better handle on the women’s viewpoint, Corning managers established a modest department of home economics, headed by Lucy M. Maltby. Trained in the burgeoning field at Iowa

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State University, Maltby spent nearly four decades at Corning, directing a department that answered consumer mail, demonstrated products to consumers, and collaborated with the design department on new products. As a fashion intermediary, Maltby helped Corning’s engineers, designers, and managers to understand the homemaker’s needs and brought authenticity to the design process. Her staff helped to design shapes that fit into women’s hands and advised male designers to introduce products that matched popular decorating styles. Maltby did not invent Pyrex, but she was an innovator who helped to improve its performance and sales. This pattern was followed in other consumer industries, such as processed food and appliances, which relied on home economists as fashion intermediaries or consumer surrogates in innovation. In many consumer-oriented businesses, fashion intermediaries labored hard to imagine the customer and report on his or her tastes. But the presence of intermediaries did not guarantee that business would always make products that shoppers wanted. Intermediaries coexisted with another type of business professional, the tastemaker, who saw consumers as malleable individuals, ripe for manipulation. Tastemakers tried to remake the consumer in their own images, imposing their ideas about what was beautiful on the buying public. Often, their visions did not find favor in the mass market. Sometimes, they were simply ahead of the curve, resulting in designs such as the 1934 Chrysler Airflow, beloved by the critics but relegated to obscurity by consumers, who refused to buy it. In other cases, their ideas were welcomed by consumers who wanted to distinguish themselves from the “unwashed masses” by purchasing distinctive goods as status symbols. Rookwood pottery, art deco kitchen ranges, and Danish modern furniture are good examples. Their creators wanted to reshape mass-market taste, but the majority of American shoppers preferred more traditional designs. Still, the American market, by virtue of size and segmentation, absorbed these products as luxury goods, or upmarket lines. Over the past two centuries, consumers often had greater weight than manufacturers or retailers in innovation. This has been particularly true in competitive markets, where personal taste determined the look and feel of the final product. Hands tied, retailers watched shoppers as they decided to buy some products while leaving other stock on the

shelf. Popular culture—movies, radio, magazines, the World Wide Web—reverberated with the sounds of consumers chattering about their favorite goods and leisure activities. Concrete information about choice found its way into corporate offices through sales statistics and market research. Smart manufacturers and retailers kept tabs, adjusting the product portfolio as dictated by the consumer jury. Those who listened to customers and consumers proved successful. Regina Lee Blaszczyk See also Capitalism; Consumer Demand; Consumer Durables; Cool Hunters; Cultural Intermediaries; Cycles of Production and Consumption; Gender; Information Technology; Markets and Marketing; Novelty

Further Readings Bakker, Gerben. “Building Knowledge about the Consumer: The Emergence of Market Research in the Motion Picture Industry.” In The Emergence of Modern Marketing, edited by Roy Church and Andrew Godley, 101–127. London: F. Cass, 2003. Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV. Wheeling, IL: Harlan-Davidson, 2009. Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Rohm and Haas: A Century of Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Clarke, Sally H., Naomi R. Lamoreaux, and Steven W. Usselman, eds. The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth-Century American Business. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. “The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems, edited by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, 261–280. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. Graham, Margaret B. W. “Technology and Innovation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Business History, edited by Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin, 347–373. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lester, Richard K., and Michael J. Piore. Innovation: The Missing Dimension. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Internet

INTERNET The Internet is among the rare group of entities— whether inventions, ideas, or cultural phenomena more broadly—that began as a development within the U.S. Department of Defense and later came to be one of the most impactful social forces in a way unimagined by the initial developers, researchers, and scientists. The Internet, and later the World Wide Web, has to this day made a lasting impression globally. First conceived of as a last-ditch means of communication within the military in case the normal means of doing so were damaged by nuclear attack, the Internet was, in some ways, the bomb shelter of the realm of telecommunications. Later, when universities revitalized it as a means of sharing research, it took on the general “shape,” if you will, of what we today recognize as the Internet. Today, the Internet is a media technology consisting of a global network of computers and other devices that allow for the relatively quick and easy transmission of data built on layers of protocols. It is this that has allowed for a variety of uses, including commerce, communication, data storage, and research. To put it in terms media theorist Marshall McLuhan once used, the Internet is the medium that contains all other media as its content. In other words, the Internet stands as the metamedia of the twenty-first century. For this reason, the Internet has since the 1990s been considered an important area of research by sociologists, anthropologists, communications scholars, and economists. More than twenty years after the Internet arrived on the consumer market, it is seen as an integral part of social research on identity, social interaction, culture, politics and consumption and has been a fruitful area of research in the humanities as well.

Emergence and Proliferation The Internet—as something that the masses, not just those who were affiliated with academia or the military, understood, identified and had some experience with—emerged in earnest in the 1990s, during an era that many call the dot-com boom or the information technology revolution of the 1990s. The preponderance of mailed CDs offering a trial of one thousand free hours of America Online, CompuServe, or Prodigy, some of the earliest

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Internet service providers (ISPs) that made headway in the U.S. consumer market, are a reminder of this era. For the most part, these ISPs were the first foray into the Internet for many people in the United States. The Internet took off in the United States more quickly than it had in most other countries due to a convergence of various factors. For one, the personal computer, which had entered the consumer market as early as the 1980s, had decreased in price enough to be affordable for many consumers. In addition, the Internet had also been backed by legislation in both the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, which allowed for the rapid building of the infrastructure necessary for Internet access in schools, for instance. And of course, the dot-com boom, which lasted from 1995 to 2000, made for not only cultural tangibility but also the speedy development of a variety of media technologies, as computer scientists, venture capitalists, and tech geeks were all creating new products. By the late 1990s, as the dot-com boom turned into a bust, concerns over who had access to the Internet (and computers generally) and who didn’t began to surface under the umbrella of the term digital divide, which was first introduced by the Clinton administration. More than a simple economic gold rush, the Internet began to be viewed as a resource, as even a human right, as Stephen Kurczy reports. The appearance of such views signaled the end of the Internet as novelty and the beginning of the Internet as a major component of social and political life for many human beings. Although the terms Internet, online, and the Web are often conflated, each deserves more specificity when used. The Internet, as described above, is the name of the network of networks that is able to link computers to one another. The World Wide Web, on the other hand, is the visual representation of the Internet that we are most familiar with today. We access it through a World Wide Web browser and tend to navigate to specific “spaces” on the World Wide Web through a URL (uniform resource locator) or web address. These two are not equivalent. Prior to the World Wide Web, there were means by which to access the World Wide Web and be online, without typing in a web address. For instance, in the 1990s, the dominant experience of being online came from America Online, which had its own “world” of keywords, chat rooms, and channels. Hence,

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accessing web content did not require one to open up a World Wide Web browser at all. One could stay within AOL’s Internet architecture. The various means by which people access e-mail is a more contemporary example. E-mail was one of the earliest functions of the Internet. There are two main ways of accessing e-mail. What most people today use is webmail. One goes to a URL to read, write, and send e-mail messages. However, some use e-mail clients, such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, or Apple Mail. These allow the accessing of e-mail messages without using a World Wide Web browser. Another example is computer games, such as World of Warcraft, which require an Internet connection but are not played on the World Wide Web but through an application (or program) that connects to the Internet on its own. In the wake of the wane of services such as America Online and Prodigy, which was spurred by the rise of broadband Internet, which did not require the use of a phone line for connecting, the World Wide Web had become the dominant mode of accessing the Internet. As cable TV providers began to bundle broadband Internet access with cable service, broadband Internet became more available in the United States. In Asia, broadband had been available much sooner than in the United States, such as in South Korea, which, as a nation, has migrated completely from dial-up phone access to broadband access. This can be said of many parts of the European Union as well, although the rate of broadband penetration of Asia far outpaces the United States and European Union. Today, broadband Internet has had the most global reach since its inception due to wireless technologies. In parts of Asia, such as Iran, and Africa, such as Nigeria and Ghana, the means by which most people access the World Wide Web is through mobile devices, reports Richard Wray.

Scholarship Over the course of its development, from the command-line Internet, which looked more like MS-DOS, to the World Wide Web with its hyperlinks, to Web 2.0 with its sociality, there have been numerous studies of the Internet and the World Wide Web, with perspectives changing according to the dominant framework of the World Wide Web. It is in this period in which names such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube came to be not

simply websites but cultural institutions. In fact, some view Google to be the World Wide Web itself. For many, if it is not “googleable,” then it does not exist. It is no surprise that it is during this period that a surge of Internet scholarship emerged. The first wave of Internet studies can be called pre-Web. These consisted of research in the realm of identity and communities in multiuser domains (MUDs) and the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (The WELL), virtual worlds that are mirrored today most accurately by Second Life and multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft (Turkle 1984; Rheingold 1993). These studies tended to focus on the effect of the ways in which members of such communities reinvented themselves to form second selves, identities that were removed from their “real” (or nonvirtual) lives. Members of communities were using these technologies to gender swap, create multiple personas, and so on; thus, multiple and decentered identities became a meme of sorts that defined this wave. As this was the early years of virtual communities, the scholarship of this wave also focused on the legitimacy of online social interactions. The connections forged in MUDs and WELLs were indeed very real, they argued. However, this approach assumed that identity and Internet are categorically distinct entities. But with the onset of the World Wide Web, more studies focused on how behaviors and actions have been “remediated” (Bolter and Grusin 2000) on the World Wide Web and, in turn, woven into everyday life. With the proliferation of the World Wide Web, Internet studies looked toward the various social forms that existed offline that made it onto the World Wide Web. One of the most oft mentioned was that of economics and search. Though indeed the dot-com boom had been an instance of the intersection of the Internet and venture capital, the ability to buy (and sell) on the World Wide Web is perhaps the most lasting impression of what scholars call Web 1.0. The World Wide Web’s rather low barrier of entry allowed for businesses of all kinds to create a digital storefront on the World Wide Web. This was made even easier by the emergence of sites like eBay and later Amazon, where users could sell and buy products on the World Wide Web relatively securely. But the Internet was not a place where the trading of goods was necessarily legal. The Internet also gave birth to file-sharing services such as Napster and later BitTorrent, which allowed

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for the exchange of media files through an Internet connection. While the earliest of file-sharing services focused on music files, file sharing exploded into other media, including films and computer programs. Therefore, scholarship began to revolve around copyright and intellectual property issues both in the academy and in the greater public. Debates over the phrase “information wants to be free,” which is at the heart of the ideology of the open-source movement, began to appear in the literature. Although the open-source movement is specific in its purported ideals (some of which are highly technical) and selfdefinition, its ideological kernel can be found in the general user-centric culture of the World Wide Web, of which YouTube is perhaps a salient example. YouTube, a popular video-sharing site, has arguably created a new “genre” of video, many of which are mundane, amateurish videos of a day spent at the zoo, for example (Heffernan 2009). This theme of participation has also fueled much and increasing research in the realm of economics, consumption, and politics on the Internet, in an era that many media analysts and scholars refer to as Web 2.0, which is shorthand for “the becoming social” of the World Wide Web. Whereas in the first generation of the World Wide Web it was viewed as an information superhighway, that is, a large database or resource from which users could gather information, Web 2.0 is seen as an arena in which the user is not only a consumer of information but also a producer. The experience of the prosumer of Web 2.0 is active, not passive like in the days when one would merely “look it up on the Internet.” The Internet, or the World Wide Web more precisely, is increasingly becoming the place where the diverse dimensions of one’s life play out—whether it is work or leisure. Blogging and social networking are perhaps the most prominent examples of Web 2.0. Although some media analysts, such as Chris Anderson, have pointed to Wikipedia as the example of Web 2.0 par excellence, it seems that blogging and social networking may be more ubiquitous. Blogging, the practice of keeping a weblog, has become so widespread that British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News Online (2005) estimates that a blog is created “every second.” At the core of the “ethic” of blogging is sharing. Blogging, while it does not necessarily have to be so, consists of short posts oriented around a link, photo, or video. It usually refers to something outside of itself. This, however, does not

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mean that blog posts are not original in their content. As David Carr suggests, many successful blogs, such as Gawker, a gossip blog, or The Awl, a mixed blog of cultural criticism, news, and music, gain notoriety and web traffic through writing style and tone though they link to other sources in nearly every post. The prosumer is also explored in the work of media scholar Henry Jenkins, who has taken note of the ways in which the World Wide Web has affected learning, in particular, literacy. In his analysis of the online fan fiction culture that emerged from the Harry Potter book series, Jenkins argues that Harry Potter fan sites are instances of the development of an informal learning culture; they are organic affinity spaces characterized by a dynamic of participation (in this case, of creating one’s own narratives using the characters and settings of the popular novel series by J. K. Rowling). The rhetoric of Web 2.0, however, did not abandon identity altogether. In this vein, some scholars such as danah boyd have looked at the effect of social network sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, on identity formation across life stages. As she argues, different age groups use the World Wide Web in varying ways. Youth, for instance, use the World Wide Web mostly for consumption, attention, and keeping in touch with friends, while “20 somethings” use the World Wide Web for courting (as opposed to dating) and seeking meaningful labor, that is, careers as opposed to jobs. But identity on the World Wide Web, more generally, becomes an exercise in careful self-curation, where one’s multifaceted identity is presented carefully in the various social networks of which he or she is a part. To describe this phenomenon, boyd uses the language of sociologist Erving Goffman, calling it identity performance. Along similar lines, scholars, including boyd, of race on the Internet have remarked the rather novel way in which racial identity comes into play on the Internet, in particular in social spaces, such as MySpace, and on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). In the case of the latter, Lisa Nakamura has remarked that there is extensive identity performance in the modification of buddy icons, the avatars that are associated with AIM accounts, that, to use her example, express a Muslim identity. Due to the default nature of anonymity of the Internet, there has been much difficulty in simply translating methodological frameworks—whether social scientific, philosophical, statistical, or

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humanistic—from offline to online. There is rich literature about the merits of performing, for instance, ethnography on the World Wide Web. Some scholars, including Angela Cora Garcia and Sam Han, have suggested that lurking, the Internet, or Net, lingo (Netlingo) slang term for the act of observing but not participating in a social space on the World Wide Web, whether it be a discussion board, e-mail list, or chat room, is the preferred method of ethnographic research on the World Wide Web. Others such as Norman Denzin pointing to the immense amount of text that is available on the World Wide Web, have used the Internet as a giant archive for content and discourse analysis. And some have used the Internet primarily as a portal for survey research, because of the anonymity it provides.

Future Directions The debate on the future of the Internet has recently flared up due to an article in Wired magazine written by Anderson and Michael Wolff titled “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” The tongue-in-cheek nature of their proclamation has less to do with an antitechnology reactionary revolution and more to do with a technical point. They are not in the least talking about the end of the forms of connectivity facilitated by a global network of computers. Rather, they are addressing the fact that the dominance of mobility in the contemporary computing experience has pushed the orientation of the Internet toward apps, software that is run on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets (e.g., Apple’s iPad). Anderson and Wolff’s point that the World Wide Web as the dominant framework of how we understand the Internet is on the decline is probably true, if things continue to go in the direction of mobile devices as they seem to be. However, the phenomenology of mobility that buttresses their claim is perhaps where they make the largest of contributions. Future Internet research will have to reckon with the impact of mobile Internet, wherein one could look up the sale items of a clothing store by pointing one’s smartphone camera at the store’s quick response (QR) code (similar to a bar code). The possibilities of augmented reality are no longer just a figment of science-fictive imagination but already here. The discussions on whether the Internet is an important aspect of modern life are moot. The future is already present in that regard. Sam Han

See also Communication Studies; E-Commerce; Electronic Video Gaming; Home Computer; Information Society; Information Technology; Prosumption; Virtual Communities

Further Readings Anderson, Chris, and Michael Wolff. “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” Wired, September 2010. Available at http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ ff_webrip/all/1. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. boyd, danah. “Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life.” San Diego, CA, 2007. Available at http://www.danah .org/papers/talks/Etech2007.html. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News Online. “One Blog Created ‘Every Second.’” BBC, August 2, 2005, sec. Technology. Available at http://news.bbc .co.uk/2/hi/technology/4737671.stm. Carr, David. “The Awl Finds Some Level of Online Success.” New York Times, October 24, 2010. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/business/ media/25carr.html?_r=1 (accessed December 21, 2010). Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Denzin, Norman K. “Cybertalk and the Method of Instances.” In Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net, edited by Steve Jones, 107–125. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999. Garcia, Angela Cora, Alecea I. Standlee, Jennifer Bechkoff, and Yan Cui. “Ethnographic Approaches to the Internet and Computer-Mediated Communication.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38, no. 1 (February 1, 2009): 52–84. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Penguin, 1990. Han, Sam. Navigating Technomedia: Caught in the Web. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Heffernan, Virginia. “Uploading the Avant-Garde.” New York Times Magazine, September 6, 2009. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06FOBmedium-t.html?_r=1&hpw. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006. Kurczy, Stephen. “Is Internet Access a Human Right? Top 10 Nations That Say Yes.—CSMonitor.com.” Christian Science Monitor, March 9, 2010. Available at http://www.csmonitor.com/World/

Interpellation Global-News/2010/0309/Is-Internet-access-ahuman-right-Top-10-nations-that-say-yes. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet, 1964. Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Wray, Richard. “Africa Sees Massive Growth in Mobile Web Usage.” Guardian, December 22, 2009. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/22/ mobilephones-internet.

INTERPELLATION The concept of interpellation has had considerable importance in analyses of consumer culture both in the academy and in the practice of marketing and advertising. This concept makes an important contribution to understanding the processes whereby people are recruited into identity positions thus bringing together the inner world of unconscious processes and external representations that occupy the public terrain of ideas, symbols, images, and myths. The concept of interpellation accords high priority to symbolic systems and representations but combines them with the operation of the psyche and psychological processes in the structuralist tradition. By offering an explanation of the mechanisms through which people are recruited into identity positions through being confronted with symbolic systems and signs, interpellation presents useful material for the design of advertisements. Cultural studies theorists are able to decode such sets of symbols, which those in advertising and the creative industries construct using the same sets of knowledge. The semiotics of symbolic systems that appeal to unconscious forces play a key role in these processes. Interpellation is all about how the mechanisms of identification work and how we come to think of ourselves as that person who has that identity. Consumers can be seen to be interpellated by the associations of a product or service that draws them in so that they think, yes, that’s me; I’m that kind of person. Interpellation derives from the work of the French social philosopher Louis Althusser who sought to

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provide a nonreductionist explanation for the operation of ideological processes through which people, as individuals or as members of groups, including social classes, took up identity positions and were recruited into ideologies. Althusser’s earlier work had been called into question by the failure of the political events in Europe 1968 (and in particular of the French Communist Party to bring about revolutionary change), so he sought to provide an explanation that went beyond the idea of a repressive state and explored more subtle and complex modes of subjectivization. Althusser’s critique, in his work on ideological state apparatuses ([ISAs], 1984), suggested that ideologies provide the basis of the presuppositions through which people make sense of their everyday lives; ideology largely operates on people unconsciously; that is, we are unaware of the social structures that seem so taken for granted that they are common sense and seem obvious. In invoking the notion of common sense, Althusser was building on the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose engagement with everyday assumptions and the routine operation of ideologies and beliefs have also informed theories of consumption. Althusser goes on to pose questions about how ideologies as systems of mass representation or structures work on us internally. How are we recruited into these perspectives on the world that become assumed and taken for granted? Althusser’s response to this question is that ideologies work through the philosophical and juridical category of the subject, which he sees as a social category, for example, a legal subject, a sexual subject, a gendered subject, and a grammatical subject. Thus, the subject of ideology is a constructed category, which is pivotal to the functioning of ideology through which concrete individuals are constituted. Interpellation presents the next stage of Althusser’s argument as the precise mechanism of recruitment. Interpellation both names and positions the individual, for example, as a subject of the law through the mechanism of hailing, in which each of us immediately recognizes ourselves as subjects who are being addressed, and through the process of recognition, we submit ourselves to the consequences of that positioning. Being interpellated is like someone calling out your name in the street, and you turn around because you recognize that it is you who is being hailed (or you think it is you). Althusser uses

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the example of Christian religion to demonstrate the different stages whereby first, the individual is interpellated as a subject, then is subjected to the Subject (the divine subject par excellence); next, individuals recognize each other and themselves as subjects. Last comes the acceptance that on condition that subjects recognize themselves and behave accordingly, “everything will be all right” (1971, 170). Thus, subjects are themselves implicated in the process; they are not merely the passive recipients and followers of ideology, whatever form ideology takes. The subject is also positioned within a set of assumptions, what Gramsci defined as common sense and spontaneous ideology. In terms of consumption, this means buying the product and buying into its associated lifestyle, through our aspirations if not actually. The moment of recognition and of being hailed is a spontaneous identification, like hearing someone call out your name when you turn around and think, that’s me who is being addressed. Sometimes, your name could be a national identity; some representations, such as the flag or national strip at sporting events, hail the spectator or fan as a member of that nation. In the context of consumption, the name we recognize is more usually that associated with a lifestyle—the homemaker, the fashionista, the caring parent, the sexy young professional, the streetwise youth, the prudent saver or investor. Positions vary, but through the process of interpellation, we recognize our place within the discourse and its characteristics so that we can identify ourselves in that place as potential authors. An interpellation operates both to identify and to circumscribe events, by defining subjects who also feel they are active in the process and are making a choice. Thus, the mechanisms of interpellation have some purchase in redressing the determinacy of Frankfurt school theories of consumption, which presented the consumer as the passive construct of class-based ideologies of capitalist production and in a state of false consciousness. Theories of consumption have shifted from an emphasis on the culture industry and critiques of capitalist commodifcation toward approaches that stress creativity. Although extensively criticized, the concept of interpellation is frequently invoked in a more general way as descriptive of the moments when, for example, people recognize the sort of person they are and want to be. Michel Foucault challenged Althusser’s notion of ideology as necessarily standing

for that which is in opposition to “truth.” Although Foucault shared Althusser’s antihumanist critique of the concept of a unified subject and argued that subjects are produced and not given, he suggested that production of subjectivity was not through unconscious processes and rejected Althusser’s use of psychoanalysis. Others such as Michèle Barrett, following Foucault, have argued that to suggest that the subject is hailed into an identity position suggests that there must be a subject who exists prior to the process whereby that subject is recruited and identifies with a particular identity. Although Althusser sought to avoid the constraints of false consciousness in his formulation of the idea of interpellation, it can, nonetheless, be seen to work all too effectively, and the concept of interpellation cannot accommodate resistance or creativity. For example, as studies of subcultures, starting with Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s Resistance Through Ritual (1976) and Paul Willis’s 1978 study of symbolic creativity have demonstrated, individual consumers and subcultural groups use goods in a subversive way. The artifacts of consumption are polysemous and multiaccented rather than delivering a simple message. However, Althusser’s incorporation of unconscious forces into the processes and the intensity of that moment when we feel that we are named by interpellation captures the dynamic of recognition and the moment at which the subject is “summoned into place” (Hall 1996). As Judith Williamson has argued, interpellation captures exactly what happens in advertisements that address us through the trope of hey you! and we recognize that we are being addressed, and at that moment, we take on the subject position that is offered. It may not always work, but when it does, interpellation catches some depth of the moment of identification. Kath Woodward See also Advertising; Althusser, Louis; Cultural Studies; Identity; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Psychoanalysis; Semiotics; Subculture

Further Readings Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971. Althusser, Louis. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso, 1984. Barrett, Michèle. The Politics of Truth. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.

Inventing Tradition Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, translated by Colin Gordon. London: Harvester Press, 1977. Gramsci, Antonio. Selection from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Hall, Stuart. “Introduction, Who Needs Identity?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage, 1996. McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen.” Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1991. Negus, Keith, and Michael Pickering. Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value. London: Sage, 2004. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertisements. London: Harvester Press, 1978. Willis, Paul. Profane Culture. London: Routledge, 1978.

INVENTING TRADITION The definition of the term tradition is wide ranging and fluid. It is commonly accepted to refer to a set of practices, customs, or values, largely of a symbolic nature, that are passed through generations through repetition (and often ceremony) thus inferring a sense of continuity and identity. Traditions are often held in high regard, as perceived wisdom transmitted from one generation to the next to be revered and protected. The term inventing tradition was first coined by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in their 1983 publication The Invention of Tradition to describe fictitious, socially constructed practices, which are governed (both overtly and tacitly) by accepted rules and/or ritual to inoculate certain values, norms, and behaviors. This groundbreaking but contested collection of essays questioned the authenticity of seemingly “indigenous” or “true” traditions and suggested that many are in fact recent constructions that have been imagined to serve particular agendas in the present day. The process or act of “inventing” a tradition, they suggested, emanates from “novel situations which take reference to old situations or which establish their own through quasi-obligatory repetition” (1983, 9). Through this modernist-constructivist reading of community and nationality, the traditions to which each subscribe are embedded effectively in traditions that are ultimately determined not by historical “fact” but by an aggregation of sentiment,

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nostalgia, and politics all stemming from the identity requirements of the moment. Invented traditions are said to differ from indigenous or “authentic” traditions in that they are social fabrications that are enacted or established to construct some sort of lineage with the past that is not necessarily there. While many are new cultural creations, others borrow, evolve from, and merge with the past. Through time, their origins become blurred or romanticized until it is no longer possible to differentiate between the original and invented tradition. Hobsbawn (1983) draws on the invention of new architectural traditions in Britain in the late-nineteenth century to illustrate this point. The intellectual elite at that time chose to construct parliament buildings (as a national symbol) using materials and a style reminiscent of the Neo-Gothic Era as opposed to the Classical trend of that time. They believed the medieval reimaginings of Parliament were more congruent with the English national character. The Gothic style the buildings eventually assumed implied a natural continuity with the past despite being subject to extensive revisionism.

Functions Invented traditions are inextricably linked to the heritage process and the construction of identity, heritage meaning the selective use or manipulation of the past in and for the present. Like heritage, invented traditions are not “given”; rather, they are “made” and serve a number of social, political, and economic functions. The motivations for constructing or inventing a connection with the past are wide ranging but appear to stem primarily from the need for some sort of social cohesion. Hobsbawm (1983, 9) believes there are three “types” of invented traditions: “(1) those establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or membership of groups, real or artificial communities; (2) those establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relationships of authority; and (3) those whose main purpose was socialization, the inoculation of beliefs, value systems, and conventions of behaviour.” All three give weight to the idea that the invention of tradition is a highly political process where cultural practices and acts are symbolically constituted to evoke memories of the past, which serve to strengthen a group’s position and/or its institutions in the present. Evoking, enacting, and inventing tradition has been an integral part of nation-building for centuries.

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Nations are in effect groups of people who believe they consist of a single people based on shared criteria, which can be both cultural and historical. In these “imagined communities” as Anderson called them in 1993, all of the members will never truly know each other; nations are created and flagged through the invention and reinvention of tradition. Responsible for formally instituting contrived practices or activities, the role of national governments in inventing traditions is fundamentally important. They are responsible for manipulating the nation’s story into a narrative that underpins the essence of nationalist ideology. This ideology, permeated by myths and historical inaccuracies, is commonly referred to as a form of emotional glue, which binds people together and promotes a collective identity; it is tradition that helps formulate this ideology through creating a moral code or consciousness. The late-nineteenth and early twentieth century in Europe, for example, saw a wave of nation-building unleashed by the dissolution of empires and the call for self-determination. Across Europe, new national governments took a vested interest in the production of enduring national identities and their accompanying narratives. At the cornerstone of each was a series of invented or reinvented traditions. It is important to note that inventing tradition is not solely the preserve of the state. Operating on a number of scales, forging a connection with the past is just as important to a small ethnic or cultural group as the nation-state in its quest for legitimization and validation. Invented traditions are also especially important to groups whose identity is under threat. In such cases, there are pronounced attempts to exhibit a strong, resilient, and authentic identity. Traditions are invented not only to strengthen our connection with those we identify with but also to reify our connection with the lands we inhabit (or aspire to). Related then to the process of inventing tradition is the act of territoriality. Territories are places that typically consist of some kind of homogeneous, collectivized community or group, which share a common sense of identity that is grounded in tradition and heritage. Territoriality, which can be understood as the processes by which territories are controlled (as the geographic expression of power), is needed to structure groups and their resources inside demarcated boundaries and is therefore entrenched within cultural practices and social relationships. Spatial practices activities that bolster and sustain the power of the dominating group are essential components for its control over the hegemonic values that

it represents or imposes. Within society then, various groups invent symbolic traditions that resonate with their sense of identity. This is then performed through ritual and repetition, which serves to simultaneously incite remembering and demarcate boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Like heritage, the invention of tradition is sensitive to economics and the forces of globalization. In serving a wide range of social functions, such traditions can dichotomously contribute to and be shaped by tourism. Heritage tourism for the most part draws on the reenactment and staging of cultural traditions. Tourism in the popular island of Bali in southern Indonesia offers an insight into how invented traditions both respond to and shape tourism in an increasingly global world, according to Johnson in 1999. Since the 1970s, music and arts in Bali have become highly attuned to the needs of tourists and have resulted in the modification and emergence of a number of new cultural practices. The Barong dance drama, a local Balinese dance evoking the gods, has since the island’s emergence as a tourist destination been shaped to meet the demands of tourists. A religious rite designed to balance good and evil, the original Barong lasted for three hours. This has been trimmed to one hour to satisfy the needs of the busloads of tourists that visit the village to experience what they perceive to be authentic Balinese traditions. The impulse to invent a tradition typically emanates from times of social or political change. Traditions are very sensitive to the social, cultural, economic, and political milieu within which they occur (or are invented). K. Shida’s study of the “invention” of the Shinto wedding ceremony in Japan is a particularly illuminating example of how a tradition can be invented in response to changing sociopolitical circumstances. The Japanese consider the Shinzen wedding a tradition that is steeped in Japanese history. It is, however, a modern product imagined primarily as a counterpart to the Christian wedding ceremony. Shida suggests that the emergence of this particular tradition can be attributed to the rapidly changing socioeconomic profile of Japan in the twentieth century. The contemporary reinvention of Shinzen weddings can be traced to the Meiji Restoration (1868–1902), which witnessed the rebirth of imperial government following some seven hundred years of Shogun military power. This coincided with the force of Westernization, known as Bunmei-kaika “civilization and development,”

Inventing Tradition

which permitted degrees of Western cultures and values to be incorporated into everyday life in Japan without jeopardizing its own character. The first ceremony took place in 1900 with the wedding of the crown prince. This ceremony was a mixture of customs of the newly constituted State Shintoism and new invention, which came to be mirrored throughout Japan. In the years that followed, Western dress was incorporated into the ceremony, and it moved out of private households and into the public domain. Not only did this new ceremony not bear any resemblance to ancient Japanese traditions and customs, but it had also, as Shida notes, actively broken away from them. State Shintoism was abolished after the war in 1945, which once again had important implications for the reinvention of the wedding tradition. Shinto priests began trying to make a living from weddings by setting up marriage halls and performing ceremonies. They focused on the ceremony as an ancient and spiritual tradition dating back to the Heian era (AD 794–1192). Shida suggests that over the course of a single generation, the majority of Japanese people perceived the Shintoist ceremony as a feudal ceremony with ancient origins. Symptomatic of Japan’s quest for modernization and denounced by critics as anticolonial, the “new” ceremony offered an appeasing alternative to that of the Meiji Restoration era. It became much more solemn, simplistic, and cost-effective. Conversely, the “original” traditional ceremony was ritualistic, lengthy, and, as Shida notes, perceived within the rapidly changing society as unsophisticated. Since the 1960s, the Shintoist ceremony has incorporated many Western traditions. Inventing the Shintoist wedding tradition converged with the emergence of the Japanese bridal industry as a response to new patterns of consumerism to reflect Japan’s changing economic and cultural profile. The new Shintoist wedding was hugely attractive to Japan’s growing urban workforce. Its introduction was imagined to serve as a counterpart to the Christian Western wedding ceremony.

Role in Contemporary Consumer Culture The invention of tradition has become an integral part of consumer culture in our modern, rapidly changing world. Scholars within cultural studies working in the realm of consumer culture have more recently employed the term to critique modern societies through an examination of certain cultural consumer patterns of consumption. A good example of this can

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be found in the invention or rather reinvention of the tea-drinking tradition in southern China. Tea drinking is widely heralded as an ancient and indigenous Chinese tradition (thus it is perceived to be authentic and original). The production of tea for export dates back to the eighteenth century when it was China’s largest export. Yet the tradition of tea drinking in the Fujian district, according to Tan Chee-Beng and Ding Yuling, is a relatively new or rather reinvented tradition, which has been occasioned by a significant shift in consumer culture in post-Mao China. While the reinvention of this particular tradition is based on an indigenous practice, it must be understood in the context of an increasingly global world and its implications for the economy and growing political might of China. Economic reform in the 1980s coupled with changing perceptions of social status had important ramifications for both the tea-drinking industry and tradition. The convergence of the Taiwanese tea industry and business in Quanzhou entrepreneurs instigated the rebirth of the tradition. As its popularity grew, more and more people engaged in the reinvention of this ancient Chinese tradition. Tea drinking is illustrative of new forms of consumption (and production) in post-Mao China. The whole practice of making and drinking tea has been transformed. It has become an economic enterprise and has also stimulated a variety of related initiatives. It has become a modern feature of life in places such as Quanzhou, championed by business people, farmers, and local government and consumed not only by the city’s inhabitants but also by an increasing number of tourists who come to participate in and consume Chinese traditions. The number of tearooms has grown steadily. Housed in buildings in the style of traditional Minnin architecture, they serve those who come not just to drink tea but to engage in the ritualization of an age-old Chinese custom. Despite their perceived traditional nature, tearooms are almost an indispensable feature of modern life in the fast-moving urban environment of Fujian. They facilitate new ways of conducting social relations and offer a new way to consume tea. Chee-Beng and Yuling suggest that tea is not simply a beverage. It is rather indicative of class, status, and of relationships with other people. While the tea industry began effectively in China, the practice of tea drinking has become an invented tradition in places like England where, since the 1880s, it became fashionable and is today widely regarded as the quintessential “English” drink—as a formidable part of English national identity. Through symbolic

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ritualism, new cultural practices have morphed into authentic traditions, so much so that their origins have become blurred, and there is little possibility of determining fact from fiction.

Criticism The concept of inventing or invented traditions has not been without its critics, many of whom have commented on the term’s utility. One of the most pervasive arguments has focused on the idea that there is no such thing as an indigenous, authentic, or true tradition. The very nature of traditions and customs as practices, values, or norms that are proscribed by groups or individuals at certain points of time, no doubt responding to specific socioeconomic conditions, means that every tradition is in fact an invented one. Shida, for example, believes that everything in society and culture originates from an invention. Through time, these inventions evolve into traditions as people grow to ignore its origin, inventor, and purpose. Others have criticized the concept of invented traditions for being antinativist. The assertion that many of the traditions we perceive to be authentic whenever they are imagined has also been interpreted by some as patronizing, for assuming a certain naiveté on the part of those inventing the tradition in question. For others, the whole concept of tradition is trivialized: we continuously shop around and look to the past for some sort of tradition that best suits our sense of self at that particular moment. Sara McDowell See also Authenticity; Belonging; Collective Identity; History; Japan as a Consumer Culture; National Cultures; Othering; Tourism Studies

Further Readings Chee-Beng, Tan, and Ding Yuling. “The Promotion of Tea in South China: Re-inventing Tradition in an Old Industry.” Food and Foodways 18, no. 3 (2010): 121–144. Hobsbawn, Eric. “Invented Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hobsbawn, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Johnson, Henry. “Balinese Music, Tourism and Globalisation: Inventing Traditions within and across Cultures.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4, no. 2 (2002): 8–32.

Shida, K. “The Shintoist Wedding Ceremony in Japan: An Invented Tradition.” Media, Culture and Society 21, no. 2 (1999): 195–204.

ISLAM Islam, the most recent of the monotheistic religions, originated in the Arabic peninsula in the seventh century. Today, the inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa are predominantly Muslim. Moreover, large Muslim populations reside in southern, Southeast, and central Asia, and there are Muslim communities in the Balkans, Russia, Europe, and North America. In Arabic, the word Islam means “to accept, surrender or submit”; accordingly, the faith requires that believers demonstrate full submission to God. The book of Islam, the Qur’an, acknowledges all the prior prophets, including Moses and Jesus, and sees Muhammad as the final prophet. Islamic faith is built on five pillars: Shahada, testimony of faith; Salat, daily prayer, executed five times a day; Zakat, almsgiving; Sawm, fasting during the month of Ramadan; and Hajj, once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca for those physically and financially fit. In addition, orthodox adherents follow sharia, the Islamic law, which regulates public and private as well as religious life. Sharia shapes many aspects of daily life from personal diet and dress to banking. Islam also distinguishes haram (forbidden) from halal (lawful) and encourages believers to consume halal versions of foods, drinks, clothing, hygiene products, financial instruments, and so on. However, the interpretations and practices of Islam show great diversity across different cultures. While much stricter versions of Islam are followed in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, more moderate adaptations are observed in Turkey and Tunisia. While all religions by definition give priority to spirituality over materiality, or the sacred over the profane, history shows that faith, commerce, and consumption have always been intertwined. Depictions of important pious figures in novels, poems, history books, paintings, and miniatures indicate lavish consumption and possessions of these people and their families. Similarly, in contemporary times, despite the stereotypical perception of Islam as anticonsumerist and anticapitalist, investigations of consumption in Islamic geographies indicate a consumerist ethos

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and lifestyle. Muslim consumers, whether they live in Dubai, Istanbul, or London, are just as interested in brands, designer clothes, trendy cars, plasma televisions, five-star resorts, travel, luxury homes, fast foods, and private education for their children as any other consumer (Godazgar 2007; NavaroYashin 2002; Sandıkcı and Ger 2002; Starrett 1995). Muslim entrepreneurs and business people, whether they operate in Germany, Kuwait, or Malaysia, are as concerned with making profit in various sectors such as food, beverage, information technology, tourism, media, and construction as any other capitalist (Demir, Acar, and Toprak 2004; Khan and Bhatti 2008). Such practices and lifestyles are consistent with Islam’s acceptance of worldly pleasures. Even though sharia and the notion of haram impose many restrictions in consumption of food, drink, clothing, and leisure activities, Islam acknowledges that pleasurable enjoyment of material things is important in life (Ülgener 1981). It propagates hedonism as long as it is moderate and moderated through practices such as zakat. Acquisitiveness must be balanced by compassion, generosity, and sharing wealth. The discourses of moderation and balance serve to legitimize consumption and ensure that one’s morality is intact (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2000). For example, in the case of clothing, modesty and pleasant appearance act as key ethical tenets that shape the practice (Sandıkcı and Ger 2005). Many urban faithful women spend a lot of money on designer clothes, shoes, and accessories and “work” diligently to craft fashionable yet religiously appropriate looks. They justify their interest in fashion by negotiating what modesty and pleasant appearance mean and require. They state that they buy many designer and branded outfits and fashion accessories not to attract the male gaze but to reflect an appealing image. They argue that by dressing fashionably, they do not jeopardize their modesty. On the contrary, they fulfill an Islamic duty—looking beautiful—and also act as role models to inspire others to dress according to Islamic principles. An essentialist juxtaposition of Islam with “Western” consumer culture willingly or unwillingly contributes to the discourse of the “clash of civilizations.” Recent studies show that most Muslims do not oppose consumption—they actively engage in consumption albeit in an Islamic way: for example, hanging a picture of the Kaba (a sacred Islamic building) rather than a figurative painting on the wall or

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drinking juice rather than beer. Consumption patterns can be and are appropriated into religiously acceptable styles without undermining consumption itself. This is perhaps even easier in the case of Islam for which hedonism is an accepted way to live and is less of a sin than in Christianity. Religious convictions blend with cultural capital, taste, and aesthetics all of which construct different lifestyles and consumption patterns along class lines rather than solely religious beliefs. Religion provides yet another discourse, one among many others that shape and legitimize consumption practices. The logic of capitalist markets and the ideology of consumerism coexist with the logic and ideology of Islam, constructing consumption practices that negotiate daily tensions, just like in any other context. Özlem Sandıkcı and Güliz Ger See also Appropriation; Asceticism; Christianity; Gender; Hinduism; Protestant Ethic

Further Readings Belk, Russell W., Güliz Ger, and Soren Askegaard. “The Missing Streetcar Named Desire.” In The Why of Consumption, edited by S. Ratneshwar, David Glen Mick, and Cynthia Huffman, 98–119. London: Routledge, 2000. Demir, Ömer, Mustafa Acar, and Metin Toprak. “Anatolian Tigers or Islamic Capital: Prospects and Challenges.” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 6 (2004): 166–188. Godazgar, Hossein. “Islam versus Consumerism and Postmodernism in the Context of Iran.” Social Compass 54, no. 3 (2007): 389–418. Khan, M. Mansoor, and M. Ishaq Bhatti. “Islamic Banking and Finance: On Its Way to Globalization.” Managerial Finance 34, no. 10 (2008): 708–725. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. “The Market for Identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities.” In Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey, edited by Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber, 221–253. London: I. B. Tauris, 2002. Sandıkcı, Özlem, and Güliz Ger. “In-Between Modernities and Postmodernities: Investigating Turkish Consumptionscape.” Advances in Consumer Research 29 (2002): 465–470. Sandıkcı, Özlem, and Güliz Ger. “Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics of the Turkish Headscarf.” In Clothing as Material Culture, edited by Susanne Kuechler and Daniel Miller, 61–82. London: Berg, 2005. Starrett, Gregory. “The Political Economy of Religious Commodities in Cairo.” American Anthropologist 97, no. 1 (1995): 51–68.

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Italian Fascism and Fashion

ITALIAN FASCISM

AND

FASHION

To be in line with the “modernity” of more advanced capitalist nations, such as France, Great Britain, and the United States, the Italian Fascist regime, especially during the 1930s in its second decade of existence when it had become a consolidated presence, dedicated a great deal of attention to culture industries (cinema, sports, fashion, popular press, and publications). In the culture industry, Fascism saw a crucial and powerful machine able to create what historian Philip Cannistraro has called the fabbrica del consenso (the factory of consensus). This was, of course, a phenomenon identified by the Frankfurt school and developed in a much more sophisticated manner by Walter Benjamin, who wrote extensively on fashion and its mechanisms of power, politics, and the body in a developing mass society. It is, indeed, within the context of the great transformations occurring in the opening decades of the twentieth century, the reorganization of capitalism, changes in lifestyles, modes of production and consumption, as well as the spread of new cultural ideals through the media (cinema, popular press, etc.), that we can better understand how the Italian Fascist regime used the consumption of fashion to influence culture. In the case of Fascism, fashion was paramount to mold the masses by establishing the terms and boundaries of ways of being and acting, forms of lifestyle, appearance, how to speak and dress according to the dictates of the totalitarian regime.

Italian Fascism as a Modernizing Force As stated in the Italian Fascist regime’s manifesto, and documented in several studies, Fascism looked both to the past and the future. It sought to be seen not only as a modernizing force but also as a continuation of Italian tradition and of the glorious past of Italy (like the Roman Empire). This call to tradition could be identified as the regime’s comfort zone, accommodating Italians from different geographical areas and translating into cultural images myths like those of the prolific mother or the rural housewife. An illustration of this can be found in an Istituto Luce documentary titled La grande adunata delle forze femminili (Great parade of female forces) that took place in Rome on May 28, 1939, and chronicles a massive female parade organized by Benito Mussolini. This was a national gathering of women

from all over Italy that aimed at celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Fasci giovanili di combattimento (Fascist youth combat brigades). The parade represented an occasion to put women on display as an integral part of the national body politic through their uniforms showing their roles in the family and in society. Three distinct moments of the documentary juxtapose shots of women wearing sports uniforms with shots of women from the countryside wearing regional costumes. These representations illustrate not only the sharp contrast between the military-like uniformity of the athletes and the women in traditional regional costumes but also the differences in dress within the same group of women. The latter group—those in regional costume—wear accessory items, such as necklaces, earrings, shawls, lace collars, ornaments, and headgear, and have a completely different body posture from the women wearing the regime-sponsored or sports uniforms, as if they were out taking a walk rather than marching. What we find illustrated in the documentary footage is a visual confirmation of the two-sided, indeed ambivalent, nature of the Fascist attempt to include every single woman of the Italian peninsula in its purview. In this way, the regime embraced a way to modernity that also included local time-honored traditions.

Fascism and Fashion The construction of a new Italy and new Italians, for men, women, and children alike, was a vital plank in the Fascist regime’s political and cultural project. Many of the regime’s initiatives aimed at changing the national character. In 1934, for example, in the article “Vestire alla fascista” (Dressing as a Fascist), Francesco Salvori had strongly encouraged the adoption of civil uniforms (Del Buono 1971, 247). He wrote: We live in a corporative epoch, an epoch of permanent civil militarization. . . . The new Italians must live like heroes; if not all of them with magnanimous gestures, which is impossible, at least with their thoughts and desires. Being heroes in style at least is very often the first step toward the substance of real heroes. (Translation, Paulicelli 2004)

Fascist propaganda exploited fashion to the full and made style one of the major concerns of fascist ideology and aesthetics. As Stephen Gundle (2000,

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131) points out, “to give style,” the aesthetic expression that reflected Mussolini’s political aim to transform the populace, had a pragmatic counterpart in the expression “to fascistize.” The consolidation of the regime’s policy on fashion was part and parcel of a more general move to consolidate control in other areas of Italian life. The 1930s saw the creation of several government institutions that were set up to ensure Fascist control over areas such as sports and leisure time. Along with fashion, in fact, the regime used the cinema and sports to convey and solidify its message of modernity, discipline, order, and amusement. Both cinema and sports took on important roles in the diffusion of cultural models, in the construction of gender and identities, and in the politics of style. Fashion, sports, and cinema—the Cinecittà film studio was inaugurated in 1937—were interrelated in many ways, arguably the most important being the visual power inherent in the spectacle and the feast for the eyes they provided in displaying dynamism and modernity. As a consequence, cinema, sports, and fashion were also linked in the diffusion and the creation of national models and bodies with which women of all classes could identify or fantasize. As an examination of Fascist documentation on fashion reveals, Mussolini considered fashion not only as a fundamental component of the Italian economy but also as a powerful and appealing vehicle for the process of modernization and the projection, both domestically and abroad, of an image of “new Italy” and “new Italians” and, of course, for the creation of an Italian fashion and Italian national brand (Paulicelli 2004). To this end, a government institution (Ente Nazionale della Moda [ENM]) was created to control the fashion industry as a whole and promote Italian fashion. Fashion was recruited by the regime as a means of regulating people’s appearance and behavior in public and private spaces. In addition, Fascist policies on fashion aimed at creating a distinct Italian style with which Italians could identify, and which would be the basis for an increase in Italian clothes exports. The move to organize fashion was in line with Mussolini’s keen nationalist intent, which also informed other sectors of culture. Stricter policies emerged from the ENM after 1935, following the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia and the subsequent sanctions applied against Italy by the League of Nations. The economic hardship that had

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been intensified by these sanctions required a new set of regulations and led to the development of autarchic fabrics and fashion, so the economy could become self-sufficient and not rely on foreign imports of raw materials. However, the deeply entrenched habit of the Italian high bourgeoisie to go to Paris for its clothes was something of a hindrance to the regime’s policy. So deeply ingrained was this habit that not even the autarchic policies of the regime and the ENM were able to halt completely the amount of luxury goods imported from abroad. To this “indiscipline” on the part of Italian women who, despite the strongest of hints that they should buy their clothes at home, continued to purchase French-made fashions, the regime responded with a twentieth-century version of the sumptuary laws emanating further policies, all of which tended toward the disciplining of the social body.

Fashion and the Forging of National Identity Fashion is not only dress. It is also culture, mentality, a way of being, and a gesture. The Fascist regime understood this and used the power of fashion in its discursive and propagandistic strategies. In the attempt to Italianize and, at the same time, establish a language of fashion pertaining to Italian culture, aesthetics, and tradition, the regime aimed at codifying taste and style to forge a national identity in line with the regime’s nationalistic plan. The ENM bureaucrats were of the opinion that the creation of a national fashion went hand in hand with the construction of a properly specialized lexicon that had strong and direct links to the Italian language, to Italian literature, to the conventional codes and the history that had marked its cultural context. In 1936, Cesare Meano began a project aimed at eliminating the French terminology that was widely used in the “global” language of fashion. Fashion and chic meant “France.” He also sought to create an Italian lexicon of fashion to plug the gap in the Italian language left by the purge of French terms. Therefore, the publication of Meano’s text had the paradoxical aim of both establishing and retrieving a national tradition in the culture of fashion. The publication of Meano’s text opened up a debate not only on the complexity of the relationship between fashion as an industry but also as a symbolic force within the context of a totalitarian regime and its project to forge a sexy image of Italy through

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fashion and style to be projected both in Italy and abroad. Meano’s project, however, was far more complex than a straightforward nationalization of the language of Italian fashion. Indeed, a close and critical analysis of Meano’s text reveals the two-pronged result its rhetorical strategies achieved. On the one hand, Meano fulfills the nationalist scope of translating French terms into Italian, as well as offering an Italian glossary of specific terms of clothing and style. On the other, he offers what Roland Barthes will later call a “description of fashion” that does not limit itself only to proposing a model as a mere copy of reality. Rather, the aim of Meano’s project was to circulate fashion as a meaning and therefore as an ideology. Words and their organization in a narrative, then, have the task of providing the necessary tools with which to create the “culture” for an appreciation of “Italian taste” and fashion both at home and abroad. As such, in Meano’s Commentario, language is identified with its performative and persuasive qualities. Meano’s creation of a language of Italian fashion can also be better understood in the context of fashion journalism and how the two are interrelated. In selecting an impressive number of entries that he connects to fashion, costume, and culture, Meano lingers particularly over definitions of style, beauty, and elegance and offers tips on these subjects to females, males, and children, according to the taste and accepted codes of the epoch. The text, then, is a useful window onto the common sense of the world of fashion and manners in 1930s Italy. According to the ENM, the Commentario aimed to establish a national tradition in fashion and to define its relations with high and popular culture, economics, and the disciplines of style and language. In the ideological plan of Fascism, fashion was identified as a privileged terrain that would make a significant contribution to the achievement of the nation’s sense of self.

Italian Fascism, Fashion, and Gender Under Fascism, there was a double take on women. The fashion of the 1930s proclaimed a return to the old days: Torniamo all’antico (Let’s go back to the old ways), was in fact the title of an editorial by Lina Putelli in the periodical Per voi signora, which became, together with Bellezza, the official mouthpiece of the ENM. Here the garçonne, or flapper, is

gone and replaced by a more elaborate image of femininity in dress. In the “Scollaturai (Cleavage)” entry in the Commentario, there are descriptions of women from different social classes, from the high society femme fatale, who wore dresses that covered her neck but revealed her completely exposed back (Meano 1936, 345), to the modest women who work in a Piedmontese workshop and learn how to continue the tradition of local embroidery called bandera. The emphasis on traditional roles also presents an overtly misogynist view. This is what informs Meano’s description of the intellettualità della donna (intellectual ability of women; 1936, 205) in which his main aim, in line with regime policy, is to emphasize women’s qualities as bearers of children instead of their intellectual work. Meano, while stressing the feminine side of fashion, minimizes the relationship between men and fashion. He puts men in what he calls the zona neutrale immobile (neutral immobile zone), which is to say that men lack audacity in the cut of their clothes and in the use of vibrant colors. This neutral zone is praised as the “calm little stream,” Meano’s way of stating that this sober style is very much in line with the notion of virility, heroism, and strength that the regime wished to reinforce and maintain.

Conclusion The Fascist project to nationalize the masses and instill a one-sided image of national identity failed for a series of concomitant reasons. Indeed, Fascist nationalism and its empty rhetoric was able neither to construct an Italian national identity that closed in on itself nor to be a permanent and universal inspiration for an Italian fashion and style. The history of Fascist fashion policy is one of continuities rather than ruptures. Indeed, continuity and fashion’s deep roots have been to the benefit of the fashion industry. In fact, it was on the basis of the debate on nationalism that took place in the pre-Fascist liberal period and that spilled over into Fascist fashion policy that many of the foundations for the postwar boom in Italian fashion were laid. Fascism was able to use and combine, seeking to render them its own, different cultures, local and national traditions, modernity and literary figures of the past, folklore, the female athlete and the prolific mother, the urban consumer and the massaia rurale (rural housewife). The history of Italian fashion under Fascism illuminates our understanding of the mechanisms by and through

Italian Fascism and Fashion

which the regime created its power. At the same time, it also reveals the gaps that were the premise of the regime’s failure and ultimate downfall. Eugenia Paulicelli See also Consumer Nationalism; Culture Industries; Fashion; Gender; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Modernization Theory; Style; Taste

Further Readings Aspesi, Natalia. Il lusso & l’Autarchia. Storia dell’eleganza italiana. Milan, Italy: Rizzoli, 1982. Brin, Irene. Usi e Costumi 1920–1940. Palermo, Italy: Sellerio, 1981. Brin, Irene. Cose viste 1938–1939. Palermo, Italy: Sellerio, 1994. Cannistraro, Philip. La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e Mass Media. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1975. De Giorgio, Michela. Le italiane dall’Unita’ ad oggi. Roma-Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1992.

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De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1943. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Del Buono, Oreste, ed. Eia, Eia, Ei, Alalá. ’La Stampa italiana sotto il fascismo 1919–1943. Preface by Nicola Tranfaglia. Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1971. Dogliani, Patrizia. Il Fascismo degli italiani. Torino, Italy: Utet, 2009. Gentile, Emilio. The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Translated by Keith Botsford. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Gundle, Stephen. “Il Bel Paese: Art, beauty and the cult of appearance.” In The Politics of Italian National Identity: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Gino Bedani and Bruce Haddock. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2000. Meano, Cesare. Commentario-Dizionario italiano della moda. Turin, Italy: Ente Nazionale della Moda (ENM), 1936. Paulicelli, Eugenia. Fashion under Fascism. Beyond the Black Shirt. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

J JAPAN

AS A

rate (which peaked in the 1970s) contrasts sharply with the consumerism highlighted in the West (often described as “excess”), in particular in the United States, suggesting an alternative model of development for consumer culture. Despite what is claimed as being the unique characteristics of Japanese consumer culture, globalization has been a fundamental condition for its modern development. Discussion about modern consumer culture in Japan therefore needs to start by examining Japanese consumer culture’s intricately hybrid nature. European and American consumer cultures were constantly being imported into Japan since the country’s reopening to the outside world in the mid-nineteenth century. The rise of “cultural living” (bunka seikatsu) after World War I was largely inspired by European and North American products as well as ideas. Upper-middle class consumers, although their presence was small and limited in large cities at that time, were often exposed to Western consumer culture at exhibitions organized by department stores. According to Harry Harootunian, these upper-middle class consumers became excited and inspired by, perhaps even enlightened about, modern Western lifestyles. However, these early developments were soon halted by the wartime ultranationalist government, which placed restrictions on the use of products, as well as the range of cultural activities (including languages), originating from foreign countries. Thus, when the Occupation Force (1945–1952) led by the Allied Powers (constituted mainly by U.S. military personnel) landed on Japanese soil and became visible to local people in autumn 1945, it

CONSUMER CULTURE

Consumer culture has long been a major index when scholars discuss Japan. From electrical appliances to computer games and their character-related merchandise to luxury designer-brand fashions, a variety of commodities produced and circulated by Japanese companies have a strong presence across the globe. Also, Japanese shoppers enthusiastically hitting the high street are a part of everyday scenes in major cities in rich as well as developing countries. Today, the great maturity of Japanese consumer culture— namely, its pervasiveness and strong weight in the national economy as well as individuals’ lives based on large-scale, well-developed production systems and information technologies—is, perhaps, the element of Japanese society most frequently exposed to non-Japanese audiences (cf. Clammer 1997; Alison 2006). A variety of scholars have studied consumer culture in Japan from a variety of angles, and many of them identified aspects that they argue are distinctive to Japan in contrast to American and European consumer cultures. At the start of their collected volume examining consumer cultures in East Asia and the West, Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan argue, for example, that “our focus on Japan provides a fresh way of examining ambivalence toward consumerism throughout the world. Japan has long embodied the tensions of a modern consumer society” (2006, 4). According to them, the thriftiness of Japanese people exemplified by a high savings 821

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was viewed as a medium that was physically carrying foreign culture, in particular American culture, into everyday Japanese life. Streets and shops in Tokyo were renamed in English, and restaurants and bars were packed with Allied soldiers enjoying jazz music while the shortage of basic foodstuffs was compensated for by foreign aid, as noted by John Dower. Bread made from wheat given to Japan as aid and milk became the essential components of school meals during the occupation period, changing eating practices in schools and homes. It is worth noting that the spread of consumer culture, in particular American consumer culture, after World War II was intended by the Civil Information and Education Bureau (CIE) of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) as a means of cultural policy to eliminate “feudalistic remnants” that led Imperial Japan to carry out irrational and disastrous war efforts and in so doing “democratize” Japan. In local communities across Japan, films that portrayed an affluent, bright American lifestyle were shown, for example a scene of a nuclear family having a Thanksgiving dinner. In addition, as Shunya Yoshimi has discussed, American cartoons like Blondie were published in national newspapers and became hugely popular, conveying in a concrete way the glamour of an American-style private family life blessed by material prosperity. This particular way of spreading propaganda was effective at “seducing” Japanese people to concentrate on fulfillment of their private lives by turning away from the prewar dedication to the national war effort. For example, Asahi Shinbun Gakugeibu notes that housewives in rural communities inspired by the CIE film organized a joint purchase of Western-style kitchens to replace the old-fashioned cooking stoves in their households. For many Japanese who were still struggling to make a living in the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, the Western-style kitchen was simply too expensive for individual households in rural villages to purchase. Housewives therefore got together to discuss and implement a joint purchase. This is one instance of how “democracy” was exercised in postwar Japan. In the mid-1950s, the Japanese economy went into a phase of unprecedented rapid growth that lasted almost twenty years, with an average annual growth rate of 9.1 percent. In 1956, the government’s Economic White Paper declared that “the ‘postwar’ has ended,” meaning that postwar reconstruction would no longer provide opportunities for economic

growth. Three years later, the term consumer revolution (sho¯hi kakumei) made its first appearance in the White Paper as a means of maintaining and stimulating growth. Indeed, strong individual and household consumption was the main factor behind the realization of the so-called high economic growth between 1955 and 1973. In particular, various household electrical appliances, such as washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, freezers, and vacuum cleaners were eagerly sought after in the 1950s and 1960s by Japanese people who wished to modernize and in so doing better their everyday lives. One of the washing machine advertisements by Toshiba was led by the slogan “How can housewives enjoy their spare time by reading? The quickest way is to rationalize the time spent on washing clothes.” Here, the washing machine is projected as a means of liberating women. The government exploited these consumers’ demands by dubbing its economic plan of 1960 the Income-Doubling Plan, linking the growth of the national economy with the increasing increments of individual/household income that could be spent on enjoying consumptive activities. Simultaneously, as Garon’s work on the postwar savings promotion scheme demonstrates, the promotion of consumption in the early postwar was countered by the nationwide governmental campaign that encouraged Japanese people to wisely organize and manage their household economies. In this sense, the idea of consumption promoted in the early postwar period was “tamed,” being coupled with national economic planning. Both the acts of consumption and saving were thereby designed to achieve happiness and fulfillment for individuals and families, with excessive acts being excluded. In 1968, Japan’s gross national product (GNP) per capita was the second highest after the United States. With the growth in purchasing power, consumer culture in Japan hit its pinnacle in the 1970s and 1980s. Two developments since the 1970s are particularly noteworthy. First, as an oft-mentioned advertising slogan from 1980, “myself, new discovery” (jibun, shin-hakken), from a nationwide department store and fashion retail chain, the Saison Group, suggests, individual consumption patterns were increasingly understood as an index representing identities. Tanaka Yasuo’s award-winning novel Somehow, Crystal (Nantonaku Kurisutaru), first published in a journal in 1980, epitomizes this tendency. Instead of thick descriptions of characters, Tanaka provides

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the readers with 422 footnotes, most of them being information about commodities, fashion brands, shops, and restaurants, with which the readers were supposed to construct the characters’ lifestyles and thus the characters themselves. Second, as consumer culture in Japan developed further, young single women’s active and often aggressive consumption patterns started to attract attention, their being linked to other social issues such as the declining birth rate—an issue that is currently a concern among Japan’s policy-making elite with regard to the sustainability of economic growth and the social security system. In the 1990s, sociologist Masahiro Yamada coined the term parasite singles (parasaito shinguru) to refer to young Japanese in their twenties and thirties who are still single and live with their parents. According to Yamada, those young Japanese tend to opt out of forming families, as revealed by the decline of the marriage and birth rates, because they hope to keep enjoying their single lifestyles with a relatively large sum of disposable income. Although the term parasite single is gender neutral, Yamada tends to refer to women’s consumption patterns rather than men’s and in so doing problematizes “excessive” consumer culture among young women as creating a serious problem for the Japanese state. Unlike other East and Southeast Asian countries that were severely affected by the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Japan’s economic downturn started in the early 1990s and has continued to define the basic tone of economic momentum up until today except for a short period of relief in the early 2000s. The prolonged economic setback resulted in a reduction in the size of disposable income for many Japanese and, more importantly, clear stratification of consumers. While there are still some who enjoy luxurious consumptive activities, which are increasingly becoming globalized, others are unable even to afford a place to live, as witnessed at New Year’s in 2009 when a park in central Tokyo was turned into a shelter for approximately five hundred homeless people. Under such circumstances, individuals’ consumption patterns appear as manifestations of their social and economic positions, going beyond mere expressions of “the self” in an increasingly stratified society. Overall, consumer culture has long been evolving in Japan in a close relationship with consumer cultures in other developed countries, particularly the

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United States. However, the speed of development was much faster in Japan than its predecessors in western Europe and North America, especially in the postwar period, corresponding to ups and downs in the national political economy, with ruling authorities (the Japanese government as well as the Allied Powers) playing a role in the process. Ambivalence toward consumerism was expressed when popular consumptive desires and activities were viewed as excessive to the extent that they were seen to be jeopardizing political, economic, and social processes. Simultaneously, certain types of consumption patterns, in particular those relating to family happiness and well-being, have been encouraged. All in all, Japan as a consumer culture certainly embodies the tensions of a modern consumer society. Takeda Hiroko See also Consumer Culture in East Asia; Consumer Nationalism; Consumer Policy (Japan); Domestic Technologies; Globalization; Social and Economic Development; Thrift; Well-Being

Further Readings Alison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Asahi Shinbun Gakugeibu. Daidokoro Kara Sengo ga Mieru [The postwar that can be seen from kitchen]. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1995. Clammer, John. Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II. London: Penguin, 2000. Garon, Sheldon. “Saving for My Own Good and the Good of the Nation: Economic Nationalism in Modern Japan.” In Nation and Nationalism in Japan, edited by Sandra Wilson, 97–114. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. Garon, Sheldon, and Patricia L. Maclachlan. “Introduction.” In The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West, edited by Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan, 1–15. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Harootunian, Harry. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. ¯ hi Shakai Kara Miura, Atsushi, and Chizuko Ueno. Sho Kakusa Shakai e: Chu-ryu- Dankai to Karyu- Junia Nomirai [From a consumer society to a society with income gaps: Middle-Class baby boomers and their

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lower-class juniors]. Tokyo: Kawade Sho¯bo¯ Shinsha, 2007. Takeda, Hiroko. “Delicious Food in a Beautiful Country: Nationhood and Nationalism in Discourses on Food in Contemporary Japan.” SEN: Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 8, no. 1 (2008): 5–29. Tanaka, Yasuo. Nantonaku, Kurisutaru [Somehow, Crystal]. Tokyo: Kawade Sho¯bo¯ Shinsha, 1981. Yamada, Masahhiro. Parasaito Shinguru no Jidai [The age of parasite singles]. Tokyo: Chikuma Sohten, 1999. Yoshimi, Shunya. “‘America’ as Desire and Violence: Americanization in Postwar Japan and Asia during the Cold War.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2003): 433–450.

JEANS Since the 1960s, jeans have been identified with a wide array of roles in consumption practices, in articulations of popular cultures as well as in social theory and research. In fact, as a garment, jeans invite different forms of reflection when discussed as a nineteenth-century work outfit, as a stylization motif of American middle-class lifestyle, as a cold war counterculture outfit, as a high fashion item, or as an ubiquitous and complex manifestation of twentyfirst-century global consumption. Indeed, few types of garments compare with jeans as an everyday outfit of such an intense global use. The materialization of jeans as a distinct garment and product can be mainly associated with Levi (originally Löb) Strauss, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria. Strauss arrived in San Francisco in 1853 and founded a dry-goods wholesale company supplying gold rush miners with tents, blankets, and other textile products. Information regarding the early years of the Levi Strauss & Co (LS&CO) is scarce, mainly because the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed its headquarters. This, together with the intense marketing of the origins of the Levi brand, make the inquiry into the “birth of jeans” an arduous task. The generic term jeans was not used until the twentieth century despite evidence that eighteenth-century Americans wore work trousers and bib overalls made from denim. In the 1850s to 1860s, LS&CO supplied general stores with work pants made of canvas, and subsequently of denim, but did not brand them as LS&CO products. It was not branded until 1873 when Jacob W. Davis, a

Reno tailor and entrepeneur, established a business connection with LS&CO, and they jointly registered a patent titled “Improvement in Fastening PocketOpenings.” These denim work pants, at that time called waist overalls, with patented riveted fasteners became the basis of the subsequent branded Levi’s jeans, although it was not until 1960 that the term jeans was used in LS&CO’s advertising. When the riveted “pants of Levi’s” appeared on the market in the West Coast, they had to compete with other branded denim overalls, such as Can’t Bust ’Em. In the 1870s to 1880s, the retailing industry in the United States grew in terms of size and complexity, necessitating companies to consciously build consumer loyalty with the help of brands and marketing. Thus, LS&CO marked its textile products with copper rivets (exclusively until 1890), the two-horse brand (after 1886), the Levi’s trademark (1928), the red tab (1936), or the winglike arches of double orange stitching on the back pocket (registered only in 1943). In addition, many work-wear apparel manufacturers extended their product line to such items as male office dress, pants, and coats (LS&CO), children’s playwear (OshKosh B’Gosh) or women’s work apparel (H.D. Lee). Jeans have been made predominantly of denim, a heavy, 9- to 13-ounce cotton twill with a characteristic diagonal and bicolor, mostly blue-white, ribbing. The term denim is derived from serge de Nîmes, once a generic name for a wool-silk blend twill whereas denim from the mid-nineteenth century refers mostly to a heavy, pure cotton fabric. The term jeans as a generic term for a cotton-made fabric dates back to sixteenth-century Genoa, whose looms supplied western Europe with a coarse textile of blue dye called Gênes. Jeans, however, as a generic name for denim pants came into use in the 1930s in the United States. The blue dye of jeans and denim was originally natural indigo, though after the early 1900s, a chemically manufactured blue dye was used. Today, India, Brazil, China, and Turkey are major denimproducing countries. For many decades, until roughly WWII, denim waist overalls (e.g., Levi’s), Union-Alls (e.g., H.D. Lee), or overalls (e.g., Blue Bell) as garments were basically loose-fitting pants intended for American men for outdoor work but sometimes worn as street wear. Mostly, miners, farmers, and other low-skilled manual laborers wore denim outfits early on. However, in the 1910s, marketing stressed not

Jeans

only the usefulness of overalls in motoring but also the safety, sanitation, and efficiency of denim overalls for female factory workers. For example, Lee-made overalls were worn by the U.S. Army during WWI, but after 1920, Lee’s marketing of knickerbockers for women promoted an active lifestyle as drivers or tourists. The developments of hookless fasteners (zippers) and Sanforized (preshrunk) fabric repositioned denim overalls as specialized work attire for the modern industrial worker. Changes in the design of the denim overalls, together with marketing allusions employed by the manufacturers (e.g., the industrious laborer, the machine master, or the emancipated woman) dovetailed with a growing customer need for garments that could be useful for stylization purposes. Stylization is a cultural strategy of expressive representations, such as speech, behavior, look, outfit, and other visible elements of lifestyle, through which individuals and groups can express particular meanings about their identity, their norms, and their stand on issues affecting social status. The first major attempt to relocate jeans from the position of a coarse working garb into a stylistically relevant attire was made by manufacturers in the 1920s. Their choice of style was Western, an influential and ever-present theme in American popular culture since the 1870s. Allusions to Western and rodeo constituted a cultural strategy that combined such distinct meanings as the physical durability of denim; the actual outfit of outdoorsmen; the moralizing allegorical faculties of thick, stiff, and tight dress; the emerging consumer culture; and burgeoning popular culture genres, such as Western comics, novels, shows, and movies. Lee 101 Cowboy pants, introduced in 1924, presented a slimmer cut compared to previous overalls. Denim marketing in the 1920s to 1940s stressing the Western look was based on the flourishing rodeo scene, the weekend dude ranch tourism in the American West, and old West cinema starring Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, or John Wayne. East Coast fashion stores and magazines extended their attention to denim from the mid-1930s: Levi’s introduced denim pants for women in 1934 and the back pocket red tab in 1936. Until the 1950s, when cinema popularized the image of the teenaged, jeanwearing rebel, jeans were worn as everyday attire only by nonconformist artists; for the middle class, jeans were still a cowboy costume at best. Jeans, called dungarees at that time, entered into the everyday wardrobe of the middle class as an integral

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part of the teenage rebel outfit, along with leather jackets, infantry boots, and white T-shirts. Rock and roll music and Hollywood movies, such as The Wild One with Marlon Brando or Rebel without a Cause with James Dean presented denim as an expressive agent of youth rebellion against mainstream society. Various streams of nonconformist youth cultures in the 1950s to 1960s combined a new politics of the age, gender, and sexuality that aimed to yield a lived authenticity through such expressions as behavior, lifestyle, the publicly displayed body, dancing, hairstyle, and outfit in which jeans played a central role. Jeans as an integral part of rock and roll and hippie lifestyle subcultures and movements had become a U.S. exported global phenomenon. By 1965, major denim labels had set up their international divisions. LS&CO sales grew tenfold between 1964 and 1975. The mid-1970s brought a further important diversification in the consumption, use, and meaning of jeans with the appearance of designer jeans as upscale fashion items whose brands were carefully managed. In the 1980s, the unisex flared outfit of the counterculture had split into meticulously crafted female and male cut wear accentuating body contours, a change that coincided with increased sexual references in denim marketing. Further stylization occurred when subcultures such as disco, punk, and hip-hop used jeans to express meanings central to their aesthetics and ethics. Subsequently, various aspects of identity, sensibility, or walk of life—such as ethical consumption, environment protection, designer outfit zeal, collector activity, or distinct apellations of age, gender, sexuality, or race—can be expressed through particular uses of denim in everyday life. The diversification of denim into ever-particularizing niches of life prescribes new approaches to analyses of jeans’ meanings. Though marketing often captures jeans as holders of essential meanings such as freedom, creativity, hip, or rebellion, anthropological accounts of denim wearers and dress scholarship often highlight ambiguous, dynamic, and heterogenous meaning structures in objects and practices associated with wearing jeans. Central to these constructs is the notion that denim, as a border territory between the body and the outside world, facilitates exchanges of meanings between the self and the social world. Ferenc Hammer See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Americanization; Authenticity; Body, The; Clothing

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Consumption; Consumption in the United States: Colonial Times to the Cold War; Fashion; Lifestyle; Material Culture; Subculture

Further Readings Bancroft Library. Regional Oral History Office. “Levi Strauss & Co.: Tailors to the World: Oral History Transcript and Related Material, 1972–1976.” Berkeley: University of California, 1976. Available at http://www .archive.org/details/tailorstotheworld00levirich. Botterill, Jacqueline. “Cowboys, Outlaws and Artists: The Rhetoric of Authenticity and Contemporary Jeans and Sneaker Advertisements.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7, no. 1 (2007): 105–126. Downey, Lynn. Levi Strauss & Co. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia, 2007.

Finlayson, Iain. Denim: An American Legend. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Fiske, John. The Jeaning of America, in Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Gordon, Beverly. “American Denim: Blue Jeans and Their Multiple Layers of Meaning.” In Dress and Popular Culture, edited by Patricia Anne Cunningham and Susan Voso Lab, 31–45. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. Miller, Daniel, and Sophie Woodward. “Manifesto for a Study of Denim.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 15, no. 3 (2007): 335–351. Oliver, Valerie Burnham. “Jeans.” In Fashion and Costume in American Popular Culture: A Reference Guide, 63–66. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Sullivan, James. Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon. New York: Gotham Books, 2006.

K human freedom and provides a rule, the categorical imperative, to constitute a common world of moral experience. The Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), unlike the other two, is not meant to legislate on the world but bridge the “incalculable gulf” that exists “between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible” (Critique of the Power of Judgment, “Introduction”). In Kant’s mind, this mediation is essential to account for the possibility of realizing the demands of moral goodness in a mechanical order of nature, which is in principle indifferent to them. The activity of criticism is necessary because “through no fault of its own,” human reason otherwise enters into self-contradiction and destroys itself. Kant believes our reason has the “peculiar fate” of being burdened “with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it cannot possibly answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason” (Critique of Pure Reason, “Preface”). Lack of awareness about reason’s inner structure has triggered interminable disputes among philosophers. It divided the discipline into warring camps, each expressing a partial truth about human rationality and hence capable of achieving a short-lived victory. This was particularly evident in the case of modern rationalists and empiricists, which forced philosophy to oscillate between dogmatism and skepticism. Kant’s project was to bring peace among philosophical contenders. To this effect, he proposed a kind of therapy: knowing the limits of knowledge allows

KANT, IMMANUEL (1724–1804) Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. He earned this distinction by introducing a new style of philosophizing, the critique of reason. Unlike the dialogue or the genealogy, which try to answer the question of what is something or how it came about, criticism is occupied not so much with objects but with the conditions for the possibility of our experiencing them. Critical philosophy undertakes the examination of the powers reason employs to cognize the world of nature, to act according to duty, and to judge natural and human purposes. Its job is to determine the limits and legitimate mode of employment of the rational powers that make such activities possible. In the case of cognition, the experience is made possible by our understanding the legislating of its rules (the so-called categories) over nature. In the case of morality, pure practical reason legislates over human sensibility, making us autonomous. In the case of the aesthetic, teleological experience, the power of judgment provides a rule for us to make sense of beautiful objects, organisms, and the whole of creation. Kant was a thoroughly systematic thinker. Thus, he devised an independent Critique to justify the legislation of each rational power. The Critique of Pure Reason (first published in 1781 and revised in 1787) vindicates the role of the understanding in the constitution of the natural world. The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) vindicates the reality of 827

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reason to overcome its obsession with grasping the absolute; Kant argued that the unsatisfied metaphysical drive could then be channeled to productive practical and spiritual purposes. This, for him, was the main lesson of criticism: “to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Critique of Pure Reason, “Preface”). There is a basic, defiant gesture underlying Kant’s major writings: he understood himself as introducing a revolution in our ways of thinking about every important aspect of human activity. In knowledge, Kant showed that what we call objectivity was subjectively patterned by the labors of our understanding; in morality, that what we call good was the result of our rational activity of self-legislation; in aesthetics, that what we call beautiful was not a property of the object but the pleasurable outcome of the play of our mental faculties; in religion, that we must obey God’s commands not because God so wishes but because they coincide with the demands of our own reason. All these conceptual “revolutions” share a common feature: they place the autonomous activity of a subject at the center of philosophical attention. If Marx is right in describing the experience of modernity as one in which everything solid melts into thin air, then Kant, by making us aware of our (almost unlimited) capacity for action and authorship, can be considered as the father of the modern period. He influenced everything and everybody, from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche to existentialism to American pragmatism to the analytic tradition. In the realm of political philosophy, Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are among the most enthusiastic recent Kantian voices. Pablo Muchnik See also Aesthetics; Consuming the Environment; Happiness; Hedonism; Marx, Karl; Moralities; Taste

Further Readings Allison, Henry. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften. Akademie-edition, Vols. 1–29. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902. Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Wood, Allen. Kant’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD (1883–1946) John Maynard Keynes, born in Cambridge to John Neville Keynes and Florence Ada Brown, was a British economist and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. He was created Baron Keynes of Tilton in 1942. Educated at Eton, he read and taught at the University of Cambridge, where he was a fellow of King’s College. He served in the Indian Office and advised His Majesty’s Treasury during World War I, being appointed financial representative to the Versailles Peace Conference. On that occasion, he took a stance against the heavy reparations imposed on Germany (which resulted in his Economic Consequences of the Peace of 1919), displaying considerable foresight, and straightway became a public character. A prolific author, he wrote on a range of academic and policy issues, from probability to money to ethics to international relations (and most of his books and papers are now collected in the Collected Writings), though Keynes’s name is inevitably linked to his masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This work was a theoretical reaction to the Great Depression and revolutionized for some decades the world of economics. It would also exert an enduring influence on the economic policies of Western governments in the postwar period. Keynes overturned the so-called Say’s law, a keystone of (neo)classical economics, which postulated the natural tendency of the economy toward equilibrium on the grounds that production created a market for the commodities produced. Instead, he argued that demand for goods and services was the primum movens, emphasizing consumer spending. Keynes extolled consumption over thrift, which had been held as a virtue in the Victorian era. Thrift was a “paradox” for it actually led to recession. In The General Theory, Keynes defined consumption as a function of real income. “The relationship between the community’s income and what it can be expected to spend on consumption,” he wrote, “will depend on the psychological characteristic of

Keynesian Demand Management

the community, which we shall call its propensity to consume. That is to say, consumption will depend on the level of aggregate income and, therefore, on the level of employment, . . . except when there is some change in the propensity to consume” (28). The relationship between consumption and income hypothesized by Keynes can be written as a linear function whereby the former, beyond a subsistence level called “autonomous consumption” (the y-intercept), is given by the latter multiplied by a parameter, which represents the “marginal propensity to consume,” that is, what proportion of an increase in income will not be saved. This is supposed to be a positive quantity, but lower than the increase itself, and dependent on both objective and subjective factors (see Keynes 1936, book 3). Subjective factors are psychologically, culturally, and historically determined; they are assumed to be constant for any given context. When a depression occurs, as in 1929, state intervention is needed to get the economy going again. Increase in public expenditure compensates for the stagnation in private consumption and breaks the vicious circle of the recession, causing the growth of production and a greater disposable income. Expansionary fiscal policy might also take the form of a reduced tax burden, which should prove useful to cure milder business cycle recessions through direct stimulation of household consumption. Keynes’s consumption function was later criticized by the Harvard economist James S. Duesenberry for exaggerating the importance of income and underestimating that of subjective factors, which influence the propensity to consume. Drawing on the institutionalist toolbox, he questioned the effectiveness of Keynesian fiscal policies. Giving people more money would not automatically affect their expenditure, for consumer behavior has above all a social significance. It depends on the emulation of others, and moreover, it is path dependent. In fact, he argued, consumption levels are sticky in the short run, even during recessions. Anyway, it should be noted that Keynes and Duesenberry were observing two very different historical situations. Francesco Boldizzoni See also Commodities; Economic Sociology; Economics; Great Depression (U.S.); Keynesian Demand Management; State Provisioning; Thrift

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Further Readings Backhouse, Roger E., and Bradley W. Bateman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Keynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Duesenberry, James S. Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. Keynes, John M. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan, 1936. Keynes, John M. Collected Writings. Edited by A. Robinson and D. E. Moggridge. London: Macmillan, 1971–1989. Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. New York: Penguin, 2005.

KEYNESIAN DEMAND MANAGEMENT The notion of demand management is commonly used in the field of macroeconomics in relation to the adoption of government policies that facilitate the achievement of full employment equilibrium in the economy. The widely known scholar John Maynard Keynes first advocated such intervention in his classic 1936 work General Theory. The British economist was a stark critic of the classical orthodoxy, in particular of the culture of laissez-faire whereby market imbalances are best dealt by natural adjustments of demand and supply, which, under certain conditions, are expected to restore equilibrium prices and quantities. Keynes observed that such imbalances tend to occur cyclically as a consequence of lack of demand, and if left untreated, could degenerate in severe downturns or periods of prolonged recession. Since under such circumstances the private sector is unable to boost demand, Keynes argued that government should intervene directly and “spend its way out of a recession,” that is, run a budget deficit. Subsequently, as soon as private sector spending had been restored to normal levels, government should reduce spending and pay off the debts accumulated during the downturn. Prolonged slumps in the economy carry the danger of triggering a virtuous circle: as unemployment rises and real wages fall, both consumer confidence and aggregate demand decrease thus creating a financial burden due to unemployment benefits (in economies

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like the United Kingdom) as well as diminished revenue from direct and indirect taxation. Government interventions following the Keynesian recipe are also known as counter-cyclical demand management policies: this is because if aggregate demand is lower than equilibrium levels, then government should pursue reflationary policies—such as cutting taxes or boosting government spending—to push demand up and boost employment and output. On the other hand, if aggregate demand is higher than the equilibrium level and there are risks of inflation, the prescription is adopting deflationary policies, such as tax increases or cutting public spending. In the aftermath of World War II, Keynesian economics shaped policy in several advanced countries, which had set full employment as a primary target. Those strategies based on massive government intervention, however, had a mixed record. During the 1950s and 1960s, most nations enjoyed the strongest and most sustained period of economic growth and prosperity ever recorded before or since, with high real wages allowing more households to improve their lifestyles by purchasing expensive durable goods such as televisions and cars. These phenomena are at the root of the dramatic changes that characterized the emergence of the so-called affluent society. By the mid-1970s, however, a dramatic turn in macroeconomic conditions around the world due to the oil crisis led to generalized stagflation, that is, strong inflation combined with high unemployment levels. It has been observed that at the root of the recurring crises in international financial relationships in the postwar period were substantial price variations across economies and that such discrepancies tended to grow as inflation accelerated. By 1973, the Bretton Woods system of normally fixed exchange rates was replaced by a regime of fluctuating rates, which would eventually push inflation even more. Most national authorities sought refuge in monetary and fiscal policies aimed at containing inflation. However, inflation has proven stubbornly persistent everywhere. Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Japan managed to restore acceptable levels by the end of the 1970s followed by the United States in the early 1980s, but several other countries did not manage until the 1990s. Similarly, unemployment grew rapidly worldwide, also partly due to the reorientation of industrial production away from commodities and toward services.

This critical transition in recent economic history undermined confidence toward demand management policies and fueled an extensive debate among economists. It has been observed that even when unemployment was low, sustained economic growth and high inflation increased the deficit in the balance of payments. The option of compressing demand reduced the deficit and curbed inflation but pushed the economy toward mild recession with rising unemployment; this, in turn, encouraged government to increase the level of demand and thus restart what Christopher Pissarides terms the stop-go cycle. Another important issue is that policies seeking full employment along the Keynesian prescription have been known to generate adverse effects in other areas of economic activity; for example, with full employment, labor is in short supply and therefore relatively costlier, which would in turn trigger increases in the price of goods and services thus encouraging demands for still higher wages, and so on. This process could clearly produce spiraling inflation. In the 1960s and 1970s, growing awareness of the link between wages and inflation led some Western European governments to seek tighter coordination with management and unions, an attempt that failed, however, due to lack of agreement, according to Daniel J. B. Mitchell. Over the last two decades, Keynesian economics has been and continues to be under close scrutiny. While it is widely accepted among economists that governments need to play an active role through active fiscal policy to restore cyclical imbalances, erroneous forecasts carry the risk of actually destabilizing the economy. At the same time, however, opposite monetarist policies have proven rather ineffective too. Recent alternatives include incentive-based incomes policies, explicit restraints to factor returns as well as a return to Keynesian-oriented solutions. Davide Consoli See also Affluent Society; Commodities; Consumer Demand; Economics; Income; Keynes, John Maynard; Money; Service Industry

Further Readings Colander, David C., ed. Incentive-Based Incomes Policies: Advances in TIP and MAP. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1986. Cornwall, John. Economic Breakdown and Recovery: Theory and Policy. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994.

Kyrk, Hazel Gershuny, Jonathan, and Ian Miles. The New Service Economy. London: Pinter, 1983. McLeod, Alex N. The Fearsome Dilemma: Simultaneous Inflation and Unemployment. Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, 1994. McLeod, Alex N. “The Problem Is Inflation-Control, Not Spending-Control.” Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro Quarterly Review (June 1995): 146–158. Mitchell, Daniel J. B. Unions, Wages and Inflation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1980. Pissarides, Christopher. “Unemployment in Britain: A European Success Story.” In Structural Unemployment in Western Europe: Reasons and Remedies, edited by Martin Werding, 209–236. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

KYRK, HAZEL (1886–1957) Hazel Kyrk was an important economist who focused on family and consumer economics. She was born in Ashley, Ohio. Her university education began in 1904 at Ohio Wesleyan, where she supported herself by working for the family of economics professor Leon C. Marshall. In 1908, Kyrk entered the University of Chicago and once again worked for the Marshall family, who had moved there previously. She graduated with a PhB in 1910 and began a PhD under the supervision of James A. Field. While working on her doctorate, Kyrk taught at Iowa State College (1911), Wellesley (1911–1912), and Oberlin (1914–1918). In 1918, she accepted an invitation from Field to do statistical work in England. She then returned to Oberlin and completed her PhD in 1920. Her dissertation won the prestigious Hart, Schaffner, and Marx prize, and a revised version was published in 1923 as A Theory of Consumption. Kyrk left Oberlin in 1921. She taught summer school at Bryn Mawr (1922–1925), worked briefly at the Food Research Institute at Stanford (1923–1924), where she coauthored a book on the American baking industry (Kyrk and Davis 1925), and at Iowa State College (1924–1925) before being offered a joint appointment as an associate professor in the Departments of Home Economics and Economics at Chicago. She continued her work on consumer economics and published Economic Problems of the Family in 1933. In 1941, she was promoted to full professor. In 1953, a revised version

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of her 1933 book was published as The Family in the American Economy. The key argument in A Theory of Consumption (1923) is that patterns of consumption behavior are largely determined by norms of the “appropriate and necessary” or by socially defined “standards of living.” In her view, a theory of consumption must take account of these standards and norms, explain how they came to be, how they relate to valuation and choice, how they develop and change, and indicate how they might be improved through policy (22). This led Kyrk to critique marginal utility theory as a basis for understanding consumption behavior and to develop an instrumental theory of choice. This institutional approach to consumption, built around the concept of accepted standards of living, was widely adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. Other women economists, such as Theresa McMahon and Jessica Peixotto, contributed, but Kyrk’s work provided the central theoretical argument. Kyrk’s Economic Problems of the Family (1933) had a broader scope, discussing not only issues in consumption and standards of living but also issues in household production; the economic position of women; employment of married women; family incomes and their adequacy; family decision making; risks of disability, unemployment, and old age; savings; social security; and consumer information and consumer protection. This book was path breaking in many respects, emphasizing the family as a joint decision-making unit over the allocation of household resources. Although Kyrk’s approach remained firmly within the institutionalist tradition, the issues dealt with anticipate much of the more recent neoclassical literature on the economics of the family by Gary Becker and others. Kyrk also contributed to issues involving women, the family, consumption, and housing through her work for the Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago and for various government agencies. Between 1938 and 1941, she was chief economist of the Bureau of Home Economics, where she made major contributions to the Consumers Purchases Study, the foundation for calculating the base year prices for the consumer price index. Later, she worked for the Office of Price Administration on wartime price controls and the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the Minimum Standard Budget and revisions to the consumer price index.

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At Chicago, she mentored other women faculty and supervised a number of women graduate students, including Margaret Reid. Kyrk never married but took in and raised the teenaged daughter of a cousin. She died in 1957 at her summer home in Vermont. Malcolm Rutherford See also Consumer (Freedom of) Choice; Economic Sociology; Economics; Families; Feminist Movement; Households; Measuring Standards of Living; Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

Further Readings Beller, Andrea H., and D. E. Kiss. “Kyrk, Hazel.” In Women Building Chicago, edited by Rima Lunin

Schultz and Adele Hast, 482–485. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Dorfman, Joseph. The Economic Mind in American Civilization. Vol. 5. New York: Viking, 1959. Kyrk, Hazel. A Theory of Consumption. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923. Kyrk, Hazel. Economic Problems of the Family. New York: Harper, 1933. Kyrk, Hazel, and Joseph S. Davis. The American Baking Industry, 1848–1923. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1925. Nelson, Elizabeth. “Hazel Kyrk.” In Notable American Women: The Modern Period, edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, 405–406. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1980.

L on locally understood gendered household divisions of labor, a strategy that also limits the potential for women to earn overtime wages. What this suggests is that the labor market is not a single location but is instead a combination of the spatiality of both workers and employers. Perhaps most famously, Henry Ford recognized the interlinked nature of labor and consumption. Mass production of his automobiles not only meant significant changes in both the way that workers’ jobs were defined in relation to production but also meant that economies of scale could be achieved that would enable those with lower wages to be able to purchase the goods that they were involved in producing. While Ford was not the only manufacturer to understand and capitalize on the consumer potential of his workforce and the benefits of mass production, the way that he organized production around specific tasks in an assembly-line format, such that workers no longer were skilled in producing the whole object but instead were skilled in one aspect of production, is referred to as Fordism (see Gramsci 1971). Many argue that the overall division of labor into separate, repetitive tasks leads ultimately to a de-skilling of labor more generally (e.g., Braverman 1974). Others argue, however, that because production is a dynamic process and because competition relies on innovation in the production process as well as innovation in the goods and services being produced, what results are a re-skilling and a resocializing of labor (see Attwell 1987). The process of labor-market change has important implications for how workers are able to sell

LABOR MARKETS At its most basic, a labor market is where labor supply (workers) and labor demand (employers) come together. Although this definition is suggestive of a marketplace where workers advertise themselves to potential employers, in reality, workers’ ability to sell their labor is linked to the skills and experience that they have (human capital); the awareness that they have about the availability of a particular job, which is largely tied to their social networks; the location of the job in relation to their home or their willingness to undertake a migration to be within commuting distance of the employer; and also their own domestic responsibilities. Likewise, because not all employees are the same, employers must discriminate between those who are selling their labor. One way they do this is by using the social networks of their existing employees to find other potential workers. Employers also make judgments about the employability and skill level of individuals based on sociospatial positionality (e.g., gender, race, class, age). For example, employers may choose locations for factories to capture the labor of Asian women, partly on the belief that Asian women have nimble fingers and are therefore more suitable to sewing tasks or computer chip production than other social groups who are perhaps located in other places or in other social groupings (Pearson 2000). Likewise, as Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt illustrate, employers may shape their employment conditions by offering “mother’s hours” that are based 833

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their labor in the labor market. First, employers may seek out labor markets in low-waged regions. A good example of this is textiles production. Historically, the United Kingdom and the New England region of the United States were the center of textiles manufacturing. As recently as 2001, Marks and Spencer, a large high-street retailer in the United Kingdom, purchased all its clothing from producers in the United Kingdom. However, due to competition from other retailers who sourced their goods from producers in Asia and could offer similar products at a lower price, Marks and Spencer among others subsequently dropped U.K. suppliers in favor of offshore producers. Between 1988 and 2001, the United Kingdom lost over 40 percent of its textile jobs (a loss of over 339,000 jobs). Second, those producers remaining in what are locally considered declining industries often restructure their employment by changing the way work is done through the introduction of new technologies or by seeking out a workforce that is socially distinct from that traditionally associated with the industry. For example, shifting employment from a largely white, native workforce to a largely immigrant workforce (as was the case in textiles production in the United Kingdom) or changing the gender of the employment by altering the conditions of work (e.g., by offering mother’s hours rather than overtime). The result of this restructuring is often a decline in the number of workers, as is often the case with technological changes to the production process, or a decline in wages or both. For workers, these changes mean that there are new labor markets in those places that are economically less well-off. Likewise, in the labor markets, change in the old location occurs such that a new group of people may be able to sell their labor power, whereas those who had traditionally had a place find themselves redundant in the local labor market. Importantly, goods such as textiles do not disappear from the marketplace when labor market re-skilling occurs. What this means for consumers in places where industry has re-skilled is that there is often a greater geographical and social separation between the consumer and the goods being produced. As a result, consumers have less understanding of the conditions under which those goods are produced than they once did. Recent research and political activism has focused on production networks with the aim of making the journey that a good or commodity takes from raw material to retail outlet more transparent for

consumers. Some of this research has specifically shown how as a good moves from one stage in the chain to the next it is also moving through different labor markets. Examples of this kind of research include Louise Crewe’s writings concerning fashion and the work of a number of authors that focus on food items (e.g., Suzanne Freidberg’s research on green beans [2003] and Ian Cook’s research on tropical fruit [1995]). Likewise, consumer activist groups have campaigned for better labor market conditions for workers through their pressure on the retailers that source from these regions. An example is the pressure campaign against Nike corporation that illustrated wage differentials between the workers who sew the shoes and the advertisers and celebrities who sell the shoes. More recent examples are the television journalism programs and activist campaigns highlighting the use of child labor, extremely low-waged outsourcing arrangements, and sweatshop conditions in the production of consumer goods, such as the soccer balls used in the World Cup and clothes for low-cost retailers, such as Primark. These efforts have meant that child labor is no longer viewed as an acceptable practice, though unscrupulous producers often try to hide their continued use of this labor pool in an effort to continue to make available low cost goods in high consumption economies. These recent efforts by those interested in labor markets as they are embedded within consumption chains has helped to change labor market practices for the most marginal in economically poor regions through the introduction of controls on how retailers in well-off nations are able to buy the goods they sell. The recognition that all labor markets are defined in the relationships between workplaces, home, and residential setting offers considerable opportunity for those interested in consumption as labor markets reside at the center of the connections and contradictions between production and reproduction in a capitalist system. Indeed, reconsidering how we consume also opens up possibilities for new ways of producing that in turn has implications for how labor supply is offered and taken up. Megan K. Blake See also Capitalism; De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Gramsci, Antonio; Mass Production and Consumption

Lasch, Christopher

Further Readings Attwell, Paul. “The Deskilling Controversy.” Work and Occupations 14 (1987): 323–346. Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974. Cook, Ian. “Constructing the ‘Exotic’: The Case of Tropical Fruit.” In Geographical Worlds, edited by John Allen and Doreen Massey, 137–142. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Crewe, Louise. “Unravelling Fashion’s Commodity Chains.” In Geographies of Commodity Chains, edited by Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer, 195–214. London: Routledge, 2004. Freidberg, Suzanne. “Cleaning Up Down South: Supermarkets, Ethical Trade and African Horticulture.” Social and Cultural Geography 4 (2003): 27–43. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Hanson, Susan, and Geraldine Pratt. Gender, Work, and Space. New York: Routledge, 1985. Pearson, Ruth. “‘Nimble Fingers’ Revisited: Reflections on Women and Third-World Industrialisation in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Feminist Visions of Development, edited by Cecile Jackson and Ruth Pearson, 172–189. London: Routledge, 2000.

LASCH, CHRISTOPHER (1932–1994) Despite launching a sustained assault on the very foundations of the American way of life, Christopher Lasch is now considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Lasch was a historian but did not confine his inquiry to the annals of history. Rather, he utilized a deep understanding of historical processes to address contemporary Western culture as it unfolded. Lasch addressed issues as diverse as public morality, the family, the rise of feminism and liberalism in the postwar era, and the growth of the market and its gradual domination of social life and in doing so displayed a perspicacious ability to grasp the essence of postwar America as it abandoned its brief flirtation with social democracy and returned to its founding principles of existential and economic freedom. Lasch offered a detailed and incisive critique of both the political left and right, but we can basically sum

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up his intellectual approach as an amalgamation of socialism, with its traditional concern with the power of capitalism to corrupt public culture and everyday life, and conservatism, inasmuch as he was deeply suspicious of the onward march of twentieth-century liberalism and what he considered the thoughtless deconstruction of traditional social institutions. Lasch was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1932, the son of progressive and intellectual parents. Lasch’s mother held a PhD and taught philosophy at the universities of Nebraska and Missouri, and his father studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and eventually became a noted journalist, winning a Pulitzer Prize for editorials that criticized American involvement in Vietnam. Lasch eventually received his doctorate in history from Columbia in 1961 and took up a post at the University of Iowa as Assistant Professor in History in that same year. After a number of other moves, Lasch eventually arrived at the University of Rochester in 1970 as Professor of History where he spent the rest of his career. Lasch was a prodigious writer and it is impossible to offer a comprehensive digest of his work here. He wrote ten books in total, with the last two published posthumously after Lasch succumbed to cancer in 1994. Perhaps the most celebrated of Lasch’s books is The Culture of Narcissism. The core thesis of this book is perhaps even more pertinent today than it was at the time of its first publication in 1979. In this book, Lasch charts the broad range of social pressures that have destabilized the traditional family and led to a rise in narcissistic personality types. For Lasch, the onward march of liberal humanism, coupled with developing forms of capital accumulation centered on competitive consumerism, have led to a marked increase in narcissism. Lasch offers a scathing critique of the liberal projects of the sixties that sought to free the individual from constraining social structures. This narcissistic focus on the needs and desires of the individual threatened the well-being of the collective ways of life on which modern civilization was structured. We can only guess at what Lasch would have made of the rise of global neoliberalism, the branding of the everyday life and the solipsistic identity projects that make up an increasingly important part of public culture. It seems unlikely that he would have found anything positive to say about the apparent instrumentalization of community, the media nature of contemporary (post) politics, and the increasingly

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desperate scramble to accumulate and display (Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum 2008). Ever the historian, it is likely that Lasch would have detailed the deep historical and ideological roots of liberalism, roots that continue to shape American economy and culture and structure both the political left and right. He would have argued that this American ideology has prepared the ground for a new and evermore socially corrosive advanced market capitalism, an economic system that seeks to draw all into an aggressive battle for cultural significance that sustains the consumer economy but has profound implications for psychic well-being and social order. Given the recent challenges to global capital and the apparent inability of the left to construct a realistic alternative to it, it is perhaps time we revisited the work of Lasch and reconsidered how his brand of conservative egalitarianism might benefit contemporary social and cultural analysis. Simon Winlow See also Families; Happiness; Hedonism; Narcissism

Further Readings Hall, Steve, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum. Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism. Cullompton, UK: Willan, 2008.

LAZARSFELD, PAUL FELIX (1901–1976) Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-born applied social psychologist who, somewhat improbably, became a dominant figure in postwar American sociology. With a conventional academic career blocked by anti-Semitism, Lazarsfeld in the late 1920s created an applied market research institute in Vienna that would, after his emigration to the United States in 1933, serve as a model for his institutes at Newark and Columbia. Owing to exigencies of contract work and his own methodological interests, Lazarsfeld and his research teams would go on to generate a number of important studies of consumer behavior over the next two decades, before turning to other questions in the 1950s. Lazarsfeld, encouraged by the physicist (and fellow socialist) Friedrich Adler, had earned a doctorate in

applied mathematics in 1925, the same year he began a close association with Charlotte and Karl Buhler, directors of the university’s Psychological Institute. With the Buhlers’ support, Lazarsfeld soon founded a fledgling market research institute—an early act of entrepreneurial pluck. Lazarsfeld’s approach to market research was original, and his emphasis on interpreting consumer motive would provoke both admiration and controversy when he brought the techniques to the United States in the 1930s. He claimed that consumer decision making, often unconscious and sometimes irrational, could be gleaned from consumers’ motivational self-descriptions with the aid of careful questioning and analysis. Already in Vienna he was leveraging client demands for scholarly ends. Lazarsfeld soon produced a book-length community study of working-class leisure practices in a depression-ravaged industrial town, Marienthal, which earned him a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to the United States. He used his Rockefeller year for a series of cross-country trips and volunteer research projects and established connections with dozens of applied social psychologists. When Austria’s fascists seized power in 1934, Lazarsfeld—a socialist and a Jew—applied to remain in the country. In the mid-1930s, he volunteered at the Psychological Corporation, collaborated with David Craig at the University of Pittsburgh’s Retail Research Institute, and wrote four chapters for an American Marketing Society (1937) methods text. In early 1935, he published his classic, manifesto-like article, “The Art of Asking Why in Marketing Research.” His arguments for reason analysis and for the indispensability of the unscripted, reactive depth interview were widely influential and prefigured the focused interview that future colleague Robert Merton was to codify a decade later. In 1936, Lazarsfeld convinced the University of Newark’s ambitious president to sponsor a Newark Research Center housed in an abandoned brewery near campus and funded—like his Vienna institute— by client-commissioned contract studies. The work style he would make famous at Columbia— methodological innovation, high analytic intelligence, the valued hunch, the quantitative-qualitative mix, directorial omnipotence, the scholarly reanalysis of client data, even the chaos and financial precariousness— was already routine at Newark.

Lefebvre, Henri

The same year, Lazarsfeld embraced the new sampling-based polling techniques pioneered by George Gallup and other commercial pollsters during that year’s presidential race. Owing to his methodological agility and social acumen, Lazarsfeld soon found himself at the center of the new interdisciplinary field of public opinion research, which cohered around the survey methods themselves and a set of overlapping relationships among psychologists, sociologists, pollsters, market researchers, and foundation officials clustered in the northeastern United States. Lazarsfeld was soon asked to direct the Princeton Radio Research Project, a Rockefeller-backed audience-research initiative that used the new survey techniques. Personal conflicts with other Princeton Project principals led Lazarsfeld to shift its affiliation to Columbia in 1939. It was Columbia’s Office of Radio Research (ORR) that would become, in 1944, the influential Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR). Lazarsfeld’s own full-time appointment to Columbia’s sociology department came in 1941, the same year the department recruited Merton. An unlikely alliance and longterm collaboration—Merton would go on to serve as the BASR’s associate director and to author influential Bureau-sponsored work, such as Mass Persuasion (1946)—helped to establish Columbia as a major center of sociology in the early postwar years. The ORR/BASR sponsored a number of landmark studies on media audiences and consumption, including work by fellow refugees Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, and Herta Herzog (Lazarsfeld’s second wife). Lazarsfeld’s own Radio and the Printed Page (1940), The People’s Choice (1944), and Personal Influence (1955) analyzed consumption, politics, and media habits in ways that remain influential across a number of fields. By the early 1950s, Lazarsfeld’s prominence within postwar sociology enabled him to focus more exclusively on the methodological questions that had always been his real preoccupation. He largely abandoned the consumption and media topics that were, after all, the products of funding opportunism. Recalling his Austrian years, Lazarsfeld (1969) once remarked, “Such is the origin of my Vienna market research studies: the result of the methodological equivalence of socialist voting and the buying of soap” (279). Jeff Pooley See also Broadcast Media; Communication Studies; Consumer Behavior; Leisure; Markets and Marketing;

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Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Psychology

Further Readings American Marketing Society. The Technique of Marketing Research. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937. Jahoda, Marie, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel. Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community. Chicago: Aldine, Atherton, 1971. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. “The Art of Asking Why in Marketing Research.” National Marketing Review 1 (1935): 32–43. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. “An Episode in the History of Social Research.” In The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, 270–337. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Merton, Robert K. Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.

LEFEBVRE, HENRI (1901–1991) Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist sociologist and philosopher. Lefebvre is best known for his theorizing of geography and urban space, but his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life also offers a trenchant analysis of consumer culture and capitalism’s colonization of leisure time and private life. Over the course of the twentieth century, Lefebvre was at the center of many pivotal cultural, political, and intellectual movements, including the avant-garde of Dada and surrealism, the uprisings of May 1968, and the development of postmodernism. Lefebvre’s intellectual roots were formed between the two world wars as he mixed Marxism with the insights of Dada and surrealism. The interwar avantgardes explored how art, performance, and spontaneous action could disorient the dominant ideology in which social conventions appear as natural and inevitable. They also allowed Lefebvre to imagine a new type of society where life itself would be a work of art, constituted by desire and creativity. Along with Andre Breton and many of the other surrealists, Lefebvre joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1928. But while the surrealists’ relationship to the Party was volatile and short-lived, Lefebvre stayed on and served as one of its most prominent intellectual spokesman throughout the next three decades,

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despite the fact that his ideas often conflicted with their interpretations of Marxism that favored “scientific” notions of objective determination. Like Georg Lukács, Lefebvre argued for a more philosophical and humanist reading of Marx that extracted the Hegelian residue in the concepts of alienation, reification, and class consciousness. Beginning with the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life, written in 1947, Lefebvre suggested that capitalism was commoditizing not only labor but also leisure, family, sexuality, the body, and the imagination. He emphasized that “there can be alienation in leisure just as in work. . . . So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work” (1991, 39–40; italics in original). Like the Frankfurt school, Lefebvre observed that Western societies were becoming increasingly oriented around consumption and commercial entertainment, but while these apparatuses of the culture industry promised relief from the workplace, in reality they represented an extension of alienation in everyday life. Lefebvre sought to theorize the junction of instrumental rationality and mass culture through the term “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” (1984, 68–109). Nonetheless, Lefebvre refused to succumb to the pessimism and despair that engulfed other Marxists in the decades after World War II. From Lefebvre’s perspective, the consumer culture did not represent the triumph of “false needs” because leisure, pleasure, and self-expression are all essential human faculties. What are false are not the needs that capital promises to fulfill but the commodities and signs that are supposed to realize them. Lefebvre wrote, “They can thus hold a real content, correspond to a real need, yet still retain an illusory form and a deceptive appearance” (1991, 40). Although their diagnoses of postwar society were otherwise quite similar, Lefebvre thus felt compelled to differentiate himself from Herbert Marcuse: “Can terrorist pressures and repression reinforce individual self-repression to the point of closing all issues? Against Marcuse we continue to assert that they cannot” (1984, 66). As early as 1962, Lefebvre had identified young people as a potentially revolutionary agent of social change: “Everywhere we see them showing signs of dissatisfaction and rebellion. . . . It is they who continue the uninterrupted dialogue between ideal and experiment” (1995, 195). In May 1968, the speculations of Lefebvre and the like-minded Situationist

International momentarily came to fruition as young people seized the streets of Paris while general strikes and mass demonstrations involving millions nearly toppled the French government. After 1968, Lefebvre pursued his study of social space and cities, including his most renowned work, The Production of Space (1974 [English trans. 1991]). Otherwise, however, Lefebvre’s influence was negligible once post-structuralism and postmodernism came to dominate the French intellectual scene. He did maintain an indirect presence through his student Jean Baudrillard whose earliest works on the semiotics of consumer culture bear traces of Lefebvre’s thought. But unlike Baudrillard and so many other post-1968 French intellectuals, Lefebvre never renounced Marxism or his utopian hopes for revolution once postmodern ideas became fashionable. Ryan Moore See also Alienation; Baudrillard, Jean; Body, The; Collective Identity; Commodification; Families; Leisure; Marcuse, Herbert; Marxist Theories; Mass Culture (Frankfurt School); Postmodernism; PostStructuralism; Reification; Sexuality; Spatial Analysis; Surrealism

Further Readings Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Translated by John Moore. New York: Verso, 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. Introduction to Modernity. New York: Verso, 1995.

LEISURE In modern societies, the term leisure is used, explicitly or implicitly, as an adjective or noun to refer to time that is unaccounted for by work, other obligations and necessary activities, the things that are done in this time, and the experiences that are derived. Leisure and consumption overlap; neither encompasses the whole of the other. That said, it is within leisure time and through leisure spending that consumer cultures have developed to a point where an issue of current debate is whether consumer cultures

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have not only penetrated but also are overwhelming the whole of leisure.

What Is Leisure? The systematic study of leisure dates from the creation of leisure studies as a specialist academic subject in North America in the 1950s and 1960s. Leisure had been studied previously but nearly always as a by-product in studies of work and occupations through exploring the “long arm of the job” or in community studies where leisure was covered as part of family and neighborhood life. Until leisure itself became the focus, a precise definition seems to have been considered unnecessary. Leisure has been defined as a type of time, a type of activity, and a type of experience and various combinations of these, but researchers have found that time is the truly basic, essential feature in a satisfactory concept of modern leisure. With this recognition, we see instantly that the leisure of today is a product of modern, industrial society. Many of the activities that we engage in during leisure predate the modern era. This applies to sports and games, drinking, and various arts and crafts. As far as we can tell, throughout history human beings have played, amused themselves and one another, and found time to relax, but this was not leisure as we know it today. Modern leisure is a product of the compartmentalization and rationalization of work. Industrialism takes work out of homes and neighborhoods and relocates it in mines, factories, and offices, where people work at set times, under work-specific authority, and amid work-specific relationships. Thus work becomes a part of life. Industrialism also involves the rationalization of work insofar as jobs are preformed not according to custom, or in ways that will maximize workers’ enjoyment, but to maximize the quantity and quality of output and minimize costs. If people find their jobs enjoyable, this is a fortuitous byproduct rather than the prime consideration. Thus, work has become a part of life in which employees are required to follow their employers’ commands. Opportunities to do things purely for the intrinsic satisfaction, just for fun, to choose for oneself are pushed into nonwork time. Hence, the everyday (in modern societies) meaning of leisure is work-free time during which, in contrast to when people are working, they are able to do what they please, purely for the personal satisfaction. In earlier times, when

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the term leisure was used, it described a particular class of people or a total way of life. Modern leisure is different: it is a part of life that is available (in principle) for everyone. There are no activities that are always and only leisure activities. Playing a sport, gardening, or reading can be one person’s work and someone else’s leisure. It is impossible to tell from the activity itself—only by whether it is done in work or leisure time. There are no uniquely leisure experiences. Leisure, like work, can be enjoyable or boring. During leisure, we may be able to choose to do things that we find especially satisfying, but we often choose simply to relax and idle time away. The leisure that the populations of Western countries experience today is a product of contextual conditions in addition to the modern nature of paid work. Leisure’s character owes much to the existence of a market economy that offers choices— invariably wider choices than when the state is the monopoly supplier. Our leisure is also a product of civil society—the existence of space in which people can organize to do things collectively with others who share their interests. Civil society is the home of religious and political organizations and the clubs that cater to numerous sports, arts, and hobbies. Finally, leisure as we know it becomes possible only when the traditions that once prescribed entire ways of life for members of neighborhood and religious communities have weakened. These ways of life usually scripted different roles for males and females, different age groups, and different social strata. De-traditionalization releases individuals, groups of friends, and families “to do their own things,” which may be different from the leisure choices of neighbors. All this means that leisure is highly context dependent. A sphere of life that will be recognized as leisure is found wherever work has been modernized, but the character of leisure itself, not just how leisure is used, varies between, on the one hand, Western societies where all the above contextual features are present and other modern societies. It is certainly possible to define leisure in a way that makes it universal and recognizable in all societies. This is possible because, as acknowledged above, throughout history people have had hours, sometimes days and weeks, free from productive work when they have been able to rest, relax, refresh, and enjoy various sports and other pastimes. Thus, some writers compare the leisure of people in primitive

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societies, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and feudal Europe with the leisure of the present day. However, it soon becomes apparent that we are not comparing like with like. The contrasts often lead to the conclusion that present-day leisure is debased, deformed, overcommercialized, and dedicated to trivia rather than to cultivating the whole person (believed to be the ideal life in ancient Athens). The error lies in judging one era using the standards of another. The study of leisure in the modern world has produced a body of knowledge about, for example, work-leisure relationships, that simply cannot be mapped onto societies where both work and leisure were not modernized.

Measuring Leisure and Its Uses Researching leisure is more cumbersome than investigating most other areas of life. If leisure is basically a type of time, then the basic measurements have to be how much leisure time an entire population, different subsections, and different individuals possess. Time Diaries The most effective way of answering these questions is through time diary studies. Representative samples of a population are asked then persuaded to keep time diaries specifying what they were doing during successive 10- or 15-minute spells throughout a day. They may then be asked follow-up questions (answers to be jotted down in the diary alongside the activities) about where they were and who they were with. The most recent time diary studies require records to be kept for no more than one or two days. Compliance dips if respondents are expected to keep diaries for longer periods. Representative results for all days are guaranteed by asking as many respondents about a Monday as about a Tuesday, and so on. Time diary studies are expensive to undertake. The diaries have to be delivered by hand then collected, whereupon the field workers must check the entries with respondents to ensure that everything has been answered correctly. The analysis of the data is complicated. So these investigations are infrequent. Uses of time are coded into a large number of categories (playing specific sports, ironing clothes, for example), which are then aggregated, usually into paid work, other work (typically household chores), unpaid caring, personal maintenance (eating, bathing, dressing, etc.), traveling, and sleep. The residue

is treated as leisure. The crude amounts and proportions of time that are devoted to specific activities can then be calculated. This kind of evidence is most useful for charting long-term trends in time use, comparing time use patterns in different sections of a population, and measuring the total amounts of time that are devoted to activities that occupy most people (or a great many people) on most days (watching television is the prime example). Time diary evidence is less useful for investigating activities that are not clearly time bounded (listening to background music and interacting with family members, for example). Also, most specific activities are practiced less frequently than daily. Time budgets are useless for assessing the proportions of a population that play sports, attend the theater, and so on. This requires a different kind of inquiry. Participation Surveys The proportions of a population who take part in different kinds of leisure are usually measured through participation surveys. Representative samples are presented with checklists of activities and are asked to say in which they have taken part within a specified time period (usually during the last week or month). Those who have taken part can then be asked, How often? Those who have not participated during the last week or month can be asked about the last year then their entire lifetimes. Using selected thresholds, the proportions of a population, and subsections of it, who are participants in different activities can be measured and compared. This kind of research proves too undiscriminating when dealing with types of leisure in which most people take part daily and where the pertinent question is not whether but for how many hours? However, most specific leisure activities are engaged in less frequently, and the main difficulty in obtaining comprehensive information about a population’s uses of leisure is that there are hundreds of different leisure activities. A list of all indoor and outdoor sports alone fills several questionnaire pages. So most participation surveys focus on just one type of leisure—attendance at arts events, participation in sports, going on holiday, or visiting the countryside, for example. A problem is that different investigations use different thresholds to decide who should be counted as a participant (weekly, monthly, annually), which makes it difficult to aggregate the evidence.

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The investigations are usually conducted as market research for specific leisure industries, which leaves gaps, mainly noncommercial uses of leisure, such as hobby clubs, and the data collected are not always freely available to anyone who is interested. Expenditure Surveys A complementary approach focuses on money— how much is spent on different activities or uses of time and by whom. All the leisure industries know how much they are worth—the totals spent on their goods and services by consumers and, in some cases, by government departments and state agencies. However, the industries’ budgets do not tell us which consumers are spending the money. In all the economically advanced countries, the most comprehensive information is collected by governments in social surveys in which representative samples of people are asked to record all their spending, usually throughout a week or month. They are also asked about their sources and levels of income and the occupations (if any) of household members. A limitation, as regards leisure, is that cashless leisure is not a feature. Also, the sampling unit in these surveys is the household, and we cannot learn exactly who (wife or husband, for example) is spending on alcohol, theater visits, and so forth. All the above types of inquiry are quantitative, but most leisure research projects are qualitative, focusing on particular sections of a population or participants in specific activities, typically exploring their motivations, gratifications, and the constraints that shape their opportunities. However, all small-scale qualitative studies rely on the macroquantitative picture to establish exactly how many and which types of people their own small numbers may represent. Experience Sampling This is a research technique (the only research method) that has been developed primarily for use in leisure research. Its use follows the assumption that if we want to learn about the experiences—the satisfactions and frustrations—associated with different uses of leisure, then people need to be questioned about their feelings at the time when these feelings are alive. This kind of research involves persuading participants to carry beepers at all times, which are alerted randomly but with an assurance that the apparatus will not beep at night. As soon as they are beeped,

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or as soon as possible afterwards, participants are expected to complete a short questionnaire (in a booklet) saying what they are doing, where and with whom, and how they are feeling—elated, stressed, bored, relaxed, or whatever.

Trends in Leisure In most Western and ex-communist countries, trends in leisure can be traced accurately from the 1960s onward because time diary, spending, and participation surveys have been conducted throughout this period. Earlier trends are known but with less precision. Leisure time, as a proportion of lifetime, appears to have expanded continuously since the earliest stages of industrialism, a period during which in Britain, the first industrial nation, hours of work were extended. From then until the 1970s, hours of work were progressively rolled back. The working day, the workweek, and the work life were all shortened. By the 1960s, a “historical inversion” was underway—leisure time exceeding working time during a typical workweek. Even so, prior to the 1970s, total gains in work-free time had arisen mainly through enlarging the sections of the population outside the paid workforce—the young who had been removed into education and older age groups who could retire on pensions. Also, the reductions in weekly hours of paid work had achieved no more than regaining free time that had been lost during the takeoff into industrialism. Since the 1960s, leisure time has continued to grow, almost wholly as a result of the further enlargement of work-free age groups. Young people are remaining even longer in education. Retirement has been extended due to increased longevity. There is an unresolved debate about whether typical weekly hours of paid work have lengthened or simply stabilized for persons in the paid workforce, but there is agreement that the earlier downward trend has ended. The total paid workloads of households containing adults of working age have typically risen due to increased rates of labor market participation by women. World War II appears to have been a watershed. Previously, trade unions had pressed for shorter hours of work to spread the available work and reduce unemployment. When governments adopted Keynesian methods of macroeconomic management and succeeded in achieving and maintaining full

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employment, workforce pressure for reduced hours of work appears to have subsided. After the war, workers began to expect and demand progressively rising real wages and standards of living. Consumer culture was taking over. Another unresolved debate is about whether domestic technology has released more time for leisure or whether rising standards and expectations have maintained time spent on home and child care. During the last forty years, net gains in leisure time have been modest and nonexistent for most members of the paid workforce. Meanwhile, spending on leisure goods and services had risen steeply. The benefits of economic growth have been taken by workers in the form of higher wages and salaries rather than increased leisure time. The more affluent a country, the higher the proportion of its income is spent on leisure goods and services, and within countries, the most prosperous sections of the populations spend the highest proportions of their incomes on leisure. The concentration of further gains in work-free lifetime among nonemployed sections of the population, while overall growth in total incomes has benefited mainly those employed, has resulted in a tendency for the most advanced, now postindustrial societies, to polarize into the money-rich time-poor on the one hand, and the money-poor time-rich on the other. Since the 1950s, researchers have been trying to measure the quality of life using life satisfaction and happiness questions. The results show that in Western countries people are now no happier, no more content with their lives than was the case in the 1950s. The particular ways in which leisure has grown have not delivered fulfillment. Indeed, experience sampling has found that during leisure time the most common psychological state is apathy, largely due to the huge swathes of time that people spend watching television. A major current debate among leisure researchers is about whether the current distribution of work and leisure time across the life course reflects people’s genuine preferences or is due to constraints. Are workers forced to choose between long hours or no hours of paid work? Do they opt for (over) full-time hours because working less incurs huge financial penalties? Have governments been well-advised to encourage young people to spend longer and longer in education while maintaining retirement ages that were fixed when the typical life was much shorter than today? Does the current organization of the

typical life course place workers under intense pressure to earn, which distorts work-life balance?

How Leisure Is Used The popularity of different kinds of leisure can be compared in terms of the amounts of time or money that they account for or the proportion of the population that takes part. It is impossible to establish a simple rank order. Even so, there is no mistaking the big three. Media TV, radio, films, recorded music, print, and nowadays the Internet account for around a half of all leisure time. Television is still king of the media in terms of hours spent viewing, but it is the Internet that is currently driving change. The Internet is now an alternative source of films, recorded music, news and chat; the base for thousands of interest groups; and a way of purchasing all types of goods. All other media, and leisure activities more generally, are having to adapt to, learn to live with, and maybe benefit from the Internet. Fifty years ago, all other media were having to adjust to the age of television. Today, people are not devoting more time overall to the media, but they now have a much wider choice of what to view, listen to, and read, and they are paying a lot more per hour through purchasing hardware and software and channel subscriptions. Out-of-Home Eating and Drinking Out-of-home eating and drinking are now among the top leisure activities. Dining out regularly used to be a privilege of the rich and an occasional indulgence for the many. Today, in the world’s more prosperous countries, a meal and a drink, or at least a drink, has risen into leisure’s top division by becoming a normal part of going out for any other leisure purpose—a trip to the cinema, a concert or a sports event, for example. Bars, cafes, and restaurants are at the heart of the night-time economies that have boomed throughout the world, creating so-called 24-hour cities. Also, there is considerable alcohol consumption during home-based leisure. Tourism Over 90 percent of the global population does not cross international frontiers in any year. Indeed,

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international tourism has reached mass proportions only in Europe—a fairly small continent containing over thirty fairly small countries, many of which are among the world’s richest. Even in these countries, substantial minorities (around 40 percent in Britain) do not take a holiday (at least four nights away from home) in any year. This proportion has hardly changed since data collection began in 1970. However, the people who take holidays are now taking them more frequently—twice or more per year, short breaks as well as main holidays—and are traveling farther and spending much more. Consumer spending on tourism makes it among the world’s largest industries. The big three are followed by medium-sized leisure industries—gambling (which is benefiting from the Internet) and sex where the video or DVD is the main product, supplemented by printed materials, with striptease reviving due to the popularity of table and lap dancing, plus the difficult-to-quantify forms of bodywork. In terms of the numbers of people who take part and money turnover, these leisure industries are far larger than the cinema, the theater, concerts of all types, sports (watching at live events and playing), art galleries and museums, theme parks and amusement parks, stately homes and other heritage sites, and other activities that probably spring to mind more rapidly than betting and sex when leisure is mentioned. How can we explain how people use their free time and money? One theory is that we tend to do whatever is easy, and commerce in particular makes its services easy to access and to use. Leisure researchers know that peaks of satisfaction are associated with demanding, challenging leisure activities. Even if lay people know this from personal experience, they may still prefer to do whatever is easiest.

Leisure and Social Divisions A major set of perennial research issues has been about the differences in uses of leisure that are associated with different occupations, age groups, and gender. Occupations Until the 1970s, successive studies focused on uses of leisure that characterized particular occupations. Sometimes, the occupational specificities

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were said to be due to “compensation”—employees seeking experiences at leisure that were unavailable at work—and sometimes the specificities were attributed to spillover of work-based interests, social relationships, and skills. The key point to note is that this entire genre of research has now become defunct. The most likely reason is the breakup of the occupational communities in which shared leisure formerly developed. The sharing occurred when workers practiced the same occupations throughout their working lives, when many towns were dominated by single industries, and when workplace and neighborhood social relationships reinforced one another as in coal-mining villages, fishing ports, and so on. Another change over time is that the higher social strata have ceased to be leisure highbrows and have become leisure omnivores, meaning that they are now the most involved in formerly middle- and lowbrow uses of leisure (such as the production and consumption of popular music) in addition to their traditional highbrow interests (classical music and the like). This change is believed to be due at least partly to high rates of upward social mobility into the higher strata. A result is that the lower strata (people in lower-skilled, lower-paid, and less secure occupations) now lead leisure lives that are simply disadvantaged rather than different. They do less of virtually everything except watching television. Age There has been a recent growth of interest in the entire aging process due to the aging of the populations in economically advanced countries. The main changes that occur in leisure during the life course are well known, and these have not changed. Young people and young adult singles are the most active age groups in most forms of out-of-home leisure. Then, many leisure activities are dropped during a “life cycle squeeze” that accompanies new household and family formation. In later life, it is exceptional rather than the rule for older leisure interests to be revived or new leisure activities taken up. The general trend is for participation in out-of-home leisure to decline further as people retire from work, as incomes decline, family members disperse, following bereavement, and eventually declining health. Yet later life is known to be the life stage when active leisure makes the greatest difference to personal well-being, which

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depends on people remaining active whereas most become increasingly inactive. A key issue for leisure research is how this might be changed.

Leisure values (choosing, doing things for their own sake, a fun morality) replacing the work ethic and pervading all areas of life. In practice, work remains governed by a business rationality.

Gender The trend over time in Western countries is toward genderless leisure. This results from more women taking part in leisure activities that were once considered masculine—watching and playing sports, drinking alcohol fulsomely, and going out in all-female groups. However, there are still gender differences, and today, the main controversy is whether these are simply differences or evidence that one sex (usually presumed to be men) is advantaged, while the other (women) is disadvantaged. The “just differences” case is, first, the lack of evidence that women want to do more of the things that men do more of, namely, playing outdoor sports, consuming large quantities of alcohol, and losing money on gambling, and second, that wherever and whenever time diaries have been used, the results have shown consistently that over the entire life course, men and women do broadly similar amounts of work when all kinds of work are taken into account (paid work, housework, and caring). The contrary view is that a presumption of female disadvantage is justified because overall women earn less than men, and their leisure is less “pure” (more likely to be shared with children) and more fragmented (more likely to be interrupted by housework and child care).

The Role of Leisure in Society Its growth has been accompanied by repeated forecasts of leisure playing not only a larger but also a stronger role in people’s lives. However, up to now, all specific predictions have been confounded. Self-actualization and personal fulfillment for everyone as an outcome of people’s enhanced scope to express their full potential through leisure activities. In practice, life satisfaction and happiness (as measured by questionnaires) have not risen alongside the growth of leisure time and activity. Leisure time becoming pivotal, with other activities fitted around leisure priorities. In practice, leisure continues to concede precedence to work and family obligations.

Leisure becoming the source of our most significant social relationships. Leisure is often where future marital partners first meet each other. Some claim that friends are replacing families as sources of social and emotional support. However, this probably applies, as it has always applied, only during the (nowadays extended) youth and young adult life stages. Leisure interests and activities becoming major sources of identities—who we feel we really are and how others see us. All social roles confer identities, but do leisure identities operate in as sustained and generalized ways (observed in all spheres of life) as age, sex, ethnic or national, and occupational identities? The main roles of present-day leisure appear to be basically the same as yesterday: recuperation and restoration of mind and body, inconsequential enjoyment, and expressing interests and identities with other roots (occupations, families, nationality, gender, and age).

State Interventions All governments intervene in leisure. They provide directly, and they subsidize. They tax and sometimes prohibit. Governments intervene with a variety of objectives and have always done so. As a result, we have track records from which it is possible to say what works or at least stands a reasonable chance of success and which aims are unlikely to be realized. Governments can try to change the public’s leisure behavior. Reducing crime is still a good promise to make when seeking state support for youth leisure provisions. This is despite the now abundant evidence that leisure provisions have not worked. Despite generous state support for the classical arts in most Western countries, the audiences for classical music, opera, and ballet remained little changed throughout the twentieth century. The U.K. government is among the many that are currently urging more active leisure to fight an “obesity epidemic,” but in the United Kingdom, levels of participation in sports

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and other forms of active leisure have declined since the early 1990s. State support is often justified in terms of widening access to include the less well-off, but this has also failed to work. In sports and the arts, and indeed in virtually everything that has received state support, it is the better-off who have benefited most from the provisions. Governments can promote and publicize a country’s assets to boost inward tourism, which then triggers an economic multiplier. They can also try to raise their countries’ international profiles, boost national prestige, and strengthen national identities by encouraging and publicizing high achievements in sports and the arts. This can work, but the “game” is zero-sum. In the short term, the global size of the tourist market is finite. One country’s gain is another country’s loss, and this also applies in the quest for artistic and sporting excellence (there can be only one winner in any event). Governments can protect leisure resources and maintain them for public benefit in perpetuity. They can do this with the countryside, coastlines, urban parks, heritage sites, and artifacts. This really does work. There are opportunity costs—of selling land for development or private use, for example—but the public benefits can last forever. This not only works but also can do so for every country, region, city, town, and village.

The Case for More Comparisons Most of our knowledge about leisure is based on experience and research in Western countries. This knowledge may not apply in all modern societies because, as emphasized earlier, leisure is highly context dependent. Modernization in the West has been linked to de-traditionalization, a process that is less evident in Saudi Arabia despite the country’s startling economic progress. In Islamic countries, modern leisure may well develop differently than in the West. In China, the legacies of Confucianism and Taoism are unlikely to be eradicated and may well have profound implications for the people’s leisure. In China and in other newly and recently industrializing countries of East Asia, normal hours of work are at levels that western

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Europe and North America left behind a century ago. Hours of work may be rolled back as the Asian countries become more prosperous, or the Asian’s countries’ traditional cultures could lead to their adopting different modern priorities. Former communist countries have a distinctive set of recent experiences: loss of state support for leisure provisions alongside the impoverishment of the majority of the populations and the creation of new, tiny super-rich strata during the early stages of the postcommunist transition. These countries also have a deeper history, which remains an important source of knowledge about how modern leisure is constituted. Communism provided examples of leisure in societies where there were no commercial suppliers and no genuine voluntary associations and where the state had a much stronger purchase over how citizens used their leisure than has been exercised in any other modern societies. Ken Roberts See also Affluent Society; Gender; Harried Leisure Class; Information Technology; Leisure Studies; Measuring Standards of Living; Postindustrial Society; Youth Culture

Further Readings Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Dumazedier, Joffre. Toward a Society of Leisure. New York: Free Press, 1967. Gershuny, Jonathan. Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Parker, Stanley. The Future of Work and Leisure. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1971. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907. Rapoport, Rhona, and Robert N. Rapoport. Leisure and the Family Life-Cycle. London: Routledge, 1975. Robinson, John P., and Geoffrey Godbey. Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999. Schor, Juliet B. The Overworked American. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Stebbins, Robert. Amateurs, Professionals and Serious Leisure. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queens University Press, 1992. Wearing, Betsy. Leisure and Feminist Theory. London: Sage, 1998.

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Leisure Studies

LEISURE STUDIES Leisure studies is an academic discipline that studies leisure, combining theories and methods from sociology, psychology, economics, history, geography, and many other disciplines.

Foundations Leisure studies was created in North America in the 1950s and 60s. These were not the first scholars to study leisure, but they were the first to describe themselves collectively as leisure scholars. At that time, leisure scholars paid little if any attention to commercial leisure and consumer cultures. Their leisure was serviced by public and voluntary sector providers. This is no longer the case (leisure studies today has wider horizons), but the initially limited perspective of leisure studies helps to explain why the study of consumption and consumer cultures developed as separate enterprises. It would be an oversimplification to say that the birth of leisure studies was a straightforward response to the growth of leisure and recognition of its importance in people’s lives. There were additional influences that gave North American leisure studies a specifically North American character. The 1950s and 1960s were years of steady expansion in higher education in the United States. By the end of the 1960s, around half of all young Americans were graduating high school and enrolling in college. This expansion led to a graduatization (a more recently coined term) of occupations for which a college degree was not formerly required. These occupations included professional and management jobs in the public parks and recreation services. By World War II, the United States already had public recreation services, which included urban and national parks. Parks were the jewels in public leisure provisions. University departments with parks and recreation and similar titles were created to supply these leisure services with qualified labor, and the subject taught in these departments was called leisure studies. The departments gave parks a privileged position in their teaching and research portfolios, but students were also prepared for work in sports, with the disabled, the elderly, at-risk youth, and in other specialist leisure fields. The United States’ leisure scholars have never created a scholarly association. They have always

aligned with and met during conferences of the National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA), which is primarily an association of parks professionals. There is a College of Leisure Sciences, a group of leading leisure scholars, currently with around one hundred members, which also holds its meetings at NRPA conferences. The NRPA launched North America’s first academic leisure journal, the Journal of Leisure Research, in 1969. In 1978, this was joined by a second journal, Leisure Sciences. Canada’s leisure scholars organized the first of what became a triennial series of congresses in 1975 and in 1983 created the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies (CALS). These congresses have become the main primarily scholarly forum for leisure researchers and teachers from all over North America. During the 1970s, leisure studies spread to Britain. The North American subject was a model, and the existing leisure studies literature was largely American in origin. However, the British version of leisure studies was not an exact replica. The circumstances in which leisure studies was established in U.K. higher education were broadly similar to the favorable conditions in America in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, U.K. higher education was expanding, especially in polytechnics, which at that time paralleled universities in a binary higher education system. A feature of the polytechnics was supposed to be their greater responsiveness to the economy’s labor requirements. By the 1970s, the United Kingdom had a set of national agencies with responsibilities for the arts, the countryside, sports, and tourism, plus the older British Broadcasting Corporation. Then, during the 1970s, as part of a broader rationalization (we would now say modernization) of local government, formerly separate local authority departments of baths, parks, libraries, playing fields, and so on were merged in departments, which usually had leisure or recreation in their titles. Thus, national agencies and local government were then creating leisure services jobs to which graduates from leisure studies departments could be recruited. Parks have been less central in the United Kingdom than in North American leisure studies. Sports have been the kind of leisure in which U.K. leisure studies has displayed particular interest. There are two reasons for this. First, sports account for large proportions of the efforts and budgets of local authority leisure services departments, and these departments, together with the national agencies for sports (there

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are now separate agencies for the four countries of the United Kingdom) and their regional offshoots, all offer jobs that are suitable for graduates. Second, the bases from which leisure studies grew in polytechnics were often courses that had trained physical education teachers. During the 1970s, former teacher training colleges, which had already become colleges of education, became colleges of higher education and broadened their syllabi. Some of these colleges were assimilated into polytechnics. Others remained freestanding, but nearly all these institutions were given university status in the 1990s or early twentyfirst century. U.K. leisure scholars established their own scholarly association, the Leisure Studies Association (LSA), in 1975 and launched an official journal, Leisure Studies, in 1982. The LSA has probably been the world’s most active and influential association of leisure scholars. Its journal and papers presented at its annual conferences, which have filled a series of books, have become a major part of the literature used in leisure studies courses all over the world. The national conferences of the LSA regularly attract delegates from many other countries and also act as a forum where researchers with specific interests in sports, tourism, hospitality, events, and so on, can find common ground. Two international bodies that were created in the 1950s and ’60s helped to globalize leisure studies by linking the Anglo-American communities to scholars based elsewhere who were studying leisure, though not necessarily under that label, and by simultaneously kindling interest in the serious academic study of leisure where this had not previously existed. First, the World Leisure and Recreation Association (WLRA), now known as the World Leisure Organization, was formed in North America in 1952. By the 1980s, WLRA was organizing World Leisure Congresses (their current title), which have become biannual events. The World Leisure Organization (formerly WLRA) has its own refereed publication, the World Leisure Journal, which is the senior journal in the field in terms of age. Second, at the end of the 1960s, the International Sociological Association (ISA) established a Research Committee on Leisure (RC13). The ISA now has over 50 research committees. They are numbered in the order in which they were created; RC13 is among the oldest. Leisure scholars who are not sociologists attend the meetings of this committee, which has

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always aligned as closely with leisure studies as with mainstream sociology. The original official journal of RC13, Loisir et Societe/Leisure and Society, is bilingual (English and French) and is edited and published in Canada. At the time of its foundation, most of RC13’s active members were not from the United States or the United Kingdom. They were from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, France, and Frenchspeaking Canada. These countries had grown their own leisure studies (though not under that title). The communist authorities in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites had a strong interest in their people’s “ways of life.” Communism was supposed to be nurturing a socialist way of life. Its details were unknown. It was to be developed through praxis (theoretically informed action). However, this way of life was expected to synthesize elements of high and traditional (folk) cultures and to obliterate divisions between town and countryside and between social classes. Communism regarded free time and holidays as important rights, and great efforts were made by governments and communist party organizations to ensure that all sections of the population had access to the arts and opportunities to play sports and, if they were talented, to excel in these fields. By the 1960s, all the communist countries had research centers that investigated how people were spending their free time and rates of participation in different leisure activities. The French had its own history in and approaches to the study of leisure. Ever since the French Revolution, the democratization of culture (access to the Louvre and other cultural facilities and opportunities to practise and to excel in these fields) had been an aim of state policy in France. By the 1960s, France had a minileisure research industry charting the extent (very limited) to which culture had actually been democratized. This was the context in which France produced cultural radicals who advocated cultural democracy—recognizing and enabling the people (the workers) to develop their own cultural forms and products instead of trying to engage them in the culture of the elite. This was the intellectual context against which Pierre Bourdieu formed his ideas about the role of culture in the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities. Joffre Dumazedier, the first president of RC13, intervened in these debates, arguing that leisure time could act as a source of new leisure values, which would usher in a “society of leisure.”

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Leisure studies proved easy to internationalize because researchers found huge similarities in uses of leisure time in all modern countries (the predominance of TV viewing, for example). Moreover, similar differences in leisure behavior by age, gender, and social class were discovered. Leisure researchers everywhere were using comparable research methods, most notably time-use surveys and participation surveys, which ask people whether they take part in lists of activities and, if they do take part, how frequently. By joining RC13 and/or WLRA, individuals and groups that were studying leisure in all parts of the world could become part of global leisure studies. Enthusiasts were able to take models from abroad and implant them in their own countries’ higher education and research agendas. The most successful transplanting has been of Anglo-American leisure studies into Australia and New Zealand, which now have their own Australia and New Zealand Association for Leisure Studies (ANZALS). This particular transplantation was facilitated by the migration of U.K. and North American leisure scholars to the Southern Hemisphere. Through the activities of RC13 and WLRA, it was discovered that kindred research was being accomplished in a large number of additional countries—the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Latin America (this list is not exhaustive). Since the 1970s, existing models of leisure studies (usually the American model) have been taken to and established in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and other AsiaPacific countries.

Challenges Throughout its lifetime, leisure studies has been a rather shaky alliance of scholars who have never been agreed on whether what unites them is a field of study or an embryonic discipline. Inevitably, the first generation who created leisure studies had roots in older disciplines—sociology, psychology, geography, economics, and so on. Were they fusing their contributions into a new synthesized body of theory and methods that would stand as a discipline in its own right, equal in intellectual stature to older academic subjects? Or was leisure studies simply a field best studied by “proper” sociologists, economists, and so forth? This debate has never been resolved. It

is not peculiar to leisure studies. There are equivalent arguments about urban studies, education, criminology, et cetera. Since the 1970s, there have been additional challenges. New divisions have opened among leisure scholars. One might say that leisure studies has fallen victim to its own success. By the 1980s, the subject had grown to a size that enabled, maybe required, it to split into scholars with interests in particular types of leisure—sports, tourism, the arts, and so on. Leisure has always faced challengers for core concept status in its field. Play, recreation, popular culture, and everyday life have been contenders. However, in recent years, the most serious challenge has been from “consumption.” Present-day societies are more likely to be called consumer societies and their cultures consumer cultures than leisure societies and leisure cultures. Scholars attracted into the field since the 1970s, especially those from older academic disciplines, have been more likely to identify with consumption than leisure. Leisure studies today embraces commercial leisure and consumer cultures, but most research and writing on consumption and consumer cultures is outside leisure studies. Maybe greater cross-fertilisation would sensitize consumption researchers to the boundaries and barriers to the spread of consumer cultures.

Achievements Leisure studies is not really threatened. It can thrive without students enrolled in courses titled leisure studies and with scholars whose primary affiliations lie elsewhere—with a particular kind of leisure, or core concept, or an older discipline. Among its cognate subjects, leisure studies has the advantage of having been first on the scene. It now has a literature with a history. It has a well-established set of scholarly associations, conferences, and journals. The conferences and journals are venues where specialists in different kinds of leisure, and even consumption, can still reach wider audiences than anywhere else. Even more important, leisure studies has developed a solid body of knowledge that no other subject replicates. The kinds of research in which leisure scholars specialize (they use the findings even if they do not collect the data) are time-use surveys and participation surveys. There are now time series in some countries spanning fifty years. Leisure studies

Lévi-Strauss, Claude

can show how time is used in different sections of a population (males and females, different age groups and socioeconomic strata), and how this has changed over the last half century or so. There is similar information about participation in different leisure activities. The main relationships that have been identified (by age, gender, and socioeconomic status) have proved remarkably durable and constant between countries. This gives leisure studies a solid knowledge base and a set of explanations (some agreed, others contested) of the variations and changes that have occurred. Ken Roberts See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Consumer Culture in the USSR; Consumer Rights and the Law; Leisure; Measuring Standards of Living; Tourism Studies; Well-Being

Further Readings Cushman, G., A. J. Veal, and J. Zuzanek, eds. Free Time and Leisure Participation: International Perspectives. Wallingford, UK: Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International (CABI), 2006. Dumazedier, Joffre. Toward a Society of Leisure. New York: Free Press, 1967. Roberts, Kenneth. Leisure in Contemporary Society. Wallingford, UK: Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International (CABI), 2006. Robinson, John P., and Geoffrey Godbey. Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Rojek, Chris. Leisure Theory: Principles and Practice. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Rojek, Chris, Susan M. Shaw, and Anthony J. Veal, eds. A Handbook of Leisure Studies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE (1908–2009) Traditionally, anthropology was dominated by detailed studies of particular peoples, but in the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss developed an analytical approach to culture that provoked the linguistic turn throughout the humanities. Lévi-Strauss looked at the patterns of similarity and differences between aspects of different cultures—kinship, myth,

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religion, magic, food—and showed how they could be interpreted systematically. He introduced the idea of structural linguistics to help in this task of crosscultural comparison and established the approach of structuralism that resonated far beyond anthropology. Structuralism offered a method that could be applied to instances of cultural form independently of the historical detail and ethnological specificity. In Structural Anthropology (1958 [English trans. 1968]), Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems could be analyzed with an approach, derived from the linguistics of Nikolai Troubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, that identified pairs “of oppositions” (1968, 35). When kinship was reduced to a series of components (husband, wife, son, uncle, etc.) whose variable patterns of relations across different societies were represented using symbols borrowed from mathematics, the analysis revealed structural consistencies in the various transformations of relations between terms. Apparently, different kinship systems were simply different ways of achieving a certain type of mediation, namely, that it is “the women of the group, who are circulated between clans, lineages, or families, in place of the words of the group, which are circulated between individuals” (1968, 61). Lévi-Srauss argued that the techniques of structural linguistics could be applied to kinship because its cultural form is realized in and through language, through the way people refer to each other and account for their relations. In rebutting the sexism implicit in the asymmetry between the sexes in his analysis, he pointed out that the women in these systems were not mere objects but were able to speak and contribute to the formation of culture. One of Lévi-Strauss’s most significant contributions to the analysis of culture was to point out that an abstract theory is not necessary for a member to have a detailed and systematic knowledge about what he or she is doing. The complex classifications and taxonomies of plants and animals created by premodern people require equivalent mental operations to science but use a different approach. Presuming that those things that look alike function alike, for example, may not stand up to experimental scrutiny but such a “science of the concrete” does help to organize complex classification systems. Mythical thought is, he says in The Savage Mind (1962 [English trans. 1966]), a “kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’” (1966, 13) drawing on signs that already

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have a cultural currency as ideas, using “whatever is at hand.” In contrast, the science of the engineer constructs ideal concepts designed for each specific project that escape the constraints of their cultural origins. Whether designing a new commodity, putting together images and copy for an advertisement, producing a television program, or shopping for an outfit, the participant in consumer culture is engaged in a complex bricolage of signs to create something new that nonetheless carries the traces of the culture from which it has been formed. In analyzing the consumption of food, LéviStrauss showed that as humans employed fire to cook their food, they demonstrated a move toward human “culture,” but when they tolerated putrefaction, it signified a return toward animal “nature.” Cultural transformation is achieved not only by the cooking of food but also by the cooking up of stories: the myths about sex, death, family relationships, animals, and nature that he analyzed in painstaking detail. LéviStrauss analyzed over eight hundred myths from different tribal groups of indigenous people in America and discovered recurring patterns of categories and themes. His approach to anthropology demonstrated the possibilities of cross-cultural analyses but most importantly showed that ordinary culture was not peculiar to the specific history of a group of people. Ordinary culture—and this is as true of consumer culture as native preindustrial tribal cultures—is everywhere a vehicle for managing the complexities of social life: establishing origins, marking social relationships, setting out ways of life, and distinguishing human culture from nature. In the study of consumption, Lévi-Strauss’s themes of food, totems, myth, magic, and knowledge recur as it is recognized that contemporary culture creates myths through advertising, treats commodities as magical, brands as totems, food as lifestyle and links social identity to knowing how to manage these elements of cultural life. Tim Dant See also Anthropology; Branding; Bricolage; Cultural Studies; Food Consumption; Gender; Identity; Lifestyle; Structuralism

Further Readings Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1966. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1968.

LICENSING

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Licensing agreements lease the right to use legally a protected brand name and its relevant logo and graphic to apply on a product, a service, or a promotion. The licensor owns the mark, and the licensee can be a manufacturer, supplier, or distributor who acts on behalf of the licensor and whose production output is increased by the perceived value of a well-known brand. In the fashion industry, licensing issues mainly concern a partnership between a brand with high reputation (often international) and a local or international manufacturer, who often holds an agreement to distribute. Licensing can be studied through various disciplines concerning management, law, international commerce, and globalization. It concerns intellectual property rights, export techniques and international distribution, marketing and branding, product development and extension. In terms of management, licensing is a powerful means to grow a company, though in a different way as a licensor or as a licensee. A licensor bears less financial risk compared to a licensee who invests in production, distribution, communication, and often design and creation. It is a means to reach new customer targets and geographical zones and expand business rapidly and efficiently. In terms of market positioning, licensing agreements on clothing brands have a wide scope and are used by all kinds of companies. Brands can range from high fashion (with a remarkable aesthetic sense and image, such as haute couture), to middle- and lower-priced character goods (cartoon figures, movies), with relatively low design input. In terms of products, clothing brands used to develop “textile made” items (ready to wear for women, men and children’s wear, lingerie and underwear, knitwear, sportswear, nightwear, etc.) are increasingly expanded into new markets such as cosmetics and perfumes, leather goods, interior goods and home furnishings (e.g., Ralph Lauren Home collection), jewelry, and more recently high tech (e.g., Dior mobile phone).

Historical and Geographical Outline The history of licensing dates back to the advent of the entertainment industry in the United States.

Licensing of Clothing Brands

Movie stars (e.g., Shirley Temple), comic characters (e.g., Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny), radio (in the 1930s), and television programs in the late 1940s and 1950s reached millions of households. Products bearing these names were sold to an increasing number of customers. Licensing went through different stages from the late 1940s to today. French designer Christian Dior was a pioneer among his peers in haute couture, not only for the “New Look” he launched but also for signing licensing agreements with American department stores. This company was also a pioneer when in 1998 it canceled its major contract with Kanebo group in Japan to reposition the brand and invest in a new and glamorous brand image for younger targets. In fact, after a boom of designer brands licensing in the 1970s and 1980s, due to the development of mass consumption and fashion appeal, the business grew worldwide. In the 1990s, a lack of control in brand management, resulting in poor design, product quality, distribution, and communication, harmed the brand image of major clothing brands. As a consequence, many companies changed strategy and canceled contracts. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, most manufacturers of consumer goods produce licensed products, as identifiable brand names are an added value in the competitive market. With the advent of worldwide sports events, such as World Cup (since 1994), licensing has reached a different step as a powerful marketing advantage and a financial leverage, although products involved are relatively lowpriced goods (cups, hats, T-shirts, posters, pens, etc.). In terms of geographical reach, licensing is a global business. The development of consumer society in Europe and Japan, after the United States, further developed the business internationally. As a matter of fact, Western clothing brands have been used as licensing agreements to enter the Japanese market, but in the 1990s, buyers in this mature market changed their consumer habits, and appreciated authentic goods directly imported from abroad. More recently, China has become the market with the highest potential, with a high demand deriving from a growing middle class. Also, licensing is a way for local Chinese manufacturers to learn foreign expertise and to gain knowledge, as the Japanese companies did for various years. Some countries are more legitimate in terms of licensing and to a large extent come from Europe and

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the United States. The most famous and financially powerful licensed brands in clothing come from France (Dior, Givenchy), the United States (Ralph Lauren, Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein), Italy (Armani, Versace, Valentino, Gucci), Germany (Hugo Boss, Escada), and the United Kingdom (Burberry, Vivienne, Westwood).

Contemporary Relevance and Key Issues Nurturing the brand and controlling it is a key issue. As a matter of fact, licensees can be larger than the fashion brands they sign with. For example, the l’Oreal group, a leader in cosmetics, enabled worldwide distribution of French brand Cacharel perfumes and strengthened its image, although the fashion brand promoter has had difficulty managing a retail network. Contrarily, the Cardin group signed numerous contracts, which resulted in a loss of its brand value. Scarcity is part of the process, and poorly managed licensing may give too much exposure to a brand. Counterfeit is another key issue. Intellectual property rights are not applied equally around the world, especially in China. In the same way, associations (e.g., Licensing Industry Merchandisers’ Association, or LIMA, in the United States), trade shows, and trade publications (e.g., Superbrand in the United Kingdom since 1994) relating to licensing and branding (e.g., Interbrand) also help the industry develop worldwide, by organizing awards, surveys, and rankings. Therefore, attending international licensing shows, which gather licensors and licensees from around the world, is a way for those involved in licensing to keep ahead of central issues and experts networks.

Future Direction and Application Future directions for research on licensing may look to contemporary business and brand management evolution and globalization as licensing will remain an efficient tool to adapt to local needs of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Identifiable products, often at a more reasonable price, suiting different regions and middle-class consumers, are better managed by local licensees. Furthermore, the increasing role of design in the industry, leading to a “design management” approach, will emphasize the need for research on innovation and branding and for understanding the creative and cultural

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industries. As such, national branding—the strategy a government implements to promote its country’s image and change its perception on an international scale—may be considered one of the future directions for research. Sabine Ichikawa See also Branding; Clothing Consumption; Consumer Culture in East Asia; Culture Industries

Further Readings Aaker, David A. Building Strong Brands. New York: Free Press, 1996. Aaker, David A., V. Kumar, and George S. Day. Marketing Research. 5th ed. New York: Wiley, 1995. Kapferer, Jean-Noel. Strategic Brand Management: New Approaches to Creating and Evaluating Brand Equity. London: Kogan Page, 1997. Kapferer, Jean-Noel. Reinventing the Brand. London: Kogan Page, 2001.

LIFE COURSE Life course refers to the identifiable stages of transition that individuals and households typically pass through, such as childhood, youth, parenthood, middle age, and retirement. It is, therefore, a term used to relate social structures, institutions, and history to particular changes and trajectories in individuals and families over time. Its importance to consumer culture rests on the identification of typical patterns (and demand) for consumption activities across life-course stages and in terms of how consumer culture impacts on, and even fragments, those stages. Its contemporary usage highlights the importance of life experience for understanding social change and the contingency and variation of individual or family transitions as opposed to a series of fixed, sequential stages. This disembarks from the term’s original use by sociologist Leonard Cain in “Life Course and Social Structure” (in Handbook of Modern Sociology, edited by R. E. L. Faris, 1964) to refer to how social status changes as a function of age. The change in focus coincided with a drop in the popularity of life cycle, often used interchangeably with life course but more commonly emphasizing individual development, as in psychologist Erik Erikson’s eight stages in Identity and the Life Cycle (1959/1980), or change

in nuclear family structures, as first established by demographer Paul Glick’s seven-stage “Family Life Cycle” (1947). The concept of life cycle, borrowed from the natural sciences, emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in social scientific debates and continues to be used in economics and in the study of organizations (O’Rand and Krecker 1990). The life-course perspective is mainly used to discuss individual aging processes and the family, although it has some claims as a research paradigm in its own right for understanding social change (Heinz, Huinink, and Weymann 2009). The work of Glen Elder, following his book Children of the Great Depression (1978), has been central in developing and conceptualizing the term. The main principles of the term are outlined by Vern Bengtson, Glen H. Elder, and Norella M. Putney as the cohort interconnectedness of lives often referred to as generations, the importance of historical context in shaping individual trajectories, individual- or family-based transitions relative to these contexts, interconnectedness between life-course stages themselves, and the recognition of people’s own agency in their construction of their lives. Large-scale demographic changes, such as the aging of most advanced industrial societies, have consolidated life course as a field of social scientific study, particularly as the fragmentation of work rhythms and the rise of consumer culture have been highlighted as de-standardizing the stages it is seen to consist of. For example, Zygmunt Bauman (1990) refers to the emergence of “nomadic” identities across the life course as consumer cultures make available a range of consumption styles, irrespective of age, that people can “wander” between, as opposed to conventional constraints related to stage in the life course. According to Andrew Blaikie, such processes lead to a blurring of life-stage boundaries. In other words, the emerging range of consumption styles and lifestyles generate increasingly individualized trajectories, what Jenny Hockey and Allison James describe as being a “pattern of consumerism which points towards self-generated life-course transitions” (2003, 194). Studies of popular culture, however, continue to focus on particular age brackets. These include particular interest in the consumption of young people and, since the 1980s, the “new old” or “third agers”: middle-aged retirees with the material affluence to continue to engage with consumer culture (Laslett 1989).

Life Course

While agency and individualism have been emphasized in recent accounts of changes in the contemporary experience of the life course, there have also been studies that discuss the often ambivalent role of advertising and popular culture in promoting “new” identities, bounded not by age but by cultural interests. Studies on “images” of aging have revealed, on the one hand, new discursive constructions of older age as a period of renewal and of self-exploration, as in the development of postretirement lifestyle titles, such as Choice, previously named Retirement Choice (Featherstone and Hepworth 1995). Portrayals of these opportunities for leisure and self-actualization, however, continue to fetishize youthfulness and pathologize declines in productivity and physical or sexual abilities (Katz and Marshall, 2003). Hockey and James also point out, in Social Identities across the Lifecourse, that marketers continue to market according to strict age categories, suggesting that although middle and older ages certainly represent a growing spending power, these more empowering and transcendent forms of identifications are considered—by marketers at least—as somewhat superficial. The debate over life-course stages clearly reflects larger theoretical arguments between more poststructuralist accounts of society and pragmatists who question the extent of the breakdown of traditional-modernist social categories. The popularity of terms such as the third age have transformed how consumption over the life course is understood, but research also shows a tension between this and the inevitability of physical aging processes, as well as the continuing relevance of class, ethnicity, and other indicators. The use of diets, exercise regimes, and plastic surgery allows for an increasingly motile body that puts off the most unattractive, if not the most uncomfortable, effects of physical aging. Qualitative research has often portrayed changes in the body as inevitable but superficial, the tension between outward aging processes and an “essentially youthful self” a “mask of age” (Featherstone and Hepworth 1991). This kind of move situates stages of the life course as the beliefs and attitudes of the “rest of society,” approximating Cain’s changing social status model of life course originally conceptualized in the 1960s. Stephen Katz and Barbara Marshall, meanwhile, point out “popular demographic terms such as ‘boomers’ . . . and ‘third agers’ gloss over the negative realities of poverty

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and inequality in old age” (2003, 5). And Sandra Fredman shows these inequalities to disproportionately affect members of ethnic minorities. Although consumer culture offers opportunities to self-actualize that may render life-course trajectories much more flexible, social and cultural imperatives still dominate many people’s experiences of life stages, transitions, and of aging. As something of a footnote, while many agree that popular culture and demographic changes have served to de-standardize the life course, there often appears no clear consensus on what exactly has been de-standardized. Those working in the field of families seem to be referring to timing of key generational “transitions,” such as childbirth and the start of parenting and new or changed roles relating to relationships or kinship. For individuals, however, it is considerably more ambiguous, implicating one or more familial roles; the starting, ending, and resuming of work and education; and membership of popular age-based signifiers, such as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle, and old age. Since the popularity of the term life course is in part based on a rejection of the stages outlined in the definition of life cycle, there is an increasing need to return to the model or to reconstruct it in order for it to remain conceptually useful. Luke Yates See also Age and Aging; Childhood; Families; Generation; Households; Identity; Retirement; Youth Culture

Further Readings Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1992. Bengtson, Vern, Glen H. Elder, and Norella M. Putney. “The Lifecourse Perspective on Ageing: Linked Lives, Timing, and History.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing, edited by Malcolm L. Johnson, 493– 501. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Blaikie, Andrew. Ageing and Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. “The Mask of Ageing and the Postmodern Life Course.” Chap. 15 in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, edited by Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage, 1991. Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. “Images of Positive Aging: A Case Study of Retirement Choice Magazine.” Chap. 3 in Images of Aging: Cultural

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Representations of Later Life, edited by Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick. London: Routledge, 1995. Fredman, Sandra. “The Age of Equality.” Chap. 3 in Age as an Equality Issue, edited by Sandra Fredman and Sarah Spencer. Oxford: Hart, 2003. Heinz, Walter R., Johannes Huinink, and Ansgar Weymann. The Life Course Reader: Individuals and Societies across Time. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus Verlag, 2009. Hockey, Jenny, and Allison James. Social Identities across the Lifecourse. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Katz, Stephen, and Barbara Marshall. “New Sex for Old: Lifestyle, Consumerism, and the Ethics of Aging Well.” Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003): 3–16. Laslett, Peter. A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. O’Rand, Angela M., and Margaret L. Krecker. “Concepts of the Life Cycle: Their History, Meanings, and Uses in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 16 (1990): 241–262.

LIFE(STYLE) POLITICS Life(style) politics have emerged as a new form of politics next to the politics we know from the world of voters, parties, and parliaments. According to Anthony Giddens, life politics are about lifestyle choices, about personal identity, about our personal ways of dealing with planetary threats and risks. Life politics concern the morals of everyday life and the “foundational principles” underlying our consumption practices and our lifestyles. They are in particular relevant for analyzing consumption behaviors since they can be shown to refer to our ways of dwelling in a house, taking a holiday, and eating and drinking. As forms of politics, they describe how we, as responsible citizens and as “ethical” consumers, become involved in efforts, projects, and policies to make this world a better, more sustainable world. The concept of life(style) politics as introduced by Giddens and Ulrich Beck in the sociological discourse takes on a special significance during the phase of reflexive modernity. It is assumed that—because of the disenchantment of science in particular—individuals are confronted with the need to reflect on the implicit and explicit choices implied in the reproduction of the set of practices that makes

up their lifestyles. When compared to earlier phases of modernity, the narrative of the self in reflexive modernity can be said to be a self-made construct to a considerable extent. Two dangers can be identified when discussing life(style) politics. First, because they are named life(style) politics, one could easily get the impression that these new politics are more superficial since they refer to the latest trends, fashions, and behaviors from the world of celebrities, women’s magazines, and cars. As life(style) politics, they would then be different from “real” or “genuine” politics in the sense of not addressing issues of power, conflict, and domination in a serious way. A second potential misunderstanding could be that life(style) politics are about individuals only. Because this new form of politics is about personal identities and about the norms and values that people adhere to in their everyday consumption behaviors, life politics run the risk of being treated as a form of “micropolitics” to be analyzed in isolation from the big political issues and social structures. In this entry, a discussion of life(style) politics is presented that prevents a shallow understanding or interpretation of life politics. It is argued that life(style) politics are as real and important as other, traditional forms of (emancipatory) politics. When it comes to changing deeply engrafted patterns of consumption in modern consumer societies, life(style) politics can be shown to be even more powerful and effective in some respects when compared to traditional forms of politics. They derive their specific powers from the interconnections made between private, personal affairs on the one hand and public, collective affairs on the other. As such, life(style) politics can do things that normal politics are not supposed to do: discuss, open up, and in some circumscribed ways interfere with the “personal” matters and lifestyle choices of sovereign consumers and their “private” consumption behaviors to contribute to and help establish more sustainable patterns of consumption in society. To move away from an “individualist interpretation,” it is argued that life(style) politics should be analyzed as politics of practices. They refer to the shared social practices that individuals embrace in their everyday life and the implicit or explicit ethical and political choices made in that respect. To further analyze and discuss the social and political nature of life(style) politics, in this entry, life(style) politics are compared with two other forms of political

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Ecological Citizenship Ecological citizenship is close to the existing concept of citizenship as used by David Held and other authors in the political science tradition. Especially, Andrew Dobson and his colleagues have contributed to the discussion of citizenship rights and responsibilities from the perspective of sustainable development. In the Dobson initiated debate, the concepts of ecological or environmental citizenship are defined in a broad way. Ecological citizenship is taken to refer not just to the public debate and the publicly defined roles for citizens in sustainable development; the concept is also said to embrace the attitudes and motives of individuals who choose sustainable behavior, both in the balization glo State Authority Ecological Citizenship

CCs

n zatio ali

Political Consumerism Market Authority

Figure 1

Life(style) Politics Moral Authority

globali za

As Beck in particular has made clear in a number of essays, politics in the twenty-first century are different from politics in the post–World War II period. The crucial difference between politics in simple (preChernobyl) and reflexive (post-Chernobyl) modernity has to do with the pervasive impact of globalization. First, due to globalization, the interrelations between the economy, politics, and civil society have changed. As a result of the more frequent and intense interpenetration of states, markets, and civil society, the neat distinction between citizens versus consumers has been dissolved. Second, the role of nation-states in national and international politics especially has to be reconsidered in reflexive modernity. According to Manuel Castells, in the global network society, states are no longer able to manage the flow of peoples, ideas, and risks in ways similar to the period directly following World War II. Politics and forms of authority in reflexive modernity are de-territorialized and denationalized in fundamental and irreversible ways while their primary tasks and responsibilities have changed. So third, instead of managing the distribution of “goods” in the context of the emerging national welfare states, the key challenges and tasks for politics in reflexive modernity have to do with the distribution of global “bads,” in particular the environmental, financial, and health and safety risks, which crosscut and perforate national borders. Instead of regulating access to (economic) resources, the regulation of exposure to global risks becomes the key challenge for politics at different levels, from the regional up to the global. It is against this background of the changing nature of politics in reflexive modernity that one has to discuss the different roles that individual human agents can adopt in processes of social and political change. The three ideal-type roles offered here

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Citizen-Consumer Roles in (Environmental) Change: Three Ideal-Types

as an analytical tool—illustrated in Figure 1—refer to different forms of authority, which are mobilized and used as legitimate sources of power, at the same time emphasizing different dimensions of the role of citizen consumers in processes of (environmental) change. The main aim of this entry is to provide an exploratory discussion of these three ideal-type roles for CCs. For a historical analysis of the emerging roles, rights and responsibilities of citizens and consumers, readers are referred to the work of Frank Trentmann in particular.

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engagements of citizen consumers (CCs) with (environmental) social change: ecological citizenship and ethical or political consumerism. All three ideal-type forms of political commitment of citizen consumers will shortly be introduced while elaborating in some detail on life(style) politics as politics of practices. At the end of this entry, the potential contribution of life(style) politics to redirecting empirical research on sustainable consumption is reviewed.

Three Ideal-Type Forms of Engagement of Citizen Consumers (CCs) with (Environmental) Change in Reflexive Modernity

Source: Gert Spaargaren and Arthur P. J. Mol 2008.

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public sphere as well as in the private sphere of the market. Issues which are normally discussed under the heading of “green consumption” and “the changing of attitudes and behaviors” are brought together under the umbrella of environmental citizenship. The concept of ecological citizenship used here remains a bit closer to the more circumscribed meaning attributed to the concept of citizenship in political sciences. It refers primarily to the participation of citizens in and their orientations toward political discourses on sustainable development. In the context of this societal, public discourse, the rights and responsibilities, or duties, of citizens are debated and defined. Citizens (rightly) demand to be free from environmental risks inflicted on them by others, inside or outside the territory of the nation-state(s) they belong to. They argue for environmental security in a similar vein as implied in the debates on national security. However, in the field of environmental politics there was no need for a 9/11 event to make citizens aware of the fact that nation-states alone or by themselves cannot guarantee environmental security. Cross bordering pollution and global environmental risks are and have been for a long time at the centre of environmental politics, as Beck in particular has argued. Ecological citizenship has gone through a process of denationalization or de-territorialization already since the 1980s. The fact that most citizen consumers do not perceive of transnational ecological citizenship rights and responsibilities as such has to do with the neglect in the political discourse of new forms of postnational or cosmopolitan citizenship. Also, environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been slow in recognizing and organizing new forms of ecological citizenship at transnational levels, partly since they feared for lower levels of environmental protection or security resulting from the denationalization of environmental politics. With the increase of both formal and informal transnational networks for environmental politics and governance and strengthened by the upsurge in informational governance, the postnational forms of ecological citizenship will most likely gain considerable importance in the near future. The use of public scorecards, transnational campaigns for naming and shaming, Internet-based mobilizations of environmental activists beyond national borders, and the strengthening of environmental NGO-networks at international—and even global—levels are just

a few examples of the new forms of transnational citizenship based forms of environmental authority. With globalization, these global civil society actors are expected to increase their relative power and authority vis-à-vis state-based forms of environmental authorities.

Political Consumerism Whereas ecological citizenship makes room for environmental authority primarily in the public domain, political consumerism articulates citizen-consumer authority in the private domain of consumption. Although globalization does not by itself lead to a loss of power for end users at the lower end of production-consumption chains and networks, political consumerism draws attention to the need for new forms of power and authority that citizen consumers can use in the context of globalized markets. Michelle Micheletti has been among the first to recognize the importance of new market-based forms of politics and has investigated them in some depth under the label of political consumerism. These more voluntary, ad hoc organized, and mostly civil society based forms of (environmental) politics have as their constitutive characteristic the fact that they are directed toward (the greening of) productionconsumption chains and networks that are behind our everyday consumption practices. Political consumerism refers to all the political forms that connect environmental activities of upstream economic actors of production-consumption chains and networks more directly and visibly with the interests and activities of citizen consumers at the lower end of these chains and networks, and vice versa. Figure 2 displays the relationships of power between actors at the upstream and actors at the downstream end of production-consumption chains and networks. It visualizes a concept of environmental power, which—in the tradition of Max Weber—could be circumscribed as the capacity of social actors to reduce the environmental impacts of consumption and production where these impacts are directly connected to sets of practices, which are predominantly under the control of other actors. In the environmental literature, the concepts of direct and indirect environmental impacts are used to refer to situations in which environmental performance is under the control of actors in the downstream (consumer or end user determined) and upstream

Life(style) Politics

(provider dominated) ends of production consumption chains and networks, respectively. To analyze and discuss market-based forms of politics, the label political consumerism is preferred over ethical consumerism to emphasize the fact that also these low-entry forms of environmental politics have to be organized and gain extra legitimacy and authority when a liaison can be realized with state environmental authorities at different levels of scale. The main and frequently discussed examples within this category are environmental labeling and certification schemes and related forms of the consumer boycotts of sustainable products and services of (green) providers. As can be concluded from the studies on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), and Fair Trade (FT) labels as conducted by Peter Oosterveer among others, citizen-consumers’ buying power is becoming an increasingly relevant source of power used for political purposes. And this insight is recognized and worked on by diverse networks covering actors and interests from civil society, the market, and the state. Where the FSC-labeling scheme is regarded as environmental NGO-initiated and dominated, the driving forces behind the MSC-label came from industry. Political consumerism is important for green providers since it helps create and sustain level playing fields for green industries and products. But political consumerism also works the other

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way around: In political consumerism, unfocused citizen-consumer concerns for sustainability are articulated, translated, and directed to providers in production-consumption chains, giving citizen consumers authority and power in a nontrivial way. Due to the globalizing of production-consumption networks, the role of trust (in distant providers, in invisible technologies, in complex and diverse information flows) gains special importance in this respect. Environmental NGOs again have a crucial role to play in this, since they are regarded by citizen consumers as the most reliable and successful trustenhancing mediators between market actors and citizen consumers.

Life(style) Politics and Social Practices Whereas ecological citizenship comes closest to politics and political consumerism refers to power relations in markets in particular, life(style) politics are primarily about civil society actors and about dynamics of change, which go beyond states and markets. Life(style)politics are life-world politics and as such directly connected to the morals and choices that are implied in our ordinary (consumption) routines. Because, as Zygmunt Bauman has noted, “lifestyles boil down almost entirely to styles of consumption” (1990, 207), life(style) politics and consumption can be regarded as being much interwoven also at the microlevel of our everyday life.

Power Flows Consumers

Disposal

Use

Access

direct impacts on the environment

Provisioning

Production

Design

indirect impacts on the environment

Providers

Figure 2

Relative Powers of Consumers and Providers in Influencing the (In)direct Environmental Impacts within Production-Consumption Chains

Source: Gert Spaargaren and C. S. A. (Kris) van Koppen 2009.

Life(style) Politics

a nctur l Spec ifi nju c

isposi t i ral D o na l

dwelling, the house going for a holiday commuting

on

cooking and dining out

Structure

bathing and showering

Figure 3

General Dispositional and Conjunctural Specific Elements of Lifestyles

Source: Gert Spaargaren and Peter Oosterveer 2010.

g

Co

ne Ge Actors

Social Practices

systems of pr ovi si

Life Styles

Following Rob Stones in this respect, we distinguish between a general dispositional dimension of the lifestyle of actors on the one hand and a conjunctural specific dimension on the other (see Figure 3). The general dispositional dimension of the lifestyle consists of the foundational principles specific actors adhere to and that they use throughout a number of behavioral contexts. As such, the concept resembles the concept of attitude as used in the sociopsychological tradition of research on (environmental) behaviors and sustainable consumption in particular. The conjunctural specific dimension of the lifestyle of actors refers to and is connected with the specific set of practices they embrace in everyday life. The rules and resources—or values and dispositions— operational in this dimension of the lifestyle are (tacitly) followed, reproduced, and altered in the context of social practices, which actors share with other actors. By outlining and defining two dimensions of lifestyles in this specific way, it is possible to connect the individual to the social in a theoretically meaningful way. Life(style) politics then refers to the ways in which (groups of) individuals at some points in time (especially when confronted with sudden changes, challenges, or fatal moments) are made to reflect on their everyday lives and the narratives attached to it. The sources of deroutinization and the ensuing discursive reflection can be located either in personal, private life (divorce, illness) or rooted in

d lize

When living their daily lives in reflexive modernity, individuals are confronted with the impacts of globalization in a direct and concrete manner. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the cars we drive come from systems of provision that by now have global reach. When bothering about the sustainability aspects of products and services in terms of traceability and the social and ecological conditions of their production and distribution, we become aware of the massive impacts of globalization on production and consumption. It is because of the globalization of consumption that life(style) politics can be said to connect the personal to the planetary in a direct, unmediated way in the present phase of modernity. While it is true that life(style) politics are about private, personal, and individual morals, and commitments and responsibilities, it is important to note that life(style) politics do not favor automatically or exclusively individualist notions of politics and consumer empowerment. They are individualist policies in a specific, circumscribed way. The concept of lifestyle as used by Anthony Giddens refers to the cluster of habits and story lines that result from individuals’ participation in a set of everyday life routines they share with others. Every citizen consumer can be characterized by his or her unique combination of shared practices, the level of integration of these practices, and the story lines that he or she connects to these practices.

a lob

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Rules & Resources

Life(style) Politics

wider social and political processes (bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE]-food crisis, financial crisis). Deroutinization of practices can (be made to) happen both at the level of the individual and on the level of social practices. The direct consequences of agents reflexively (re)considering their existing behaviors and narratives will most times pertain both to the level of the individuals as well as to the practices involved. Life(style) politics are important for sustainable consumption policies primarily because they deal with individual affairs without disconnecting the private and the personal from the public and the global. If separate waste collection is well organized at home and engraved into the lifestyle of the individual, he or she will be disturbed, upset and deroutinized when the infrastructure for waste separation turns out to be lacking in the office, at the railway station, and at the campsite. Or it will be the other way around: When employers make a set of sustainable options for commuters available at work, they can seek to deliberately optimize this “green mobility mix” in such a way that actors start using the options also at home, for their private and family related mobilities. Research concerning these different mechanisms of spillover is just in its infancy and makes us aware of some of the complexities involved.

Epilogue When applied as politics of practices and distinguished from ecological citizenship and political consumerism in a way as suggested above, the significance of life(style) politics for the greening of global consumption can hardly be underestimated. In consumerist societies, life(style) politics for more sustainable consumption must be regarded as of similar weight and importance as the greening of industry policies, which originated in the productive phase of modernity. The three ideal-type roles for citizen-consumer involvement in environmental change will, in empirical reality, always overlap, with hybrid forms to be detected along all the three connecting lines of Figure 1. The added value of the analytical distinctions made will have to be tested and further proven in empirical research. In conclusion, one type of sustainable consumption research, which could benefit from the analytical distinctions introduced here, will be shortly discussed.

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In a paper on the “ethics in consumption,” Clive Barnett and his colleagues discuss the need for organized ethics with respect to globalizing consumption-production chains. Since the globalization of consumption has removed distant (local) producers from view for the citizen consumers at the downstream end of the chains, trust in and care about distant producers have to be organized, with (eco- and fair trade) labeling schemes and certification schemes serving as the obvious examples. They have to make visible and debatable the rules for dealing with risks and responsibilities for distant others. So far, however, the commitments and roles of citizen consumers in labeling systems—mapping out distant actors and processes—have been conceptualized in an individualistic way primarily. Responsible citizen consumers are supposed to take their responsibilities by reading the label and using it as a guideline for consumption. Ethical consumption for this reason has been limited primarily to moral selving, either in the form of explicit performances and display or in the form of more humble, ordinary, even anonymous modes of consumer conduct. In being limited to individual considerations and choices primarily, the analyses of ethical consumption so far have focused on the individual aspects of life(style) politics, more in particular on general dispositions of actors toward fair trade and sustainable consumption. Barnett suggests that the individualist approaches to ethical consumption become transformed and translated into a more social and sociological approach when the process of moral selving is connected to ethical governance for production-consumption chains and networks. This can be realized by induced forms of deroutinization at the level of consumption practices. The implicit ethical rules guiding the practices are made visible with the help of policies, practices, and campaigns of NGOs, governments, or organized groups of consumers. They open up for reflection the commitment and obligations toward distant others and—so we would add—distant natures as well. By connecting—in the increasing number of social science studies of eco- and fair trade labeling— life(style) politics in a more direct way to forms of political consumerism, the twin processes of governing consumption chains and governing the consuming self are analyzed in their mutual dependency. The commitments of (organized) citizen consumers for sustainable consumption are analyzed in terms

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Lifestyle

of the interplay between the simultaneous processes of governing the chain and governing the consuming self. In doing so, a new field of empirical research on the ethics and politics of globalizing green consumption is opened up. Gert Spaargaren See also Citizenship; Environmental Social Sciences and Sustainable Consumption; Globalization; Individualization; Lifestyle; Political and Ethical Consumption; Self-Reflexivity; Social Movements

Further Readings Barnett, Clive, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke, and Alice Malpass. Articulating Ethics on Consumption. Working Paper no. 17 of ESRC-AHRB Research Programme on Cultures of Consumption. London: Birkbeck College, 2004. Bauman, Zygmunt. Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Beck, Ulrich. Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne [Risk society. On the way to another modernity]. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1986. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Dobson, Andrew, and Derek Bell, eds. Environmental Citizenship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Held, David. Democracy and the Global Order. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism and Collective Action. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Oosterveer, Peter. Global Governance of Food Production and Consumption: Issues and Challenges. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007. Spaargaren, Gert, and Arthur P. J. Mol. “Greening Global Consumption: Politics and Authority.” Global Environmental Change 18, no. 3 (2008): 350–359. Spaargaren, Gert, and Peter Oosterveer. “CitizenConsumers as Change Agents in Globalizing Modernity: The Case of Sustainable Consumption.” Sustainability 2 (2010): 1887–1908. Spaargaren, Gert, and C. S. A. (Kris) van Koppen. “Provider Strategies and the Greening of Consumption Practices: Exploring the Role of Companies in Sustainable Consumption.” In The New Middle Classes: Globalizing Lifestyles, Consumerism and Environmental Concern, edited by Hellmuth Lange and Lars Meier,

81–100. Bremen, Germany: Springer Verlag, 2009. (ISBN: 978-1-4020-9937-3) Stones, Rob. Structuration Theory. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Trentmann, Frank, ed. The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

LIFESTYLE The idea of lifestyle has a long history that is closely associated with consumption practices and consumer culture. It refers to the ways in which people express their identities through the practices that they are engaged in, notably outside of the area of work and typically within the arena of consumption. In particular, it is a term often associated with matters of how people communicate their tastes through their individual everyday interests and practices. While there was a surge of interest in the question of lifestyle in the 1990s within sociological and cultural studies, styles of life sometimes associated with social class position were an important issue for early sociological writers, such as Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, at the end of the nineteenth century. In particular, lifestyle seemed a way of addressing not just issues of class but also of status, which had become less certain at that time because of rapid social change with the modernization of Western societies. For Veblen, the newly monied rising capitalist class, or leisure class, of the late-nineteenth century in America, unable to draw on aristocratic tradition and rank to assert their emerging status within society, used the conspicuous display of consumer goods to highlight their wealth and emerging prominent social position. Weber, too, in an essay called “Class, Status, Party” sought to show how each of these three dimensions of social life determined a person’s position within society and his or her access to life chances and social power. Although often closely associated, Weber argued that class and status were not always directly connected. Class, for Weber, is established by a person’s economic position within the capitalist marketplace while status and status groups relate to more cultural factors associated with questions of honor and position within a community. For example, a person can have a high and powerful class position but belong to a weak status group or vice versa. While

Lifestyle

this analysis does not address the issue of lifestyle directly, the suggestion is that it will be shaped not just by class position but also through the relationship between the social class and status group that a person belongs to. Simmel’s analysis of what he called styles of life is altogether more detailed and explicit on the question of lifestyle, and it forms the lengthy final chapter of his most important book from 1900, The Philosophy of Money. There, Simmel argues that money within a capitalist society produces a culture in which separate spheres of life develop around which objective lifestyles are formed that people identify with. Styles of life are an expression of individual creative potential that people create from their experiences—how we express who we are and make the world meaningful to ourselves and others—those styles of living become objectified as recognizable lifestyles within a money economy and the rationalizing culture it promotes. Linked to his theory of objective culture as a source of alienation from the vitality of living creative practices, Simmel suggests that lifestyles are the outcomes of a rationalized capitalist culture that lead to the fragmentation of experience in modern society. These issues of consumer display, status honor, and of subjective experience and forms of cultural expression that were prominent within classical sociology went into abeyance within most sociological writing in the mid-twentieth century where a preoccupation with the establishment of social order in the Durkheimian and functionalist tradition or an interest around issues of class conflict and production rather than consumption within an industrial society among Marxists preoccupied most sociologists in that period. Where an interest in styles of living was kept alive during this time was in ethnographic work around cultural (or subcultural) practice—within the Chicago school tradition in the United States and mass observation studies, notably of working class life in Britain. However, it is since the 1980s when consumer culture again became a prominent sociological issue that the idea of lifestyle began to be reestablished as a key question associated with similar issues of taste and status (Bourdieu, 1984) and styles of life and identity as before. Often linked to the postmodern turn and to ideas about the changing character of capitalism, Scott Lash and John Urry argued that capitalist society had become more disorganized than before

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and, according to David Chaney (2002), its culture more fragmented and uncertain. Whereas some such as Pierre Bourdieu continued to hold the view that the taste and outlook that people have on life, their lifestyle, is shaped indirectly by their class position through the accumulation of different forms of capital that help them to engage with a structuring habitus, others saw this cultural fragmentation as creating an opportunity for identity formation and lifestyle choices not available in the past to all except the wealthiest in society. Within these debates, lifestyle as a concept has come to emphasize issues of agency, practice, and meaning making within the spaces of everyday life as a key feature for understanding the character of contemporary society. In particular, lifestyle has come to be associated with how people express who they are, their identities, through their consumption practices, tastes, and stylistic preferences. Less pessimistic than Simmel on the alienating character of modern life within a capitalist society, the others’ central theme remains the need to express one’s identity and one’s experiences through styles of living in a fragmented culture that a consumer society brings with it. To make sense of their experiences, Mike Feathersone argued that people create lifestyles out of their interests, enthusiasms, hobbies, and style preferences through an aestheticization of daily life. This refers to the idea that people work on themselves in a reflexive way to communicate a sense of who they are to others through what they do in their leisure time, their cultural affiliations, and how they look. A weak link to questions of class remains, however, in this analysis as it did for Veblen and Weber in earlier times. If the wealthy leisure class of conspicuous consumers were the class that typified how modern lifestyles were being made in the 1890s, then it is the so-called new middle class—those employed in service sector jobs notably in the creative industries associated with such things as media, marketing, and publishing and in the various culture industries of music, art, and television—who are seen as the trend setters in creating lifestyle choices in the 1990s and today. This so-called new middle class has been studied because some have argued that its social prominence within contemporary capitalist societies and its direct experience of cultural fragmentation allows the members of this group culturally to distance themselves from previous forms of class distinction in shaping their outlook and their tastes. It is believed

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Lifestyle Typologies

that they are able to draw from across the class divide when developing lifestyles that are seemingly omnivorous in enjoying both expressions of high art alongside forms of popular culture in a way that does not follow a previously distinct class pattern. In general, though, empirical investigation of these issues has been inconclusive as to whether lifestyle and social position, notably associated with social class, have become completely disassociated and completely individualized even among the new middle class. From a high point of debate in the late 1990s with the focus firmly then on exploring lifestyle though looking at individual agency, over the past decade, a greater emphasis has been placed on lifestyle as the outcome of the structuring of tastes informed by Bourdieu’s earlier and more class determined analysis. One change is that issues of gender and ethnicity now sit alongside social class as what is seen to be shaping people’s tastes as well as their opportunities (or constraints) in being able to express them as lifestyles. However, the similarity between some of these recent arguments and those expressed over a century ago by Veblen, Weber, and Simmel suggests that lifestyle remains an interesting problem through which to explore the tensions in modern experience between expressions of agency and effects of structuring social constraints rather than one which is likely to be fully resolved just in one direction or the other. Kevin Hetherington See also Aestheticization of Everyday Life; Disorganized Capitalism; Lifestyle Typologies; Postmodernism; SelfReflexivity; Social Distinction; Status; Taste

Further Readings Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1984. Chaney, David. Lifestyles. London: Routledge, 1996. Chaney, David. Cultural Change and Everyday Life. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. The End of Organised Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 1987. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space, London: Sage, 1994. Savage, Mike, James Barlow, Peter Dickens, and Tony Fielding. Property, Bureaucracy and Culture. London: Routledge, 1992.

Shields, Rob, ed. Lifestyle Shopping. London: Routledge, 1992. Warde, Alan. Consumption, Food and Taste. London: Sage, 1997. Wynne, Derek. Leisure, Lifestyle and the New Middle Class. London: Routledge, 1998.

LIFESTYLE TYPOLOGIES Lifestyles can be defined as the way people live and present themselves to others. They do this through the brands of products they purchase, which reflect matters such as their taste, values, beliefs, and socioeconomic status. As consumer cultures have developed, consumer lifestyles have become increasingly significant sources of identity and status, making typologies of them particularly valuable for marketing purposes. Typologies involving lifestyles are classifications of different categories of consumers. These lifestyle typologies are generally developed by marketers to enable advertisers to target individuals more effectively. Marketers are interested in classifying people to understand people’s consumer behavior better. There are two rules that must be followed when classifying people’s lifestyles. First, the categories must not be ambiguous—each person must fit into one and only one group. Second, the classification of lifestyles must be comprehensive and cover everyone. There have been numerous lifestyle typologies developed by marketing companies over the past decades. Here, a few lifestyle typologies are discussed, beginning with that created by the Total Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey. It developed an instrument called Equitrends that studied approximately two hundred brands in fiftyfive product groups. The company used a survey to study consumption practices and ended up classifying Americans into seven categories and listing some products they prefer, which are described below. 1. Intellects: Michelin Tires, Wall Street Journal 2. Conformists: Kodak, Hallmark, Crest 3. Popularity Seekers: Nike, Mercedes Benz, Home Box Office 4. Pragmatists: Fisher-Price, Rubbermaid, Mr. Coffee 5. Activists: Maytag, Kenmore

Lifestyle Typologies

6. Relief-Seekers: IBM computers, CNN, Hilton 7. Sentimentalists: Campbell soups, Hershey’s, Folgers

Marketing companies tend to give jazzy, descriptive and memorable names to their categories. One of the more popular typologies was the Values and Lifestyles or VALS typology developed by SRI, the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. SRI developed two different typologies: first VALS1 and then its successor, VALS 2. The VALS typologies categorize consumers by their demographics and on the basis of cultural trends. The categories were developed by giving consumers a thirty-question survey that not only obtained demographic information but also provided insights into their values and beliefs. The lists below show the different categories for each of the VALS marketing typologies and briefly describe each of them. VALS1 1. Survivors: Old, poor, and not in the cultural mainstream 2. Sustainers: Young, on edge of poverty, and ambitious 3. Belongers: Conventional and conservative tastes, sentimental 4. Emulators: Upwardly mobile, status conscious, want to be successful 5. Achievers: Society’s leaders; successful, with high status; materialistic 6. I-Am-Me’s: Narcissistic, young, exhibitionistic, individualistic 7. Experientials: Grown up I-Am-Me’s, focus on inner growth 8. Societally Conscious Individuals: Simple living, environmental causes, smallness of scale

VALS2 provides a different list of categories, based primarily on the ability of people to actually purchase desired products. VALS2 1. Actualizers: Wealthy and successful, interested in social issues and social change 2. Fulfilleds: Practical, like durability and functionality in products, mature, well off 3. Achievers: Career oriented, buy things to reflect their success, value structure, stability 4. Experiencers: Young, impulsive, enthusiastic, love to spend money, risk takers 5. Believers: Highly principled conservative consumers, buy well-known brands 6. Strivers: Desire approval of others, are like Achievers but have less money 7. Makers: Active, self-sufficient, are like Experiencers 8. Strugglers: Poor and struggling to survive

These categories assume that people act rationally and don’t purchase things they can’t afford. The Claritas Corporation, now called Claritas Nielsen, has developed a typology based on the notion that people tend to live in places with other people like them, principally in terms of their socioeconomic status. Claritas Nielsen bases its typology on zip codes and has developed a typology that divides American consumers into fourteen lifestyle groupings, based on income and lifestyles, and sixty-six different consumer preference groupings, based on zip codes. Like other marketing companies, Claritas Nielsen tends to give groups “catchy” names that offer some insights into the nature of the groups being dealt with. The fourteen lifestyles are shown below:

Lifestyles

Income

Urban Urban Uptown Midtown Mix Urban Cores Inner Suburbs

Suburban Elite Suburbs The Affluentials Middle Burbs Rustic Living

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Second City Second City Society City Centers Micro City Blues

Town & Country Landed Gentry Country Comfort Middle America

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Lifestyle Typologies

This list focuses on where people live and that those at the top of the chart are wealthier than those at the bottom of the list. Claritas Nielsen developed a more refined typology called PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Marketers) a number of years ago that lists sixtysix groupings. It describes PRIZM as follows on its Internet website: PRIZM operates on the principle that “birds of a feather flock together.” It’s a worldwide phenomenon that people with similar cultural backgrounds, needs, and perspectives naturally gravitate toward one another, choose to live in neighborhoods offering affordable advantages and compatible lifestyles. That’s why, for instance, many young career singles and couples choose dynamic urban neighborhoods like Chicago’s Gold Coast, while families with children prefer the suburbs which offer more affordable housing, convenient shopping, and strong local schools.

Claritas Nielsen also obtains its information from the government and survey data. It argues that its data should be interpreted in a general way and not as an actual portrait of the lifestyles it deals with, which means it deals with purchasing preferences and not actual purchasing behavior. It focuses on zip codes, where it provides as many as five different PRIZM clusters in a single zip code even though there may be as many as twenty different clusters found in that zip code. For Claritas Nielsen, identities are based on location; it argues, “You are where you live.” Each zip code covers from 2,500 to 15,000 households, but the Claritas Nielsen PRIZM groups deal with census block groups of between 250 and 500 households and its “ZIP+four” with from 6 to 12 households. Claritas Nielsen claims to offer rather precise information about the consumption behavior of the different groups in its typology. It should be pointed out that many social scientists don’t believe that “you are where you live” because of several factors. For example, in some wealthy suburban areas, a number of homeowners are “grandfathered in,” which means they purchased their homes many years ago when the homes were relatively inexpensive. A list of the Claritas Nielsen sixty-six consumer cultures follows, with 01. Upper Crust being the wealthiest and most successful group and 66. Low Rise Living being the least successful group, socioeconomically speaking.

01. Upper Crust 02. Blue Blood Estates 03. Movers & Shakers 04. Young Digerati 05. Country Squires 06. Winner’s Circle 07. Money & Brains 08. Executive Suites 09. Big Fish, Small Pond 10. Second City Elite 11. God’s Country 12. Brite Lites, Li’l City 13. Upward Bound 14. New Empty Nests 15. Pools & Patios 16. Bohemian Mix 17. Beltway Boomers 18. Kids & Cul-de-Sacs 19. Home Sweet Home 20. Fast-Track Families 21. Gray Power 22. Young Influentials 23. Greenbelt Sports 24. Up-and-Comers 25. Country Casuals 26. The Cosmopolitans 27. Middleburg Managers 28. Traditional Times 29. American Dreams 30. Suburban Sprawl 31. Urban Achievers 32. New Homesteaders 33. Big Sky Families 34. White Picket Fences 35. Boomtown Singles 36. Blue-Chip Blues 37. Mayberry-ville 38. Simple Pleasures 39. Domestic Duos 40. Close-In Couples 41. Sunset City Blues

Likert Scales

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42. Red, White, & Blues 43. Heartlanders 44. New Beginnings 45. Blue Highways 46. Old Glories 47. City Startups

Lifestyle

Group Boundaries

Number of Rules

Strong Strong Weak Weak

Many and Varied Few and Weak Few and Weak Many and Varied

Elitist Egalitarian Individualist Fatalists

48. Young & Rustic 49. American Classics 50. Kid Country USA 51. Shotguns & Pickups 52. Suburban Pioneers

What is important to recognize, Douglas argues, is that our desire to purchase products and services are not based on individual taste and psychological temperament but on the unconsciously held imperatives of the lifestyle to which we belong.

53. Mobility Blues

Arthur Asa Berger

54. Multi-Culti Mosaic 55. Golden Ponds

See also Consumer Behavior; Douglas, Mary; Lifestyle; Markets and Marketing; Status; Taste

56. Crossroads Villagers 57. Old Miltowns

Further Readings

58. Back Country

Berger, Arthur Asa. Shop ’Til You Drop: Consumer Behavior and American Culture. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Berger, Arthur Asa. Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Douglas, Mary. “In Defence of Shopping.” In The Shopping Experience, edited by Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell, 15–30. London: Sage, 1997. Michman, Ronald D. Lifestyle Market Segmentation. New York: Praeger, 1991. Mitchell, Arnold. The Nine American Lifestyles: Who We Are and Where We Are Going. New York: Macmillan, 1983. Vyncka, Patrick. “Lifestyle Segmentation: From Attitudes, Interests and Opinions, to Values, Aesthetic Styles, Life Visions and Media Preferences.” European Journal of Communication 17, no. 4 (2002): 445–463.

59. Urban Elders 60. Park Bench Set 61. City Roots 62. Hometown Retired 63. Family Thrifts 64. Bedrock America 65. Big City Blues 66. Low Rise Living

It is possible to find out what people in any zip code are like by accessing the Claritas Nielsen website. The final typology discussed here is one developed by social anthropologist Mary Douglas, who argues—based on what is called grid-group theory—that there are four, and only four, lifestyles in modern societies. This theory maintains that each of us is a member of a group with either weak or strong boundaries and also that each group has either few or many rules and prescriptions. When you combine the kinds of groups to which people belong and the number of rules and prescriptions to which they are subjected, you get four mutually hostile lifestyles—elitist (hierarchist), individualist, egalitarian, and fatalist (Douglas and other gridgroup theorists use other names for the lifestyles in some cases):

Websites Claritas Nielsen. www.mybestsegments.com.

LIKERT SCALES Likert scale is a technique to measure complex concepts, such as attitudes, styles of media use, or satisfaction for aspects of life, and have become increasingly common for survey research into consumer behavior. Due to simplicity, it is the most wellknown and used practice of unidimensional scaling. By scales, we mean “measurement instruments

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that are collections of items combined into a composite score, and intended to reveal levels of theoretical variables not readily observable by direct means” (DeVellis 2003, 8–9). For instance, it is common to combine a set of variables (exposition to political information on newspapers, exposition to political information on television, knowledge of political facts, knowledge of political leaders, etc.) into a single index to measure the level of political information of a sample of individuals. Political information is an example of a unidimensional scale: combined with others (electoral participation, parties participation, associations participation, etc.), it can originate a multidimensional scale to reveal political participation. The original and principal application of Likert scale is the measurement of attitudes (Likert 1932). If attitudes are general beliefs impossible to observe, then opinions derived from such attitudes are easier to reveal: based on this principle, Likert scales consist of a set of opinions on which individuals are asked to agree or disagree. For instance, it is possible to define a scale of social dominance from the agreement or disagreement individuals give on a battery of opinions like the following ones: “Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups,” “It’s OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others,” “If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems,” and so on. Likert scale is used in other applications where items change— they are not opinions—while scale analysis procedures remain the same. From the point of view of consumer culture, two other applications of Likert scale are particularly meaningful: the measurement of the frequency and satisfaction for consumption behavior. For instance, it is possible to define an index of cultural extra-domestic consumption asking for the frequency individuals go to cinemas, theaters, libraries, and so forth. Moreover, the satisfaction for the various aspects of these and other consumptions can be investigated. The procedure to define a Likert scale presents three phases: formulating questions, administering questions, and analyzing scale. Attention is paid here to the first and the last phases that are the more specific to Likert scales. As to the first phase, the usual norms in question wording apply: statements must be clear, concise, straightforward, and unambiguous while the vocabulary must be as simple as possible, according to the cognitive skills

of the respondents. Double negatives (e.g., “I am not in favor of corporations stopping funding for antinuclear groups”) or double-barreled statements (e.g., “I support civil rights because discrimination is a crime against God”; an individual could agree with the first part of the sentence disagreeing with the second part) should be avoided. In attitudes measurement applications, it is important that sentences permit a judgment of value (opinions) rather than a judgment of fact: “Two persons with decidedly different attitudes may, nevertheless, agree on questions of fact. Consequently, their reaction to a statement of fact is no indication of their attitudes” (Likert 1932, 44). Opinions can come from different sources: newspapers and magazines, books, addresses and pamphlets, parallel pieces of qualitative research (e.g., focus group), previous research. As to question and response formats, out of the four kinds of questions originally proposed by Likert, the five-point agreement/disagreement scale (strongly approve, approve, undecided, disapprove, strongly disapprove) prevailed in the scaling research following his contribution. On this basis, much methodological research has been developed on three technical points: whether to allow a longer seven-point scale, whether to permit a central neutral option (undecided), whether to allow a residual option (don’t know). Once the questions have been administered, a numerical value must be assigned to the response alternatives. In his original article, Likert proposed two methods: a so-called Sigma method, based on normal distribution, and a simpler method of scoring. The latter, that Likert found works as well as the Sigma method and prevailed in the following scaling research, is illustrated as follows: If five alternatives have been used, it is necessary to assign values of from one to five with the three assigned to the undecided position on each statement. The ONE end is assigned to one extreme of the attitude continuum and the FIVE to the other; this should be done consistently for each of the statements which it is expected will be included in the scale. (Likert 1932, 46)

On the basis of this scoring, a scale is the simple sum of the different items. At this point, data analysis aims at assessing three characteristics of the scale: reliability, validity, unidimensionality. In scaling, reliability refers to the

Likert Scales

amount of the observed results that can be attributed to the underlying concept to observe rather than to other sources (the measurement errors that occur in the various phases of the operationalization process). Reliability can be measured on the basis of the correlations between scale scores (alternate forms, splithalf, test-retest reliability) or on the basis of internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha). In the social sciences approach, where few items are usually administered to many individuals on a single occasion, the last definition is preferable. Internal consistency is considered a reliability measure since it is assumed that items referring to the same underlying concept should be highly intercorrelated. Cronbach’s alpha is a standard indicator of internal consistency, and it depends on two parameters: the inter-item mean correlation and the number of items, as they raise alpha increases. It varies from 0 to 1: scale reliability is judged satisfactory when Cronbach’s alpha is above 0.7. Once the questions have been administered, the only way to increase reliability is to perform an item analysis to drop items loosely related to the scale. Signals of loose relation can be detected by many coefficients, but the most exploited are the item-scale correlation and the alpha in the case where the item is dropped. Much less performed in social sciences research practice are the validity and unidimensionality checks. Determining that a scale is reliable does not guarantee that the latent variable shared by the items is, in fact, the variable of interest to the scale developer. The adequacy of a scale as a measure of a specific variable (e.g., perceived psychological stress) is an issue of validity. (DeVellis 2003, 49)

There are many validation procedures, and it is valuable to mention at least two of them: In criterionrelated validation, the relation between the scale and an external standard is evaluated (e.g., a university admission test can predict the following student career?); in construct validation, the relation between the scale and other variables (constructs) is evaluated according to the theoretical knowledge in the field (e.g., is this prejudice scale correlated to education?). Finally, unidimensionality is checked through standard multidimensional techniques, such as factor analysis. In developing Likert scales, there are at least three problems researchers must be aware of. The first one is the so-called response-set, that is, the

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tendency to give the same response to a battery of items. To discourage—or at least to detect—the triggering of such mechanism, it is useful that the semantic orientation of the different items is not homogeneous: To avoid any space of error or any tendency to a stereotyped response it seems desirable to have different statements so worded that about one-half of them have one end of the attitude continuum corresponding to the left or upper part of the reaction alternatives and the other half have the same end of the attitude continuum corresponding to the right or lower part of the reaction alternatives. (Likert 1932, 46)

Second, people at the opposite ends of the continuum could agree or disagree with the same item due to its ambiguity: it is the case of doublebarreled statements and other sentences (e.g., “The woman has the right to decide for herself whether to have or not have children”: a male chauvinist could agree on this item on the basis that he could consider children a women’s exclusive problem). Last, when items are summed to create a scale, it is assumed that items are cardinal variables when, strictly speaking, they are ordinal variables. Such an assumption is not obvious since agreeing is cognitively easier than disagreeing, and also, the distance between the different categories of agreement and disagreement varies from item to item. It follows that cardinality assumption should be deepened when a Likert scale is a central variable of a piece of research. Ferruccio Biolcati-Rinaldi See also Cognitive Structures; Consumer Behavior; Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture; Multivariate Analysis; Surveys

Further Readings Carmines, Edward G., and Richard Zeller. A. Reliability and Validity Assessment. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979. DeVellis, Robert F. Scale Development: Theory and Applications. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003. Likert, Rensis. “A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes.” Archives of Psychology 140 (1932): 1–55. McIver, John P., and Edward G. Carmines. Unidimensional Scaling. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981. Spector, Paul E. Summated Rating Scale Construction: An Introduction. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992.

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LIMINALITY Liminality is a term associated with rites of passage through which a person’s identity and status is transformed at different times in his or her life. First systematically studied by the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep in the book Rites of Passage (1960), rites of passage were noted to have a three-stage structure. The first stage, separation, saw the person about to undergo the transforming rite have all previous markers of his or her identity removed. In the second stage, liminal, that person, removed from his or her community, would undergo some form of ritual ordeal or initiation ceremony before in the third phase, reaggregation, being returned to his or her community with a new identity. Such rites are often associated with the passage between key life stages including transition from childhood to adulthood or marriage or with the rites associated with the death of a person and his or her burial. As well as being associated with different times in a person’s life, these rites often have their own social spaces—the liminal phase, in particular, is often associated with a particular space of initiation removed from the everyday spaces of the community associated with the rite. It was also often noted that in the liminal phase, many social norms and conventions are temporarily overturned in sanctioned but otherwise transgressive forms of behavior as part of the rite. Those undergoing initiation in this phase will also typically experience a strong sense of communion and intense emotional experience associated with such things as pain and hallucinogens, as well as the intense emotional experience of being through the performance of the rite. Such rites have long been of interest for anthropologists and one in particular, Victor Turner, wrote a series of works in the 1960s and 1970s on rites in both small-scale societies as well as Western society. While much of the early writing on rites of passage, including Turner’s own, understood these rituals as a functional requirement for how life-course identities were constituted within a society and how such ritual helped to affirm existing social structures, this began to change when he attempted to apply these concepts to understand aspects of Western consumer societies. Of particular note is that Turner sought to understand the 1960s counterculture in the United States using elements from this analysis of rites of

passage. Turner argued that social structures often produced moments of anti-structure, which are liminal in character. This involves the creation of free spaces where social norms can be transgressed and oppositional or alternative identities established. Festivals such as those at Woodstock, Stonehenge, or Glastonbury, as well as bohemian neighborhoods, such as Greenwich Village in New York, Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, or the Left Bank in Paris, can all be seen as liminal spaces where subcultures or neo-tribes were able to establish new identities and lifestyle practices that challenged the social conventions of their day. In this analysis, Turner went on to try and free ideas of liminality from the earlier functionalist context of being seen as a necessary process associated with social reproduction to a space of freedom and play where novel forms of community might be established. He introduced the term liminoid in contrast to liminal to understand such spaces and their practices freed from the structuring principles of a rite of passage. In the late 1980s, an emerging interest in the creation of alternative lifestyles and neo-tribes in which the challenging of social norms, creation of new identities, a strong sense of communion, and the creation of free spaces for social experimentation reemerged. Prominent in this analysis was an interest in liminal space (rather than liminality as the middle stage in a rite of passage) as a space for alternative consumption practices. The term liminality began to be associated with others like neo-tribes, marginal space, transgression, and transgressive identities as well as with the carnivalesque practices associated with the overturning of social conventions and identity markers (Bakhtin 1984). The application of such terms was no longer applied simply to the remains of the counterculture but more broadly to some of the practices of creating identities through consumption. As well as sites such as free festivals and raves, secondhand shops, New Age centers, and other sites of alternative consumption where people could be different and create a new identity through their consumption practices, uses (or reuses) of fashion and style and through their identifications with others who share their consumption practices were seen as key forms of identification created with liminal space. Although previous countercultures had created liminal spaces in which to challenge social conventions through creating new fashions, taking illegal drugs, and developing new styles of music

Linder, Staffan Burenstam

just as the new ones of the 1990s were doing, those earlier countercultures had often had strong political motivations and beliefs that were the foundation for such practices. Many were often anticonsumption in their motivation. The new ones of the 1980s and 1990s, however, appeared more hedonistic and playful in their forms of transgression, less overtly political in character, and more accepting of consumption practices—albeit alternative forms of consumption. Indeed, they often made overt use of consumption practices rather than to see consumerism as something to be challenged as part of a capitalist society. It might be argued, though, that the reaggregating dynamics of rites of passage are more present in this use of liminal free spaces and transgressive acts than is immediately apparent. Many spaces such as festivals, raves, alternative shopping sites associated with such things as tattooing and piercing as well as cheap secondhand and retro clothing and New Age spirituality have subsequently ended up becoming influential on mainstream consumption and fashion in more recent years. A phenomenon of the late 1990s and 2000s has been that many countercultural spaces from twenty or thirty years ago are now more mainstream and commercial spaces, no longer on the liminal fringes of consumer society but at its forefront. Kevin Hetherington See also Identity; Life Course; Lifestyle; Neo-Tribes; Rituals; Spaces and Places; Subculture; Tamed Hedonism

Further Readings Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Hetherington, Kevin. “Stonehenge and Its Festival: Spaces of Consumption.” In Lifestyle Shopping, edited by Rob Shields, 83–98. London: Routledge, 1992. Hetherington, Kevin. “Identity Formation, Space and Social Centrality.” Theory, Culture and Society 13, no. 4 (1996): 33–52. McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty. London: Verso, 1996. Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin. London: Routledge, 1991. Shields, Rob, ed. Lifestyle Shopping. London: Routledge, 1992.

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Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Turner Victor. The Ritual Process. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1969. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974.

LINDER, STAFFAN BURENSTAM (1931–2000) Staffan Burenstam Linder was a Swedish economist based at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), who also spent time at the universities of Columbia, Stanford, and Yale, among others. As Professor of Economics and President of the SSE, he founded the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Latvia, in 1993. He was active politically, first as a conservative member of the Swedish parliament (writing the economic-political program for the Swedish Conservative party in 1966) and in his later years as head of the Swedish delegation to the European parliament. Known for his independence of thought, his main contribution to economics was the socalled Linder thesis, a conjecture regarding patterns of international trade in industrial goods first articulated in An Essay on Trade and Transformation, the book that he presented for his doctoral thesis in 1961. In contradiction to prevailing theories, which hypothesized trade as occurring between countries with complementary resources, he argued that the more similar the demand structures (emanating from similar per capita incomes) of countries, the more likely they were to trade with one another. Linder was also among the first to recognize the future significance of the Pacific economies, proclaiming in The Pacific Century (1986) that the century of the Pacific had begun. In the area of consumer culture, he is known for his short but influential book The Harried Leisure Class (1970), which marked something of a departure from the majority of his writings on international trade and has become a classic in research on the relationship between economic growth, time, and consumption. In it, Linder demonstrates the economic logic of a vicious circle in which increasing rates of productivity must be matched by increasing acceleration in consumption. Since consumption takes time, however, the outcome in the affluent societies is an increasing acceleration

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of the pace of life and the “harried leisure class.” The ultimate result is a society driven by the need for economic growth and a decline in overall well-being. The impact of the book has perhaps been greatest in the area of sociology, since its message resonates both with the work of classical sociologists who wrote about social acceleration and with more recent debates on the pressure of time in late modernity. Oriel Sullivan See also Affluent Society; Consumption and Time Use; Convenience; Economics; Harried Leisure Class; Industrial Society; Work-and-Spend Cycle

Further Readings Godbey, Geoffrey. “The Harried Leisure Class” (Book review). Journal of Leisure Research 35, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 478–480. Lundahl, Mats. “To Be an Independent Thinker: An Intellectual Portrait of Staffan Burenstam Linder.” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 12, no. 4 (2005): 663–688.

LOCALITY There have been many debates within social science about the importance of locality in shaping people’s experiences. In some of these debates, locality is the key concept used; in others, analysis is framed around ideas of community or neighborhood. All such terms carry with them different connotations, but equally all in essence are concerned with the ways in which the more or less local impacts the structure of social relationships in which people are involved. The term more or less local is deliberately vague as what different researchers take locality to mean varies significantly, depending on the research questions they are addressing. For some, the remit of the word or application of the concept is highly local; for others, the reference may be to a city or a larger conglomeration or even a region. Whatever the unit in question, the focal concern is with the relationship between the social and economic structure of relatively proximate geographical space on people’s experiences and lifestyles, including their consumption practices. Much of the early research into localities was driven by a concern to understand the basis of community solidarity, in line with popular—and

longstanding—theorizing that community life had experienced significant decline with urban and industrial development. Oversimplifying somewhat, two main traditions can be identified within this perspective. First, there was research that focused on local personal and social connection. This research examined the extent to which individuals were reliant on others (family, friends, neighbors) who also lived in that locality and dependent on the institutions (shops, employment, leisure facilities) found there. Its dominant questions concerned the extent to which people were socially and economically embedded in localities, a matter which was inevitably differentiated by, among other factors, class, gender, and life-course position. The second (linked) tradition was more concerned with the institutional relationships within a community. It focused more on the structure of the local social system, including organizational linkages and the mechanisms by which different groupings sought to protect their political and economic interests. Although much interesting research developed, especially in the mid-twentieth century, around this second perspective, its weaknesses became increasingly apparent. In particular, in the highly connected world of contemporary commercial society, it was recognized that people’s life chances and lifestyles could never be properly understood through focusing solely on local social organization and institutional connection. Despite such theoretical critiques, many of the core questions about locality remain important for understanding people’s experiences. Notwithstanding the impact of globalization, the local—in its different formulations—still represents a prime site in which lifestyles are constructed and resources contested and consumed. That is, while many of the decisions that shape the social and economic character of particular areas are consequent on actions taken outside the local sphere, responses to these wider structural occurrences are often framed at a local or regional level. Indeed, recent scholarship has emphasized that the local now needs to be understood “through the lens of global relationships” (Savage, Bagnall, and Longhurst 2005, 3). In other words, rather than rendering the local as unimportant, globalization adds fresh complexities to the patterning of local social, economic, and political relationships. As Doreen Massey (1991, 29) contends, we need to think in terms of “a global sense of the local, a global sense

Longitudinal Studies

of place.” Her argument is that globalization does not equate to the homogenization of locality. Rather, the mixture of local and global in different localities is itself “yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place.” Consider, for example, the consumption of housing. What type of housing is built, who has access to it, how its use alters across time, and so on, clearly influence the characteristics of the local population and the lifestyles they develop. Similarly, the local protest movements that develop in response to land use issues, whether these involve new shopping developments, new roads, or facilities for housing socially less desirable groups, indicate the significance of the local in the construction and consumption of lifestyle. Importantly too, research into the impact on different local labor markets of national and international economic restructuring at the end of the twentieth century demonstrated the importance of local responses and initiatives. In Cooke’s (2009, 260) words, local proactivity “facilitated responses and initiatives by some, not all, localities to self-improve their conditions of living and working within the constraint and opportunity-sets locally available.” In the context of globalization, consider too the consequences of increased levels of international migration. For some migrants, especially those with wealth, the local is of little importance; they do not become embedded within it to any significant degree. For most migrants, though, the process of settling involves establishing a local organizational framework that reflects their cultural identity. For example, those involved develop economic enterprises, build places for worship, form political organizations, and the like, in the process generating personal networks through which knowledge and resources, as well as ties of kinship and amity, can flourish. These processes lead to the migrants and their families becoming embedded in the new locality, though frequently they simultaneously sustain connection with their “home” localities through continuing transnational networks of support and exchange. In these and other ways, globalization adds fresh complexities to the social, economic, and political relationships that emerge in different localities. Rather than becoming redundant sociologically, locality has enduring significance, being routinely

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reconstituted over time as a consequence of the interplay of local and nonlocal processes. In this, locality matters for understanding people’s differential incorporation into social organization and the patterning of lifestyle, consumption, and identity. Graham Allan See also Belonging; Geography; Globalization; Glocalization; Migration; Spaces and Places; Transnational Capitalism; Urbanization

Further Readings Cooke, Philip. “Locality Debates.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 256–262. London: Elsevier, 2009. Delanty, Gerard. Community. London: Routledge, 2003. Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” Marxism Today (June 1991): 24–29. Phillipson, Christopher, Miriam Bernard, Judith Phillips, and James Ogg. The Family and Community Life of Older People. London: Routledge, 2001. Savage, Michael, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian Longhurst. Globalization and Belonging. London: Sage, 2005.

LONGITUDINAL STUDIES In general terms, longitudinal studies are research designs dealing with the problem of time and change. To give a proper definition of longitudinal studies it is necessary to follow some steps. First, it has to be acknowledged that longitudinal research is not a single technique to collect or analyze social sciences data (such as, for instance, Likert scales to survey attitudes or regression analysis). Longitudinal research is a set of techniques matched according to different objectives. Second, it is useful to contrast longitudinal with cross-sectional studies, that piece of social research not only most specialists—but also most laymen— are acquainted with. In cross-sectional studies, data are collected for each case (individuals, organizations, countries, etc.) only once; they refer to a single time interval (that is the same for all cases). An example could be a telephone survey about ethnic consumption where data are collected once and refer to a single period. By contrast, in longitudinal studies, collection takes place more than once and—above all—refers to different periods (days, years, etc.). Third, an important distinction is between collection occasions and time points. Collection occasions are

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the number of times the researcher enters the field (for instance, organizing a new survey or experiment); time points are the number of periods the data refer to (i.e., in household panels, it is usual to ask the occupational condition for every month of the year preceding the interview). Collection occasions and time points usually coincide (in the year Y0, information is collected about the interval Y0; in the year Y1, about the interval Y1; and so on). But it is not always the case: in a single interview, a subject can be asked to think back on his or her life with regard to family, work, education, et cetera (a standard practice in lifecourse research). Finally, cases can change from one collection occasion to the other. Not all authors agree on this statement: some restrict longitudinal studies to designs where cases are the same (Rose 2000). Only these research designs provide the chance to study change at the individual level (see below). Here the alternative position on the argument is adopted: it is useful to consider the different features of the full range of techniques used in collecting and analyzing data for different time periods. These last two points are useful to better understand the longitudinal research designs that are introduced later in this entry. At the end of these steps, it is possible to adopt the following definition: Longitudinal research must be defined in terms of both the data and the methods of analysis that are used in the research. Longitudinal research is a research in which: (a) data are collected for each item or variable for two or more distinct time periods; (b) the subjects or cases analyzed are the same or at least comparable from one period to the next; and (c) the analysis involves some comparison of data between or among periods. (Menard 2002, 2)

According to Greg J. Duncan and Graham Kalton (2002, 50–78), the different longitudinal designs encountered on a research field can be classified as follows: 1. In repeated cross-sectional surveys, the kind of information collected (e.g., questions to subjects) is the same over time while samples change. Anyway, samples are drawn from equivalent populations (in terms of geographical boundaries, age-limits, etc.). 2. In panel surveys, information collected and samples are the same over time. Panel surveys

can differ deeply in the interval between rounds of data collection; it can range from weeks (as is usual for consumer panels in market research) to years (as is usual in household panels). There are also hybrid designs where subjects stay in the panel not for all its length but just for a part of it; this is the case of the Surveys of Consumers (SOC) held at the University of Michigan since 1946. 3. In retrospective cross-sectional surveys, there are many time points but just one collection occasion. 4. Electronic data archives can also be used to set up longitudinal designs. They may be administrative or even commercial; the last can be a valuable source of information to study consuming behavior. According to the research designs and objectives, a myriad of data analysis techniques exist that are useful for different purposes. The interested reader can refer to Menard’s Longitudinal Research. It is not easy to give an overview of the origins of longitudinal research since many disciplines—not only social sciences—are involved in them, notes Elisabetta Ruspini. If we focus on data collection, longitudinal studies origins can be traced back to the first national censuses in New France (now Quebec, since 1665), Sweden (1749), Norway and Denmark (1769), and the United States (1790). As to longitudinal data analysis, we have to wait until the 1920s in the United States to appreciate—in psychology and medical sciences—a flourishing of longitudinal studies concerning child development. It is interesting to note that two of the most important stages in longitudinal studies history are strictly connected to consumption and consumer culture. In fact, one of the methodological problems Paul F. Lazarsfeld tried to solve introducing panel studies was the causal order of the relationship between consumption and advertising (Do we buy a certain product after listening to the advertising on the radio? Or do we listen to the advertising of a product we bought to gratify ourselves?). Lazarsfeld’s contribution was particularly valuable because he was the first to introduce systematically longitudinal studies in social sciences, particularly in sociology and in political science. The second important stage strictly connected to consumption took place at the end of the 1960s with the American

Luxury and Luxuries

Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID). It was the first of a series of household panels that became widespread even in Europe during the 1980s. They cover individuals’ socioeconomic condition—much attention is paid to consumption behavior—and their growth is due to the information need concerning demographics and the social and economic crises of advanced societies since the 1970s. Briefly, there are four objectives that longitudinal studies try to achieve. First, as anticipated by Lazarsfeld’s pioneering work, longitudinal studies could be set up to establish causal relationships. From a statistical point of view, three conditions have to be satisfied: (1) there must be a systematic relationship (covariation) between cause and effect; (2) the relation has to be not spurious, that is, it must persist even when other variables are controlled for; (3) the supposed cause must precede (or be simultaneous with) the supposed effect. In the context of standard cross-sectional studies, the first two conditions can be controlled for while the third one—concerning the causal order—can be only assumed. In the context of longitudinal studies, a direct control for causal order is possible. Second, longitudinal data are collected when one wants to analyze individual or social change. In the first case, we want, for instance, to study how individuals enter, persist, or exit from a condition of poverty; in the second case, we want to know if poverty is increasing, stable, or decreasing in the whole society or in some of its subgroups. Third, longitudinal studies are necessary if one wants to disentangle age, period, or cohort effects. For example, a general decrease in book reading could be explained as an age effect (people getting older stop reading), as a cohort effect (individuals born and socialized in different years have decreasing reading practices), or as a period effect (the whole society declines due to specific historical conditions). Fourth, when studying changes at the individual level, we could be interested in distinguishing inertial effects from omitted variables effects. Let’s go back to the poverty example. In such a field, there can be inertial effects (the longer one is poor, the more difficult it is to exit poverty) due, for instance, to demoralization. Such inertial effects tend to be overestimated if one does not take into account (omit) important variables such as household networks. Longitudinal studies allow for the variables researchers should omit to be taken into account, so as to get better estimates of inertial effects. Ferruccio Biolcati-Rinaldi

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See also Measuring Standards of Living; Surveys

Further Readings Duncan, Greg J., and Graham Kalton. “Issues of Design and Analysis of Surveys Across Time.” International Statistical Review 55 (1987): 97–111. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. “The Uses of Panels in Social Research.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 92 (1948): 405–410. Menard, Scott. Longitudinal Research. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002. Rose, David, ed. Researching Social and Economic Change: The Uses of Household Panel Studies. London: Routledge, 2000. Ruspini, Elisabetta. Introduction to Longitudinal Research. London: Routledge, 2002.

LUXURY

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LUXURIES

Luxury refers to a condition of comfort characterized by opulence, elegance, and the enjoyment of desirable, inessential and rare objects, and pleasurable activities. As term, concept, and practice, luxury presents a complex history in Western cultures owing to its connotations of distinction, privilege, and selfindulgence and because of its relevance to notions of progress, stability, and decline. Already amply debated in the Hebrew and Greco-Roman civilizations, excessive sumptuousness and spectacular display have traditionally proved controversial issues. A gratuitous and therefore “scandalous” waste of resources, luxury has been associated with immorality and sin on a variety of levels. It is indeed significant that the Latin luxus has an etymological connection to luxuria, or lust. In particular, Western cultures have traditionally figured the pernicious effects of luxury through feminized allegories thus designating it as an intrinsically female quality and an effeminizing influence on men. In An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767/1995), Adam Ferguson points out the difficulty of providing a satisfactory and coherent definition of luxury, as he observes that “we are far from being agreed on the application of the term luxury,” which may generally be taken to “signify that complicated apparatus which mankind devise for the ease and convenience of life” and “all that assemblage which is intended rather to please the fancy, than to obviate real wants, and which is rather ornamental

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than useful” (1995, 232–233). Presenting it as an “assemblage,” Ferguson avoids defining luxury as a mere accumulation of objects (or luxuries). In fact, luxury also implies distinctive activities and gestures of self-display crucial to its function as a positional category locating the individual in relation to other individuals and socioeconomic groups. Luxury corresponds to a discourse, an intersection of knowledge and power in Michel Foucault’s terminology, which undergoes important epistemic shifts in different cultural and historical environments. As such, it is both an object and a sign, the product of wealth and the representation of its usage. In semiotic terms, then, luxury is not an index but a multifaceted sign. It directs its addressee toward absent (and often largely implicit) signifieds belonging to complex cultural mythologies of lack and overabundance. A “cultural marker . . . halfway between object and sign,” and, more generally, “less an external substance than a cultural coefficient” (Morton 2000, 18–19), luxury is intimately related to artistic and literary representation, and therefore plays an important and multifaceted role in definitions of communal and individual identities.

Luxury in History The Old Testament defined luxury as a sin in line with the punishment of unregulated enjoyment expounded in the book of Genesis. Biblical lore fixed the traditional Western approach to luxury by treating it as a cause of sociopolitical decline, especially in Samuel and Kings, and an “active” sin, a rebellion against the Law of God to be eradicated from individuals and society (Sekora 1977, 23–28). Later treatments of luxury in classical civilizations presented essential similarities with Hebrew precedents. Thus, in Greek philosophy and legislation, it was often featured as a destabilizing force threatening the balance of the cosmos, a pernicious human impulse to be curbed and controlled. For Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, the luxurious individual is the lowest form of humanity in whom appetites prevail over reason, an agent of anarchy in an otherwise orderly universe. Similarly, Roman culture produced a substantial number of denunciations of luxury and calls for its suppression to ensure the subsistence of the res publica. Thus, Roman legislators identified with ever-increasing precision the

forms of luxurious indulgence to be punished, and luxury called forth the rhetorical skills of Cicero, the satirical barbs of Juvenal, and the historical critiques of Sallust, who dated the penetration of luxury into Rome back to its destruction of Carthage, and Livy, for whom luxury had entered Rome with the return of its victorious armies from Asia in 187 BCE (Sekora 1977, 36–37). Drawing on these precedents, the Fathers of the Christian Church associated luxury with corruption and damnation and accordingly influenced medieval conceptions of it. Another distinctive feature of late-medieval discourses on the evils of luxury were the sumptuary laws that harked back to such classical precedents as the Roman sumptuariae leges and aimed at regulating consumption along socioeconomic lines. In fourteenth-century England, for instance, Edward III passed the earliest sumptuary decrees, later significantly expanded during the reign of Henry VII in the late-fifteenth century. Still in force well into the later modern era, these highly controversial statutes were specific manifestations of the clash between the ritualized luxury of feudal civilization and a growing bourgeois culture characterized by acquisitiveness and ostentation. The development of modern Western discourses of luxury climaxed in the eighteenth century, when it became a central concern in a wide-ranging debate on such themes as civilization, progress, and decline. In the process, the discourse touched on issues of stability, protoanthropological theories of national character, the evolution of human societies, private morality and public virtues, and the delineation of discrete gendered identities. Perhaps the single most influential work that launched the Enlightenment debate on luxury on a European scale was Bernard Mandeville’s satirical poem “The Grumbling Hive” (1705), republished with prose additions as The Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723). Here, the author rejects the idea of the fundamentally selfless nature of human beings, arguing instead that self-interest is their main motivation and a fundamental force of change. As a major manifestation of this human tendency, luxury represents progress, wealth, and power. Mandeville’s polemical statements gave rise to a controversy that prompted interventions from all the different national Enlightenment traditions. In particular, the question of human progress significantly expanded the scope of the debate, as

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did assessments of the civilizing potential of what Charles-Louis de Montesquieu termed le doux commerce (sweet commerce). The suggestion that luxury could contribute to cultural refinement and the development of the arts (as in David Hume’s essay “Of Luxury,” 1742; later retitled “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 1760) was an extremely divisive concept. Exemplary among the vindications of luxury was Voltaire’s provocative poem “Le Mondain” (1736), whereas one of the most vocal censors was John Brown in his severely anticommercial Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757–1758). Yet as intellectuals started to defend luxe de commodité (luxury of comfort) or literature and the arts as forms of luxury, the century saw a gradual process of rationalization and “demoralization” of the sumptuous that progressively removed it from religious and ethical strictures. As a result, by the 1790s, the discourse had reorganized along three main lines—a continuation of traditional condemnations, a moderate mediation between older and newer approaches, and views of luxury as inextricably woven into contemporaneity. In this latter perspective, Adam Smith’s writings on political economy—especially The Wealth of Nations (1776)—significantly treated luxury objects as mere components of an economic system and thus anticipated nineteenth-century developments. In the new century, luxury objects were more widely available and thus increasingly associated with the decencies of life. Yet although this industrial and democratized luxury became typical of bourgeois society, political economists increasingly abandoned it as a relevant category in a situation dominated by mass production and consumption. By contrast, near the end of the century, luxury and luxuries began to feature prominently in innovative sociological studies on the consumption practices of the wealthy bourgeoisie. In 1880–1801, Henri Joseph Léon Baudrillart published his ambitiously exhaustive History of Private and Public Luxury from Antiquity to the Present. Thorstein Veblen’s identification of “conspicuous consumption” as a defining trait of the “leisure class” allowed for an up-to-date examination of luxury and its social symbolism (in The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899). Equally significant contributions were Georg Simmel’s On Social Differentiation (1890) and Werner Sombart’s

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Luxury and Capitalism (1913). The human sciences variously appropriated the issue of luxury and gave it renewed importance as a central category in interpretations of contemporary social and economic phenomena. Sociological reevaluations of superfluity as a key factor of discrimination and classification, what Pierre Bourdieu calls the logic of “distinction,” were also part of the background to Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift (The Gift, 1923–1924). As a form of gratuitous expenditure resonant with symbolic values, Mauss’s gift belongs in an economy of excess that works through the expulsion of meaningful waste. Also drawing on Mauss’s theory, Georges Bataille’s notion of the “accursed share”—the symbolic surplus and dangerous superabundance that societies ritually exorcise and expel—was another significant, early twentieth-century attempt at making sense of excessive consumption (The Accursed Share, 1949).

Contemporary Issues The intersection of object and sign, materiality and representation, typical of the discourse of luxury, is particularly crucial in recent manifestations and figurations of the sumptuous. From the late-twentieth century, luxury industries have started to merge into conglomerates, the largest of which is LVMH (Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton). Founded in 1987, this company incorporates over 50 luxury brands in the areas of perfumes and cosmetics, fashion, champagne and liqueurs, jewelry, and leisure. It also owns the Bon Marché department store in Paris, the original inspiration for Emile Zola’s novel about late-nineteenth-century retail culture and consumer economy, The Ladies’ Paradise (1883). The “group mission and values” statement on LVMH’s official website declares that the company is committed to spreading “the most refined qualities of the Western ‘Art de Vivre’ around the world” through products that convey “cultural values” by mixing “tradition and innovation” and capable of “kindl[ing] dream and fantasy.” This global conglomerate has opened the way for similar companies such as the Frenchbased PPR, originally Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, and Swiss-based Richemont. Owing to the remarkable increase in the demand for, and consumption of, luxury goods and activities, recent scholarship has again focused on luxury as a

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relevant economic factor. In Luxury Fever (1999), Robert H. Frank has examined the exponential growth of luxury consumption in the late-twentieth-century United States by setting it in the context of a widening gap between the rise in the retributions of upper socioeconomic groups and a generally slower average growth of incomes. Also, from a North American perspective, James B. Twitchell has addressed recent manifestations of conspicuous consumption as part of a compelling passion for luxury that has uninterruptedly affected Western societies since the 1950s. He has also suggested a taxonomy of contemporary forms of luxury through such categories as “technoluxe,” technological luxuries gradually mutating into necessities; “populuxe,” originating with the 1950s to 1960s consumer boom and the beginnings of emulative celebrity culture; and “opuluxe,” contemporary “luxurifications” of consumption in the areas of fashion, retail, advertising, and the media. Although sustained investments in the discourse of luxury are a thing of the past, contemporary scholarship continues to engage with this concept as a complex cultural fact producing important effects at the nexus of materiality and signification. In a postmodern perspective, therefore, luxury constitutes an aesthetic and economic frame enabling Western cultural systems to define, and make sense of, notions of ownership, practices of consumption, and ideas of taste and distinction within a context broadly characterized by mutable and aleatory principles. Particularly, luxury matters in relation to a dimension of individual choice that is one of the few reliable tenets in a situation where shared patterns of consumer behavior and identity no longer obtain. Luxury is thus a knowingly relativized category, whose provisional and strategic relevance betrays a keen awareness of the unstoppable interplay of signs, objects, and activities composing contemporary Western cultural systems. Particularly, the discourse of luxury bears on contemporary notions of subjectivity and treatments of identity as construct and performance. Its distinctive positional function contributes to processes of distinction and classification of the body and the self, as well as to a reassessment of the cultural value of space and time. American designer Tom Ford has recently described “democratized” luxury as one of the main outcomes of his transformation of the Gucci fashion house in the mid- to late 1990s. As a result of these changes, “people from lots of different income levels could then participate in the dream. It became

mass luxury” (2004, 26). Ford observes further that “fashion is a luxury, just like steak or caviar or champagne,” and stresses its relevance to identity-making processes: luxury “adds something to your life,” because we are all essentially “physical beings who live in a material world” (2004, 21). These words clarify the extent to which luxury matters to contemporary definitions of individuality and a dimension of enjoyment that justifies the indispensable presence of objects and signs of superfluity in contemporary lives. Recasting and updating older models of individual hedonistic consumption originating in Romantic-period culture, Ford’s statements confirm that luxury contributes to delineating forms of selfhood within the time- and space-specific conditions of pleasurable enjoyment, conspicuous consumption, and self-display. It is hardly coincidental that essential coordinates of subjectivity, such as time and space, should be deeply affected by contemporary revisions and reinventions of luxury as object and sign. Space becomes luxurious whenever one experiences the opulence of emptiness as a form of pleasantly gratuitous spatial expenditure. A case in point is Rem Koolhaas’s (Office for Metropolitan Architecture [OMA]) Prada shop in New York’s SoHo district, opened in December 2001. Located in the building previously used for the SoHo branch of the Guggenheim Museum, the shop covers an area of 23,000 square feet and is estimated to have cost around 40 million dollars. In the main section of this enormous retail space, designer wares are displayed in a large empty area that not only increases the luxury aura of the goods on sale through ritualized presentation but also transforms superfluous space itself into a luxurious experience. Similarly, the luxury of emptiness as the paradoxically ultimate form of sumptuousness is in full sight in Andreas Gursky’s (photo) art installations “Prada I” (1996), “Prada II” (1997), and “Prada III” (1998). In the second of these works, in particular, the hallmark shelves of a Prada shop stand completely empty. This representation of (absent) opulence uncannily conjures up the luxury aura of the missing goods, expenditure as mirage and impossibility, and the self-renewing desire for the unattainable. Thus, this artwork effectively transforms a void into an evocation of the multiple suggestions of luxury. German intellectual Hans Magnus Enzensberger has emphasized how space and time (especially its

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slowness) have recently become luxuries that are more radically relevant to contemporary sociocultural formations than older forms based on the ostentation of material wealth. Paradoxically, however, present-day elites cannot enjoy such luxury, caught up as they are in late-capitalist patterns of incessant production and consumption. In an ironic twist, Enzensberger suggests that those who may enjoy time-as-luxury are the masses of the unemployed, the elderly, immigrants, and refugees, who are the bottom layers of contemporary advanced societies. Yet for these people, time is anything but a privilege. If luxury constantly oscillates between materiality and signification, Enzensberger’s provocative approach utterly dematerializes it into time and space, even as he locates it at the center of the structural fault lines underlying contemporary societies. The conversion of luxury into a spatiotemporal reality is both a measure of its cultural importance and its conceptual slipperiness. Indeed, Enzensberger’s interpretation ultimately respects the lines of development of the discourse of luxury. It engages with the difficulty of defining luxury’s transitional and contingent nature, its combination of materiality and signification, while recognizing its centrality to complex sociocultural systems. In Arjun Appadurai’s words, luxury objects—and, we may add, activities—are “goods whose principal use is rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated signs” (1986, 38; italics in original). It is precisely the multiplicity and instability of luxury that grounds the uninterrupted investment in its production and consumption, as well as its discursive relevance and vitality in Western cultures.

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Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Zig Zag: The Politics of Culture and Vice Versa. New York: New Press, 1997. Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Ford, Tom. Tom Ford. Foreword by Anna Wintour. Introduction by Graydon Carter. Interview and text by Bridget Foley. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Frank, Robert H. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. New York: Free Press, 1999. Hollein, Max, and Christoph Gruneberg, eds. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture. Liverpool, UK: Tate Liverpool, 2002. Morton, Timothy. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Perrot, Philippe. Le Luxe: Une richesse entre faste et comfort XVIIIe–XIXe siècle [Luxury: Wealth between opulence and comfort in the 18th–19th centuries]. Paris: Seuil, 1995. Sekora, John. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Silverstein, Michael J., and Neil Fiske (with John Butman). Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods—and How Companies Create Them. New York: Portfolio, 2008. Twitchell, James B. Living It Up: Our Love Affair with Luxury. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Websites LVMH. www.lvmh.com.

Diego Saglia See also Conspicuous Consumption; Desire; Fashion; Identity; Luxury Taxes; Positional Goods; Postmodernism; Sumptuary Laws

Further Readings Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Berry, Christopher J. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Calefato, Patrizia. Lusso [Luxury]. Rome: Meltemi, 2003.

LUXURY TAXES A luxury tax is an excise levy on goods or services considered to be luxuries rather than necessities. If luxuries are consumed conspicuously with the intention to gain social status by distinction, one can call them status goods. The taxation of status goods has a long tradition. Historical examples are taxes on servants, drapes, hair powder, or windows in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth century in England or Holland. Modern examples can be found in the United States, where luxury taxes were introduced on expensive cars, boats, aircrafts, jewelry, and furs in the late-twentieth century.

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Generally, goods can be taxed for several reasons: taxes are levied on goods for fiscal reasons to finance governmental activities, such as defense, infrastructure, and social redistribution. This is not without problems because taxes on goods other than lump-sum taxes distort behavior away from goods (and activities) that are taxed toward goods (and activities) that are not taxed. As a result of the tax, individuals reduce their economic activities, which causes an economic loss over the revenue collected on a societal level. This loss of welfare is known as the excess burden or deadweight loss of taxation. Initiated by the seminal work of Frank P. Ramsey (1927) and carried on by Peter A. Diamond and James A. Mirrlees (1971), the optimal taxation literature identifies tax systems that minimize the distortion of behavior and with this the excess burden of taxation, subject to a certain amount of governmental revenue. The main question in this stream of literature is, How can a certain budget be raised through commodity taxes with minimal distortions and therefore with a minimum excess burden? Corrective taxes have a totally other intention. The work of Arthur C. Pigou (1920) analyzes the use of taxes to correct for externalities associated with imperfect private markets. With corrective taxes, the state tries to internalize the negative external effects of a certain kind of destructive or harmful behavior. Examples are pollution of the environment or behavior that negatively affects health, such as the use of cigarettes or alcohol. Here the question to be answered is, How can a certain kind of behavior be changed by taxes to maximize welfare? Also, the taxation of status goods and luxuries has a long tradition in economic theory and thinking and often implies strong normative statements. From a mercantilist perspective, ostentatious consumption of luxuries diminishes capital accumulation, reduces economic growth, and is to be seen as immoral and condemnable. Therefore, conspicuous consumption was often tried to inhibit by sumptuary laws but with little success. Bernard de Mandeville offers a contrary view, however, in his poem “The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” published first in 1705 and again in 1714 in his seminal work The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. He states that any selfish economic activity and thus also the

conspicuous consumption of luxuries generates economic growth and increases welfare. In other words, from Mandeville’s perspective, status seeking is a socially desirable motive. With the actual development of trade and economic prosperity, the mercantilist thesis that high levels of consumption were incompatible with sustainable economic growth was disproved. Intellectual authorities of the classical school, such as Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776), and John Rae (Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy, 1834), distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate consumption and fear economic and social instability. Consumption behavior, which corresponds to individual rank in society, is seen as legitimate whereas consumption that exceeds individual rank in society is to be repudiated. Conspicuous consumption also plays a central role in the work of institutionalist Thorstein B. Veblen. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, he describes the consumption behavior of the pecuniary upper class as well as its propensity to avoid useful work and its negative effects on economic and societal development. A renaissance of this kind of thinking can be found in the social and consumption criticism of John Kenneth Galbraith (The Affluent Society, 1958), Fred Hirsch (Social Limits to Growth, 1976), and Tibor Scitovsky (The Joyless Economy, 1976), who focus on qualitative aspects of economic progress. Assuming status seeking as a zero-sum game, Hirsch even emphasizes the social limits to growth. More recently, the relation between status seeking, conspicuous consumption, and interpersonal effects have gained attention in consumption theory. The idea is that individuals gain a social usefulness by conspicuous consumption in a social environment besides the materialistic usefulness from consumption. Two branches of ideas can be identified: In the contributions of Robert H. Frank (1985) as well as Norman J. Ireland (1994), individuals care about their status, in other words, about their rank in the consumption or income hierarchy of society. Whereas in Frank’s model, rank in the consumption hierarchy causes usefulness directly, in the model of Ireland, individuals look after their status in a world of asymmetric information. Individuals usually know

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their own income quite well but cannot observe the income of others directly. However, individuals have the option to signal their wealth by the conspicuous consumption of positional (visible) goods. In the “signaling equilibrium,” observers then infer correctly about individuals’ ranks in the income hierarchy of society, which causes status utility to the individual. All these models have in common that status is a value itself and causes purpose or worth directly. By contrast to the instrumental use of conspicuous consumption, for instance, to impress potential partners, this implies that the motivation to consume conspicuously can be seen as intrinsic. All of these contributions essentially adhere to Hirsch’s way of thinking and define status seeking as a zero-sum game: consumption of status goods raises the worth of those who consume conspicuously but decreases the worth of those who do not. Thus, resources used in status-driven consumption cannot increase welfare on a societal level. The authors claim that the conspicuous consumption of status goods is welfare decreasing and often recommend introducing a luxury tax to internalize the negative external effects of conspicuous consumption. These results are hardly surprising because they follow directly from the assumption that if status seeking is assumed to be a zero-sum game, it cannot be welfare improving. In line with Hirsch’s ideas, in 1990, a 10 percent luxury excise tax was introduced by the U.S. government on sales of expensive cars, boats, aircrafts, jewelry, and furs. From this perspective, Hirsch’s way of thinking can be seen as quite successful. However, after only three years, the tax was removed, because of unwanted side effects and distortions. On the one hand, consumers changed their consumption behavior toward other status goods, which were not affected by the new tax. On the other hand, producers changed their product lines toward more mainstream or offered to reimburse the luxury tax. A different point of view is reflected by Laurie S. Bagwell and B. Douglas Bernheim (1996) and Justus Haucap (2001) where demonstrative consumption is seen as a useful signaling or communication device in the initiation of social contacts. Here, status itself does not cause usefulness directly; that is, the motivation to consume conspicuously can be seen as extrinsic or instrumental. Again, individuals face asymmetric information. They know their own income quite well

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but cannot observe the income of potential partners directly. However, individuals have the option to signal their wealth by the demonstrative consumption of positional (visible) goods with the objective to match with desired partners, and Haucap demonstrates that conspicuous consumption as a signal or communication device in social interaction may be welfare improving. However, if status signaling by the conspicuous consumption of status goods can be welfare increasing, it should not be taxed from a welfare economic perspective. In the history of economic thought, luxury, status seeking, and conspicuous consumption are seen as highly divergent. Thus, it is hardly surprising that economic advice with respect to a possible governmental intervention varies with time and perspective. Whereas historical policy recommendations are often based on open moral considerations, more recent ones are often based on the arbitrary definition of status seeking as a zero-sum game and with this on a questionable welfare analysis. Taking these results into account today, luxury taxes are hard to justify. Tobias Thomas See also Affluent Society; Conspicuous Consumption; Desire; Economics; Luxury and Luxuries; Positional Goods; Social Class; Sumptuary Laws

Further Readings Bagwell, Laurie S., and B. Douglas Bernheim. “Veblen Effects in a Theory of Conspicuous Consumption.” American Economic Review 86 (1996): 349–373. Diamond, Peter A., and James A. Mirrlees. “Optimal Taxation and Public Production I: Production Efficiency and II: Tax Rules.” American Economic Review 61 (1971): 8–27 and 261–278. Frank, Robert H. “The Demand for Unobservable and Other Nonpositional Goods.” American Economic Review 75 (1985): 101–116. Haucap, Justus. “Consumption and Social Relationship (in German).” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftswissenschaften (Review of Economics), 52 (2001): 243–263. Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Ireland, Norman J. “On Limiting the Market for Status Signals.” Journal of Public Economics 53 (1994): 111–126. Pigou, C. Arthur. The Economics of Welfare. London: Macmillan, 1920. Ramsey, Frank P. “A Contribution to the Theory of Taxation.” Economic Journal 37 (1927): 47–61.

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Veblen, Thorstein B. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1899. Reprint, 1953.

LYOTARD, JEAN-FRANÇOIS (1924–1998) The origins of postmodernism lie in the architecture and writing of Robert Venturi in the 1960s and Charles Jencks’s identification of an architectural movement in the 1980s. But it is with the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979 [English trans. 1984]) that the broader implications of a shift in the nature of modernity were first explored. Lyotard, whose early career was as a philosophy teacher and Marxist activitist, later employed Freudian ideas as he engaged with the contemporary philosophical debates that grew out of phenomenology and post-structuralism. The key feature of the postmodern world that he described was the failure of the grand narratives— those of religion, philosophy and politics—to continue to legitimate knowledge claims. The problem was the success of science in arbitrating the truthvalue of descriptive statements and in eradicating contradictions. Science operates with a different pragmatics (rules of the discourse) from narrative knowledge, so statements making a claim to truth are subject to standards of proof as evidence is verified or falsified. This happens within a community of those with equal rights to contribute statements and the effect is to progress toward a consensus. Science can produce institutions and professions, but this system of knowledge is at odds with the narrative-based language games traditionally used to establish a broader social bond. Societies have, up to and through modernity, been bound together by systems of knowledge in which who speaks and how they speak are what confirms the value of what they say. The form of what is to count as knowledge— the social stance of speakers; the rhetoric of words, rhythms and patterns, and references—is specific to each culture. Who knows is distinguished from who doesn’t according to the criteria of justice, beauty, happiness, truth, and efficiency that are

already established in a culture and are used to judge the competence of the performance of knowledge claims. It is through tradition and custom that these standards are set and narrative knowledge can then blend descriptive knowledge with ethical knowledge—how the world is with how human beings should act. Narrative knowledge produces a coherent and complete system of know-how, knowing how to speak and knowing how to hear “through which the community’s relationship to itself and its environment is played out. What is transmitted through these narratives is the set of pragmatic rules that constitutes the social bond” (Lyotard 1984, 21). The success of science as a mode of knowledge that describes the world has undermined the grand narratives, leading to a weakening of the social bond and resulting in the postmodern condition. Scientific thinking led to the operations of commercial companies and the state being transformed into technological systems organized around principles of efficiency. But, Lyotard argues, efficiency, performance maximization, and power combine to produce local self-legitimating systems that are independent of an overarching grand narrative that might legitimate them all in relation to society as a whole. Despite the fact that science has developed to try to grasp instability (chaos, complexity), the postmodern condition is one of many little narratives that work for particular fields of human activity but which are each temporary and unstable. There is no grand narrative that can draw them together into a coherent whole, legitimating the specialized knowledge of different fields through the same criteria. Lyotard revisited the theme of the postmodern a number of times in essays and papers, but though it attracted wide interest, it was not perhaps the source of his most subtle philosophical ideas. These are difficult to grasp and impossible to summarize or adequately represent, but they involve provocative debates around a series of different forms of knowledge and discourse. In Libidinal Economy (1974 [English Trans. 1993]), Lyotard articulated a response to the sterility of semiology through an invocation of the body that draws on Sigmund Freud’s ideas about drives, cathexis, and polymorphous sexuality. In The Differend (1983 [English trans. 1988]), his theme is the conflict in discourse between those who justifiably disagree in ways that

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can never be properly resolved. All of these ideas reappear in collections of essays that also cover aesthetic and technological topics and a recurring interest in time and judgment. Tim Dant See also Freud, Sigmund; Marxist Theories; Philosophy; Postmodernism; Post-Structuralism; Semiotics

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Further Readings Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988. Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. London: Athalone Press, 1993.

M economy, continue to reap its benefits. Rather than a vindication of the new forms of liberal self-interest, Mandeville’s work, functioning as a critique of early eighteenth-century ideology, instead focuses on the manner in which many supposed moralists employ a discourse of virtue as an instrument in view of their own self-interested ends. Mandeville’s literary career began in 1703 with a pro-Whig political satire as well as translations and imitations of La Fontaine’s fables. After trying his hand at several more political and burlesque satires, Mandeville wrote the satirical poem that would lead to his literary infamy, first published in 1705 as “The Grumbling Hive: Or, the Knaves Turn’d Honest.” Following the 1711 publication of his medical work, A Treatise of the Hypochondriak and Hysterick Passions, Mandeville added twenty explanatory prose “Remarks” and the crucial philosophical treatise “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” (a text that Adam Smith suggests served as the conceptual foundation of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) to this poem, which was republished in 1714 under the title The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vice, Publick Benefits. Still, the work remained virtually ignored until, following its third augmentation and republication in 1723, the Grand Jury of Middlesex attempted to censor the work, claiming that it sought “to run down Religion and Virtue as prejudicial to Society, and detrimental to the State; and to recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride and all vices as necessary to Public Welfare” (quoted in Hundert 1997, xv). Although never resulting in censorship, the cases piqued the public interest and ultimately transformed The Fable of the Bees into

MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1670–1733) Born in the environs of Rotterdam in 1670, Bernard Mandeville obtained a medical degree from the University of Leiden in 1691. After settling in London, he began working as a physician treating nervous disorders while pursuing a modest literary career. In 1723, however, following several attempts to censor his chef d’oeuvre (masterpiece), The Fable of the Bees; Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, Mandeville unexpectedly became early eighteenth-century London’s most infamous observer of changing societal and economic realities. The Fable, which insists that the motive force driving the increasingly liberal market economy was self-interest rather than a benevolent civic humanism, generated a scandal that lasted throughout the eighteenth century, eliciting replies from some of the most significant Enlightenment figures, including Francis Hutcheson, Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant. Until his death from influenza in 1733, Mandeville continually retooled the Fable’s central position to counter the continual attacks from his moralist and civic humanist critics, who insisted that public virtues, not “private vices,” were the cement of human society. Whereas Mandeville’s contemporaries traditionally depicted his work as an inaugural, unapologetic vindication of a laissez-faire economy, it targets, on the contrary, moralists who, although appalled by Mandeville’s depiction of the inherent viciousness of new market 883

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a national phenomenon and the name Mandeville, often referred to as Man-devil, into a lightning rod for debates concerning the changing vision of the relation between morality and economy. Other significant works, such as A Modest Defense of Public Stews, in which he argues for statesponsored houses of prostitution or his “An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools” (reviled by Karl Marx) in which he attacks schools designed to educate the working poor, walk a fine line between advocacy and critique. It is for this reason that Mandeville is often misunderstood. The criticism directed at Mandeville resulted from his appearing to be a champion of the underlying selfish viciousness driving the new market economy. Understanding the critical thrust of his project relies on reading it in relation to his intellectual predecessors, especially Pierre Nicole, Pierre Bayle, and La Rochefoucauld. As E. J. Hundert has demonstrated unambiguously, Mandeville’s Fable appropriates the French Augustinian skeptical arguments of these late-seventeenth-century philosophers and adapts them to the contours of London’s new market realities. The section of the Fable titled “A Search into the Nature of Society” gives a concise articulation of Mandeville’s central position: society is the continuation of the self-seeking animal appetite transposed into the social world, so society is founded grounded on a paradox that Kant, referring to Mandeville, will eventually call “unsocial sociability.” Lawgivers must convince everyone that it is beneficial to repress individual appetites and do so only to advance selfinterested ends by attaining what Mandeville refers to (long before Marx’s English translators) as a “general equivalent,” which is an imaginary reward that takes the place of immediate satisfaction. In this way, however, virtue functions as yet one more mechanism, routed through the laws of the nation and custom, for pursuing one’s self-interest. Craig Carson See also Kant, Immanuel; Marx, Karl; Self-Interest; Smith, Adam

Further Readings Force, Pierre. Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hundert, E. J. The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Hundert, E. J. The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. Mandeville, Bernard. Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

MARCUSE, HERBERT (1898–1979) Born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Herbert Marcuse came of age during World War I and served in the German Army. Becoming disillusioned with the internal politics of the military, he began pursuit of an academic career. After receiving his doctorate, Marcuse began a habilitation under Martin Heidegger, the preeminent German philosopher of that era. However, Marcuse left Freiburg in 1933 (largely due to Heidegger’s affiliation with the National Socialist Party) and joined the Institut fur Sozialforschung, now frequently referred to as the Frankfurt school, where he developed enduring professional relationships with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Marcuse fled Germany in 1934 and immigrated to the United States. He took a hiatus from scholarship in the 1940s and early 1950s, working for both the Office of Secret Services and the U.S. State Department, in what, ostensibly, was an effort to directly contribute to the struggle against fascism. Following his service, Marcuse wrote the first of his major works, Eros and Civilization (1955), followed by One-Dimensional Man (1964) and The Aesthetic Dimension (1979). In this later period of his career, Marcuse tended to synthesize Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxian structural analysis. His most important contributions to consumption theory include the concepts of surplus repression, repressive de-sublimation, and onedimensional society, which are explained below. Marcuse believed that humans are first and foremost motivated by the pursuit of pleasure. Like Sigmund Freud, Marcuse viewed this “pleasure principle” as potentially dangerous because, in a world of scarcity, survival often depends on our ability to sacrifice immediate desires for the sake of our long-term best interests. And because nature leaves so many of our desires unfilled, Marcuse argued that repression and alienation are basic aspects of human social life. The raison d’être of society is to help individuals fulfill all the natural desires that we would be unable to meet if left in isolation. However, society can only

Marcuse, Herbert

extend human productivity by systematically forcing its constituents to toil (a term that Marcuse uses to designate labor that is both sublimated and alienated). Even though the productive capacities of industrialized nations have come to far exceed that which is necessary to meet all of the basic needs of their constituents, workers in these nations find themselves toiling not less (as we would assume, since toil is no longer justified by society’s original purpose of generating sufficient resources to satisfy the basic instinctual needs of its constituents) but more. This toil in excess of what is required to meet basic instinctual needs is what Marcuse terms surplus repression. In essence, Marcuse argues that capitalism has become a social pathology, supplantin